Before we were shifted into this Housing Commission flat, I lived across the road in a street called Cross Street, which doesn't exist now. We had a two storey house, with a garden and an apple tree and a barbeque area out the back. We rented it.
We had a lot of fun there. We had our privacy. You could go in the backyard and do what you liked. We were more or less on our own, even though we were on very good terms with our neighbours. It was multi cultural. There were a lot of ethnics living around us and we were all good companions, before the rotten Housing Commission took over.
We lived there for nineteen years, went to work, and the kids went to school from there. That's how long we lived there.
The most important part of our lives was to stay in Carlton. My husband worked here, I worked here, the kids went to school here, all their friends were here, Carlton was our home, our suburb, no way known were they going to get us out of it.
I started working, with the intentions of buying a house, when the kids were old enough to go off to school. I was a trained dressmaker believe it or not. When I came out of the army, they gave me a rehabilitation course. I always used to make my own frocks. Before the war we didn't have the money to learn to do it. People talk now about a depression, and the fall in the stock market, but they wouldn't have any idea of what it was like in those days. A girl just didn't have the money to learn a skilled trade. So when I came out of the army I took a dressmaking course, and that's what I used to do at home when I was first married. Then worked as a barmaid.
Where we live now used to be all shops and dwellings. On the corner of Palmerston Street there was a grocer's shop, a boot maker's shop, a barber a tailor, there was a wood yard just up on the come and a Chinese shop. We did all our shopping locally, all in Lygon Street, wouldn't think of going anywhere else. Now you wouldn't shop down Lygon Street, it's too expensive.
The Housing Commission had been pulling down houses around different areas, but we thought we were too good a block and they wouldn't do it to us. All of a sudden they decided to demolish ours too. And some of the weaker people just moved out straight away. Some of the landlords sold to the Commission, and then they wanted our house. But we wouldn't move because they wanted to send us first of all down to Pigdon Street, then they wanted to send us to North Melbourne, then to Flemington. Anyhow my husband dug his toes in. He said to the woman we were dealing with: 'Look if you want our home, we want a flat over there, so until a flat comes vacant don't send for us anymore'. So we just stopped on twelve months or so, and when this block of Commission flats was opened in 1966 we move in. Peggy, who lived just around the corner in Lygon Street, came across here to this block. Mr Dolton, (her husband died before they moved), went to the 530 block. The others all moved, one to Brunswick. There's only two of us out of the whole block that are in here.
The old Housing Commission weren't a patch on what we've got today. You weren't treated like human beings, you were just a number on the file. You couldn't hang a picture on the wall, you couldn't change the colour of your rooms, you had to stick with that rotten cream all the time, that off-white business. For everything, you had to get permission. It wasn't like your own home. They used to come and inspect the flats every six months and give you a week's notice. I hated it when I first came here, really hated it. I missed my garden, stood at the window and watched them pulling our home down, watched the apple tree getting carved up and watched the garden getting pulled out. It was a shocking thing.
What made us all so bloody mad about the Housing Commission was that they cleared the block, got rid of us all, (the Italian family were the last ones to go), and within six months it was all sold to private enterprise. Not one Ministry flat was built on it, and all those red brick flats over there now are all private enterprise, so I mean what did they kick us out for? It might be different if it had been a run down area, but some of the homes were absolutely beautiful, like all the old terrace homes that flanked Cardigan Street. They were solidly built. With the prices that houses are bringing in Carlton now they could've demanded and got anything.
No one was happy with the money they got. They had no comeback because the Commission had their own government valuators who just said, 'Well, we're going to give you so and so, and that's it.' No Commission inspector came through our house. They went through the Italian boarding house of Mrs Lazarus, up in Cardigan Street. I think the bigger the fight you put up, the more pressure they'd put on you, so they'd send these inspectors. Everyone had lived under threat because we didn't know when the Commission was going to pounce the next time. We'd seen it happen so many times, because before they took this area they had already cleared from High Street down to Reeves Street. And we used to think that we were safe this side of the street, but we weren't. Everybody tried to fight, but they just had no comeback. The Minister of Housing wouldn't see our point of view. As far as he was concerned, as far as a lot of them were concerned, I think we were just second grade citizens.
I disliked many things about living in the flats, did not like not being able to do your washing when you felt like it, standing waiting for lifts, not being able to leave your front door open ('cause you haven't got a back door) without anybody walking past and gigging in. I think we broke every law that the old Housing Commission had. We put up a security door; we put pictures on the wall; we painted our flat a different colour. The inspector came round to inspect one day and said, 'Your flat's so nice, I won't dob you in for painting it.' I said,'I couldn't care less. They're not going to kick me out.'
You felt as though you were no longer an individual, but you adjust, particularly when you have nice people around you; we had some lovely people around us. We had to support each other then, because we had to fight the Commission so much. The people who are coming in now are not forming that same strength of community feeling because they have nothing to fight for now.
Although the Carlton Association people were fighting the Housing Commission we did not like them. They were snobs, so we thought. People like that live in their own homes and they don't want their area disrupted by this and that or anything else They think their standard of living is going to be lowered because these kinds of flats are built, but look at the prices of homes in Carlton now, we didn't lower the value of their homes.
As for the anti freeway fight, I think freeways are a good idea, with the way traffic is on the road today. I don't like to see the environment ruined, don't like to see homes go, but I always think the freeways are a good idea. My daughter hates them she demonstrated, that was her prerogative; mine was to say, 'Let them go ahead and do it.'
I was always glad to live in Carlton, and man, more people think so now: they all think it's really the 'elite of Melbourne'. It's funny what I find with quite a few people. If they ask me where I live, I say the Ministry of Housing flats on the corner of Palmerston Street. Some of them tell other people they just meet, 'Oh, we've got a unit in Carlton because it's the trendy thing to have a Carlton unit If that's the way they want it, that's the way they can have it, but I wouldn't move out from here.