Mad Dog Moxley (2 page)

SYDNEY
IN THE 1930s

For dole bread is bitter bread
Bitter bread and sour
There's grief in the taste of it
There's weevils in the flour
DOROTHY HEWETT

William Moxley rises early. Working people do in Sydney in the 1930s. Although Moxley was later to exaggerate the length of his working hours to elicit sympathy, it is true that he is up before dawn on most days. He prepares his own plain breakfast – typically tea, bread and jam, sometimes a boiled egg – and sets off about his wood-cutting and hauling business.

While cutting and loading fallen timber, with permission, in the Holsworthy Army Reserve, Moxley maintains a rough camp in the bush nearby. In this way he is like many men in the years of the Great Depression – neither a city nor a country dweller. The work is hard; he is later to say, The hardest work I should say a man could do is an axe and a crosscut saw and a 14-pound hammer and wedge.' Over time he suffers injuries in the course of his work, but at least he has an occupation and this distinguishes him from many other unskilled men at the time – ‛the thousands of unemployed. He uses horses to haul the timber from the scrub, another indication of his halfway status between the city and the bush.

Some of the timber he processes at one of the sawmills in the area; the rest he takes home in his truck and splits and chops it into saleable lengths. He charges for the wood in bags. Hessian bags.

He is able to pay his rent and board for his young son, but there is little money to spare. His clothes and shoes are workaday, rough and mended, and after paying for petrol and tobacco there is nothing much left over. He hangs around the timber yards, scrounging for cups of tea, cadging rather than buying newspapers himself. One of his few indulgences is a night at the pictures.

Although a police report describes him as a frequenter of hotels, he is not much of a drinker. His tipple is tea. For Moxley, like thousands of others in the Sydney of the 1930s, life is a struggle. He carries many extra burdens. His head is above water, but only just.

On the day Dorothy Denzel and Frank Wilkinson were abducted, the news reached Sydney of the death of the champion racehorse Phar Lap in America. Most adults and many children in the city would have heard of ‘Big Red' and the general reaction was something like mourning. The news made headlines. Perhaps Dorothy and Frank talked about the matter, joined others in speculating about whether poison was involved, as they sat on the rug in Strathfield.

Phar Lap's death came at a time when Sydney had more than enough of its own bad news to go on with. Nineteen thirty-two was the worst year of the Depression. Historian Peter Spearritt has pointed out that the dramatic decline in building construction is a clear indicator of the economic malaise. The building of houses, flats, factories and offices practically came to a standstill, reducing the flow of money into the broader economy. Vulnerable unskilled workers such as builders' labourers lost their jobs, as did skilled tradesmen like carpenters and bricklayers. Government employees and those in banks, hotels and big city stores were the least likely to lose their jobs, though many worked fewer hours for less pay.

Historians disagree about the rate of unemployment, which varied from area to area, occupation to occupation. The rate was lowest of all in suburbs like Vaucluse at 16 per cent and highest in Redfern at 48 per cent. An overall rate of 25 per cent seems safe to suggest, with the rate among women lower than it was among men, principally because their wages were lower. One apparently firm statistic is that 32.5 per cent of registered trade unionists were out of work in New South Wales in 1932. Another is that Australia had a higher unemployment rate in that year than any other industrialised country apart from Germany.

Australia continued to import and export, although at a reduced level. Ships arrived, unloaded, took on cargoes and left, and while work was available at the Sydney wharves there were many more willing hands than jobs. Desperate men lined up outside the gates to the docks from dawn or even earlier, waiting for the gangs to be formed. At times the press of bodies was too great for the foremen to make an orderly selection so they threw the job tickets into the crowd (as was graphically depicted later in the American film
on the Waterfront
). When that happened, only the strong and the lucky got a day's work.

Society was stratified and class-bound. Some members of the moneyed class were aware of the poverty around them, such as the young middle-class women who anonymously left food packages around the city. In so doing they avoided actual contact with the lower orders, while also sparing the less fortunate the embarrassment of accepting personal charity. But many remained completely ignorant. This was demonstrated later, in 1946, when Ruth Park's novel
The Harp in the South won the Sydney Morning Herald's
literary prize. When combined with her references to prostitution, alcoholism and domestic abuse, many readers were shocked by passages such as this:

The room was as clean as a scrubbing brush could make worn and hideous linoleum, and a manila broom the crude blue kalsomined walls. The bed sagged forlornly in the middle, and the blankets were stained with tea and coffee and a dozen other unanalysable things. But it was no worse than a thousand other lodgings in Surry Hills…It had a door which locked, and it had a window which looked out on the alleyway which ran down beside the house, and, across that, into three crammed and hideous backyards full of garbage cans, tomcats, and lavatories with swinging broken doors and rusty buckled tin roofs.

But these were all things they were used to. They didn't mean anything to Roie and Charlie. A stranger in this attic room would have withered and died with the sheer ugliness and sordidness and despair of it; but to Roie and Charlie it was a room of their own.

How could people be unaware of such sordid conditions? Park was accused of exaggeration in her depiction of life in the slums of Surry Hills, but she was right. For many people, hard times had begun before the Depression and persisted long after it.

Affluent suburbs may not have shown visible signs of distress but the less prosperous areas did: boarded-up shops and factories, grass growing tall around unoccupied buildings. There were long queues at centres where government vouchers for food and clothing were handed out and similar lines at the shops that supplied the goods. Charities were stretched to the limit.

Makeshift camps were the most obvious signs of unemployment and distress. Only one was set up north of the harbour; the rest were in such southern suburbs as Rockdale, Brighton-Le-Sands and Matraville. In Cook's Park, a narrow strip above the beach at Brighton-Le-Sands (now an elegantl sculptured promenade), humpy camps were established. A well-known photograph of the period shows a family assembled outside a dwelling built of corrugated iron. It may have been one of the better improvised houses, but the adults and children are still hollow-eyed and gaunt.

The camp at La Perouse, ironically named Happy Valley, was very large, comprising more than 100 tents and shacks huddled among the dunes and subject to severe weather. Oral historian Wendy Lowenstein recorded the story of a woman who spent years there and was desperate to escape from it for the sake of her children. The camps could be sad, violent places. Contraception was unavailable and pregnancy could be a last straw. Abortions were common among the destitute, with household implements such as knitting needles and crochet hooks being used, often with disastrous results.

Smaller shanty settlements sprang up on patches of vacant land and in the paddocks that were still a feature of the suburban landscape in the 1930s. A cruel statistic has been emphasised by historian Nadia Wheatley in a study of the Depression in Sydney: a speculative building boom of the 1920s had resulted in the construction of many houses and blocks of flats, but once the slump had started people could no longer afford to buy or rent these properties, and many thousands lay empty at a time when people were desperate for shelter.

In New South Wales, 1932 was a year of political turmoil. Labor premier J T Lang, elected in 1930 as the Depression began to bite, attempted to flout conventional economic wisdom by advocating non-payment of interest on overseas loans. This caused dissention within Labor ranks and conflict between the state and federal governments. Physically imposing and a powerful speaker, Lang was regarded as a saviour by some and as a threat to the entire social and economic fabric by others.

Sydney's population was around 1.25 million, but it was fluid. In 1932, 10000 more people left Australia than arrived and Sydney must have contributed its share to this outflow. In addition, many men went ‘on the wallaby' – they walked, cycled or hitched rides into the country to look for work. This put pressure on women left at home to cope with children, illness and food shortages. Many families, disrupted in this way, never reunited.

The nation's economy, and therefore that of its largest city, had shrunk. Even for people in employment there were shortages – of food, of clothing, of simple things like matches, pins and bathplugs. People required fewer and simpler material possessions to feel happy then than they do now, but to be deprived of them or to have to struggle for them could take the joy out of life, just as it would for someone today to live without a refrigerator, a television set or a computer.

Some historians stress that the experience of hardship tended to unite people rather than divide them. In fact, these times brought out the best and the worst in people. For every evicting landlord there was a shopkeeper giving away unsold food at the end of the day; for every farmer threatening to set the dogs on a ‘sundowner' there was a farmer's wife inventing a job she could have done herself to save the tramp's pride as she fed him in return for his effort.

The unskilled and the unconnected were the most vulnerable. Family ties were stronger in that period than they are now, and family members strove to help each other with jobs, loans and accommodation. Even among people without this support, there were those whose energy and resourcefulness stood them in good stead. William Moxley and those he came into contact with, including the unskilled, showed a great deal of resilience in their ability to keep themselves above the breadline. Of course, the safest billets were in the professions – medicine and the law – and in the public service, including the police.

Remarkably, given the stresses people experienced, the 1930s saw a drop in the crime rate in Sydney. According to the chronicler of organised crime in Australia, Alfred McCoy, the consorting laws introduced in 1929 gave the police a weapon against the razor gangs that had terrorised the inner city in the 1920s. Now people could be arrested for consorting with known criminals and be sentenced to gaol terms for that association. McCoy argues that the virtually arbitrary powers given to the police and courts, plus support from the press and the public, curbed criminal activity. Police numbers were relatively high and ‘the force had not yet been seriously corrupted'.

Guns were not in short supply in Sydney in the aftermath of World War I, but there were few murders with firearms and those that occurred were mostly in the country and outer-suburban areas. Inner-city criminals seem mainly to have used guns as a threat or deterrent rather than as an aggressive weapon of choice. Police were not routinely armed; weapons were only issued when police were in pursuit of or expecting to confront criminals deemed likely to be armed.