The extraordinary in the ordinary: the story of Piera Street

From a talk given at the Brunswick Community History Group in 2011 by Cheryl Griffin.

A bit about Piera Street

Piera Street is located on the east side of Lygon Street, Brunswick East, off 132 Lygon Street. It’s two streets south of Glenlyon Road and on the corner with Lygon Street is one of my favourite haunts, the Small Block Café.

Piera Street began life as Nicholas Street in 1889, at the end of the boom years, just before the Depression of the 1890s. It’s a small street, with only 42 houses. Not even that, really, because there are three factories on the north side of the street. Until very recently there were no multi-storeyed developments, but several years ago four three-storeyed townhouses were built just opposite my place, in what was once a pickled onion factory and planning permission has been granted for the building of more at the end of the street where Belcher’s enamelling works operated until a few years ago.

When my elderly neighbour Peter died a few years ago and his house was sold, I realised that what was probably the last little glimpse of what the street had once been was about to go and that prompted me to take action and move my research along a little faster. Peter had lived in the house, for most of the time with his elderly mother, since the mid 1960s and the house still had a number of features that harked back to earlier times. There was no indoor plumbing at all, for instance. The outdoor loo was the back of the lean-to that now served as a bathroom cum laundry and the only water tap was in a make-shift covered-in section at the side of the house over the original gully trap.

So, I began putting together the history of the street and along the way I’ve learned a great deal about the history of Brunswick and this corner of Brunswick, in particular.

I’ve consulted a wide range of resources, many of them found in the wonderfully rich collection in the Les Barnes Room at the Brunswick Library. I’ve also consulted Crown Land Maps, MMBW Maps (now available online). I’ve used Sands and McDougall street directories, electoral rolls, the Women’s Suffrage Petition of 1891. I’ve poured over the Brunswick City Council rate books and read contemporary newspapers, thanks to TROVE. All this in addition to the standard family history tools, now largely available via the Internet.

In this way I’ve been able to tell something of the story of a street lived in by ordinary people, people who would otherwise have had no place in the history books.

So, let me tell you a story, a story of Piera Street, an extraordinary story of ordinary people living ordinary lives.

As my guiding premise, I have used these lines from local author Steven Carroll’s novel The time we have taken: ‘There is a line … a straight line and a true one, that runs all the way from then until now. It is the thread that connects them all, generation upon generation …’

And so to ‘The extraordinary in the ordinary: the story of Piera Street’: 

When 60 year old John Heeps and his wife step through the door of their newly built home at 4 Nicholas Street, East Brunswick in 1889, they are probably thinking of their future and not their past. They own this house and it represents security in their old age in a time when there is no Old Age Pension. This is where they intend to spend their final years.

It does not enter their minds to think about the speculator who fifty years earlier had bought the land on which Nicholas Street has been built. In October 1839, the area had been surveyed and large blocks one and a half miles long and a quarter of a mile wide were marked out. Nicholas Street was part of Lot 93, bought by Gordon Sandiman, a speculator, who had no interest in working the land. His block was soon subdivided and resold, a pattern that was to be repeated often in all those original blocks over the following fifty years.

Fifty years earlier, John Heeps had been a 10 year old living in the industrial village of Grangepans in West Lothian, Scotland, mainly known for its manufacture of sandstone and ironstone and coal mining. He could not know then that he would marry, migrate to Victoria with his wife Elizabeth and four young children and that by the time he was thirty he would be settled in Brunswick where eight more children would be born.

It does not enter their minds, either, to think about the members of the Aboriginal people of the Wurundgeri-willam line of the white gum clan who once called this area home. After all, the Wurundjeri were all but gone from the area by the 1840s and 1850s. Yet Nicholas Street (today’s Piera Street), has a rich history that stretches back thousands of years.

John Heeps is unaware, too, of how ancient this landscape is, or how, in fact, the basalt he deals with every day in his work as a quarryman actually represents ‘one of the easternmost lava flows from volcanoes to the north and west of Melbourne’ and that 800,000 years ago it was one of the last lava flows to occur.

In 1889 John Heeps is no stranger to Brunswick, having first settled in the area in the late 1850s. He’d come a long way to get there, from Stirlingshire in Scotland, but Brunswick seems a logical place for someone of his background to settle. Since the late 1840s, Brunswick’s trademark industries of brickmaking and pottery had begun to make their mark and by the mid-1850s this area was in the heart of the brickyard quarter that had recently sprung up around nearby Weston and Ewing Streets. As well, there were extensive stone quarries in the nearby Merri Creek area, ideal for building and road construction.

As a young man in Scotland, Heeps had worked as a coal miner, but the town he lived in was known also for its tile and brick works as well as its sandstone, ironstone and coal works. These latter industries were something that Heeps had known from birth. It can be no surprise, then, that John Heeps made his living in Brunswick as a quarryman.

By the time the Heeps family move into 4 Nicholas Street in 1889, the first year of the street’s existence, they have already seen thirty years of change in Brunswick. By the mid-1860s they were among the 3,000 residents of Brunswick who witnessed changes all around them as technological advances made their mark in the community. The first gas light went up in Sydney Road in 1860, for example.

Some of the flavour of these early times can be seen in the reminiscences of an elderly Catherine Mary Clinton, born in 1853, arrived in Brunswick in the 1860s and a resident of Brunswick for eighty years:

[She recalled] canvas constructed shanties with stone and mud chimneys on the banks of the Merri and Moonee Ponds Creeks, amidst white blue gum trees and saplings, and women carrying armfuls of washing to rinse in the creek waters.

She could vividly describe Aboriginal corroborees in North Fitzroy and Princes Hill…

She recalled the carrying of merchandise along Sydney Road by donkeys and bullock teams, the arrival of the Cobb and Co’s four horse drawn mail coaches …

As the parents of young children, John and Elizabeth Heeps, like all parents, were affected by the 1872 Education Act, which mandated that education should be free, secular and compulsory until the age of fifteen. If they had not done so already, they were now compelled to send ten year old Robert, eight year old Alice and six year old James to school, possibly to the South Brunswick State School in Brunswick Road. Their younger children Mary, Margaret, Matthew and Emily were soon to follow. The family were there in 1879 when Brunswick’s first bus service was established, based in Sydney Road, which was the centre for most of the development in the municipality. And no doubt they were aware of the exploits of the Kelly Gang, of the spectacular hold up of the bank at Jerilderie in 1879 and of Ned’s hanging at Old Melbourne Gaol in the following year.

Brunswick was a rapidly developing city. In the 1880s its population rose by 253 per cent. Big changes had occurred. No longer a ‘semi-rural village’, it had developed into a ‘built-up industrial dormitory town.’ In 1884, the first railway opened and in 1887 the first cable tram began operation. In 1889, the Brunswick Gas Company was established and so the modernisation of the area continued.

By 1888, Brunswick had been declared a Town and on the tail end of Melbourne’s land boom more land was subdivided, including the O’Connor Estate in September 1888. This meant that the land near today’s O’Connor Street was developed, and, of course, it also meant that nearby Nicholas Street, named after local market gardener James Nicholas, was subdivided and lots were made available for sale.

The 1888 Brunswick Rate Book reveals that there were twenty-five ratepayers in this newly constructed street, ten on the south side and thirteen on the north. The net annual value of the street was £210. Within a year, as more houses were built, the value of the street had almost doubled.

***

The Heeps’ new home, number 4, appears today to be part of a row of sixteen four roomed brick workers cottages which line the southern side of the street, but a closer examination of numbers 2 and 4 show that they are set slightly further back from the street and the rate books reveal that they were built separately and were owned by their original occupants, Thomas O’Farrell at number 2 and John Heeps at number 4. The following fourteen cottages were built by builder, Thomas H. Bond. Bond also owned the two wooden houses now known as numbers 38 and 40, although those houses very soon passed into the possession of his mother-in-law, Annie Riley, and soon after that to his sister-in-law Annie Malmlof, but that’s another story.

The cottages are typical of the end of the Victorian era style of housing. They were built in two colour brickwork and several of the houses have been restored in recent years revealing once more this original feature. Their roofs were slate and today, one hundred and twenty years later, two houses still have slate roofs. The chimneys were cornice-topped but today only two of these remain. The houses featured pendant brackets under narrow eaves and today some of the houses still feature the original cast iron lacework on their verandahs. The front window (only one in these single-fronted houses), was framed by narrow sidelights, another characteristic of the style.

***

In 1889, the cottages dominate the streetscape. At the far end of this side of the street are numbers 38 and 40, but the space between is empty. It’s a similar story on the other side of the street. There are several houses at the end closest to Lygon Street and several more at the lane end, but for the most part, the north side of the street is made up of empty blocks. And with the advent of the 1890s Depression, many blocks remain empty for years. Families move in and out; houses remain vacant for years at a time. In the Heeps and O’Farrell terrace, for example, half the houses are empty in 1895. In 1893, rates skyrocket. Bond’s row of cottages becomes the property of the London Chartered Banking Company. Other home owners default on their home payments and for the first time bank managers, accountants and estate agents number amongst the rate payers in the street.

Life in the 1890s is tough. In 1893, the boom goes bust. Banks and building societies collapse and Victoria is the worst hit state. It has been estimated that at the height of the 1890s Depression, a third of Brunswick’s working population is out of work. Many people leave the district, often doing a midnight flit. The O’Farrell and Heeps families represent stability in this row of sixteen houses.

John and Elizabeth Heeps crowd into their four-roomed single-fronted home, along with five of their children, two boys and three girls, although two children soon marry, which alleviates some of the crowding. It is quite a squeeze to fit the whole family in, but within a few years only the parents and the two youngest remain at home.

Next door, at number 2, live the O’Farrells. Unlike John and Elizabeth Heeps, Michael and Johanna O’Farrell are newcomers to the Colony. Indeed, they are newcomers to Australia, having arrived in Brisbane in November 1886. Their three eldest sons, Terrence, Patrick and Thomas, have already settled in Victoria and it is son Thomas O’Farrell, a gardener, who is the first owner of number 2, and it is Thomas, along with his wife Annie and their two children, who are the first occupants of the house. When they move on to live in nearby Brunswick Road, his parents (Michael and Johanna) and siblings move into the house, and it is at number 2 that Michael dies in December 1902.

Michael O’Farrell, the same age as John Heeps, is a native of Limerick. In 1890, the Irish make up about 22 per cent of Brunswick’s population and no doubt there are tensions between the Catholic O’Farrells and the Methodist Heeps family, especially in July 1896 when there are clashes between the Orange and the Green in Melbourne. In Brunswick there is a large march of Orangemen along Sydney Road in celebration of the Battle of the Boyne. It is an annual event, but on this occasion a huge counter-march of Irish Nationalists is organised and it spills over into violence. Fortunately, extreme violence is avoided, but it is likely that the tensions carry over into the street, especially between the Protestant and Catholic neighbours at the top of the street.

In 1891, twenty Nicholas Street women sign the Women’s Suffrage Petition, including Johanna O’Farrell and Elizabeth Heeps. Elizabeth’s Methodist beliefs must have something to do with her willingness to sign. Methodists of this time are teetotallers and much of the motivation behind the suffrage movement revolves around the temperance movement, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) being one of the driving forces and there has been a branch of the WCTU in Brunswick since 1887. This petition, often referred to as the Monster Petition, is important in the history of female suffrage in Victoria, but it is important in the history of Piera Street, too, because for one brief moment these anonymous, barely literate, working class women step out of the street and into history.

***

After Michael O’Farrell’s death in late 1902, his wife Johanna and daughter Bridget stay on for a year. Michael’s son Thomas, who still owns the house, only outlives his father by six years and dies the same year as John Heeps, 1908. With their passing, the story of this part of the street is taken over by newer and younger families, such as Percy and Amelia Schott, who move into number 28 in 1903. The Schott family is to remain in possession of the house for the next sixty years.

Percy Schott, now thirty-three, has lived in Brunswick since he was nine years old and after an unpromising start in life, he has bought the house at number 28 and he and Amelia are looking forward to raising their family here.

Percy has come a long way to get here, not geographically, but in social terms. He was born in December 1869, his brother Philip in January 1871, to Philip Schott and Kathleen Desmond. Shortly after Philip junior’s birth, the boys were declared neglected children and made wards of the state. Although their mother claimed that she had married Schott, a note in Percy’s file reveals that he already had a wife in England. Besides, 30 year old Schott, a German from Frankfurt, who had been living in England for some years and who had arrived in the Colony three years previously, had just been found guilty of arson and was serving a prison sentence in Pentridge.

Philip Schott senior and his business partner Adolphe Sanders had established a business as East India merchants in Little Collins Street in 1870, but had burned down their premises in a failed attempt at insurance fraud. Schott’s English wife Elizabeth and his two year old son sailed for Melbourne as soon as she heard of her husband’s conviction. It was through the intercessions of his wife and the German Consul that Schott was granted a pardon on condition that he left the colony, which he did in early May 1873, accompanied by his wife and son. On their return to England, two more sons were born, and in 1887, presumably after his death, his wife and sons Walter and Victor left England and settled permanently in Los Angeles, where Walter became a dentist and Victor a photo engraver. Philip, a furniture dealer, had settled in Kansas. Percy, who grew up in Brunswick believing that he was alone in the world, was unaware of these three half-brothers living successful lives in the United States.

Percy’s mother, Kathleen Desmond, a needlewoman, loved her two boys but was unable to support them and besides, the authorities felt that she was ‘not of good character.’ She changed address constantly, but she was careful to give each change of address to the authorities so that she could be informed of illness and so on, and this continued for more than fifteen years, the time in which the boys remained wards of the state. She wrote to her boys, so clearly she did not want them to forget her, and it must have been a bitter disappointment when she was asked to stop writing to Percy in 1886 because it ‘unsettled the boy’. (He was then sixteen.)

When the Schott boys became wards of the state, they were not kept together and Philip was boarded out to a Ballarat East family when he was two. Percy, however, was moved from institution to institution until five days after his tenth birthday when he was finally boarded out with Mary Williams of Edward Street, Brunswick, and it is here that Percy’s sixty year connection with Brunswick began.

This placement was not a success and five months later Percy ran away. Percy’s next placement, again in Brunswick, was much happier. He joined the family of Mary Ann and Charles Beer. The Beers brought him up well, sent him to school regularly where he received favourable reports and when he was fourteen, Charles Beer took him on as an apprentice in his plumbing business at 188 Sydney Road, between Edward and Merri Streets. Three years later, Percy moved on to the plumbing business of Edward Slinn at 217 Brunswick Road East.

From that time, Percy’s future had been determined for him. Unlike his mother, who moved from place to place and finally disappeared from the scene, and his father, whose criminal activities saw him incarcerated in Pentridge until he, too, disappeared from the scene, Percy’s life was firmly anchored in Brunswick. By 1900, he is running his own business on the corner of Edward and Lygon Streets. He is to remain a plumber all his life.

Percy and Amelia move into 28 Nicholas Street as newlyweds in 1903 and they remain there until their deaths, his in 1939 and hers in 1944. Even then the Schott connection with the street does not end. Unable to have children of their own, they foster a boy, known as Percy Anketell Schott. This Percy, a labourer, does not marry and lives on alone in the house until the 1960s.

The Schotts move into number 28 in 1903, the year of the first federal election in Australia and the first year in which women are able to exercise their right to vote. And it is the 1903 electoral roll that allows us our first glimpse of the social composition of the street. Apart from Abraham and Rose Berner at number 26, the families in the street are all of British backgrounds, mostly English or Irish. Most homes are occupied by couples, but six voters are women on their own, although some are widows or deserted wives with a family of underage children. Johanna O’Farrell of number 2, whom we met earlier, now newly widowed and working as a dressmaker, is one of the few women in paid employment. The others are Sarah Matthews of number 27, a grocer; Annie Carlisle of number 24, a machinist and Edith Reynard of number 32, a music teacher. The men’s occupations are widely based and solidly working class: foundry dresser, carter, labourers (four), tram employees (two), bootmaker, boot finisher, clerk, hairdresser, cab owner, hawker, quarryman (John Heeps), butcher, gilder, plumber (Percy Schott), potter, blacksmith and storeman.

***

The pattern of life does not change much over the first thirty years of the street’s existence. Each morning, after a quick breakfast of bread and jam, or bread and butter or even better, bread and dripping (a firm favourite with everyone), and a cup of tea, the men of Nicholas Street set off for work and remain away until the evening, some later than others if they decide to stop for a drink at the Quarry Hotel, or perhaps the Brunswick Club. The residents of Brunswick share an alarm clock. The Hoffman’s whistle blows at 7.15 am, alerting everyone that it is time to be on the move. To make doubly sure that no one is tempted to turn over and go back to sleep, it echoes through the otherwise quiet morning for another five minutes. The school age children leave, too, and do not return until mid-afternoon. The street then becomes the domain of the women.

Perhaps they stop and chat with their neighbours for a while, but running a household in Edwardian times is an onerous business and there is no time to be wasted. Remember that electricity does not come to Brunswick until 1914 and many houses do not have gas connected. Then, too, there is no running water inside the house and the kitchen, bathroom and laundry facilities are primitive and tucked away at the rear of the house, often in a wooden lean-to extension. There is certainly no running hot water. Just outside the back door is a tap over a gully trap and this supplies all the family’s water needs for drinking, cooking, washing and bathing. (When number 38 is sold in 2010, the original tap over the gully trap is still in use, now neatly covered by a metal lid.) The toilet, a can with a seat on top, is to be found at the very end of the backyard, which is probably just as well, especially in summer when the smell is intolerable. Once a week, in the middle of the night, the ‘nightman’ comes down the blue-stone laneway to remove the waste. Sewerage does not come to Brunswick until the 1920s.

The street itself is unpaved, throwing up dust in summer and turning to mud in winter. Those who live closest to Lygon Street might be aware of the horse-drawn trams and other horse-drawn vehicles moving along the poorly made and poorly drained main street, dropping dung and creating a smelly mess that is especially difficult during the summer months. Next door, too, in the building that today houses the Small Block Café, are the premises of C. Waters and Sons, hay and corn merchants. The dust and chaff produced in their daily work adds to the housewife’s difficulties, as does the smoke pollution coming from the chimneys of the many potteries in the area. Just as street away , in Edward Street, where the former Tip Top Factory was located, is the closest of the potteries. It begins life in the late 1890s as W.H. Rocke and Co, Australian Terra Cotta works and becomes Wunderlich Terra Cotta Manufacturers by 1910. It remains in business until the second great Depression in the 1930s. The housewife may be aware of the value of fresh air in keeping her home free of disease, but has she dared to open the front window?

***

Being seen to be respectable is of utmost importance to the housewife and the orderliness of her home reflects this. If she is house-proud, she scrubs her front door step and sweeps her paths daily, aware that others will judge her as slovenly if she does not do so. After all, cleanliness is next to godliness.

It is possible that behind the high picket fence the housewife has placed a cheerful pot of flowers in a prominent place on the front verandah – geraniums, perhaps. And the tiny front garden may be planted with hardy flowers and shrubs – her selection of nasturtiums, begonias, wallflowers, sweet peas, agapanthus, nerine, iris, violets and maybe even a rose bush or two. The plants need to be hardy. In the first year of the street’s existence, 1889, there is plenty of rain and there is even severe flooding in the nearby Merri Creek and for a few years this remains the case. This gives the gardens an excellent start in life, but in 1895 a serious drought begins and it does not end until 1903, the year the Schotts move into the street. It is as if the weather dries up in sympathy with the economy and when the economy improves, within a few years the weather does so, too. In the meantime, water cannot be spared for the garden, and besides, there is only one tap, at the back of the house, and someone needs to care enough to lug it through to the front yard if the plants are to be watered. But the garden is important to the housewife. When she walks through her front gate and closes it behind her, she is closing out the outside world and entering her own private world, her home. Her garden tells her neighbours that not only are they survivors, but they look forward to a better future here, in their little workman’s cottage.

***

These are single-fronted houses, so there is only one front window. Its starched lace curtains are a sign of a woman who is proud of her home. The curtains provide privacy, hiding from the street the activities within, but the routines are similar in every house. If she has decided to air her house and has left the front door open to let in more air and the sunshine that bathes the front of these north-facing terraces for most of the day, it is possible to see straight down the narrow passage to the back yard where, if it is Monday, the housewife is hanging out the washing, but more of this later.

That front room is the parents’ bedroom and further back in the house there are another two rooms where the children of the family sleep. The bedrooms are small, especially the children’s rooms. The youngest child, an infant or a toddler, shares the parents’ room. The girls of the family squash into a double bed in their room and the boys do the same in theirs. They probably have to ‘top and tail’ to achieve this, but there is nowhere else for them to sleep. There is room for little else but beds. A chest of drawers and a wardrobe might be squeezed in. Under the bed is the chamber pot, the potty, used during the night, for it is a long way to visit the toilet in the dark. On the chest of drawers is a candle, the only available lighting.

For the people of Nicholas Street, living in these overcrowded cottages, privacy cannot be assumed anywhere in the house, except, perhaps, in the toilet, the dunny or thunderbox as it becomes known in the Australian vernacular, located on the very edge of the family’s territory.

And then we reach the heart of the home, the sitting room, which doubles as a dining room. Against the wall it shares with the parents’ bedroom (which was probably designed originally as a parlour) is a fireplace, the wood fire being the only form of heating in the house. The mantelpiece is of wood and houses vases and knick knacks, some of which were wedding gifts. Someone, maybe a daughter too old for school and as yet unmarried, has painstakingly made a decoration for the front of the mantle. To do this she has cut out a long strip of newspaper then cut decorative patterns into it. It cheers up the room, is cheap and can be replaced easily.

The sitting room itself is crowded. There is a sofa close to the fireplace and maybe a chair, the domain of the man of the house. On one wall there is a dresser, where crockery and cutlery are to be found. In pride of place in its open top are the reproduction blue willow pattern pieces they were given as a wedding present. There, too, is the kerosene lamp that lights the room. Maybe there is a treadle sewing machine in a corner, so the mother or daughters can make or mend clothes. Some families may have a piano. It is dusted and polished religiously every week for to them it is a symbol of civilisation, of gentility. The family gathers around the piano on weekends to sing hymns or popular ‘pop’ tunes, such as Stephen Foster’s ‘Beautiful Dreamer’ or ‘Danny Boy’ or if it’s war time, patriotic tunes like ‘Australia will be there’.

But the room is dominated by its table and the four chairs placed around it. In some houses there is not enough room for the everyone in the family to sit down and eat together, but then the housewife rarely eats with the rest of the family, as she is busy serving up the food and supervising the meal. She makes sure that hands are clean and that everyone gets their fair share of food. She clears the table and washes up. Her girls help her, but the preparation, delivery and clean up of meals is a major part of her day’s routine. The pine table is scrubbed clean at least once a week and on most days is protected by an oilcloth tablecloth. On Sundays, though, it is replaced by a meticulously starched and pressed lace tablecloth.

Sunday dinner is the most important meal of the week. It is the only day of the week that everyone is at home, men included. The meal centres around the roast – a joint of beef or mutton. It is served with potatoes and gravy, carrots and some greens. For dessert, if they are lucky, there is a pudding, golden syrup dumplings, perhaps, but certainly something filling.

The leftovers from this meal are served up in many guises during the week to come. Add a few carrots and onions and it forms the basis of a stew, served with suet dumplings to help fill those hungry mouths. On another night it is transformed into shepherd’s pie, using a cast-iron mincer screwed to the end of the table to mince the meat, onions and carrots, just as my own mother did well into the 1970s. Bread is added to make the meat go further then it is the turn of the left-over gravy and some herbs. This mix is topped with a thick layer of mashed potato and another satisfying meal is ready for the family to devour. If there is meat left still, there will be a meal of cold cuts, but perhaps, too, a rabbit has been bought to make another stew, and occasionally there will be a meal of eggs and bacon or fish.

The kitchen, such as it is, is in a wooden lean-to at the back of the house that doubles as a laundry. The stove is near the copper and the fuel used for both is wood. The wood has come from the wood yard around the corner in Leyden Street and one of the boys has split up pieces into kindling to help get the fires going. The wood itself is stacked high against the outside wall of the kitchen cum laundry, within easy reach. But it is the housewife who lights the stove fire early every morning and puts the kettle on for that first refreshing cup of tea, then begins the work of preparing breakfast. The stove remains hot all day. This routine never alters, even in the sweltering heat of the summer, when temperatures in that room, especially on Monday, laundry day, are unbearable.

On one wall of the kitchen is a food safe, a Coolgardie, made of wire mesh covered in hessian. The ends of the hessian hang down into a tray of water at its base and so the food inside is kept cool and out of the reach of flies and vermin. In it the housewife keeps meat, butter, milk, bread and anything she has cooked ready for the evening meal. Close at hand are canisters full of other staples such as flour, tea, salt and sugar. A little further along the wall is a small shelf of cooking equipment. There is very little on it: a frying pan, some saucepans and baking trays. Fresh food is bought daily. There is no fridge, no ice chest, nothing but the Coolgardie to keep the food fresh, especially important in the summer months. There are greengrocers close by and hawkers, often local Chinese market gardeners, do regular rounds of the streets. As the Depression bites deeper, she may find new hawkers appearing, men without jobs who are trying to eke out a living touting fruit and vegetables that they have bought at the market on the corner of Dawson and Saxon Streets, where the Brosnan Centre now stands.

Maintaining a clean and healthy home is time-consuming and relentless work, but the housewife knows it is important if her family is to survive. In working class areas such as Brunswick, where there is often overcrowding and sub-standard accommodation, lack of sanitation leads to infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever and whooping cough. It is the housewife’s responsibility to keep her household clear of these potential killers. With soap, soda and vinegar as her cleaning agents and her broom, bucket, mop and scrubbing brush, she must keep her family healthy. Every day she must wash the dishes, sweep and scrub the floors and other surfaces. This routine dominates her life and every day of the week has a particular role to play.

Saturday is family bath day, but not before the whole family takes a dose of castor oil to ensure internal cleanliness. Then it is the turn of the external surfaces of the body. The ritual that follows takes place in the laundry cum kitchen. Here the family washes and bathes. There is a daily routine of washing face and hands and once a week on a Saturday everyone bathes in a tin bath that is filled with hot water from the copper. It is likely, too, that the whole family (apart from the mother, who makes her own arrangements during the week when everyone is away from home) bathes in the same water. The mother has filled the copper with water she has carried in a bucket from the tap in the backyard, lit the wood fire underneath it, then bucketted the hot water into the bath tub. Later, she will bucket the water into the backyard where it will run to the back of the property and join the bath water of other houses in the street as it runs along the gutter in the bluestone lined laneway at the rear of the houses until it eventually makes its way to the main street.

On Saturdays, everyone has their hair washed and massaged with olive oil mixed with a little kerosene in an attempt to escape the stigma of lice. Imagine the crying of the girls as the knots are combed out of their long hair after it is washed. Imagine the resistance to cutting out any recalcitrant knots in those days before conditioners, but it is part of the Saturday bathing ritual and cannot be avoided.

Saturday is also the day when beds are stripped of their blankets and heavy cotton sheets and sheets are changed, ready for wash day on Monday. The beds have been aired daily in an attempt to ward off bed bugs and fleas. If this is the week when mattresses are turned (or turned over), help will be needed to complete this chore.

Sunday is the traditional day of rest. It is a family day, the only day when the workers are at home. In the morning there is church, which is followed by Sunday dinner and family visits and other recreational activities. There is no work for anyone on a Sunday – except the housewife, who still has to prepare the meals and organise the washing up.

On a weekday, her husband may come home for a meal. She knows when it is lunchtime, because the Hoffman’s whistle blows promptly at midday and then again at one o’clock to signal the men’s return to work. She shops for food daily, as there is no refrigeration in her house, not even an ice chest. At the far end of the street is Sidney Sims’ greengrocer shop, so she does not have far to go to get fresh food. Just a little further away, on the corner of Lygon Street and Glenlyon Road is J.T. Coles’ grocer’s shop ,where she can buy essential supplies such as bread, butter, milk, tea and flour. Around the corner in Leyden Street is James Parkin’s wood yard. In Lygon Street, on the corner of Edward Street, where Lygon Bikes is today, Moran and Cato has a general store. Or she can visit King and Godfree on the corner of Weston and Lygon Streets. Here the housewife can purchase soap and cleaning agents, brooms, candles, matches and kerosene or oil for the lamps which light her house. Those who manage well have money left over for tobacco and beer for their husbands. Those whose husbands have a fondness for beer often struggle to find enough money to feed and clothe the family, especially during the Depression years in the 1890s. The shopping routine is played out daily and rarely changes, but in addition every weekday has its own special routine.

The housewife has a heavy workload on Monday. This is wash day. The routine of heating water begins early, just as it did on Saturday. Once the water is hot, in go soap, sheets, towels, dishcloths, clothing. She agitates the water with a wooden dolly and when satisfied that her washing is clean, she removes the items one by one using a solid piece of dowel then drops them into the concrete wash tubs attached to the wall next to the copper. Between the tubs she has attached a mangle through which the washing passes as she turns the handle that works the rollers. She now places the items in a wicker clothes basket which she carries outside to the clothes line, a long length of galvanised wire held up by wooden props and stretched along the length of the back yard. The days of the Hills Hoist have not yet arrived.

On days with a southerly breeze she faces the prospect of sooty smoke blowing across from the Wunderlich factory in Edward Street and contaminating her washing, but she has no choice. Monday is washing day come rain, shine or pollution. If she is lucky, the washing will be dry in the afternoon and she will be ready for Tuesday’s ritual – the ironing. For this she uses a charcoal iron or flat iron heated on the top of the stove. She begins by damping down the items (no steam irons in those days) and so the day’s ironing begins.

On Wednesday she does a thorough clean of the house and Thursday she dedicates to mending. She darns socks, sews buttons back on, turns collars and cuffs, mends and patches clothes and sheets, tears up clothes too old to wear any more for use as cleaning cloths. Perhaps, if she is able, she will make clothes for herself or her children.

By Friday she has her house in order once more. It is baking day and today she prepares for the coming week. And now she finds herself back at Saturday, and her battle to keep her family fed, clothed and healthy starts over again.

***

Life continues in much the same way until war is declared in early August 1914. Families such as the Abbeys at number 6 and the Dunlops at number 10 are not to know that this ‘Great War’, this ‘war to end all wars’, as it is known, is only the first and that their sons and grandsons and generations beyond will fight in Europe, in the Pacific, in Korea and Vietnam, in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Nearly a hundred years on, the sons (and now the daughters) of Brunswick leave the suburb, their homes and families, either willingly or unwillingly (for conscription is finally introduced during the days of the Vietnam War) to fulfil their patriotic duty. But for now, they enlist, believing that this really is the war to end all wars.

After the war there are a few years when it seems that life will return to normal, but then another Depression occurs and another world war. From the late 1940s great social changes occur in the area, many as a result of post-war immigration. Non-anglo families move into the street to live close to their work in the many nearby factories. It is during this time, in 1950, that Nicholas Street becomes Piera Street, named after the then recently retired Mayor of Brunswick, Gordon Piera. Eventually most of the non-anglo families move away, the factories close and Brunswick East becomes a ‘hip’ locality. The shopfronts of Lygon Street that have been closed or that housed failing businesses come to life again. Piera Street is home to young families again.

The lives we live now are creating the street’s future history and I hope that someone in the future will be as interested in exploring this history as I have in breathing life into the stories I’ve presented here.

Photo: State Library Victoria “Brunswick Road, East c. l.: Sydney / road ; c.r.: Park / st East; u.l.: Austin’s / house (Bowman’s / school) – Note open spaces and large gum trees, 1866.