MURIEL JOAN CASEY

Laurel Belcher

10/05/2001 E0480

0:56:00 Judith Hockenhull 16/06/2015

City of Joondalup

1:01:57 Interview with Muriel Joan Casey at her home in Quinns Rocks, on 10 May 2001. Interviewer is Laurel Belcher. Muriel is an original settler in the Heathridge area.

LB: Muriel where were you born?

MC: Belfast, Northern Ireland

LB: Thank you. It’s a long way from Ireland to Perth, Western Australia what happened in your life to bring you there?

MC: Well, back in 1950 our mother passed away on the operating table in the hospital, Queen Victoria Hospital, Belfast and from there on our family was tossed around a little bit from one place to the other and by the time my youngest brother Harold got to 16 he applied to come to Australia under the Big Brother Movement which brings young chaps out and puts them on stations and trains them in all sorts of jobs to obviously give them a new start in a new country. And he seemed to settle in very, very well so two years later my brother Ken, who at this stage was 21, arrived in Australia and I was left in Ireland nursing grandparents. I never went to work before I got married. My father was in hospital for eight years so I had quite a tragic sort of childhood inasmuch as we weren’t together as a family. And so on 24 April 1968 I married this young seaman who I’d met at the Missions to Seaman in Belfast and his name was John Casey and he was only 19 years old. On our wedding day we actually sailed on the Ulster Queen which was the ship that he was working on at the time and got a great reception from the crew, VIP cabin and big dinner with, everybody was there, the whole family travelling back to England. John’s family were English and we had a lovely trip that night but I just cried, that was the last time I saw Ireland which is 33 years ago and we made our way to Southampton and had a few days in a beautiful hotel there and sailed on the Fairstar on the 28 April.

LB: Why did you choose to come and live in Heathridge?

MC: Right, we originally went to Sydney to my brother Ken because I had lost touch with my brother Harold. Quite interesting story was we were coming through the points or the heads or whatever they called it in Sydney and there was a man walking towards me and I kept saying to my husband ‘That looks like my brother but we aren’t in port yet’ and he was getting closer and closer and I was getting very embarrassed because I hadn’t seen him for about six years and it was actually my brother. He had come out on the boat to meet the Fairstar, the pilot boat, because we were sponsored by the Hunter’s Hill Rotary Club. We didn’t need a sponsor because we had saved hard and we had enough money but they wanted to sponsor us and my brother’s future father-in-law was a member of that club so we were in the Gladesville Times in Sydney as, you know, new people who had arrived and there was a picture of us in there so we ended up in Sydney for three and a half years. In that time we had our son Shaun and all our friends seemed to be moving out of Sydney. It was a very hard place to get ahead, it was a very lonely place when you were used to your family and friends and I find my brother Ken was the only person and his wife he married a year after we arrived, were the only people we really seemed to know there so we decided, when we found out that my brother Harold was in Perth. I hadn’t seen him at this stage for 11 years, we get on the Indian Pacific and make our way right across Australia and meet up with him. His wife had come across to Sydney to meet us and that’s what sort of give me the urge because we got on very well. So we arrived in Perth about three and a half years later, so round about 1972 and rented a house in Leederville which no longer is there, there’s a bridge that runs into that garden from the freeway, it’s in Tower Street, Leederville and then we ended up with a few little moves in between. We lived in Bayswater down near the Swan River and then we bought a house in Embleton which is now a child care centre facing John Forrest High School. We got a little bit tired of the pressures that we put ourselves under so my husband one day looked really fed up and he was working in retail and I just said to him ‘What would you like to do?’ and he said ‘I’d like to take off around Australia’ and I said ‘Yes, so would I.’ So we went home, sold our house that week, sold everything we owned, bought a brand new Kombi van and just wrote our address as Australia and at this stage we had two children, we had Sean and Virginia and so anyway we took off around Australia and thought we were quite clever. Only in our twenties and free and easy and no worries and don’t own anything except our Kombi and we were both quite experienced retailers so we didn’t worry about jobs too much and ended up in Sydney and my husband got such a good job he ended up as a floor manager in David Jones in Sydney and we were living in a Kombi van in my brother’s driveway. So every day we would have to jump out of bed while the Kombi van as a cot full time and we would drive off to work in our home so we were street kids, but no we were really at my brother’s house so that was going so well and his job was just doing so well that we ended up having to go and rent a house in Gladesville and it was going along nicely except we were really itching to get on with our trip and go up to Queensland. So John resigned from the job and we were about to take off that weekend when on the Thursday night my husband took really ill and ended up with a collapsed lung but when he got taken to hospital nobody realised what it was, we thought he had had a heart attack at first, they said no, sent him home. Anyway the other friends of ours that we had over in Sydney still, Heidi and Mike Bevan, who now live in WA, took us to a friend of theirs who was a specialist at Concord Hospital and John was operated on immediately. He’d had a collapsed lung that whole weekend and nobody had woken up to it. So anyway we had to stay in Sydney until he got that done so to this day I have never seen Queensland. I just wanted to get back to WA back to where I feel my home is and my heart is and so when he was well enough we drove back with the two children, rented a house in London Street and decided once he was back working with Myers or whoever it was at the time, because he seemed to float between Myers and Aherns quite a bit, that we would invest our money back into some land, sell the Kombi as quickly as we could and get back to reality. So we went looking for some land one day and we drove out to Padbury and spoke to someone there and they said oh there’s a new development just happening up the road, the auction was yesterday but you know there’s a lot of land still available in Heathridge. So off we went to Heathridge and of course it was just sand and nothing much else but you know there was great little plans there for us to look at and the land was, you know, looking nice and good size blocks, reasonable prices and we bought our block of land in Cruise Court that day and paid, I think about $8,200 and so off we went looking for the best home for the best price to build on it and because we had four years. Everybody had four years to build their house and in that time you weren’t allowed to sell it either. This was the restrictions on the blocks, they wanted to stabilise the area so they could put in the schools and everything else, they didn’t want a lot of land lying empty so we bought, it would have been 1976 we bought our block. I have got a picture of me standing on our block with my flares with these two tiny little children who are now 31 and 20 years and very big and it was a nice cul-de-sac, it was quite an interesting thing because you felt like a bit of a pioneer. The house that we decided to build was an Abode Home and everybody around us was building the Pacesetters and all the other, you know, names that were around at that time so I got to know most of the houses in the area which helped me later on when I went into real estate because I knew everybody’s house, I had walked through them when they were being built.

LB: Describe for us your house, what made it different from anybody else’s?

MC: It’s quite funny really because one of the things that happened was they put the pad in the wrong place because there was a walkway up the side of my house and of course that hadn’t been built so the builders had misjudged and so I was really put on the wrong spot for putting car ports and things in the future so that was a bit of a bind but the house itself I went for more expensive bricks and more expensive tiles and to be honest with you these days they are the worst looking ones you could imagine. I wished I had gone with what the builder had built his with. But anyway the house next door they put down the wrong design on their block so that whole pad had to be pulled up and everybody had stories which was really interesting because the chappie over the road was working for town planning, his name was Kevin and his wife was Heidi. So just about a month after we moved in he had a party at his house with all the plans of what was going to happen to the northern corridor and called in all the neighbours because we were all building at the time and we all had stories of who had put up the wrong house or the wrong fence or the wrong everything so everybody had a story and in the end I think I was sorry I went to that meeting because everybody was whinging but it was good to get to know the neighbours and we decided from that day on we were having a street party every year for New Years Eve and we had a committee and we had the best street parties, all in fancy dress. So our street became quite a good place to be for the children and you know everybody sort of grew up together. The people were all very helpful to each other. If somebody had a tool that the other person wanted they would borrow it. We had no letter boxes, we had no telephones, we had underground power but we didn’t have much else so if anybody broke down you actually had to physically give them a lift somewhere to tell somebody. The buses weren’t on so I went to the first meeting to get buses on and that was held in a hall in Mullaloo. I had never travelled on a bus yet but I was really glad they put them on. I used to come home late at night from some jobs I did because I was always out there trying to earn money to pay for plants because everything was so sandy I needed more plants. So I had a full time job plus a little second job for that and when I came home at night I used to think it was like Fred Flintstone town because there was no street lights, there was all these little lights at windows so I contacted a member of the council and begged him to hurry up with the street lighting so that happened. I was there for the school opening up because originally our children had to go to Camberwarra Primary. There were no schools in the area so we had to take them over there and my daughter went to the pre-primary there also she stayed with a lady in Craigie who a lot of people must know, she was always know as Aunty Daphne and she used to have her own children plus she would have children that were all in between everything, pre-adoption babies and everything so there was always a multitude of children at Aunty Daphne’s. So that’s where Virginia spent her time because I was at work at the Osborne Park Co-Op as a buyer there so I managed to have pretty good hours but I did need help so she was wonderful because in those days we didn’t have child care centres of course. So our children went to Camberwarra until Heathridge Primary opened up but my daughter’s first year at school and I was there for the uniforms being picked out. I was at the parents’ meeting when they picked the green tee shirts and the blue pants, I don’t know if it was a good idea. But they are still wearing them I noticed the other day and they had the emblem on the front which was an eagle or some sort of bird and the motto was ‘To fly high is to see far’ I thought that was rather good, I liked that but anyway they went to that school. My son lived at Ocean Reef fishing I could never get him home from there, he was a bit of a loner and he just liked catching fish and selling them, he used to sell them to all the neighbours and do very, very well fishing until one day they put a big sign up and said that no one was allowed to go down the little path down to Ocean Reef Marina because they were blasting the harbour out and he was devastated. So we virtually had to tie him up at home because without his harbour he was lost so when that opened up again that was marvellous when they built the new harbour so just lived there for many hours a day. He also went to tennis courts in the park, my daughter and him went for tennis lessons and thoroughly enjoyed that on a Saturday morning. The Bini Shell was built but I sort of felt that was built for a lot of the wrong reasons in those days we needed places for our children.

LB: What’s the Bini Shell?

MC: The Bini Shell was one of the big dome type buildings that they built at that particular time like a recreation centre. But instead of building it for children it seemed to be built for parents to go and play badminton and other type of meetings and things where I really felt, you know, it was a new area there was lots of young children and it needed to be developed for young people to have something to do and somewhere to go. I always remembered my teenage days I wanted to get out and meet people and I didn’t want to be a person who hung around shopping centres so we always had places to go in those days and they didn’t seem to be providing that in Heathridge. So later on when I went into real estate I sort of caused a bit of a stir with somebody who was trying to get on the council and we got a meeting called for that very reason and it was held in that building and the Mayor was there and the Member of the Parliament and the young people actually stormed out of the meeting because somebody said something to upset them. And yes a lot of things went on that I didn’t feel were right for children because in no time at all we had three primary schools and those children were going to be on the streets wanting something to do and all they could provide in the end was a bus that was going to come and sit in the park and they could all get on this bus which I have seen that used recently in Quinns and I just think it’s pitiful. Our youths are our future and they should be, you know, be directed into something that is good for them and not sort of under Mum and Dad’s noses all the time because they have to have their time away as well, so the facilities weren’t as good as what I would have liked seeing the size of the area and the development that was going on.

LB: The people that lived in Heathridge were they a young community?

MC: Very, very much, I was like one of the older ones because, well it was my third home with having travelled around and so on where a lot of people it was their first home so I built quite a nice sized home and we…

LB: What did it look like? MC: Well, it looks terrible today. But it looked very nice because I was a great gardener and it looked very nice and we had we actually had an above ground pool given to us, quite a big one at one time from a relative and we were going to have that sort of set down into the garden so we had the bobcat in and he dug this big circle out in our garden and not being very intelligent we had pipes running right across the middle of it so we couldn’t use it for a pool so that was the only time I’ve been close to getting a pool but anyway we did a sunken barbecue area and tiered the sides of it and steps down into it and had our barbecue built in there so that was lovely and beautiful patio areas and then we built a huge big 25 x 15 games room on the other side of the sunken area so it was sort of hidden by all this lovely shrubbery. It was like a cottage down the garden, all wood panelled and that’s where my daughter and all her friends did all their concerts and the shows, it was all carpeted, wood panelled and all furnished so every day after school I knew where everybody in the whole street was, they were all in my games room. I wanted to know that I knew where they were and then of course I’d return home about 4.30 and everybody was having a great time. We sometimes had to pay to get into those concerts, the parents in the street but we didn’t mind it was well worth it. My daughter’s always been a very outgoing person and whenever the Premier Burke came to the school at Heathridge Primary it was my daughter who must have been the only Liberal in the whole area was chosen to greet him and come and introduce him to the headmaster.

LB: Burke being Labour?

MC: Yes and we were the only Liberals that I knew of around the area so that was a real joke but I took photographs of him. I was good, I didn’t hold that against him and so that was another experience that we had you know finding out that, you know most of the people in that area at that at that time were Labour and my husband had got to the stage where he had been made manager of Aherns store in Whitfords and then went on to be city store manager for Aherns. And he just didn’t want to move, he was comfortable with his games room and he had built on a big garage to build his vintage cars, he was building a 1930 Chev so he had all his toys and you know it was all very much what he wanted but I sort of was getting itchy feet. I had been there seven and a half years and so it was time maybe to move on but we had been there through a lot of development and then I went into real estate 17 years ago so whatever year that was and 2nd October I started at Lyon Brothers up in Heathridge. That was really good because I knew everybody in Heathridge and my business just took off. I knew the areas, knew the streets, knew where all the facilities were, I knew the doctors. The doctor’s surgery in the beginning was in one of the duplexes down at the bottom of Admiral Grove, there’s a pair of duplexes and from the street you don’t know but you actually go down steps when you are inside them and he had the second one in from the corner, the chemist shop was at the top of Admiral Grove and that closed down a number of years later but that was a nice chemist shop. In time you know they built the service station but for some reason they demolished that over the years. The first part of Heathridge when it was developed it was say underground power and it was done by the Urban Lands Council which was the Government. To the right of Admiral Grove which was sort of the next stage was done by private developers and that was called the Oakley Ridge Estate then there was another development.

LB: Did that close?

MC: Sorry

LB: Developers?

MC: I don’t know, don’t know what the name of the person who developed Oakley Ridge but they didn’t have to build within the four years. In our instance where we had to build within the four years so every block got used except one block in our street somebody had overlooked, somebody had handed it back and it got overlooked for many years until somebody told a friend and that got built so the whole of the centrepiece around the park area of Heathridge was all built on pretty much straight away. I think the first house was built on Sail Terrace.

LB: What was a typical house like?

MC: The typical house was, it’s hard to describe maybe it would be about a three bed, one bath home, a lot of them had family rooms, most of them didn’t have games rooms they weren’t really the in thing then. Most of our kitchens were oranges, greens or blues which was pretty horrendous. Because we couldn’t sell in four years an awful lot of people tacked on games rooms. I built mine down in the garden and did it differently and I am so glad I did because a lot of them, their bedroom windows to this day go out onto tacked on games rooms and that was the reason the people built they couldn’t sell their homes, they needed more space, they needed a family room and in my instance I had a family room. I had a very nice home. I had a big jarrah bar as you walked in through the front door with the turned veranda post and it was my husband’s favourite spot with a little servery going through to the family room, we had made quite a few changes in our house originally when we built it. You know we’d had a few homes before, we knew roughly what we liked about things but there was some really good sized homes in our street. The people were all very fastidious about their gardens in our street they were really, really beautiful and yes it was really, there was a few streets in Heathridge that were real dress circle areas and people seemed to take a lot of pride in them, there was very few rentals in those days. The people who did, you know, have to go up north or go in the forces or somewhere well you know they obviously would have had to rent their houses out but they couldn’t sell them for those first four years so yes there was just a mixed bag of you know the three one pacesetter and so on. There was a nice Glenway house in our street that this particular Peterson family built on the bend as you went round into Cruise Court and they built a lovely Glenway home. The funny thing is to this day their daughter and I work together and she actually played with my daughter. She has her own settlement agency in Joondalup and she hates me showing photographs because what used to happen was when we had any money left over from our street parties all the people, because we used to invite all our friends and relatives to the street parties, we used to block the street off so that only one car could get through very slowly because we would be out there all night. One house would be the music room, one house would be the nursery, one house would be the toilet and so on so you know, and one house provided the electrics and that was at the bulb of the street, there was a vacant block there still and that was the block where all the rubbish got buried so it was a great night and we had people’s fathers turning up as bowling ladies and all sorts of things and Hawaiian girls and everything. We had a great time, money left over from that would go to Neil Hawkins Park the people who actually lived in the street and have a party and all sit down and have a great get together and as I say I have got a photograph of this girl at one of those parties with my daughter so it is quite lovely you know now that they are in their high twenties and to say we have been friends ever since and we have not lost touch, yes.

LB: How many people would have been at one of these street parties?

MC: Well I would say at least two thirds of our street would come. There’s always those people who like to keep to themselves and you know luckily they didn’t live up the end of the street where all the noise and mess was, the paper man or milkman whoever it was used to come in the morning he used to come along and we’d be out there still with barbecues going and having you know toasted vegemite on the barbecue in the morning and all these people with you know, there hats would be hanging off their heads and their clothes were all over the place and they would just sit there and look in amazement and wonder what had hit them you know. There was quite a big crowd because most of them got their relatives to come because there was, you know, a place for the babies and it was easy, it was cheap, it was good we were obviously all trying to establish homes so it was important that, you know, we could all have fun on New Year’s Eve without costing a lot and the children at twelve o’clock would always get in the middle and we would all come in a big circle and rush in on them oh’ they are great memories for them, yes. LB: What kind of people were they, we know they were young people, where did they come from, were they young Australians, were they migrants?

MC: Most of the people in our street were young marrieds; we had the odd person who was a bit older but mainly young people. The whole area was full of young people who were just mainly starting out. I felt from what I got to know of them that a lot of their relatives were more down around the areas like Mt Hawthorn, Osborne Park, Balcatta, those sort of areas so you know they could have had migrant families in the past but they were Australians. A lot of them were young business people weren’t starting their family straight away there was mainly the people across from us, who were ones who I was explaining had the party the first week, they had three children we had two so apart from us everybody else seemed to be much younger. When we first moved out that way before the shops opened up I must say it’s funny when you mention to some people in the northern corridor do they remember Tom the Cheap because back in the old days there was no Whitfords City and they had just near where the Library is now they had a transportable and that was the shop and that was Tom the Cheap. So if you didn’t go to Tom the Cheap you had to go to Charlie Carters on Marri Road, Duncraig, that was the nearest supermarket. So for to get work out in those areas was unheard of so I became the Electrolux lady in the early days before going into real estate. So I door knocked all the houses in my high heels, fell down a few driveways in Beldon and places like that but I sold quite a few Electrolux because the sand was absolutely flowing into the homes and cutting their carpets to ribbons because they cleared just about every tree in Heathridge. They might have left two in the whole of Heathridge so it was very sandy and every time there was strong winds of course everybody’s fences blew over so we all had to help each other. They were all very nice, a lot of the young people I find didn’t come home a lot of nights because they would stay at their parent’s home having worked in the city often you know without having children to come home to they would just stay overnight. So it was a bit deserted many times until the weekend and then everybody appeared in their garden again and helping each other with whatever tools they needed and so on. So once they all started having babies the place started to change quite a bit and of course the facilities started to come in, such as the school and the shops and buses everything else that went with the people that were arriving there. I guess people too in the Balga, Girrawheen areas, those sort of areas too when they wanted to upgrade it was the obvious choice to come further north to the likes of Heathridge. So there was quite a few people came from there as well, most people used it was a stepping stone, there’s still a few originals in there I know of but most people have moved on and obviously as that happens a lot of elderly people move in because the homes are pretty much established and I think they stabilise the area a lot. There’s people at home during the day watching things and a nice calm aspect where in the beginning we were all like running by the skin of our teeth because we needed driveways, patios, gardens, carpets, you just seemed to need a million things and of course when cyclone Alby went through, because it was like the Sahara Desert in those days without a lot of greenery we all got covered you had to try and find your house and a few things got broken and damaged and the fine sand got into everybody’s home. And one day I remember looking out of my kitchen window and I looked up to Beldon and I couldn’t believe it but they’d cleared the whole hill in Beldon and they had, it looked like a lot of little Matchbox toys, all this machinery was lined right across the top of the hill ready to develop Beldon but it was like oh no there’s more sand coming, and then they’d do the hill up Flotilla Drive up towards the primary school which was, you know, all quite elevated compared to us again because we were all around the big park and down would come all the sand again so it took years for everybody to stop sending sand in our direction and for everything to stabilise and obviously become lovely and green. I used to have a Norfolk Island Christmas tree every year so once we’d used it in the house, because I like natural things, I had to plant it in the garden and when I ran out of space then I had to sell the house because there was too many Christmas trees around my house but that’s another story. Yes it was a real mixed bag of people that obviously had to help each other, we all had to get on because we were quite isolated and yes there wasn’t the things to actually do in the area, you had to actually had to get in your car and go quite a distance for any entertainment so yes.

LC: Did you have besides your street parties, barbecues together and group functions for fund raising for different areas?

MC: We didn’t do things like that; I think everybody was very busy, very very busy just getting established. The only other thing that I can sort of remember was down in the big park at the front, the different things that happened. There was some square dancing on and one year we were all down there for the square dancing in the park and somebody had forgot to turn the sprinklers off and things like that. Yes there was always you know Carols by Candlelight things like that. But not generally a lot of things that I personally was involved in, because I did work full time so I was away during the day. There was the Granny Spiers Home that opened up way back in the beginning. A lot of people were very isolated and had problems and they had people paid for by the Government to come in and talk and run group counselling and that was very, very good it helped a lot of people. I actually attended some of those myself because I think everybody had some sort of problem and I had a friend going there so I thought I’ll tag along and see if they can sort out my problem. And yes, you know it was a little community thing that has gone on to this very day and of course they were given a proper hall on Poseidon Road and they’ve helped a lot of people. I think they were just trying to close it down recently because there’s a shortage of funds but somebody has come to the party and helped it and I really believe that should be kept going because every community needs somewhere that they can go if they do have some trouble in their lives and once you get it sorted out well obviously you know your life improves greatly. So in those days the isolation was the big thing, the shops weren’t handy, the entertainment wasn’t handy you know you really had to have two cars to get to places and that put a huge burden on people. The children loved to go to the rolling skate rink at Craigie that was part of their entertainment. I think in recent years that’s closed down also but that was a wonderful outing for them, they could get out there and go for it whereas there wasn’t just that many things for them to do which I feel if you are opening up a new community you have to have things happening for young people as I mentioned earlier and it was really strange when they closed it down, it was like something had disappeared that was quite valuable to the young people of the area.

LB: Your family enjoyed their early days in Heathridge?

MC: Yes, my daughter always reckons she had a really blessed life. She always had good things in her life because we both worked hard and we had good jobs and she had a lovely time at Heathridge Primary. When it was the end of the year she would be the one who was chosen to thank everybody for helping with the concerts and everything. She wrote some books when she was at Heathridge Primary School that were actually printed and appeared in other school libraries.

LB: What books were they?

MC: Just little children’s stories, some other friends of ours who were in Padbury they said they had seen Virginia’s books in their library so she was encouraged very, very encouraged with her education. She used to count the days to go back to school, she was very, very happy. My son was the opposite, he was very much a loner, loved his fishing as I said before and loved his tennis but school was not his strong point so in the last term of year 7 I actually moved him from that school and tried him in another school because I just felt that being a new school there was a lot of teething problems and it was fine for the likes of my daughter but for someone who needed a bit of support it wasn’t so good.

LB: We were just talking then before the dog barked about your son and school etc. You mentioned that you were selling real estate in the area so can you tell us what kind of properties that you were selling and after the four and a half years of the initial restriction on selling were there a lot of people moving out of the area? MC: Right yes. Well I started in Lyon Brothers when they first opened up. First day we had a real estate office in Heathridge I was there and at that particular time the government were giving everybody at the most $7,000 which was quite a lot of money considering that they weren’t allowed to buy any house that was over $42,000. So anybody who you know got the money went out and just built anything at the time so a lot of types of cheaper homes were built. It was the case of you didn’t have to have a deposit so a lot of Heathridge got developed at that particular time. We could sell anything that was in the area that I originated into because they had all run out of their four years. So there was a lot of movement was happening because the first home buyers a year down the track they were fed up with the sand or they hadn’t put the money aside for the rates and the marriages had dissolved because of the pressures of trying to establish a home in an area that was pretty far out for most people. And so we were selling you know just homes mainly in Heathridge because I specialised in Heathridge. We all door knocked Heathridge and got to know everybody. We had a newsletter that we used to run from the real estate office and that’s what we went around telling people in their homes so they could drop their ads in if they had something to sell. In those days we didn’t have many garage sales so we had this little free ad thing and we would have a bit of information about what was happening to do with parks and things in the area. So that was really good and I actually continued that on in years later when I moved to a different office at Whitfords and I actually ran the Heathridge Star which I still have copies of, which I had recipe the people could sort of do that was easy and quick and also we would award a dinner to people who had contributed something to the area such as like the P&C or something like that. So yes the real estate took off quite good in those days. The people were now coming out to Heathridge quite freely, it wasn’t South of Geraldton anymore, it was turning into quite a nice area, some nice homes and gardens were getting established. Funny thing was too when I was in the real estate office they ran a gardening competition. I think it was run through the West Australian or it was something from the West Australian Gardening who judged it or something, it might have been the community newspaper did the ad I think and they had all these different categories. And I remember this one particular house that had won its category and you know we obviously hoped that they’d all come to us because we had advertised their homes and when they got prizes. And the next week, when they’d put their house on the market with some other agency advertised as the winning garden and everything and it was Lyon Bros Real Estate who had run the competition and we never got a look in and the next people bought it and got the bob cat in and cleared the lot. So that was quite funny and the strangest thing is here we are at 2001 and it is a friend of my sons who actually owns that house now. So it has followed me around a bit but yes I really think that a lot of Heathridge nowadays the people need to really get that up to scratch again. I think there are a lot of very nice homes that a fresh coat of paint and take off some of the old added on rooms that are not so nice and turn it into some really rich real estate because it is so central to everything these days with the trains on the doorstep and the beaches and all the restaurants and everything else. It’s a great area for getting to a lot of places now it’s not the last post, it’s an inner suburb and there is a quite a mixed bag of homes in there. Back in the old days when we bought the blocks we didn’t realise the value of having duplex blocks, obviously there’s a few people who were lucky enough to have bought those and with deep sewerage obviously they can sub divide so some of that has gone on as well. Way back in the early days prices had dropped at one stage and we had all been in our houses quite a number of years and of course you think your values have gone up and then there was a whole big pocket of land I think around the Lysander area that I think some developer needed to offload fairly quickly and he started selling that around the 7,000 something, years and years later after we had all bought ours for 8 so it was like everybody’s values had dropped quite dramatically too. So it took a few years for all the land to be sold and for it to sort of take off and go ahead and obviously become worth what it is today.

LB: And what would the average value be today?

MC: Well once again it’s an area where there are a lot of three bed, one bath homes they can, I would say a sort of average three one, it obviously depends what maintenance has gone on you know what upgrading you know the orange kitchens and the green bathrooms and so on. It depends what people have done but they can sell today for about 125, 130, if it’s nice. I just sold a four bed, two bathroom home last week first time I opened it and I sold it for 160 but that was a beautiful atrium home. Walk in the front door and there is this beautiful huge big central atrium and everything was really nice proportioned. So that was a really good price considering it was down off the road and once again the old walkway down the side which people feel very insecure about so it does put a few people off. Heathridge was built in a lot of cul-de-sacs and so the plan was to have all these walkways through one cul-de-sac to the other and through to parks and so on and into schools. But over the years I think you know that has not been a big help trying to sell properties because people feel very insecure and I know there was one up the side of my house and within a year of me selling they had actually been broken into. So yes that’s something that you know it was a nice idea at the time, but life has changed and security is a big thing yes.

LB: So looking back at those early days what do you think in its development were the major issues within that community.

MC: The parks were a big thing and you know just getting them established. I remember the park; I think down of Lysander, we actually ran it in our newsletter how the people were getting really fed up because it wasn’t a wet park. I think a lot of the parks in Heathridge were a bit slow at becoming wet parks.

LB: Can you just explain what you mean by a wet park.

MC: Right, yes they weren’t being reticulated and useful to young children. I know my daughter used to obviously love playing in the big park at the front of Heathridge, that was a great place and we were very close to there. And then she used to say ‘I’m going to the little park’ and luckily in those days you could let them wander and do all sorts of things like that. The little park was over at Poseidon Road and there was some climbing things, in those days we didn’t have many parks that you could actually use you know, they were designated as parks but they were quite dry and they weren’t that nice. It’s the same as the land up next to Heathridge Primary School on Admiral Grove. I used to sell quite a few houses that were facing there and there was talk you know at times that the children were scared coming home from school because there was a lot of bushland there and it took a while for that all to be cleared and made to look, you know, that it was safe and nice next to a school. Generally you know the government was doing its best I think at the time to get the facilities in for us because it was developed by the Urban Lands Council. So they did have plans in place, they were always going to build, I believe from memory, a big supermarket up at Marmion Avenue end. The land laid vacant for a long time and they have just developed that land now and that’s quite expensive housing because it’s got city views and it’s quite a nice pocket of new residential homes there. But that was always going to be a supermarket. So at first we used to have to shop at Woolworths at Beldon that was our local supermarket until obviously they opened the one in Heathridge. So it was just a case of, if you only had one car you were very, very restricted where you could get to, you would have to wait for buses and it was like waiting for a stagecoach. I guess they didn’t come too often; we were the last stop so you know you were lucky if you could get out to get to different places. We were pretty fortunate because my husband always had a company car with his job and I had my car plus I worked down around Osborne Park and you know I could get out and about, but there were a lot of women who I guess didn’t have the same things that we had, we were pretty fortunate.

LB: I also read quite a few articles about the sand problem, was that another issue for the community?

MC: The sand problem was one of the worst because, you know, putting up fencing is nobody’s joy. It was something that we all had to try and do with the old asbestos fences. Getting money out of your neighbours was another thing; everybody was broke so you used to have all these fallouts because you’d see them you know buying nice new things but they hadn’t paid for their fences. So that was a nightmare in itself so you ended up not liking your neighbours sometimes but, yeah getting the fences up and then because in some parts in Heathridge as I say they didn’t have to build that quickly and with the winds. It used to be very windy, there was no trees breaking the wind and there certainly wasn’t any grass in a lot of cases and yeah the sand flying around was dreadful and it pushed a lot of fences over and it obviously got into your home quite a bit too you know. Your children going out to play there was a lot of sand flying around so they really shouldn’t have cleared it the way it was cleared, it should have been a bit better thought out I think, yeah.

LB: Yes, that’s a problem isn’t it?

MC: It is.

LB: You have discussed a number of different changes that have taken place since you moved out of the area. Are there any special memories that you had when you first moved there?

MC: Special memories. It’s really, really hard for me to think back that far. Really not that anything that sort of jumps out and, you know, says something special but I had nice people around me. I had quite a few air force people lived around me and a nice young couple next door and some Irish people came to live across the road from me and that was quite funny because we’d lived there for a number of years and they bought what was a beautiful home across the road and continually worked on it. He never rested until he had changed everything this particular man and they were lovely and so their little girls who were younger than my daughter came across to play with her and then Phillip would come across to pick them up to tell them to come home for tea and he would say ‘Come on Joanne and Emma hurry up and get your gaddies on’ and I screamed because I hadn’t heard the word gaddies since the 1960s because that was what we called gym shoes in Ireland. So you know that was interesting to hear the old language, so my daughter who is very Australian always says ‘Come on Joanne and Emma hurry up and get your gaddies on’, that was always her saying forever after but, yes, I think the street parties were the highlight. I always enjoyed my gardening. I had a great joy with that and the sunken barbecue area and the barbecues, we always had barbecues in that area.

LB: What kinds of plants did people have in their gardens then, were they natural plants because of the wind?

MC: Well I think we made a lot of mistakes because not having lived on the coast before. As most people find when they do move to the coast they don’t realise until they have learned the hard way what actually survives. As I said I have a lovely collection of Norfolk Island Pines and drove past my house about a month afterwards and found it lying on the ground cut down the one from the front garden. I was devastated I felt as if somebody had, you know, done something to a member of my family. But these people who bought my house were from Melbourne and they were on the phone continually asking me what they should be doing and not doing afterwards because I’d had a very lush garden and three patio areas full of baskets hanging everywhere. The sort of things we had were, I was really a very energetic person in those days and I had what I always called the Prince of Wales Feathers. It’s like a Pampas grass type thing and so I had big clumps of that. I had sort of I suppose weird tastes in many ways and yes I suppose a lot of my stuff was in hanging baskets in those days. I had a patio area that I sort of had a wall built around it, behind it was like a jungle so you looked through to this jungle and I had a three tier bamboo hanging basket that I got from work and I thought it was fantastic. And it’s in quite a few of our photographs and I just sold a house in Wanneroo and there it was. I had given it to these people eight years ago and there was my basket again. It didn’t look good it was old but it was like ‘oh no it’s still following me around’ so yes I wasn’t into roses and that and I don’t think too many people were. It was basically in those days I think more the West Australian native plants. We were all into native gardens. I think there was a bit of a drought, one side of the road could water one day and then the other side of the road could water the other day so everybody kept away from anything that needed a lot of water, so yeah.

LB: That was water restrictions imposed by the government.

MC: Yes, and of course the native gardens if they are not looked after they start getting very woody and they can, you know, get out of control and very what would you say, spindly, dead looking. And so a lot of the gardens after that didn’t look, you know everybody had got rid of their lawns and everything else but now we had all these overgrown native gardens that really had no shape so I think that, you know, if you drive through Heathridge you’ll still find them like 20 years later needing desperately to be cut down and sorted out, yeah.

LB: Any other memories that you have instead of street parties?

MC: Not really. To me it was a very busy time working hard I think just you know when Whitfords opened up; just going down there shopping was a nice feeling. Having the facilities arriving and of course my husband ended up as store manager down there so after school if I was home early enough I would get the children dressed up, tidied up because their Dad was the boss and they had to look decent and we would go down and say hi Dad and see him at work. That was really nice, nice to feel something was coming to us. Just prior to me starting in real estate I desperately needed a new car for the job and obviously there would be no employment out our way at that time and all of a sudden Whitfords was open and there was a boutique in there I used to pop in on the night off and I said to the girl one day, if ever you need help because I need a new car I am going to do real estate you know let me know and I will come in on Thursday nights and help or something. You know I was after some extra work and I ended up getting her job the same time as I was about to start in real estate so I thought I would try and juggle the two because this is so handy. I have never been able to get a job five minutes from home and I lasted about three days and decided that no, I was a real estate agent and I couldn’t be in a shop so I never even went and collected my pay I just didn’t go back. I thought no that’s made the decision so I had been talking to people in their homes, seeing how they lived, seeing how you know get ahead, some people have done really well that have started out in Heathridge. I have watched the progress over the years where they have got to, others you know have obviously had the bad luck stories and I still see quite a few of the people and we all have a big hug and a chatter about what all has happened in our lives and yes it has been an interesting progress.

LB: So when did you move out of Heathridge area?

MC: We moved out in 1985 and obviously it was the stepping stone in our lives like it was in a lot of other peoples to where we are today.

LB: Muriel thanks for your time

MC: It’s a pleasure.

End of recording

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