It was about 1940 when I first came to Carlton. I was twenty one years old. My mother, my brother and I were renting a place in Parkville and it was very crowded. We had the opportunity to come in here, and we have lived in this house ever since. My mother owns it now; she's ninety one.
There were very few motor cars about, only about two in the street. Most of the people here were Jewish; the Jews started moving here from overseas in about 1938. The first stop off place for most of them was North Carlton. They couldn't say Pigdon Street, but said 'Piggiea don' Street. As they gradually got into business and made more money, they moved to St. Kilda or Caulfield or Malvern. There are very few of them live here now. One Jewish businessman built a big house down this street. It cost thousands of pounds at the time. He was one of the big men of the business world. The Australians here called the Jewish people, 'five by twos', they didn't call them Jews. But there weren't many Australians lived here in the area, only four or five families.
The Jewish people seemed to keep to themselves mainly. Some of them couldn't speak very much English, but eventually they learnt more. They got into clothing manufacturing. I worked for one for a few months down in Fitzroy. They wouldn't have me in the army as I've got deformed feet. Through the war I had to go into an engineering place down Carlton that did war work. I was directed to go there by the Director of Affairs. And after that, the engineers' strike came and I worked for a little while in the Jewish business. Then I went to work for the Salvation Army, the Bethesda Hospital in Richmond. The train went through North Carlton, through here and down to North Richmond. I could get off there and walk up the street to the hospital. They stopped the running of the train after a while, so I had to give it away. I went to work in Brunswick at Stokes and Son where I could walk to work and I stayed there ever since. Thirty three years.
Down in Lygon Street there was a fruiterer who was a Jew, and a chemist and the grocer. They had very good custom there and the fruiterer used to deliver the fruit as well. He gave us a reasonably good go.
After the war things were pretty scarce until industry went back to peacetime conditions. There were very few refrigerators or washing machines or anything like that. We had an old ice chest and the ice man came around with the ice. You used to boil the clothes in the copper. The bath heater was a chip heater, in which we lit the fire with the chips and sticks and little bits of wood.
Quite a few Italians live here now, all around this area. That made a difference to some of it. You can see quite a change in a lot of the buildings. I worked with a few Italians, and they seemed to be all right.
Around here there are two or three of them who have got their own businesses, builders and so on. They seem to be a decent class of people. They're not any sort of standover or anything like chat; they just come and go to the work and their business.
We never have any trouble with them. There is an old lady who lives next door to one Italian family. They see that she's all right, all the time. She's in her seventies.
The threat of freeways was a bug bear to the place, you know, because people didn't know how they were going to be constructed. Some said there was going to be a fly over, and other people said they were going to come up through where the old railway was. In that case it would go right past your back door and you could hear it. Already the traffic makes a great noise. When the trucks roar past here the windows rattle, even now.
The big thing that ruined this area up here was the Olympic Games. Before they came they were going to rebuild this Carlton Football Ground. They had it all surveyed and pegged out when the big notes at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, (Bob Menzies was one of them) had a meeting and decided that they would upgrade the M.C.G. Of course the Carlton business was scrapped then. There was going to be everything, the football ground, cricket ground, the track for athletics and a bike track. We'd have had one of the biggest and best sporting arenas in the southern hemisphere. When it came to building the new football stadium the V.F.L. went away out to Waverley. If they had built it here, there would have been a train line running right past the door. I reckon it would have been tons better than going to Waverley to the football. That was a big blow for Carlton. We lost that.
There are many good things about living in Carlton. This is a beautiful big, wide street, with a nature strip up the middle. We are right close to the park. I often walk around it on a nice day, or sit under a tree. The children play in the landscaped play area, not just flat like it used to be but all little hills and hollows. Over the years I saw many small, old homes pulled down and flats put up, and it seemed a change for the best. It made a difference to the place, and there were more people living here. One small house in the next terrace sold for exactly $100,000 a few weeks ago. It's a bit silly to pay so much money for them, but of course they are solidly built. It would cost you a lot to build a house like that now, wouldn't it?
Children playing in Princes Park. Football fans' cars turned the grass into a quagmire