We bought a house in Carlton in September 1965 and moved in just before Christmas that year. Our prime reason for buying was because my husband had received an appointment at the Melbourne State College, and it meant that he was able to walk to work. The other reason was that we had come from the country, and had no idea of city values. We didn't have very much money, so we bought at the time, we thought, very modestly. It was quite interesting, because soon after we arrived some neighbours came over and asked how we found the house. They told us that Bowen Crescent was regarded as a prime area, and that people would rent in the area until a house came on the market. In fact, we had looked at the house three times and said no because it was so dirty and so shabby. It had been run as a rooming house and each room had been let to a different tenant. The lady who owned it had a caravan in the back lane where she lived herself, to get the maximum rental, and you really couldn't tell what any room had been used for except the bathroom.
At that time, people were buying and renovating, taking walls out, putting in arches and sunken conversation pits. A lot of the renovations were being done without permits and some of them were not particularly safe. A large number of migrants had come to live here and were doing their own renovations, like pouring concrete on the kitchen floors, without adequate ventilation. When I started to renovate I would have to go to demolitions, and if I wanted a door knob, I would have to buy the whole door. In fact, from the property on the corner of Garton and Pigdon Streets (which is now flats), I was offered cedar doors at the dollar rate and they had the old ceramic door knobs. I couldn't afford it. I didn't have twenty dollars, but I did get a letterbox slot.
One of the criticisms when we came here was that Victorian and Edwardian houses were pokey and dark and horrible. But when you have high ceilings your house is cool. Once you live in them you realise how imaginative the early builders were in their use of space and the ingenious use of lighting.
On one side my neighbour was Bob Dunn. He was known to generations of people as Uncle Bob. He was the youngest of a very big family who lived here for many many years, and from him I've had a lot of information about the early area. For instance, there were two dairy herds on what is now Princes Park which used to be fenced. It had a gate and if you were a Carltonian and went out of the Brunswick gate, the Brunny Push would bash you up. If you were a Brunswick person who came out the wrong gate the Carlton Push would bash you up. As he got older Uncle Bob became quite an identity in Carlton, because he used to take a stool and sit on the front path just to watch the passing parade. In the seventies at some stage when all the fittings and furniture were going up in value, people were literally knocking on doors seeking things out. People knocked on Bob's door and asked him if he had any antiques; he said, 'Yes, me.' They ran!
The area was very friendly. This little old man's sister had been a very active member of the St. Michael's Church. She had a stroke and was not very mobile, and every Christmas Eve the carol singers would come and stand in the plantation outside her house to sing carols to her. On New Year's Eve we would have people call and at midnight one of the neighbours across the road who had bagpipes would come piping, and all the guests would follow. The doors of the houses would open and there would be a whole procession weaving itself up and down in these two or three blocks. That would be at midnight. Everybody would say, 'Happy New Year', and then go back inside again. When we first moved here, on hot nights the children would be put in their pyjamas and people would sit out on the nature strip. One Group of students had a croquet set and would have croquet games on the plantation. People would take deck chairs out and sit on the street, like in a European city. There would be much more parading and walking in the streets and people could have Sunday lunch with their bottle of white wine, and so on.
It was in those days a good place for children, because they had a lot of places to play. No backyard is big enough for a small boy once he turns ten. There were basketball rings in the back lane and they played basketball, or cricket or they would come home very, very excited and say, 'Mum, we were playing footy with Barassi', because Ron Barassi was coaching the Carlton team. If the football got out, the children would kick it back; therefore they had been playing football with Ron Barassi!
My children had been used to a very mixed area because we had lived in Wodonga, which was an area where new migrants lived in the Bonegilla Migrant Centre. The first wave of migrants settled in the area. So at the children's school were many who did not have Anglo Saxon names. At one stage when the boys were at Princes Hill High School, the school did a survey on the school seventy per cent of the students were either born overseas or their parents had been born overseas.
The shopping I used to do in Lygon Street suited me wonderfully, because I could do all my shopping in twenty minutes. I would often ring the green grocer and give him my order, or I would drop him in an order. Then I would go to the grocer Mick Saffer and pick out what I wanted, take that into the green grocer after getting my meat, and he would say, 'Well, I'll deliver the meat too,' and he would deliver the whole lot. My relationship with the green grocer became such that, if I did not want to put an order I had to go down and tell him, or he would be knocking on my door to find out what was wrong with me. He would drive past the house to go to the market regularly and he would worry if one of the lights had been left on all night. Perhaps, someone was sick, was everything all right in your house?
Now this sort of thing was quite fascinating. To watch him with the people from Princes Hill Village was also very interesting because it is well known that the older people like to be able to walk several times a day, and they would come down and say, 'Oh, I didn't bring the right purse. I will only have a pound of potatoes today.' They might take two or three trips to the shop. I also saw him giving people the wooden cartons, for their fire places, literally giving them firewood, and I know that he would give people things at the end of the week; they would clear things out. If he liked you there would never be a hard measure. I'm sure he quietly supported quite a lot of poor people around the area, as I think most of these older trades people did.
The reason the Housing Commission found the area so desirable was because there were all the services here, electricity, gas, water, wide streets, and back lanes. If they were going to develop some of the northern areas they had to put all those in before they built.
During one of the cases the Carlton Association fought, the opposing barrister knew how much money we had and kept talking until our money ran out. That was over the demolition of a lovely large Edwardian house in Wilson Street, for flats. You couldn't take class action at that time, and so some members of the Carlton Association mortgaged their houses to pay for the costs of the court case. They lost, but at least we did get the building regulation changed. That is one of the things that we have been quite successful on.
Now, one of my neighbours has just been away for three months and I have had his key and the privilege of enjoying his vegetable garden and every second day I would walk through the house to see if the windows were closed. Now if I need it he will do it for me. I keep the key of another neighbour's house because the school boy keeps forgetting his, or losing it, or locking it inside.
When my old neighbour said, 'I am frightened that I will take all my pills at the one time,' I said, 'Right give me your bottles of pills.' Every day I would take him his three little pills, morning, afternoon and night, and if I went out I would ask Dorothy French over the road whether she would keep an eye on the 'meals on wheels' ladies. When asked nicely they would give him two serves of sweets instead of something else. Now, this is a quality of life that you cannot buy, you cannot sell, you cannot trade. I don't know what it is, what promotes it or why it happens, but this is the thing that I have enjoyed in Carlton.
I do feel that if you are going to have a community you want to feel that you have some say in what happens in it. I think this is what has happened in the past, and I would like to see it being maintained in the future.