The House That Was Eureka (29 page)

Despite these fictional changes, the violence done to the pickets has not been exaggerated. The account of the storming of the house is based on the statements that the eighteen pickets made to their solicitor. Newspaper photographs show police gathering up bullet shells from the street, as well as holding off the crowd with guns.

A number of the background characters are real. These include Jack Sylvester, who was National Secretary of the Unemployed Workers’ Movement; Richard Eatock, an Aboriginal activist who was shot by police at Bankstown; and Alexandra Kollantai, who was an early Russian Bolshevik, feminist, and writer...

But Evie and Noel and their problems are just as real. Sometimes it is only through fiction that we can read between the lines of history.

Nadia Wheatley, 2013

A number of the epigraphs in this book were originally published anonymously in a broadsheet called
The Tocsin
, which was produced and distributed by the Balmain branch of the Unemployed Workers’ Movement (UWM) in the 1930s. Copies of this publication were kept by labour historian and union activist Issy Wyner, who as a teenage boy was a member of the Balmain UWM. In the 1970s, Issy encouraged me to include this material in my historical research and publications about unemployed workers in the Great Depression. The fragment of verse about the ‘Bankstown and Newtown boys’ was compiled from various sources. It is typical of the kind of anonymous verse that sprang up spontaneously in response to political events.

Other material used as epigraphs comes from popular songs (also anonymous) that were sung in this era.

Readers wishing to know more about the history on which this novel is based could consult my article, ‘Meeting them at the door: radicalism, militancy and the Sydney anti-eviction campaign of 1931’ in Jill Roe ed.,
Twentieth Century Sydney
, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1980.

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