I moved to Carlton some time around 1970. My husband and I had been living in the inner suburbs when he was at University. We had lots of Carlton friends from those days who were still around the district, so we looked for a place to live. Six weeks after our first child was born we moved to a house in Princes Hill.
Lifestyle was different then, although I suppose it's partly a product of age. We'd begin to go out about ten o'clock at night to visit friends, often within walking distance, and we'd come home at one or two, after talking for several hours. We would wonder why all those stuffy people were turning off their lights at ten o'clock.
There were fewer trees in the area when I knew it. I can remember my mother saying, 'Oh not there dear, brick to brick,' and it was very brick to brick. Many houses weren't done up and they still had a lot of old residents in them. There were a lot of Jewish people still living in the area and little old men used to walk along the streets in bowler hats. There were still the remnants of a few Jewish shops, and the Greek hall in Lygon street was still a Jewish Hall. Then there were a lot of Italians living in the area and they had extended families often in this block. The Italians made wine and their own sausages, and hung up their food on strings in the back yard. The daughters in the strict families needed alibis, which my neighbour provided, to see their boyfriends.
Our own houses needed renovating and that went on and on. In the early years here we used to have lane parties. We'd open up all the back gates along the lane and build a fire on the bluestone. Life was slower. Saturday lunches meant often just sitting in the back garden, courtyard type gardens, drinking wine and people would bring food. The food would be traipsed from one house to another; dishes would pile up at back doors to be taken over when you were delivering the children over there the next time. So there was a fair bit of communal life, especially along this immediate lane here. But I think that's a product of the cycle that areas go through when they're being rejuvenated. There's a mix of people, then a lot of young people with families who are probably ready to socialise and very aware of the community. Then they go on to other things and other people come in who are not so adventurous or outgoing, and the area becomes stuffy and middle class and houses are rented. It's happened here and in North Melbourne and I suppose it will happen to South and Port Melbourne too.
We knew such a lot of people around, because my husband (a theological student) had been very active in student politics, and had a large network of friends. Carlton was a focus in those days, and when I had young children you could go down Lygon Street and everybody would know you. I used to shop, and we'd get a bunch of grapes at Chris's, and a teddy bear biscuit from the biscuit tins at King and Godfree's, and a folly from Giancarlo at the coffee shop. Later on we'd promenade along on a Saturday morning. You'd know so many people on the street and it was very much a community.
I became involved in the women's liberation movement in the early 1970s. I really don't know exactly what prompted me. My husband and I were both interested in philosophical issues, lifestyle issues, I suppose community issues. We had a background of looking at what your life should be like and what relationships between people should be about. I was a member of probably the second consciousness raising group to be started up. I think Beatrice Faust, Chris Molan and many of my friends were involved. I don't know where I heard about it but we decided that we would start up a group. There was a shop in Rathdowne Street which fed Information in all directions, and I joined a group in (I think) Waterloo Street, the little lane that ran into Lygon Street opposite the Housing Commission Flats. There was a sign on the street corner saying, 'Save The Earth'. There was a little student house there, where we met, discussing a different paper every night and going on to general discussion. After about nine months we'd talked through all the issues and suddenly there was nothing more to say, so the group disbanded. We discussed, mostly, articles from current women's magazines of the time. People got them in from the U.S. and overseas as well as in Australia.
I remember mostly this good feeling between the women which I hadn't experienced before, this sort of community of oneness and openness. You could talk to people about absolutely everything. I remember too, there was marijuana in shoe box sized parcels that was handed out. At that stage nobody really worried about it very much. Most of the women were either in the throes of leaving their husbands or decided to leave their husbands during that time. People supported each other. I was working and employed a woman to look after the children, and so I was free up until about six o'clock in the evening. If I wanted to be late home I could go and visit friends and talk. I had a couple of very close friends at that stage and I kept in very close contact with those people. It made me aware of what I wanted, about the limitations of the relationship that I was in at that time. I don't know that it was very much help in working through or developing relationship.
I did a diploma course when I was pregnant and had very young children, and then I went to University when the children were slightly older, so I had years and years of study. I think I probably did push myself by having the house and children and finally the job and study. It got to be a bit much in the end. We really pushed ourselves far too much and I think the children did suffer. My involvement in the women's movement was a personal one. Ruth Crow and other people in the left who were Communists or in the left of the Labor Party were much more aware of issues like equal pay than I was. I can remember quite often people coming to the house and saying, 'O.K. what about this issue, what about that issue?' but I didn't ever get really involved in wider social issues for the good of other people.
The women in the movement were very independent women. One local woman renovated a whole house on her own, demolishing, putting in stairs and fixing the whole place up. It was a very self centred sort of movement, that first women's movement. People were looking at their own lives. As a theological student's wife, I faced all these young men coming into the house and talking seriously about philosophy and other great issues, feeling very much the wife in the background, the person who got the coffee, and got the dinners. I remember trying to make pasties one night and one of my husband's friends was not at all pleased that dinner was late. Very much I was the homemaker and housekeeper in those early days, and that really wasn't good enough. It was at odds with the notions that people were coming up against in the Arts Department at Melbourne University I suppose. Women were all looking at their roles and saying, 'This is not good enough, I want to be a person in my own right, I want to change.' It was all a great intensive effort to change. It ended up with most of the women in the group separating from the person they were living with. Coming to the inner suburbs was in any case saying, 'We don't want the sort of lives that our parents lived,' which were essentially dull and where nothing happened. My parents would have much preferred me to be living in Camberwell near them, rather than in a rather sleasy, half done up house in Carlton.
We wanted new beginnings, personal relationships that were much more real, we wanted to communicate with people. As women we wanted to be equal to men. It was a rather crude sort of equality. I think we outgrew the need for it in the end and practicalities took over, but I think we are probably better that we have been through it. Women were saying, 'We can do the same sorts of things that men can do. We might concede a bit of physical strength, but we can do virtually anything that a man can do.' You weren't just the person who sat back and listened, as the women of my generation had, listening to the words of wisdom of all these up and coming smart arses of young men, who thought they were so terribly clever. We just got sick of it, and the relationships collapsed. The men expected to be the assertive ones, and the women expected to be the people who listened, and were impressed and then went off to get the dinner and bolstered the ego of the men. Many women might be quite assertive and had great arguments with men in private and probably won. But when there were a whole lot of people around it was men who did the talking, whether it was a students' political club meeting, or a group of friends. The movement probably influenced many women to make choices to leave husbands, to work, to go back to study. It really changed the course of lives, whether or not it actually made the people terribly different as people.
International Women's Day March, 1975