The House That Was Eureka (13 page)

A volley of revolver shots was released by the police, nine bullet holes later being found in the woodwork of the cottage.

One of the defenders, Richard Eatock, fell back suffering from a bullet wound.

The police eventually entered the house from the side as well as from the front and back. The occupants put up a short but fierce resistance, but at last, realising that they were hopelessly beaten, they surrendered.

Some of the men were treated on the spot by the Canterbury-Bankstown District Ambulance, others were taken to hospital and treated, but only two were admitted to hospital. The 14 men not admitted to hospital were eventually taken to Bankstown police station.

Two more men were detained at the station, and later 16 men were charged.

Several waggons were despatched by the Canterbury-Bankstown Ambulance, and the following were treated for various injuries:–

Richard Eatock, of The Mall, Bankstown, bullet wound in the right thigh; Alex Makaroff, of Chiswick-street, Chullora, injuries to the hands and probably a fracture of the skull; Douglas Kendell, of East-street, Lidcombe, incised wound of the head; John Arthur Terry, of Nelson-avenue, Belmore, cuts on the head; John Boles, of Liverpool-road, Bankstown, lacerated jaw; George Hill, of Crown-street, Surry Hills, lacerated scalp; Harold Woolfe, of Boronia-road, Bankstown, lacerated scalp; Jack Hansen of Cornelia-street, Punchbowl, incised wounds on the head; and Daniel Sammon, of Clyde-street, Clyde, lacerated scalp.

A large crowd watched the battle from a safe distance. News of the encounter spread round the neighbourhood like wild-fire. The noise of the conflict could be heard a quarter of a mile distant. Glass in the windows was smashed by the flying missiles hurled by the besieged and returned by the police vanguard. After the battle, the cottage presented a battered appearance. Not a window was left intact, and a side door had been smashed in during the conflict. Inside there was devastation. Scarcely a piece of furniture remained. The floors of what had once been bedrooms and living rooms were littered with dirt, blue metal, broken glass, and the crude weapons which the occupants had used. Bloodstains marked the floor, and the sandbags on the front verandah.

More than 300 Communists attended a meeting at Bankstown to protest against the actions of the police during the riot in that suburb later this morning. Wild speeches were delivered, one speaker declaring that what had happened today was only the beginning of a revolution, and that further developments would take place at Newtown.

Wednesday 17 June 1931. The Liberty Street pickets are crowded around Nobby in the kitchen, reading the afternoon paper that Nobby-the-runner has just brought them.

‘I was there!’ Nobby is saying. ‘I was out there!’

A picket called Isaacs slaps him on the back.

‘Good on yer, lad,’ says Mr Dacey. So glowingly that Nobby doesn’t mind being called ‘lad’.

Mick Cruise envies him.

A young bloke called Williams asks him how much blood there was.

‘I saw the pistols. I heard the bullets. It was like the war, so many guns. And then I saw Eatock limp out with that bullet in him. They were all handcuffed.’

To be a hero
, Nobby feels.
To know things and do things and lead things
. Everyone is slapping him on the back, though all he did was stand in the crowd and yell.

‘All right, comrades,’ Paddy’s voice is booming over. ‘We’ve all had our read now and there’s nothing we can do about what happened today, so I vote we have our tea and bag up the gap and settle down for a good night’s sleep in case Lang’s Larruppers pay us a visit tomorrow.’

The pickets drift off from Nobby’s newspaper. Isaacs and Murchison and Nicholls and Johnnie Kennet sit down on the floor and play euchre. Mr Dacey pulls out his tin whistle. Murphy lights the two kerosine lamps – for the electricity has been cut off and the pickets live by candlelight and lamplight at night. Paddy gets out his penknife, sticks his feet up on the table, and starts to cut his toenails.

‘Aren’t we going to do something?’ Nobby says.

Paddy moves onto the second foot. Says nothing. He’s got enough trouble keeping all the pickets nice and steady without this lad with his nerves strung tight like piano wire.

‘I was out there!’

Nobby saw blood drawn, and he feels he’ll never be the same. For Nobby, it was like the Russian Revolution or the Easter Rising, that Lizzie is always spouting about. The police use bullets, so shouldn’t the people use bullets back? It seems only fair. Tit for tat. The way Mick and Lizzie had taught him to fight, you never let no one beat you. If a kid gets the better of you in a scrap one day, then you go back the next and do
him
. If he moves on from knuckles to rocks, then you pelt rocks back.

Nobby can’t stop saying it: ‘I was out there!’

‘And out
there
,’ Paddy nods towards the backyard, ‘you’ll be in a minute, soon as you’ve run up and got us our tea. Ask Ma to give you all the bread and jam she’s got, we’ll eat cold tomorrow, because from now on I want you out there all the time.’ Paddy’s got a feeling the cops may come tomorrow, and there’s no way he wants Nobby in the house.

Nobby protests. But you can’t budge Paddy. Paddy is sweeping his toenail clippings off the table.

That evening, Roseanne came down from Campbelltown. Her father was going to some club in town, and Roseanne had nothing to do so she said: ‘Drop me off and I’ll have a look at Evie’s new place, and pick me up on your way home.’

Evie was pretty boring, but she was better than sitting out at Campbelltown and doing nothing.

Ugh, Roseanne thought when she arrived. The house-paint outside was coming off in strips, like peeling sunburn, and the little front yard was just weeds. Roseanne didn’t like to imagine how many people must’ve died here over the years.

From his balcony, Noel shot her. Then stood up to watch her live body go up to knock at Evie’s door. Roseanne looked up and saw a creep of a boy looking down a mouth-organ at her from the next-door balcony. Noel hated girls who looked like that, in smart-coloured jeans.

‘Gee it’s dark and pokey,’ Roseanne said when she got inside.

Evie didn’t say anything. When Roseanne arrived, Evie was feeling funny.

She’d just had a fight with Ted, and for once she’d fought.

Not sitting in her Evie-Peevie sleep but alive and fighting.

‘
You
reckon…the way
you
talk…anyone can just go off and get a job, easy as that!’

Ted sat there with his can of KB. He didn’t say anything, but Evie knew what he must be thinking. There was fight and anger then in Evie. A redness flying behind her eyes. Better to be awake and struggling than the nothing she’d always felt before.

Bang, I hate you, Ted.

Hate, a feeling. Like what we’ve got next door, you and me, Mrs Oatley.

‘I think I’d like to have a baby,’ Roseanne says. She and Evie are in the scullery. Mum and Ted are out.

Roseanne smokes, and drinks some beer from one of Ted’s cans that Evie has got her from the fridge. Evie doesn’t care if Ted notices.

‘If I can’t get a job I might as well do something,’ Roseanne says.

It’s still all airy-fairy in Roseanne’s mind but Evie doesn’t know that. It all seems too old for Evie, full of things she can’t work out.

Evie talks about Roger. He’s her boyfriend. Not in real life maybe, but in the mind of Evie these days the thin membrane between real life and some other world is disappearing.

‘He’s got lovely hair,’ says Evie. ‘Really clean, and a really good suntan. He goes surfing a lot. He often takes me, weekends.’

‘What sort of car’s he got?’

Evie falters. They don’t travel by car. They’re just suddenly there, alone on a beach with no other people, sitting high up on a rock, dangling their legs down over waves and waves of bright blue freedom; feeling good. ‘A Kingswood. Same model as Ted’s.’

‘Yeah?’ Roseanne is impressed if it’s true, but she’s not sure it is. How would someone like Evie get someone like this? ‘What’s he do?’

‘He makes movies,’ says Evie. ‘Only little ones so far,’ she swings back closer to the truth. ‘On, you know, video, and I help him, and do the sound.’ Evie’s ambition: to supplant that fattish girl with glasses and trail around after Roger like a puppy on a lead.

‘One night we took a camera to the beach and made a film of all the lights.’ It didn’t sound so exciting, when you said it like that.

‘Chris doesn’t like movies,’ Roseanne interrupts. Roseanne doesn’t like it when Evie talks: the point of Evie is to listen. ‘Chris is into music.’

‘Yeah?’ Evie leaps in quickly. ‘Noel’s into music too.’

‘Who’s Noel?’

‘The guy I’m telling you about.’ Evie hasn’t yet realized her mistake.

‘I thought his name was meant to be Rod or something.’ Roseanne doesn’t care. Rod or something, or Noel, he doesn’t exist anyway.

‘What did I say?’

‘You just said Noel.’

Jump jump. Evie’s mind keeps making sudden jumps these days and she gets muddled.

She’ll have to keep calling him Noel now, when she talks to Roseanne, to cover her mistake.

‘He plays mouth-organ,’ Evie says. ‘Real well.’ Making in her mind a picture of Roger playing mouth-organ.

‘One night he was playing in this big place up at Newtown and he got me this free ticket to go and watch.’

Lizzie’s out in the street when Nobby runs past down to Kennets’ to get the tucker. She’s not talking to Nobby. Hasn’t spoken to him for over a week.

Thinks he’s smart, Nobby Weston. Hanging around in the house all day while she’s stuck out on the street, keeping the picket going. Her and baby Fee all day, her and the other girls when school gets out, her and a couple of dozen grown-ups too in the daytime, but the grown-ups change, come for a few hours and then go. Only Lizzie is there all the time, making the signs, leading the chants, making it tough for the scab to walk through if she wants to walk into the street.

Lizzie’s lonely, split from Nobby. He’s been there, always beside her, for ten years now, her best friend. Her only friend. Following her lead, doing what she does, doing what Mick does too but only if Lizzie does it first.

But now it’s just Nobby doing what Mick does, or even doing things first.

Sometimes now, it’s as if she’s at war with Nobby. Lined up against each other, like Saturday mornings with the invading armies. She much preferred it when they were both Crusaders together. Lizzie shivers. I’m cold as silver.

For some reason, there flashes into Lizzie’s mind the bright memory of that helix of a spinning silver serviette ring that disappeared that Saturday morning into thin dark air. That last free silver-Saturday morning, long ago now. That morning was the first time she realized Nobby’s mother’s hatred for her. And now the hatred had led to this. In Lizzie’s memory now the silver spins faster and faster till the spin of the movement turns red as a flame. I’m warm, I’m a flame. No I’m not, I’m cold as silver.

Lizzie gets cold out on the June street, so she skips to keep warm. Skips to get Fee to skip with her, to keep Fee warm.

Fee Fee

Here with me…

Fee, my baby sister, only four. You shouldn’t have favourites, but I do.

Lizzie grabs Fee’s hand with the automatic action of a big sister and skips her up and down,
Fee with me…
It makes the loneliness sometimes warmer, holding Fee.

Lizzie’s out on the street with Fee when Nobby runs past down to Kennets’ to get the tucker.

‘Hey Nobby!’ she yells. She’s not talking to him, but her voice yells out to him.

Nobby runs past. Lizzie with her brigade of kids. They throw old tins over his mother’s fence at night, and Nobby hears them through the night as he and his mother lie in their beds, not sleeping in the silent house.

Mother, Mother, Lizzie, Girl, don’t split me like a piece of firewood.

Lizzie yells out, but she’s been playing not speaking. Nobby can play that too.

Nobby runs past; Lizzie skips and chants. Secretly Nobby feels that Lizzie’s being a bit childish. Lizzie playing revolutions. Nobby saw one today.

Noel was playing his mouth-organ in the outside dunny. It was a nice private place to be. Lots of people would think he was a creep if they saw him sitting in here with his mouth-organ, with his new music propped up on the toilet-roll holder, with his candle. Mum had given Evie’s mum the bulb from here the night Evie moved in, and since then Noel has used a candle. People would think he was a creep, but they did anyway, and anyway they wouldn’t see him here because it was a private place. A line of poetry from school went through his mind.

The grave’s a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

Embrace. The word made Noel feel embarrassed somehow, and clumsy. He imagined putting his arms around someone and giving them a hug, and kissing them, but the kiss missing them and Noel feeling stupid. Noel had never tried that, and that was another reason why he never hung around with the guys at school.