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1. Dolls House 1957

I was about seven years old and visiting the city with mum when I saw a beautiful Dolls House in the window of the Legacy Shop in Elizabeth St. My reaction was to ask mum to buy it. She explained we couldn’t afford it. We continued to see it in the window over a period of months until my mum decided to go in with me to have a closer look. They told us it was a prize in a raffle and we bought a ticket for sixpence.

Many months later as I was coming home on the tram from my school at
Rose Bay, I saw mum at the tram stop. This was unusual as I always walked down Salisbury Rd on my own. She greeted me and reminded me of the Dolls House Raffle and told me I had won it!

It was the most beautiful house I’d ever seen and it was waiting for me at home. I spent many hours playing with it and sharing it with friends. It was built by a man in Rose Bay in about 1950 as a fund raiser for legacy. It had everything. There were miniature windows, a chimney, a fireplace, doors that opened and shut and a part of the roof which lifted up; a fully equipped miniature kitchen and bathroom-it even had a frosted window in the bathroom. There was a shower curtain, a small vanity unit with a mirrored door that opened revealing a shelf, a set of stairs to the two upstairs bedrooms…it now needs renovation to restore its splendour after many years of use by me, sisters, friends, sons and various relatives over the years.

The Craftman's Letter

2.     Factory Story [1968-1969]

While at Uni, over the 1968-69 Christmas period, I worked at Westons Biscuit Factory in Camperdown.

I was a shift worker with a Bundy clock forcing workers to queue at the beginning and end of shifts. I was identified very quickly as someone with an academic background even though I did not tell them that I was a university student. I was offered a job weighing biscuits so I had to apparently have a great handle on maths. They asked if I had a handle on fractions. I said yes. So I was put to work at the end of the process where the chocolate, cream and the jam was put into the biscuits. Prior to this I had been packaging up biscuits and getting them off the conveyor belt. My new task was to weigh the biscuits before each process and, at the end, pass the information onto the Manager of the factory, a little Scottish man.

Now that sounds all very simple and the girl before me who had been doing it found it okay. I earned a bonus of $1pw so I earned a total of $26pw instead of $25. An extra $1 was a lot to me back then.

I kept doing this weighing and reporting and was finding that there was too much chocolate or too much cream, erratic kind of covering of these biscuits. Having reported the truth to the little Scottish man I was in big trouble with the men who ran the machines and the mechanics that looked after them. They sat up in an attic watching, [smoking of course}, the machines go around and all the women doing the hard work down below and very rarely coming down to fix the machines.

They came up to me after a couple of days and said “you must not report accurately on the biscuits, you must show us the figures and we will tell you what to report to the manager”. There was no way I would do that. I felt that I had a job to do and it was to give the information to the manager. I kept doing it.

On my last evening at the factory [I had found another job at the university in the administrative enrolments], I was confronted by the group of male watchers, very big men, waiting outside across the street at the bus stop. I was terrified but fortunately heard my sister’s voice just near me. For the first time I was being picked up by my sister and her boyfriend. I was able to get into the car and drive off shaking.

There were many other stories I could relate about the poverty people experienced, the lack of childcare and the awful situation many of those women suffered.

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