House That Was Eureka (9781922148254) Read online

  NADIA WHEATLEY was born in 1949 in Sydney. Her award-winning publications for children, young adults and adults include picture books, novels, short stories, biography and history.

  Nadia began writing full time in 1976, after completing a postgraduate degree in Australian history. Her first book, Five Times Dizzy, was published in 1982. The House that Was Eureka, published three years later, grew out of her research into the Sydney Anti-Eviction Campaign of 1931 and a subsequent visit to the house in which the bloody Newtown eviction battle had occurred. Shortlisted for the 1984 Australian/Vogel award, the novel went on to win the New South Wales Premier’s Children’s Book Award in 1985 and to be commended in the CBCA Awards in 1986.

  Nadia Wheatley’s classic picture book My Place (illustrated by Donna Rawlins) was the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Book of the Year for Younger Readers in 1988 and has recently been adapted as a television mini-series. Her biography of Charmian Clift won the New South Wales Premier’s Australian History Award in 2002. In the same year the collaboratively produced Papunya School Book of Country and History, for which Nadia provided the written text, won the Young People’s History Award.

  Nadia Wheatley has been nominated by IBBY Australia for the prestigious 2014 Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing—the highest international recognition given to a living author whose complete works have made a lasting contribution to children’s literature.

  Her latest book is Australians All: A History of Growing Up from the Ice Age to the Apology. Nadia lives in Sydney.

  TONI JORDAN was born in Brisbane in 1966. She has written three acclaimed novels. Her debut, Addition, has been published in seventeen countries and her most recent, Nine Days, won the 2013 Indie Award for Best Fiction. Toni lives in Melbourne.

  ALSO BY NADIA WHEATLEY

  Five Times Dizzy

  Dancing in the Anzac Deli

  1 is for One

  My Place

  The Blooding

  Lucy in the Leap Year

  The Night Tolkien Died

  Highway

  The Greatest Treasure of Charlemagne the King

  Vigil

  Luke’s Way of Looking

  A Banner Bold

  Papunya School Book of Country and History

  The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift

  Charmian Clift: Selected Essays (ed)

  Going Bush

  Playground

  Australians All

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Nadia Wheatley 1985

  Introduction copyright © Toni Jordan 2013

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Viking Kestral, 1985

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2013

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922147189

  Ebook ISBN: 9781922148254

  Author: Wheatley, Nadia, 1949– author.

  Title: The house that was Eureka / by Nadia Wheatley ;

  introduced by Toni Jordan.

  Series: Text classics.

  Subjects: Homelessness—Juvenile fiction. Unemployment—Juvenile fiction. Eviction—Australia—Juvenile fiction. Depressions—1929—Australia— Juvenile fiction.Australia—Social conditions—Juvenile fiction.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  The Ghosts around Us

  by Toni Jordan

  The House that Was Eureka

  Prologue

  Book One: Winding Up

  Book Two: Fusion

  Book Three: Facts

  Book Four: Interim

  Book Five: Confusion

  Book Six: Interim

  Book Seven: Acts

  Epilogue

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgments

  The Ghosts around Us

  by Toni Jordan

  IN 1985, the year Nadia Wheatley’s extraordinary The House that Was Eureka was first published, I was eighteen, unemployed and desperate, and sleeping on the floor of my boyfriend’s brother’s flat. I would wake early on a Saturday morning and circle job ads: those few that said ‘no experience required’. For a while, the only work I could get was selling aluminium siding door-to-door. My ‘job’ was to convince people who lived in broken-down houses in the western suburbs and were home during the day (so probably not working either), and who answered the door to clueless teenagers, that they needed to buy cladding. On credit.

  The work was commission only. My two-week stint of walking miles every day earned me, oh, roughly: nothing. After that, I was interviewed and missed out on a job as a receptionist in an office-furniture showroom. I’ve never sobbed so hard, before or since, than when I received the ‘regret to inform you’ letter. I thought I was good for nothing. I thought my life was over before it had begun.

  I was sometimes hungry in those early years, yes. And frustrated. I was surrounded by people who cared about me, though, and was never in any real danger of homelessness or starvation. My sense of desolation was not based on practical considerations. I’d been brought up to believe I should have two simple goals: to get a job and then, if you work hard and live a stable life, a mortgage. A mortgage, that shimmering Holy Grail, was the only thing that could save you from being at the mercy of a landlady.

  This is the world Wheatley shows us. The House that Was Eureka is about two families in two different times: in 1931, in the middle of the Great Depression, and in 1981, during the economic downturn of the early 80s. These families live fifty years apart, but there is a great deal that’s similar: jobs are the source of freedom, of economic strength, of the ability to care for your family.

  But there were also significant differences. In 1931, as opposed to the 80s, the dole was given as food or coupons. That’s why evictions were commonplace, and why communities sometimes banded together to prevent them. There was simply no cash for rent. Families would find themselves on the street, their belongings dumped beside them. Some families, especially those with young children, took desperate measures to prevent losing their homes.

  In The House that Was Eureka, Lizzie’s father and brothers and supporters were determined not to let unemployment lead to homelessness. They make the fateful decision to defend their home against the police coming to evict them. They barricade themselves in, as if Sydney is a war zone. They are preparing for a riot.

  Lizzie peered through the spy crack and saw Pa’s face on the other side. Heard him grunting.

  ‘Heave-ho!’ she heard, and Pa’s face and the spy crack disappeared. They must be building the sandbags higher. Five foot high they were already at the door, and six feet thick. No way the cops could get in the front. For the window to the loungeroom was boarded up too, with sandbags six feet thick behind it…Not that the cops would even get to the front door, for the front fence and gate and the little front yard were criss-crossed back and forth with roll upon roll of barbed wire, going up about six foot high.

  The Hou
se that Was Eureka is gritty and realistic in its accounts of everyday life in a depression and a recession. Part of the thrill of the novel is the confident way that Wheatley balances the personal and the political, like the message that Lizzie writes in whitewash on the footpath in front of the landlady’s house:

  DOWN WITH SCABS AND CLASS-TRAITORS.

  NO EVICTIONS FOR THE UNEMPLOYED.

  In Wheatley’s hands, it’s not just a cheap slogan. We can feel Lizzie’s fear and anger. We understand what’s brought her to that point.

  The House that Was Eureka was commended in the Children’s Book Council of Australia awards in 1986, and it won the New South Wales Premier’s Literary award for young people’s literature—yet despite writing for a young audience, Wheatley never backs away from the politics of real life. By meticulously weaving actual events and people and newspaper clippings with her imagined ones, she creates a novel that speaks for people rarely shown in fiction. She changes the way her readers see the world.

  Intellect and theme and politics are well and good. In the end, though, what matters is what’s at the heart of a novel. At the heart of The House that Was Eureka are four young people: Lizzie and Nobby, in 1931, and Evie and Noel, in 1981. The thing that connects them is the house itself, where both families live: it’s a rambling Newtown terrace with a balcony and a scullery. It has changed little in fifty years. Wheatley possess great technical skill in showing us the similarities and differences in their times and lives and in gently weaving her characters’ stories together, but, when reading this book for the first time, I didn’t notice any of it. My notepad was on the table beside me but I didn’t make a jot. I was too involved in the story and the people; I was turning pages, busting to see what happened next. The later stages of the novel have a dream-like quality, as the shifting realities of Evie and Lizzie and Noel and Nobby intersect and collide. My heart was pounding for the final fifty pages.

  History is never really past. We all live with our memories, every day, and stories and traditions are passed down to us. In 1931, when Lizzie was dealing with her father’s unemployment and the family’s eviction, my grandmother was fourteen and beginning her working life in domestic service. My childhood was filled with memories that are actually hers: her love of fresh bread and dripping, her fear of being caught in the outside loo when the dunny men came, her gratitude to the nuns for teaching her to read, her enduring distrust of green vegetables. The past lives on. It is always a part of our lives. To me, this is the central idea of the novel. There are ghosts everywhere around us, if only we could see them.

  The ending of The House that Was Eureka especially pleased me. Wheatley treats all her characters with compassion, even the landlady, ‘the despot’. Many of the characters pay a dreadful price for the riot and hers is among the heaviest to bear, though Wheatley’s subtle lessons left me wondering what it was about the despot’s own past that led her to those fateful decisions.

  My period of teenage unemployment was brief. Just a few weeks after the shocking loss of my potential career in office-furniture administration, I was finally hired: my job was in a mailroom in the Department of Physiology, at the University of Queensland. From there, I was even luckier. After a while, my supportive bosses allowed me to work back at night to make up time spent at lectures during the day.

  My experience of unemployment did not define me. When I finished the final page of The House that Was Eureka, I hoped for the same for Evie. I hoped her years of teenage despondency left her with nothing more than an appreciation for work, and an empathy for people down on their luck. Right now, as the world struggles through the global economic collapse, kindness is more important than ever.

  The House that Was Eureka

  For Issy Wyner,

  who showed me the meaning of labour history

  The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

  KARL MARX, THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF LOUIS BONAPARTE

  PROLOGUE

  ...It was the gun dream he was dreaming. He had it more and more as time went on.

  Crouching in darkness, underneath a bed. Looking up, he saw the criss-cross of the bed-wire, beneath the mattress. Not far away there were suddenly bullet-bangs. Out that way, in front. Though of course in the dream he didn’t know where the bed was, so didn’t know where that way was. He lifted up the counterpane a bit, and peered out.

  There were legs outside the cubby-house of his bed. Legs from the knee down, running back and forth, some in old brown or black-dyed trousers, others in long white underpants, mostly barefoot; and outside the bed too there were yelling sounds, louder than bullets. Some close and loud; a dozen or so men’s voices; though in the dream he could never hear what they yelled. And voices too out that way (wherever that way was); not as close, but loud; a mighty roar of voices, like when you hold a seashell to your ear; then bullet sounds too from the other way.

  Under the bed, he had a gun that now he loaded, carefully slipping in a bullet; then hid the gun inside his coat. The gun changed from time to time: sometimes a rifle, or a revolver; sometimes a machine-gun, or even a red water pistol.

  He held it close to his body and began to climb out from under the bed. Then he’d wake up.

  BOOK ONE

  Winding Up

  This is the house that Jack built;

  He laid each brick and fastened each board

  For wages laid down by State award.

  Now Jack lives in the slums

  Worried by bums

  Who gather the rent

  For the noble gent

  Who lives in the house that Jack built.

  ANON, THE TOCSIN, 1930S

  1

  Evie was sixteen, but Mum always reckoned she was a very young sixteen. By the time mum was sixteen she’d been working for a year; by the time she was nineteen, she was having Evie. In the album there was a photo of Mum at sixteen and she looked as mature and polished as she did in her wedding photos, when she was twenty-four.

  Evie took the framed wedding photo out of one of the boxes. They were moving in tonight, and with all the packing cases around full of plates and saucepans and useful stuff it was more interesting and homelier to decorate the place than to unpack properly. Evie put the wedding photo of Mum and Ted up on the mantelpiece in the downstairs front room. Then the baby photos of Maria and Jodie, and the three baby photos of Sammy. Then the family photo they’d had done by a proper photographer last Christmas in the loungeroom at their old house: Ted and Mum standing at the back, Mum very attractive still, well groomed and made up, tall and suntanned in her green slack suit; and Ted blond, smiling too much for Evie’s taste, with a shirt out over his slacks to hide his beer gut, but still not too bad (Evie gave him that) for forty-three. Then Maria, nine, Jodie, eight, and Sammy, four, sitting at the front on the lounge, all with blond hair like Ted’s, that white-blond colour gone a bit green from chlorine swimming pools. And then Evie kneeling beside them at the end of the lounge, neither sitting down like the kids nor standing up like the adults, neither blond like Ted nor dark-haired like Mum, but a one-out and middle-ey sort of Evie.

  ‘Evie-Evie-Evie-Peevie!’ Sammy ran in in her pyjamas, singing one of Maria’s Evie-songs. She jumped from the armchair onto Evie’s back.

  ‘Bed!’ Evie said. ‘Back to bed!’ She’d put Sammy down an hour ago but the kids were being loopy tonight. Everything was everywhere. The beds hadn’t arrived yet and Evie couldn’t find the sheets so they’d all be sleeping just with blankets on mattresses on the floor.

  ‘I want Mr Funny.’

  ‘I told you, I don’t know where it is.’ Mum had been working all week and so Evie had done most of the packing, and everything was topsy-turvey. ‘I’ll read you something else.’ But Sammy started to howl. ‘You and your Mr Men books.’

  ‘What’s she doing down here! I thought I asked you to take her up an hour ago.’ Mum came in and fossicked around through the piles on the lounge til
l she found the car keys.

  ‘Listen, love, Ted and I are going back with the trailer for another load, so get those other two to bed will you, there’s a good girl.’

  ‘You’re going now?’ Evie said. It was already dark.

  ‘Yeah love, I want the sheets and things, God only knows where you packed them. We’ll be back by eleven, twelve at the latest, you’ll be all right.’ Mum often left Evie to babysit when she went to the club, and she knew Evie never got scared.

  ‘Listen, you make up your bed in here on the divan tonight – you can fix up that back room tomorrow. Night-night, sweetie…’ Her lipstick left a kiss on Sammy. ‘Be a good girl for Evie. And put the skids under those other two, won’t you, love.’

  Evie heard the car start as she hauled Sammy over her shoulder for an upside-downer. She struggled out the dark obstacle course in the diningroom, then up the pitch-dark narrow stairs. Ted had told Evie to buy light bulbs and she had, but then she’d gone and packed them somewhere she couldn’t remember.

  ‘Can’t that girl do anything right?’ Ted had complained to Mum. ‘No wonder no one’ll give her a job.’

  By the time Ted had gone to put the light bulbs in and Evie realized they were lost, it was too late to buy any more. Mum had gone in next door to 201 and borrowed two bulbs from Mrs Cavendish, so they had lights now in the loungeroom and kitchen, but the upstairs was like a tomb.

  ‘Oopsadaisy. Oh don’t carry on.’ As Evie turned on the tiny landing where the stairs divided, Sammy bumped her head. Sammy bawled and Evie plodded on past the bathroom to the back room that was to be Sammy’s, felt around with her foot for a mattress, and plunked Sammy down. ‘What a weight!’

  ‘She’s ten-ton-Sam, the fatso-man,’ Evie sang as she held Sammy to stop the tears. Then found a blanket and tucked it around her. ‘Go to byes now. Evie will stay with you.’