Pat Stretton

STATE LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA J. D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION

OH 730/33

Full transcript of interviews with

PAT STRETTON

on 1 March;

and 5 and 19 April

by Madeleine Regan

Recording available on CD

Access for research: Unrestricted

Right to photocopy: Copies may be made for research and study

Right to quote or publish: Publication only with written permission from the Adelaide City Council Archives.

OH 730/33 PAT STRETTON

NOTES TO THE TRANSCRIPT

This transcript was donated to the State Library. It was not created by the J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection and does not necessarily conform to the Somerville Collection's policies for transcription.

Readers of this oral history transcript should bear in mind that it is a record of the spoken word and reflects the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The State Library is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the interview, nor for the views expressed therein. As with any historical source, these are for the reader to judge.

This transcript had not been proofread prior to donation to the State Library and has not yet been proofread since. Researchers are cautioned not to accept the spelling of proper names and unusual words and can expect to find typographical errors as well.

First interview with Patricia Stretton recorded by Madeleine Regan

1 March 2013 at the North Adelaide Library

for the City of Adelaide Oral History (Extension) Project 2012/2013

Oral Historian (OH): Thanks, Pat, for agreeing to be part of the project. I’m going to start the interview by asking you some background information. Could you give me your full name?

Patricia (Pat) Stretton (PS): Patricia Mary Stretton.

OH: And your date of birth?

PS: 29 October 1937.

OH: And where were you born?

PS: I was born in Adelaide, and when I was born my parents lived at Woodville, and when I was five they moved to Glen Osmond.

OH: Pat, what about your parents, what was your mother’s name?

PS: My mother was Margaret Myfanwy Thomas, and my father was Alexander Gibson, and they had a great fellow feeling because both of their fathers were alcoholics, so there was never a drop of alcohol [laughs] in the house.

OH: And where had your mother been born?

PS: She was born at Lockleys. She didn’t stay at school much beyond primary school I think, but she learnt shorthand and typing, and so after she left school she was a shorthand-typiste. I’m ignorant, but I’m not sure where she worked, but she wasn’t working by the time we were born.

OH: And you father, his place of birth?

PS: He was born in the City, right in the City, as far as I know, but anyway that’s where he lived when he was tiny. He had three older sisters and his drunken father left his family when my father was very young. My

grandmother ran a boarding house on South Terrace and took in lodgers. She managed to get my father educated in primary school at Christian Brothers’ College, because they took in poor boys – he was the only boy who didn’t have a uniform. When he was 12 he had to leave school and help support the family, and he went to work at a carriers in the city called Gambling’s, he was the office boy, and whenever my sister1 and I complained about not having enough money for whatever we wanted, he’d say, When I was young I got 10/- a week as a wage, and I had to give it all to my mother.

OH: Do you remember your grandmother and the boarding house on South Terrace?

PS: No. She died before I was born, unfortunately on the same date as my birthday, so that was a bit sad for my father, but she was dead so I never knew her.

I knew my other grandmother who came to live with us when we went to live at Glen Osmond, my grandmother and my uncle who was a hunchback, he always lived with her, and they came and lived in the house we were renting at Glen Osmond. My grandmother died when I was about 10 I think.

OH: And I think that you told me also that your mother died before you were ...?

PS: Yes, my mother died in 1951 I think – she had cancer – and when she died her GP, Beryl Bowering, who lived in the same street, took me as a lodger and my sister went to live at St Ann’s [University of Adelaide College] because she’d gone to university already.

OH: And just to finish off your biographical details, the name of your spouse?

PS: Hugh, Hugh Stretton.

OH: And between you and Hugh you have?

PS: When I married Hugh he had two small children who I helped bring up after that, and then we had two more children, so four altogether, who are all really fond of each other.

OH: That’s lovely. If we can return to your childhood and growing up, what do you remember about the City of Adelaide as you were growing up?

1 Judy

PS: Well the City was a big deal. If my mother had to go to town she always put on corsets. My mother was very skinny [laughs] but she couldn’t go out without wearing boned corsets [laughs] and a hat and gloves. We had to walk about three-quarters of a mile down to catch the Glen Osmond tram if we were going by tram; my father had a car but he was at work. She used to take us to films, especially at the York (picture theatre), because the York showed English films, so they were good films [laughs].

OH: And where was the York?

PS: In what’s now Rundle Mall on the corner of – my memory is faulty, you’d have to look it up in a gazetteer – I think it was near the corner of Stephens Place, yes, because they knocked it down to ... No, that’s not right because that’s Birks, and if we went to Birks they had chairs for ladies to sit on, and I can remember her buying gloves and being seated on a chair having the gloves stretched over, down, like that.

OH: So they were long gloves?

PS: Yes, long gloves.

OH: And Pat, Birks was a department store?

PS: Birks, Charles Birks, it was a very old-fashioned department store, as was Myer’s; Birks got demolished to build David Jones, and David Jones was the latest thing. When I was a teenager, anything you’d bought from David Jones had to be posh and superior [laughs] and better than anywhere else, but it was a beautiful shop to go in. John Martin’s and Myer’s didn’t care what they looked like, and David Jones, new David Jones, did, and it was all marble and reflections, and just glamorous is what it was to us.

OH: Do you remember other department stores in the City?

PS: Myer’s, I remember Myer’s, Birks, and John Martin’s had a wonderful place to eat with lions. Don’t ask me but there were decorative lions around it, and that was all very exciting.

And the other thing we used to do, not all that often, was go to the Theatre Royal to see musicals like Annie Get Your Gun and White Horse Inn, and especially because my mother adored Gilbert and Sullivan, so we went to all the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas that ever played here, Ivan Menzies was the comic then. We didn’t ever go to plays, I suppose she thought we were too young for proper plays, though my sister, much to my chagrin, went to see Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in School for Scandal, and I didn’t go, so I was not happy.

OH: Where was the Theatre Royal?

PS: Down in Hindley Street and now a car park.

OH: What about cultural things, like did you visit along North Terrace?

PS: Every year we went to the Children’s Library at the back of the Museum, and we used to go to the Museum, and my strong memories were the Egyptian Room – we always had to go and see the Egyptian Room – and all the things that are terribly unfashionable and wrong – everything about the Egyptian Room apparently is wrong – and I loved that, and I loved the Dioramas with the dead birds and the eagles [laughs], louring over their prey in the Museum. The best of all were the bees, they had a beehive in the window, and you could sit there for as long as you were allowed to stay, just watching the bees flying in and out, it was just magic. That was my very favourite thing on North Terrace.

And we used to go to the Art Gallery. My sister and I were both transfixed by The Descent from the Cross, and we used to look at that in a horrified way because it was so gruesome, for as long as we were allowed to look at that, and I’m ashamed to say it’s the only picture that I remember from then in the Art Gallery, because it was horrible.

OH: Pat, what about eating, did you have any places in the City where you would have eaten or had drinks?

PS: Yes, we went to Balfours Café, and we used to have, it wasn’t fish and chips it was fish, whiting I think, and bread and butter, and then Frog Cakes. We ate at the Maple Leaf Café which burnt down sometime I remember.

OH: Where was the Maple Leaf Café?

PS: I honestly can’t remember, but I know that we ate there, and I know that it burnt down [laughs] because that’s why I remember it, but I’m sorry.

OH: Going back to Balfours, where was Balfours located?

PS: Balfours, unless my memory is all wrong, was where it is now, in Rundle Mall, what was then Rundle Street, but in the same spot, I think.

OH: And when you went and had a meal like that, was that with tablecloths, was it grand?

PS: They had tablecloths but it wasn’t very posh, it was ugly. I think everybody had tablecloths then. It wasn’t until a bit later that people started having formica and plastic, and low grade laughs] my mother

would have thought, so I think she would have insisted on tablecloths. They might even, in some places, they might have been paper, but you did cover up the table.

OH: You mentioned about your father working at Gamblings, and I’m wondering if you could describe what Gambling’s was like and what business it did, and where it was located.

PS: Okay! It was in Pirie Street, roughly where the Adelaide Bank is at the moment, but is about not to be I think, they’re moving, but down there, and it ran alongside a street called Ackland Street. I don’t even know whether Ackland Street is still there because people often ... but I think it must be. Anyway, it was on the corner of Ackland Street and Pirie Street, down the wrong end so to speak.

OH: Is that off the Square?

PS: Yes, beyond the Square, beyond Hindmarsh Square, if you keep going you come to that. I know the business was going in the ’20s but at some time in the ’30s they must have put a new front on it because it had a very art deco curvy front. My sister and I were very proud because it had a neon sign that lit up green that said, Gamblings, and when the Queen came in 1954 they decorated the whole front of the building, it was draped in flags. My father, who was a very keen photographer, had endless pictures of his building [laughs] all decorated for Her Majesty. When he started there it must have been almost entirely horse-drawn vehicles, and it had a little office space in the front, but out the back was just a big area where there were drays.

For a long time, and I never percolated that far then, but there were old stables that I think were Gambling stables, down at the back of where that building was. Hamish Ramsay tried to save them and get them used for interesting things, I haven’t looked lately but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they’d been demolished, like most things.

Anyway, by the time we knew that place I’m not sure that they had any horses anymore, it was all very modern [laughs] with petrol, but there was a wonderful smell. People talk about being reminded about places because of the smell, and I’ve never smelt the smell of Gambling’s anywhere else. Whether it was a hangover from the horses, but it mixed with a lot of other things, and it was just, you were transported into a different world the minute you walked in the door, by the smell.

OH: What was the smell?

PS: I don’t know, it was the Gambling smell [laughs], but I think looking back that it must have been partly, maybe they had some horses still,

horses and horse feed, don’t know, I really don’t know.

The other thing that my sister and I loved was the switchboard, because they had a little old-fashioned switchboard that you plugged in the plug, and so we’d play with that for hours on end and pretended we worked in an office and transferred calls to each other [laughs]. My father had what must have been new technology when he first got it, but probably it wasn’t by the late-40s, a dictaphone. It was a big sort of horn that you talked into and it recorded, and you could record onto it, and then leave it for your poor secretary to type up [laughs] whatever letters that you wanted, and so we used to play with that too.

OH: What was your father’s role at Gambling’s?

PS: Well he started off as the office boy, he was clearly bright, and he took the fancy of Reg Gambling, who’d started the firm, his son didn’t want to work at Gambling’s. I’ve never known or maybe I’ve forgotten what he did do, but he didn’t want to work there, and so old Mr Gambling groomed my father to become the Manager which, when Reg Gambling either died or retired, that’s what he did. So when I first knew him that’s what he was doing, and that’s what he did until Mayne Nickless took over their business in the early-50s, mid-50s maybe, and my father was deeply offended because the headline said, Mayne Nickless takes over old-fashioned Adelaide firm [laughs].

OH: The business that Gambling’s was in was carrying?

PS: Yes, they carried mostly stuff between Port Adelaide and Adelaide, and they did a lot of business with Actil and [pause], I’ve forgotten now, but it was just transporting stuff from Port Adelaide, getting it when it was unloaded from the ships, and taking it to various big firms. They weren’t really into interstate transport at all, they were just an old-fashioned [laughs] local Adelaide firm.

OH: So Mayne Nickless was already a national firm at that point?

PS: Yes. They took them over but I don’t know whether they then just sold that building because clearly they’re not there now, so I’m sorry, I can’t tell you, but I’m sure the internet could [laughs].

OH: [laughs] Yes. Well thanks for that. One last question about your family kind of context before we move on to your education, you mentioned previously that there was an allegiance in your family to Bob Menzies, and I was wondering how did that play out in your family.

PS: I just remember at election time my parents, being totally true-blue Liberals and being very pro Menzies, and very anti Chifley, who I have come to have a huge [laughs] admiration for in my later age, but they

would go off and come back very pleased that they’d voted for the proper people, not the rubbish, and I do remember them voting in the referendum to try to ban communism, and coming home being sure that communism would be banned, and that they had voted the right way to make sure that happened.

My father was a real, he was a lovely man but he was a real cold warrior. When I went to university during the Suez Crisis we argued about whether Britain should have invaded Suez with the French. I told him that I thought that this was a terrible thing, and he said to me, I’m going to take you away from that university, they’re turning you into a communist [laughs], which is funny because he was terribly pro American and the Americans thought it was wrong to invade Suez, but my father was more pro British I suppose, most of all.

OH: And was the same allegiance for Playford?

PS: That didn’t really arise. Playford just was, I ought to know, I think it’s Holloway, I’m not sure, but the Leader of the Opposition was a sweet chap who on the whole agreed with Playford on most things, so politics was very warm and friendly back when I remember, local politics, so I have no memory of people being up in arms about disgusting behaviour, whichever side, it was all we were all South Australians and Tom Playford was our Leader, and that’s how things had to be [laughs].

OH: Interesting! I’d like to turn to your education and ask you about where you went to school, Pat.

PS: When I was five we moved to Glen Osmond, and we lived opposite the junior school at PGC (Presbyterian Girls’ College), so I just had to walk across the road to go to school, and I was often the only person who was late [laughs] because I was so close so you didn’t think you had to hurry.

OH: And PGC is?

PS: It is Seymour (College) now, but Presbyterian Girls’ College. My sister and I both went there, and by the time my mother died I was in the senior school, and Beryl Bowering that I went to board with, lived opposite the senior school, up the top of the road, so I still only had to cross the road to get to school. I was a good student but I was hopeless at sport, I wasn’t a very good school girl.

OH: Was there an expectation that you would have been, or that girls were ...?

PS: Well my father, my poor father, he’d been a footballer, a league footballer, when he was young, and then he was a really good tennis

player, not competition but good, really good social tennis player, and he’d hoped that his daughters would be good. I was born with crap eyes and my sister at least could play tennis but I could never hit the ball at all. I would wave my racquet wildly, so I was a great disappointment to him [laughs], but he was very proud of us because we were good at school.

OH: So you had your entire primary and secondary at Presbyterian Girls’ College?

PS: Yes, which is probably a very bad thing with no experience of any other life.

OH: And did you have aspirations when you were at school?

PS: Well yes, I’m not sure at what stage. My sister, when she left, she went to the university, so I suppose I just thought I would go to the university too, I just liked studying. I didn’t actually for a long time ever know what I wanted to do, I just liked studying.

OH: I think previously you told me about the influence of a very good teacher.

PS: Oh, at PGC there were lots of good teachers, nice teachers, but Cecil Teasdale-Smith was just a brilliant English teacher, and made a huge difference, I think, to dozens if not hundreds of girls’ lives by just being a wonderful teacher, very inspirational. She encouraged me to go to university and said that’s what I should do, she was just a marvellous woman. I went back and taught at PGC for one year, she was still there, and she used to tease me about how I talked in class when I was her pupil.

By then Ellen Christensen was the Headmistress, and she also was an outstanding woman, and when I worked in Old Parliament House we did an exhibition about women who’d achieved things in South Australia for the centenary year of women getting the vote, and it was a great shock to me when we were doing the research. We’d picked out the women we wanted and how many of them had gone to PGC – Carolyn Somerville, Cathy Branson, 2. I just knew them as successful people and so you had to put who they were and what they were, and of the women we did, I think three at least – we didn’t do all that many – went to PGC, and went in the time of Ellen Christensen and Cecil Teasdale-Smith, so at that period it just was a very good school.

2 On review of the transcript, Pat added Diana Laidlaw

OH: And would it have been an expectation for young women who finished at PGC to go on to university?

PS: I’m not sure, that’s putting it a bit strongly. An awful lot of people went, I think when I was there most people just expected to get married and what you did was filling in time between, and so a lot of people did Nursing, a lot of people did Physiotherapy. There wasn’t necessarily much pressure on people to go to university, but the person who we all remember as being held up to us as a proud old scholar was Nancy Cato. Of course Nancy Cato was famous [laughs], so I think the message we got was that you wanted to be someone who turned out famous [laughs].

OH: Whatever that means [laughs].

PS: [laughs] Yes, for whatever reason.

OH: Did you complete Leaving Honours?

PS: Yes.

OH: And then what was the next step?

PS: I started university in 1956, finished school 1955, went to university in 1956 and then I went to St Ann’s to live in 1958. This was the era, after I left university, of sharing houses with other people, so that’s what I did.

OH: And what about when you were at university, because we’re talking about the University of Adelaide, what did you study?

PS: I studied History and English, and French because you had to – I was hopeless at French – but you had to, to get a degree then you had to do first year of a language in order to get a BA, so lots of people did French. Some people did Latin, but I would have failed that [laughs]. I wasn’t sure when I went, I think I knew I wanted to do History, but I loved English too, so I was going to major in both of those.

When I started doing History, the first term I was totally put off because they had a very ancient lecturer, who had been a good thing when he was young, but he was due to retire so he used to read out his lectures at dictation speed, and I discovered when I went to teach History that a lot of them he’d copied out of H.A.L. Fisher. Anyway, he was very boring [laughs], I’d been taught History much better at school than he was teaching us. Then in second term we had Ken Inglis and we had Hugh Stretton, and that was a revelation, so that’s when I decided that History was a good thing and not something totally boring at university.

OH: And you went on to do Honours?

PS: Yes.

OH: And what did you do your thesis on?

PS: Oh, I did it on the conscription referendums in South Australia. I mean that was an Australia-wide referendum, but I did the voting in South Australia in the referendums in 1916 and 1917, how many people voted which way and why, and about the splitting the Labor Party then which, looking back, I was a terrible novice. I just read the newspapers and I believed what it said in the newspapers [laughs] then. I would know how to do it better now, but that’s what I did.

OH: Pat, why did you go and live at St Ann’s after two years?

PS: Well it was a great haul to catch the tram in to university, and my sister had gone to St Ann’s, and I thought that that was being properly part of the university, to live nearer and to go and live there. I loved going there. I’d always lived a long way, what to me was a long way from town, and to suddenly live in North Adelaide and to be able to walk to a picture theatre, because we had to catch the tram into town to go to the pictures, and to be able to go to the Piccadilly [picture theatre] just like that. The Piccadilly then used to have two feature films, unlike other cinemas that had B films and then the main film, the Piccadilly was sort of, they were second release films I think, so you got two proper films, but if you wanted to, if you didn’t like the look of the first one, or you knew it was a rubbish film, you could just go after interval.

We used to walk up there often after interval and [laughs] because the cheapest seats were the front stalls and we were all poor, we’d sit in the front stalls. Two or three times the person selling the tickets had said, Are you nurses? and we’d said, No, we’re not nurses, we are students, and we couldn’t work out why they asked, so the next time we said yes, that we were nurses, just to see what happened if you were a nurse. So we bought our front stalls tickets and went and sat in the front stalls, and they came running after us and said, Oh, if you’re nurses you can sit anywhere you like. You can sit upstairs if you like. We were so embarrassed [laughs] because we’d fibbed, so we went upstairs, and the old Piccadilly, the upstairs was miles – it was a huge cinema, now it’s three cinemas – but the upstairs was way away from the screen and we were all short sighted, so we paid for our lie because we couldn’t see anything [laughs].

OH: When you were a student, Pat, how did you use the City of Adelaide?

PS: Well mostly I was a good student, used the Barr-Smith Library in the university; sometimes went to the State Library which had various things that the Barr-Smith didn’t have, and that was very fusty and

musty, the State Library then, in a way I would treasure now, but I think I thought it was a bit too much then.

I used to go to the pictures a lot mostly in, there were still cinemas, mostly in Rundle Street, the York was there. The Regent (picture theatre), it was mostly the Regent, and down in Hindley Street was the Metro [picture theatre], the Metro had huge chandeliers, and that was that some aura that David Jones had. This was a very romantic place to go, big thick carpet and chandeliers, so you had entered this ‘nother world of poshness.

When I was young there was a cinema called the Rex which I’m sure I went to, but I have no memory of now. Oh, and the other cinema that we used to frequent was the Curzon, which was in Rundle Mall – that was Rundle Street then – a fair way along, nearly up to Pulteney Street, I think – and that showed foreign films, so that’s where you’d go to see La Dolce Vita. Anything with subtitles wouldn’t ever make it to a mainstream cinema, it would be at the Curzon. I saw some wonderful films there which I cannot list you.

OH: [laughs] Well, that’s fair enough. What about eating places or cafés, do you remember from your student days?

PS: I used to spend time in the Richmond Hotel drinking more than eating.

OH: And that was in Rundle Street at that time?

PS: That was in, it’s the Renaissance Arcade now, isn’t it, I think, but it was the Richmond Arcade then, but mostly we ate in the Refectory when we were studying, or at St Ann’s. The Copper Kettle was the posh place, one of the posh places [laughs] if you went out at night to a restaurant.

OH: Where was that?

PS: That was in Hindley Street, I hope! You’re taxing my memory.

OH: [laughs] Why was it posh?

PS: I think it was Swiss food, allegedly, but I’m not sure whether [laughs] German or French and I wouldn’t have known the difference anyway. I’m not very good on that sort of eatery because I didn’t go out all that much, I was not a beautiful young lady [laughs], so I wasn’t eating out and dining out with people.

OH: And of course costs and things like that. Were you on a scholarship?

PS: Yes.

OH: Commonwealth Scholarship?

PS: Yes, which didn’t mean all that much because it paid your fees, but the fees were very low, so it wasn’t big money, and my father gave me an allowance. All of us used to supplement our money but only in the holidays. I worked in John Martin’s one year, two years I think, and one year, the only year I earned big money, I went fruit chopping at Loxton, working in a peach factory, and all you did all day, from eight in the morning until, some nights until six, and if you were lucky some nights until ten, because everyone fought for overtime, because the overtime was double, but all you did all day was cut peaches in half and take the stone out, and if I ever grumbled all the other women would say to me, You should have been picking asparagus, that was really hard [laughs] work. I worked there for I think a month, and I came home, I was staying with friends so I was bludging on them, but I saved all my earnings, and I came home with £50 and I thought I was the richest person on earth [laughs].

OH: And life at St Ann’s, how structured was it?

PS: Not very, I mean they had regular meals and just lovely people. I loved being at St Ann’s, and I roomed with, when I first went there, with Deb McCulloch, who’s been a lifelong friend. I’d been really lonely at Glen Osmond because there wasn’t anybody around much my age, so it was just lovely to be in a place where there were lots of people, and lots of people studying. It was structured in comparison with now, I mean men live there now, no men were allowed [laughs] anywhere near the premises, and any man seen to be sort of even in sight at all would be sent packing, and so people were very censorious about males, sex. They were all – I was going to say into drinking – but I don’t remember anybody much drinking or being told off for it, but certainly you got told off if, you know, the ultimate sin would have been to have a man in your room.

I really liked being there, it was nice because when you wrote essays you sat up all night and people, I mean there were no curfews or no one came and told you to put your light out or anything. It did a good thing for me because no one ever had milk that was within date, anyone who ever had any milk, it had gone off, so we all learnt to drink black coffee [laughs], which is a great saving.

OH: And how long did you stay at St Ann’s?

PS: I was there for two years, and then when I left university I registered with the Commonwealth Employment Department, and instantly got a job in the Pensions Department. All I had to do all day was forge somebody’s name – I mean as per, it wasn’t forgery really – but pretend

you were signing on behalf of whoever the Minister was – I had to do it so many times I thought I might remember, and also vet letters from pensioners who were trying to explain why they had spent the money they had, because they were keeping tabs on people who might be cheating and might really have more money than they were ... this was when pensions were means tested, because they stopped being means tested for a while.

It kind of swings in roundabouts about pensions, but they were means tested then, and there were pathetic letters from people saying that they’d spent really large sums and always on funerals, funerals for relatives, and these were people on the pension, and you were presumably allowed to have some savings, but you did have to explain if you’d spent more than a certain amount. Then there were the people who would send in a whole envelope full of bus tickets [laughs] to explain where their money had gone. You didn’t have to account for how you’d spent it all, but if you withdrew any money, a large sum, from your bank account, they wanted to make sure that in some way you weren’t cheating, or just giving it away, or giving it away so that you could keep under the bar and get the pension. So I did that only for a few weeks I think.

OH: Pat, once you had finished your Honours degree, what were the possibilities for employment?

PS: Oh, endless. The reason I went to work there, I thought then that I wanted to do a PhD, which I had to apply for. I think then you had to go to Canberra to do it. Anyway, that’s what I was aiming to do, so I was filling in time, and then I thought I would go to Canberra and do a PhD, so this was a fill-in job.

My chief memory of working in the Pensions Department, it was in an old Adelaide building, I think it’s probably been demolished, but in Grenfell Street, and it was totally un-air-conditioned, it was hideously hot in summer, it was almost unbearable, and as a nod to the heat and the staff’s welfare, there were fountains in the corridors so you could get cool drinks, and when it was really hot they’d put salt tablets next to them so that we wouldn’t all pass out from having perspired all the salt away.

Anyway I did that, and I can’t exactly remember for how long, but then because I had a university degree, I was offered a job in the Commonwealth Department of Census and Statistics, and I went there and said, Look, I can’t add up for toffee, I know nothing about anything, and they said, That’s alright, you’ve got a degree, come and work here. I have to say I wasn’t much use to the Department of Census and Statistics [laughs]. Just dreadful things, every now and then someone

who could add up would notice that the milk statistics, for example, had been being collected wrongly for the last five, six, seven years, because when you looked at the totals they had added two of them together, as well as the total – see I would never have noticed that. I didn’t hate working there but I didn’t love it. That was in Da Costa Building that was cooled, so that was better than the Pensions Department [laughs].

They used to stagger the workforce because it was full of public servants on every floor, so people came at kind of ten-minute intervals, that was your starting time, so that the lifts could work – I don’t know whether people still do that. They had a wonderful system, you had to sign in when you got there, so they knew if you were late [laughs] because you couldn’t jam your name in above somebody else’s.

OH: And from there you moved to another working position?

PS: When I was working there I was offered a tutorship in the History Department, by Douglas Pike – a very happy memory.

OH: At the University of Adelaide?

PS: Yes, and so I did that. That was meant to be for a year, and who was a tutor that saved me was a much grander lady than me, Meredith Hooper, she was Meredith Rooney then. I was about to say she’s the mother of Tom Hooper of The King’s Speech fame, but she is famous in her own right. She’s written a whole swag of books about the Antarctic and about Australian explorers, so she’s a famous person in her own right, but most people have heard of her son, Tom, more than they’ve heard of her. She went to England and married an Englishman, but she comes back to Adelaide every now and then. She was lovely, so we had great fun being tutors.

OH: Was that a fulltime position?

PS: Yes. There were all sorts of wonderful people there. There was a lovely American called Hector Kinloch, who taught American History, and Ken Inglis was teaching there then, and George ( ) hadn’t. I’m trying to remember whether he’d come, perhaps he hadn’t. Cath Woodroofe was teaching in the department then. It was a smaller department than it became later on, and probably is back to being a small department again now because of all the cuts, but anyway they were lovely people, and one of the nicest things – it sounds dreadful to say it – was morning tea because everybody came to morning tea, and they were often having the most riveting discussions about whatever was going on in the world, or whatever they were researching, and it was just fascinating to listen to. Apparently you don’t have morning tea in universities anymore, in university departments, because that’s wasting time and money, and you

should be working, but they were brilliant ways of people swapping ideas and helping other people doing whatever they were doing. It’s a very short-sighted way of cutting people’s time, what they think is pleasure, which is actually very useful.

OH: And to finish off this interview, Pat, where were you living at this time in your life?

PS: I was sharing a house with Deb McCulloch, who by then married Peter Cook, and another friend of ours called Jenny Thomas, so we were all house sharing in Adelaide, or in North Adelaide and then in Hackney for a while.

OH: Close to the City both times?

PS: Yes [laughs].

OH: Well thank you, Pat, for your interview today, and I look forward to picking up next time. Thank you.

PS: Well thank you, and you’ve certainly done your homework. You have a much harder task than me.

Second interview with Patricia Stretton recorded by Madeleine Regan

5 April 2013 at the North Adelaide Library

for the City of Adelaide Oral History (Extension) Project 2012/2013

Oral Historian (OH): Thanks very much, Pat, for coming in again today for an interview. I was going to pick up on just a couple of things from the previous interview, something that we passed over, and it was about your early working life. I remember you said that after a year of tutoring at the University of Adelaide, you took on a teaching job at Presbyterian Girls’ College (PGC), and I wanted to find out what that experience was like.

Patricia (Pat) Stretton (PS): It was absolutely terrifying [laughs]. I was teaching Leaving and Leaving Honours. Leaving Honours was fine because there weren’t all that many and they were very bright and really lovely people to teach, but Leaving, I had a range from bright to not very bright [laughs] at all. I’d never taught and I didn’t know how to teach, I kept reading books about how to teach, which didn’t help me, so I struggled and I really wondered whether I should run away and never come back for a while.

I persevered and in the end I did enjoy it, I always enjoyed teaching Leaving Honours. Three of my students got Distinctions, and so I was very proud of that, but I’m afraid a shocking percentage of the people in Leaving failed [laughs], they either did very well or they did very badly. So in the beginning I did dislike it very much, but it was a nice school to teach in and the Headmistress, Ellen Christensen, was an absolutely inspirational woman who the girls there adored. She had attracted a wonderful staff, the English teacher was Cecil Teasdale-Smith, now sadly dead, and she regularly, I don’t know how regularly but it seemed like regularly to me, her students got the Tennyson Medal, so she was just, she was just a wonderful woman and a wonderful teacher. I was very privileged to work there, but I did hate it in the beginning [laughs].

OH: How old were you when you first went there to teach?

PS: I think I was 23 or 24.

OH: And you’d gone from the University of Adelaide to there?

PS: Yeah.

OH: And after you were there, what was the next step in your kind of personal/professional life?

PS: Well I taught there for a year and at the end of that year I left to marry Hugh. He was a divorcee with two small children to bring up, so when we got married, we didn’t have a honeymoon because there were children to look after.

OH: How old were the children?

PS: Simon was eight and Fabian was three. We finally had a honeymoon I think after 25 years [laughs], which was the first, it was about the first time we’d ever not had any children hanging around our necks. So I married him, and in those days not everybody stopped working, but most people stopped working when they had children to look after. I take my hat off to women who work and have children, small children, because I couldn’t cope with small children [laughs], let alone a job. Then Hugh and I had two more children, so we had four children altogether.

North Adelaide was very different then because there were lots of local children around for them to play with. I was looking around the other day and you see children come to school, but they all get picked up or go off home somewhere else. I’m not aware of any small children close to me – I mean there may be but I don’t know them – and it was lovely. There were lots of vacant lots, and our children used to go around the corner and dig up things in the vacant lots, and run around the district – I don’t think they were too wicked – but given that it was a built up area, they had a pretty free and easy life. None of us then were scared of molesters or murderers, or kidnappers, and we didn’t fuss too much about where our children were.

We did fuss about safety, so they didn’t go to the local school, our daughter went to Walkerville Primary (School), and our sons went to St Peter’s [College]. They always got driven, and that wasn’t for marauders, that was because of getting run over. They used to complain and the lot of them wanted to ride their bikes, and we wouldn’t let them, which may have been feather bedding them too much, but traffic was pretty horrible even then for, we thought for little kids.

OH: So you lived in?

PS: We lived in Tynte Street, and we thought we were the luckiest people in the world because we lived two doors down from a corner shop that had

everything, so if you ever ran out of anything you could go down to Claude and Maria. Claude got up at 4.00 in the morning to go to the market and get fresh vegetables, and Maria always had a small child on her hip. They were migrants who were making good like anything. We met some of their children grown up and they’d done well in life, so their parents working hard paid off for them. Anyway, there was Claude and Maria in the corner shop; across the road was Perryman’s Bakery and all our children’s friends were more impressed that we lived near Perryman’s Bakery than anything else about our family.

Then over on the other corner, opposite Perryman’s, was Renc’s Butcher Shop. The Renc’s were German migrants, I suppose post-War German migrants, but people came, snobby people, snobby food people came from all over Adelaide to buy their veal to make veal cutlets, because the Renc’s were the only people in Adelaide, allegedly, who knew how to cut veal properly. They smoked their own meat on the premises, so they had beautiful German sausage. They were alone but they always gave kids, they didn’t give them beastly fritz [laughs], they gave them some sort of nice German sausage to eat when they went in there, they just had beautiful meat.

We knew we were lucky to live near this wonderful food, and in O’Connell Street there was a great big mass vegetable shop, which is where you bought your vegetables if you hadn’t had to buy them from Claude Maria [laughs] who over-charged you, as you would, if you were running a corner shop, but Nelson’s was the greengrocer shop, a big place in O’Connell Street, and there was Old Mrs Nelson, who was sort of grandma, and then her son, Mr Nelson, who ran the shop, and his wife. It was this lovely family business and they had very good vegetables, but if you were very posh and you had lots of money, you went further down the street to Lokan’s, who had superior [laughs] fruit and veg. That’s where you went if you wanted really good raspberries, and I hadn’t remembered until we went to Canada that raspberries and strawberries used to come in straw punnets not in plastic. We visited Canada lately and they still have straw punnets. It’s terrible what you forget, if someone had asked me I would have said, No, we always have plastic, but we didn’t.

The other memorable shop for me was Ellen Kay’s – I’m not sure what exactly they called their shop – but it was two sisters called Ellen and Kay, and they had toys, they had Matchbox cars and stuff like that, and our kids loved going in there. A trip to Ellen Kay was part of going down O’Connell Street. Then there was Dean Toseland’s Bike Shop, which was very important to our family because we were into bikes. He was just a lovely man to meet, so our kids used to go and have long chats with him while they were looking at bikes. He was an ex-cycling star, but not a bit like Lance Armstrong.

Across the road was the famous Le Cornu’s still up and standing and that, I learned long ago, started off as making coffins [laughs] back in the 19th century. They worked in wood and they made coffins, but then not enough people were dying I suppose so they branched out into making their own furniture. If you peered through you could see behind the shop front there were all these old sheds from way back, where they were still making some stuff I think, and more and more I think they were buying in furniture from other places. I’m not sure, but I think they were still making some of their own.

They kept expanding up and down O’Connell Street, they bought the butcher on the corner of Archer Street, and they bought the dress shop further up the street. I think that’s when it was still belonging to them, they were going to expand back as far as Curtis Street, they wanted to expand, and an equal distance the other side of O’Connell Street was part of the City’s Plan. So Le Cornu’s would expand on one side and there would be a huge supermarket and on the other side, and huge amounts of parking.

That’s when everybody, when they found out about Plan 16, which was Mr (Hugh) Bubb in the City Council, the City Engineer Planner’s plan for North Adelaide, everybody revolted, and that’s when the North Adelaide Society was formed, (a) to fight that, and (b) to fight the MATS Plan (Metropolitan Adelaide Transport Plan). The MATS Plan, was devastating and we debated what we would do and where we would move to, because they were going to widen Margaret Street, demolish Perryman’s, demolish Renc’s, demolish the corner shop, not demolish our house. That was part of Mr Bubb’s [laughs] plan to demolish our house and all the houses around to put in high rise in order to shop in the new improved Le Cornu’s. We didn’t think it would be worth living where we were living if we didn’t have all those shops we were used to, so we were deeply relieved when the MATS Plan was shelved, but Plan 16 looked like going ahead, and that was going to be devastating to the way we lived.

The North Adelaide Society organised to tip out the Councillors who were in favour of that, what they thought of as progress, and people like Jim Bowen – I think Jim Bowen was already on Council – but David Bright, who later became a Judge, he stood for Council. Anyway, six of what we regarded as the villains got tipped out, and six goodies got put in, and they absolutely voted against this awful plan. They had a modified one and you can see the shopping centre, and the housing behind that is a much scaled-down version of what was going to happen. Bubb’s plan included knocking everything on the front of O’Connell Street down. He allegedly hated old buildings, so the only building he wanted to leave there was the brand new Commonwealth Bank Building, I think it was that building, and all the rest would go, all the

dreadful old buildings would come down.

The North Adelaide Society was full of nice goody two-shoes, heritage [laughs] people, so they would have knocked down the Commonwealth Bank Building [laughs] and left all the rest. There was great tension at one stage in the North Adelaide Society because in discussing the MATS Plan people like us and our neighbours, who didn’t want Margaret Street destroyed, somebody suggested that instead of widening Margaret Street and knocking down all the wonderful shops along Margaret Street – which had been picked because it was a slum street on the whole, they were small slum houses – someone had the temerity to suggest that the road widening could occur on Le Fevre Terrace.

There was then great huffing and puffing in the North Adelaide Society [laughs] about where best it should go, and of course what they did was to fight it going anywhere, and to say, We don’t need to help traffic more and more. I think in my memory Dunstan persuaded of this, that the more you have road widening, you just make more cars, and everywhere in America that’s tried to cope with traffic problems by making more space for cars, they think, Oh good [laughs], and so more cars come, so it’s a never ending process. That’s what helped to save North Adelaide.

I mean whoever you talk to likes to think it was them that saved North Adelaide [laughs], but it was a great combination of forces and economics, and pushing, and you never know which bit was the bit that worked, so everybody had to keep pushing whatever they believed in.

OH: Pat, when you talk about the MATS Plan, the full name for that was the Metropolitan Adelaide Transport Study, and this was late-1960s, I think it was 1968, why do you think it was seen as a solution, or as some kind of plan?

PS: Well it was to solve what were thought of as Adelaide’s traffic problems, because traffic had increased. I think forward thinking people thought that it was increasing and would increase even more, and the Engineering solution to that, was just to widen the roads. At one stage it was to get, I mean what was going to ruin North Adelaide was getting traffic out of the City and along Frome Road, and to get traffic to the North. When Hugh went to talk to Mr Bubb about the City’s involvement and what they were planning, because the City, I think it was the City rather than the State, had bought a lot of houses up Margaret Street, planning to demolish them, and when Hugh talked to Mr Bubb he said that Mr Bubb put his arm over the Plan on his desk, but when he got up to get something, Hugh had a look at it, and he reckoned that Bubb’s plan would mean that all the Frome Road Plane trees would go. If you were going to widen Frome Road there was no

way that the trees wouldn’t go, and that’s why he put his arm over it so Hugh wouldn’t see. Someone said he would have just had the plan, the MATS Plan, that everyone had, I don’t know, but anyway Hugh came home in a very bad temper [laughs] saying, He wants to knock down the Frome Road trees.

But it was most interesting. Originally the straight way to do that, and the original MATS Plan I think, went through houses that fronted Stanley Street. They were very elegant, posh old houses, so those people were up in arms, and I think it was going to be moved so it would go up Margaret Street instead, because they were thought to be poverty- stricken people who wouldn’t bother to protest.

The same thing was true, when the City was planning to help Le Cornu’s, they wanted to compulsory acquire land back to Margaret Street, I think, so this would tie in with the MATS Plan.

OH: From O’Connell Street, east?

PS: From O’Connell to Margaret, so they wanted all those lovely houses in Archer Street – they were the backbone of the North Adelaide Society because they didn’t want them to be demolished – and the houses on our block, they wanted compulsory acquisition at valuation, and then they would put high rise there. That was Mr Bubb’s plan, supposedly. They started off down in Curtis Street, that we knew about, doorknocking, the City Officers, doorknocking to say to people, You lucky people, we will pay you so many thousand dollars for your house. They had expected to meet poor people, because there were lots of poor people in North Adelaide then, and those cottages weren’t the posh cottages they are now, they were often fairly derelict, but one of them belonged to Geoffrey Dutton, the poet and author, it was his townhouse, so he wasn’t a mug face [laughs] who was going to sell at valuation, and across the road was Ethel Payne, who ran the University Bookshop, and she certainly wasn’t [laughs] going to sell at valuation. Anyway, so they met a lot of resistance there, and then it just snowballed, and once the Council changed then that Plan was dead.

OH: And Pat, you mentioned Plan 16. Was Plan 16 tied to the MATS Plan, or was it separate?

PS: Look, I’m not sure, Plan 16 was like saying, Six, Six, Six. It was Mr Bubb’s plan, and it was secret, and I don’t know who leaked it, but somebody leaked it. It showed what he wanted demolished, where he wanted car parks, and I think where he wanted high rise. I should have done my homework and gone back and looked, because in the end the North Adelaide Society had copies of it. They hired Ian Hannaford to analyse that Plan and say what was wrong with it, so there were all sorts

of people fighting from different angles to say that this would be a terrible thing, so it didn’t happen.

OH: In North Adelaide at that time, in the late-60s, there were already some high rise going up, weren’t there, you know Jeffcott Street and around that area?

PS: Yes, I’m trying to remember. Is the Jeffcott Street the late-60s or is that ’70s? Certainly there was what I think of as the hideous [John] Chappel high-rise building down in lower North Adelaide which still ... Of course it’s partly when they stick out like a sore thumb, but the blocks of flats in Jeffcott Street, because they were together, didn’t offend people, I think, as much. They probably did when they went up. I thought they were later, I thought they were ’70s but I can’t swear.

OH: I was just, I guess, drawing the conclusion that things were changing in the ’60s.

PS: One of the changes, and something that people very much wanted to stop, and that’s why they were so pleased when George Clarke’s plan came out, was that more and more buildings were being knocked down for two and three-storey yellow brick blocks of flats that were not hideous but just boring, and the whole didn’t have trees around them, and I think some of the North Adelaide houses, even the rather slummy ones, nearly always had lots of vegetation around them, so you didn’t notice that they needed a bit of mending, or they had salt damp. These blocks of flats often replaced quite nice old buildings. They clearly were ugly and people were angry that the character of North Adelaide was being changed. I think that they were very profitable then. On that amount of land you could get a lot of rent for relatively little outlay, so if they hadn’t changed the rules then eventually people were scared North Adelaide would be covered in yellow brick flats [laughs].

OH: You mentioned about the houses along Margaret Street, people who were less affluent living there. Can you say a little bit more about what you think the population mix was then, in North Adelaide?

PS: Well it was very different. Our kids’ best friends lived around the corner, and their house had a 12ft frontage, fronting onto Margaret Street and they had – I used to know how much their house had cost them because they were very proud – they had bought it, they had bought it outright, because they didn’t believe in owing money [laughs], so where other people had mortgages they ... I mean this was a relatively cheap house even then. Dad was a motor mechanic and mum, like the rest of us, was mum and didn’t work at all, so they didn’t have much money, but their kids, and our kids I think, were very happy, and grew up happy.

OH: What was their house like, if it had a 12ft frontage?

PS: I can’t remember the depth, but not very deep.

OH: So single-fronted?

PS: Single rooms, there must have been I think just sort of four rooms back, or even three. I know the kitchen was at the back. I’ve been in there but I can’t remember the configuration, but it was, it must have been very cramped.

OH: And was it like a row house?

PS: Yes, there were, and there were originally when we first moved there four in a row, and their next-door neighbours – our kids’ friends were dinkum Aussies. Well in one of that row there, there was a family of migrants, and they had two or three kids. We met them in the park, not all that long ago, the mum and the dad who were quite old, who said that their children had grown up, I think one was a doctor, one was a dentist. They’d all succeeded and you wouldn’t have thought that at the time, I mean you would have thought these people lived in the worse possible conditions. Next door to however many remained was this, for a long time, was this lovely vacant block for our children, which was part [laughs] of the MATS Plan. I don’t know when they started buying up Margaret Street, but anyway they’d knocked down some of these houses that had been row houses. Margaret Street was always a very poor street.

When I was trying to find exactly when our house was built, I was looking through the Town Clerk’s record book, I think it’s called, and it’s indexed by acre number, so I used to look up our acre number. I never found our house but on that acre I often found Margaret Street houses, and either they were being listed because they were being demolished, or because they were being cleansed [laughs], and you had this picture – this is back in the late-19th century –of really horrible conditions, just rats and dirt. North Adelaide was sort of built with these narrow streets for the working class, for the sort of servant class, to be servants for the upper classes that lived around the corner.

OH: Because down that eastern end of say Tynte Street and Archer Street, there’s some beautiful old, magnificent houses.

PS: Oh yes. On the big wide streets they’re sort of gradations of grandeur and, you know, right down the end of Tynte Street are the very grand houses, and then down the other end of North Adelaide, the continuation of streets like Barnard Street and Molesworth Street, then you get great grandeur there. Le Fevre Terrace is grand, but around the corner from Le Fevre Terrace you get less grand, and it gets sort of poorer the further

down you go.

Years and years ago the Electricity Trust [of South Australia] was lopping branches to keep their wires safe. They only had wires on one side of the street, but they were lopping both sides of the street for symmetry, and Hugh was outraged that they would lop them for nothing, and said, Since there aren’t any wires, do you have to do that? They said to him, If you can get a petition saying more people want us to stop than want us to go on, then we’ll stop, and what he found, to his astonishment, was the further along Tynte Street you went, the more people were in favour of lopping [laughs]. So the people up near Le Fevre Terrace didn’t want them lopped if they didn’t need to be. He thought everybody would say, No, of course not, but lots of people further along the street and down the O’Connell Street end, said, Yes, they’ve got rubbish birds in them and they drop on your car. Yes, lop them!! He managed to scrape up a majority to stop them, but he was quite upset how many people [laughs] didn’t want them to stay.

OH: Down the end of Tynte Street you had the beautiful Park Lands. In the ’60s were people using the Park Lands there much?

PS: There were always horse paddocks there, so people kept their horses there, and the playground at the end of Tynte Street was used and there was, I’m trying to remember her name, there was a lovely woman who spent the whole day there to mind children who came in, you know, put bandaids on their knees if they fell over. She was a lovely mother figure, and I’m ashamed I can’t remember her name.

OH: Was she an employee of the Council?

PS: I think she must have been, I think so, it would be possible to find out who she was. I’m sure she’s long dead because she was sort of middle- aged back then, but you needed someone like that because there was a big sign up saying, No men allowed, and Hugh, who for a while was a single father with children, had to sit in the gutter outside the playground to keep an eye on his kids because he didn’t want to leave them unattended, but he wasn’t allowed inside. I’m not sure whether they even needed rescuing [laughs], whether he went in anyway. I can’t remember when that policy stopped of no men allowed, but you wonder whether it will come back again soon because everybody is so terrified of men and small children.

OH: Pat, going back to finish off about the MATS Plan, if you had to say how widespread was the opposition to it – you know I’m thinking we’ve talked about North Adelaide, and obviously people in North Adelaide opposed it – but how much wider was the opposition?

PS: I honestly don’t know. I’m sure anybody who was going to have their house removed for road widening, probably would have been opposed, unless they wanted to move anyway. I think it would have been selective. I mean like now, probably half the people neither knew nor cared. If you’d said, What do you feel about the MATS Plan? They would have said, What’s that? I think. So I think that people in the path of the bulldozer were very aware and most very angry. I should think a lot of other people, if anyone said to them, Oh, your trip to town will be faster. They would have said, Terrific, and it’s not affecting my house, so I’m all for it! But I don’t know whether people, I mean people did Gallup poll them about politics. I’m not sure how many people – people poll everything these days – so I don’t know whether they did then, whether anyone would have gone around saying, How do you feel about the MATS Plan? I ought to know but I don’t know.

OH: That’s fine. I’m going to take you back a little to earlier in your professional life when you decided to take on postgraduate study, around ’74, ’75.

PS: Yeah, I went back to do half time to study. That’s when my youngest child started school. I got a pathetic note from her after a few weeks which began, I love you very much BUT [laughs]. Why do you have to go away to study? She was very offended.

She had just started school and I went to do a library course. The University of Adelaide had just started a postgraduate library course because they wanted to train librarians to work in the Barr Smith Library especially. They had a great fight because the University thought that a library course was not a fit and proper thing to have in the University, and in fact they’ve abolished it. I don’t know how long it lasted, I think maybe six years at the most, but it was the brain child of Ira Raymond, the then University Librarian, who was thrilled to bits that he’d manage to persuade the University Council that they could run this course. He hired a wonderful American called Nancy Lane. America was years ahead of Australia in terms of running libraries and running big libraries, so we were very lucky to have her.

One of the courses we had to do was a course in computing, and the University at that stage had, I don’t know how big it was, but it was like nearly a building full of a computer. Our course which was baby simple, consisted of typing programs into punch cards, and then you took them down to the person in charge of the computer, or one of their minions, handed in your bundle of punch cards, and came back the next day to have your program printed out, except in my case it took about a week because I used to, to make it look neat and tidy, I would leave spaces between the typing I was doing, or put in full stops. It took me ages to find that you didn’t do any of those things, you had to type exactly what

you wanted, and you didn’t leave spaces [laughs], and you didn’t put in full stops where they weren’t meant to be. So I was always going down, waiting to get my program, and being told it hadn’t worked and to do it again [laughs], and come back the next day.

Anyway, nobody had a personal computer then, but we were aware of what computers could do, especially for a library, that a computer would be able to work out when books were overdue, and to generate notices to tell people that they had to bring it back, and to work out the fines that would accrue. So this would take all that sort of physical labour out of individuals’ hands, and hand it over to a computer, so you could tell it was good, but I was glad that I never had [laughs] to have anything more to do with punch cards. I’m not sure when punch cards went out, but I know I hated them.

OH: What was your hope in doing the study for the library?

PS: Well I wanted to work in the University Library. I loved my time at university, I especially loved the Barr Smith Library. I loved Ira Raymond, and I thought it would be a wonderful thing, either to work there or to maybe initially to work in a school library, because then I could get school holidays and I could mind my children, but more and more doing that course. I wanted to work in the Barr Smith Library, and I was absolutely devastated and really very angry when I finished and done the course. It was a fascinating course and I learned so much that I didn’t know I didn’t know, especially about using reference tools, things that if only I’d known when I’d been an undergraduate I would have done much better. Anyway it was a terrific course.

I was going to apply for a job there and we were told that there would be no part-time jobs, only fulltime jobs, because if you shared a library job there would be no continuity between the two people occupying that job, and that this would be very ineffective cost wise, because the person trying to pick up the query from the other librarian, would have to do it all over again, and it would be rubbish. Various people had thought they would get half-time jobs there, and I’m even angrier in retrospect because that is so not true and not true now. But it just was much harder for women to get jobs or to be sort of assertive about, Don’t be stupid, of course [laughs] splitting a job in half isn’t going to make it deeply inefficient.

I was lucky because I did get a job in the University, I got a job as a research assistant working for Tom Sheridan in the Economics Department. He’d got a grant to write a book about Ben Chifley’s labour policies, and someone told me that he was looking for a research assistant. When I went to be interviewed I said, I could really do this job well because I’ve done a reference course, and I now know how to look

things up, and my library course has been very useful for teaching me a lot of things. Tom said, Oh yes, well I wanted to talk to you because you’ve done a library course. And I said, Yes, that’s just the sort of person you want. And he said, Well, it’s actually because a lot of the job I want you to do is very boring, and anyone who can stick out two years of the library course, because it was half a year each, is someone who won’t mind boring. So that’s why you’re qualified [laughs] for this job.

So I worked for him from 1975-1976, roughly, and then we went to England because Hugh had study leave, and then I came back and worked for Tom again until the early-80s. He had a lovely story about someone who, when he applied for an extension for his grant because he hadn’t finished his book, which I may say when it came out, got wonderful reviews and it’s a very good book. But he applied for another year to employ a research assistant, and one of the people said, You’ve had three years, surely you should have finished your book by now. And if I’d been Tom, I would have got all embarrassed and said, Oh yes, I’ve been ill, or I broke my leg, or I know I should have finished by now. Tom didn’t say that at all. He said, Well, you might be able to write a book in that time, but I do proper research [laughs].

OH: With a very good research assistant obviously.

PS: Well I loved that job, I did, and he taught me, I learnt a lot doing history about research, and I learnt more when I did my library course, but I learnt even more from Tom, because he would say, Go and find out X or Y, and I’d trot off and read the newspaper or look it up, come back and say, Here you are, and he’d look at it and say, Thank you very much, and now I want you to find out what ... somebody else said. He tested. I used to think, Oh, it says it in the paper, it must be true, and he’d say, Oh no, you can’t trust that. He just made me, anything you read anywhere you then went and tested against every other possible source that you could find, and you did find huge discrepancies. I’m surprised I ever passed my History course because if I found it in the paper, that was good enough.

OH: What was the University of Adelaide like at that time, say in the late-70s and in the early-80s?

PS: Well, all I’m going to sound like is old fuddy-duddy, thinking it was terrific then and it’s rubbish now like old people do, but to me it was a wonderful place and a wonderful environment, and the staff there were very free and they, on the whole, weren’t filling in forms, it was pre- Dawkins reforms where everybody became beholden to Canberra for money, and had to justify their existence.

Now there were some good things about those reforms. There had been

some people in the university who used to start drinking at 10 o’clock in the morning in the staff club, and very few, but some, who didn’t do any work. You can see why some people said that there needs to be a tightening up and there needs to be a bit of discipline around here, and there are a lot of deadhead people who never write any books and just draw their salary, and may or may not be good teachers, but just talking to people now it’s really sad what’s happened. A lot of people want to retire because they just find it very dispiriting how much you’re supposed to produce research or books and if you haven’t got anything to say that’s a bit stupid.

When I was a tutor there were a couple of people there who were the most wonderful teachers who didn’t write books but they were as valuable as you could possibly be as teachers, and the fact that they didn’t feel that they had anything particularly novel to say, was good for the trees! Anyway, it’s not like that now, if you don’t produce, you get the boot, and there’s a huge percentage of people now on short-term contracts, and so a terrific sense of instability. Whereas when I was working there, I was on an hourly-paid research contract, but that was what I was. There was almost nobody on a contract, you were tenured and you could get on with what you wanted to do and what you wanted to be. One of the awful results is that nobody there, as far as I can see, has morning tea anymore. When I worked there people had morning tea and they swapped ideas. Maybe I told you this. I did, I’ll shut up.

OH: No, no, that’s fine. I was, I guess, trying to get a picture of what the sort of culture of the university was, and the fact that you were sort of on the staff and mixing in with people.

PS: Yeah! I didn’t all that much because I was mostly off in libraries. My big memory of that period was a meeting, and it was probably in the early-80s, where there was discussion about whether the – I’m trying to think what his title is – Executive in the administration, whether he should get an expensive car, and there was a big meeting of the staff to complain that they didn’t think either that he needed the university to provide him with a car, or the cost of the car, I can’t remember, but there was beginning of ill feeling between the staff and the Head Office about salaries and perks and lurks, which I think has got much worse [laughs] over time.

Third interview with Patricia Stretton recorded by Madeleine Regan

19 April 2013 at the North Adelaide Library

for the City of Adelaide Oral History (Extension) Project 2012/2013

Oral Historian (OH): Thank you very much, Pat, for agreeing again to an interview.

Today we’re going to pick up on the 1970s, a time of change in Adelaide, and I’d like to ask about your involvement in the North Adelaide Society, which I understand was established in 1970, and I wanted to ask you why do you think that the Society was needed.

Patricia (Pat) Stretton (PS): It was needed for two special reasons. I mean they’re general reasons why you would have a community society, but it was of course, North Adelaide was absolutely under threat both from the MATS (Metropolitan Adelaide Transport Study) Plan, which was going to carve a swathe through mostly what people would call slum housing, so it was going up Margaret Street, and I think the MATS Planners thought nobody would care a bit about displacing poor people, they wouldn’t make a fuss, and it wouldn’t cost much buying their houses or that land, but what they didn’t realise was that it would destroy Perryman’s Bakery where everybody shopped – I think I’ve talked about this.

OH: Yes.

PS: And the butcher’s shop, so it was, and it would cut …it would mean the school children, depending where they came from, would have to cross a six-lane highway to get to school, it would have been terribly dangerous, so this united all sorts of people who the planners hadn’t even thought of. Apparently the MATS Planners did no social interviewing, or took no care about where the road went, they just looked at the map and said, Here’s a nice straight line and that will take the most traffic. I read that in 60 miles of widened road they had three pedestrian crossings that they’d thought of, not very nice.

So the MATS Plan was scaring a lot of North Adelaide people, and they wanted to protest about that, and the other plan that was from the State Government, and the plan that was coming from the City Council [Adelaide City Council], which was a secret plan – no one was allowed

to know but it got leaked, and that was Plan 16, which was going to demolish huge swathes of old housing to provide parking from Le Cornu’s which would be extended so it would be a vast emporium, like it is now, in its new position, so huge Le Cornu’s, a huge parking lot for them, and then Mr Bubb, the City Engineer, and self-styled planner, wanted to compulsorily acquire all sorts of houses on the block from Tynte to Archer Streets, including our house, so we were very keen members, to demolish them and build high rise, and this would provide shoppers for the supermarket they were going to build on the other side of O’Connell Street and for Le Cornu’s.

It was going to devastate North Adelaide for huge numbers of people, so all sorts of people, not just the people immediately affected, but all sorts of people from all over North Adelaide, came together to say, We don’t want this.

I won’t go on about the North Adelaide Society because John Bridgland has just written an admirable history of the North Adelaide Society, which anyone who’s interested can borrow from the library [laughs].

OH: But what about your part in it, how active were you, Pat?

PS: I wasn’t especially active. My husband, Hugh, was very active and helped draft various submissions to government. He’d written a book about planning and it was just published.

And the book was?

PS: Ideas for Australian Cities. It got refused by six publishers, so he published it himself with a lot of help from The Advertiser. He loved the printer at Gillingham Press I think it was, who gave him terrific advice about the size of the book and what you could sell it for. So he published it, we financed it, and it turned out to be a best seller. It got reprinted numerous times, and he got a lovely review in The Bulletin that said, This is a terrific book and unbelievable that six publishers turned it down. You should go out and buy six copies just to give them a kick in the bum, and send one to your local MP, one to the Prime Minister, one, whoever you feel like, and even if you don’t do that at least buy one. So he was sort of hugely influential in a general way.

He’d written in that book a lot about North Adelaide, and how Adelaide would be devastated by the MATS Plan. When the Dunstan Government got back in 1970 I think, because they swapped around with Steele Hall, they junked, eventually junked the MATS Plan and didn’t do it, and the government and the Council, who were beautifully hand in glove then – and it’s a very sad thing that the current government and the Council don’t get on, and the government rides roughshod over the Council and

takes away its powers – but Dunstan and the then Lord Mayor, Bill Hayes, saw things in a similar way, and didn’t want to devastate Adelaide. My husband always said how ironic that Bill Hayes, who’d made his money out of selling cars, was absolutely opposed to Adelaide having car parks or having car lots anywhere, and was absolutely in favour of having more residential, making it a liveable city. I used to go to North Adelaide Society meetings but I won’t say I was very active. I had four small children, or three small children then, no four, so I was being mum [laughs].

OH: What was the strength do you think of the North Adelaide Society?

PS: I think it had, it had a lot of expertise, a lot of architects, planners. I’m not sure about then but certainly in latter years traffic engineers, and I think it may have had them in their own jobs, and they were looking at what the state and Mr Bubb were planning to do and saying, This is terrible planning. These people don’t know what they’re talking about, and so they could present very good arguments. It wasn’t just not in my backyard, this was saying, You are going to wreck one of the oldest and most interesting suburbs in Adelaide. It wasn’t just Adelaide, a lot of the inner city, ringing the city suburbs, were threatened by the MATS Plan, because it all centred in on Adelaide, so all these roads from all over all came in. It was going to be really devastating and really wreck Adelaide.

So I think the North Adelaide Society – Peter Stephens was the first President, he worked morning, noon and night – he was the North Adelaide Society, and he was terrific. I think – I shouldn’t say it on tape if I’m wrong – I think he was an engineer, but he was a big driving force behind what it did. Unlike some people who were interested for a while and then they get interested in something else, that was his pride and joy and life. Well, there are fewer and fewer people who remember him now, but he was deeply admired, a good man.

On the whole, the members did have unified aims. Every now and then someone would pop up, in my memory, and say things like, Who will sign a petition about something else? And you’d get a lot of huffing and puffing and, I’m not having anything to do with that. But about North Adelaide, they were unified and they thought it was a lovely place to live. Not like now. It wasn’t just rich people, there were lots and lots of pensioners and old people who owned their own homes and were very, very keen to hang on to them, and to hang on to the suburb they’d grown up in.

OH: When you mentioned about Peter Stephens being a long-time member, was that the case with the membership that people continued to belong?

PS: Yes. Well, I mean like all organisations there are people who come and go, but there were a few core people. I’m being stuck for names but it’s all in the [laughs] North Adelaide Society history. Oh, Ailsa Osborne, Ailsa Osborne who lived in one of the Archer Street terraces, which was going to be knocked down. I think the people, some of the keenest people, were in these houses that were to go in aid of Le Cornu shoppers. She was a long term and very faithful North Adelaide Society member. She and Peter Stephens are the two I remember most vividly, but there were many others, and John Bridgland’s book [laughs] will tell you.

OH: Thank you. Are you still involved as a member, Pat?

PS: I still get the newsletter. I get blood pressure every time I read it because John Bridgland writes the newsletter, and he details all the dreadful things that are happening, have just happened, are about to happen, and because I’ve become a carer I’m not involved in any way other than getting blood pressure, but I do [laughs] care very much.

OH: Thank you. I was going to ask you what you remembered about the demolition of the South Australian Hotel, which was 1971. I was thinking, contemporaneously, there’s quite a few things happening in the landscape of the City of Adelaide.

PS: Yes. Two dreadful things, I’m not sure how close together, but the demolition of the South Australian Hotel and the demolition of the Theatre Royal, for a car park, and they were followed close on each other’s heels, I’m not sure which was first, but they were both just disgusting things, and this is because that was part of, made part of the move to have a heritage list.

OH: Could you just tell me where the Theatre Royal was?

PS: The Theatre Royal – it makes me cry – the Theatre Royal was in Hindley Street. It became what was then Miller Anderson’s car park, and I’m not sure what. Miller Anderson’s was on the northern side, fairly close to King William Street. And I can’t tell you what’s there now, but there’s still [laughs] still a car park. It was a beautiful building – the people enlisted the Oliviers to speak up for it because they’d played in it – it was the most glorious theatre, and it was modelled on English theatres.

The first time I went to England and I went to the theatre in London I thought, Ah hah, this is what the Theatre Royal was, a small theatre but very high, so if you didn’t have much money, and we usually didn’t, you went up and sat in the gallery, which was just wooden benches. It was very cheap, you were a long, long way away, but you weren’t very

far from the stage in one sense but you were in height, so if you fell over you would have died.

People argued vehemently for those to be saved and they were, so to speak, the upper classes, because the upper classes ate at the South, not poor people, and all the theatre people were just devastated by the Theatre Royal, and so that did give heritage a huge push along.

It was fascinating because one of the justifications for knocking down the South Australian Hotel was that it was riddled with salt damp, couldn’t be saved, shocking building, We’re doing you all a favour to knock this thing down before it falls down. Which I’m sure was an absolute lie. I mean all buildings, or North Adelaide buildings, have salt damp, a lot of the city buildings had salt damp, and they wanted to knock it down because they wanted to build something higher to make more money. One wit went around saying, Ah, you know the building that has the most salt damp of all in Adelaide and must come down, if the South Australian Hotel must come down, Government House must be demolished, it is shocking. And it was, and is, and they’ve spent a fortune. You know, no one would dream of knocking that down, you mend it, and you could have mended the South, but you were going to make more money if you didn’t mend it, so they didn’t.

OH: Did you ever go to the South Australian Hotel?

PS: No. We knew people [laughs] who went to the South Australian Hotel. The South Australian Hotel figured very largely I think in everybody’s lives, whether you ever went in, because they had this wonderful waiter called Lewy.

OH: That was Lewy Cotton?

PS: Yes, and he was a stickler for propriety. He wouldn’t let anyone in if they didn’t, into the dining room, if they didn’t have a tie, and there was just, in the ’50s there was a huge hoo-ha scandal because he had refused someone wearing a cravat entry to the dining room, and the someone wearing the cravat was Norman Hartnell, the Queen’s dressmaker’s minion, who was visiting Adelaide to work out what clothing Princess Margaret and the then Queen, the Queen Mother, would wear on their visit out here. The King got sick so they didn’t ever come, but he had a Royal connection. And the fact that the South Australia had made this terrible boo-boo and refused someone, who however distantly connected [laughs], was connected to the Royal Family, wasn’t allowed in the dining room without a tie, so that was all over the front page of The Advertiser, in my memory.

That year for the university Prosh rag, six students, six men, dressed

themselves in top hats and ties and tails, but no trousers, they just wore underpants, and they went to the South Australian Hotel in the morning and knocked on the door, and were refused entry. One of them was wearing about six ties. [laughs] They had ties galore, they were just making the point what a stupid rule it was. One of these people told me later that he had consulted a lawyer before they went in case they could be arrested for indecency on account of only wearing underpants, and the lawyer said no, as long as they were decent sized underpants, they couldn’t be arrested for indecency. But just to be on the safe side they should wear bathers underneath so that nobody could claim that they had seen any unseemly bits, or that they had had wardrobe malfunctions.

There was talk of arresting them. This chap had been well-worded by the lawyer and said to the policeman, Just tell me on what grounds you would arrest us. The policeman wasn’t sure [laughs], so they weren’t arrested. So that was in the papers, and that was so clever and so funny. When they turned around, they turned around to pose for the camera, and written on the six of them, so they had to stand in the right way, it said, Fooy to Lewy.

OH: That’s a gorgeous story, that’s lovely. We were talking about ...

PS: I was saying the South was just part of South Australia. The Beatles stayed at the South, it was a beautiful building, really just to see it from the outside it was an exquisite looking building, so it was a great devastation to knock that down.

OH: One building that was saved from demolition around that same time was the ANZ Bank Building, which became Edmund Wright House. Why do you think that was saved?

PS: A variety of reasons and it’s very complex. I mean Don Dunstan stepped in and said the government would buy it, so that’s what ultimately saved it, because that was an extraordinarily, is thank God, an extraordinarily beautiful building in and out, and the whole knocking down was complicated because the then Head of the National Trust was involved with the ANZ Bank, or else with the people who were going to build on the site. Anyway there was this kind of smell of things not being quite right, and people got very upset about that, as well as about the building going, that somehow this building was being demolished by, you know, backroom deals. So I think that the whiff of scandal involved a lot more people, and people were contributing money, so it wasn’t just a government saying, Oh, we like this building so we’ll save it. It was piggy-backing on real popular feeling about that building.

Initially it had the most wonderful use because it was the Registry Office, so you could get married in a beautiful place. Hugh and I got

married in the old Registry Office which was just a very plain brown government room.

OH: Where was the old Registry Office?

PS: It was, in my very dim memory, it was not memorable [laughs], I think it was in Flinders Street, but it was, it was just someone’s desk, an office, and I think there was room for chairs. I’m sure they did their best but it wasn’t a place that you thought you didn’t want to get photographed on the steps of that place [laughs].

The Bank Manager’s room was where you got married, and the lovely banking chamber they had concerts in. I heard Christopher Hogwood playing there, and a pianist called Tchaikovsky, who is apparently no relation to that Tchaikovsky, and it was, it was a ... and then they stored all the Births, Deaths and Marriages stuff in, because they had wonderful downstairs vaults and safes. Then the Liberal Government in the ’90s [laughs] decided to sell it. Someone said, The most you’ll get is a million dollars because there’s nothing you can do with that building. I mean nothing a commercial person could, so they didn’t sell it, but they had dismantled the Registry Office and they kicked out the concerts, and then they put the History Trust in there for a while. Now it has a good use I think because it’s a migrant centre, so I’m sure it’s nice for migrants to be in a posh building, not a rubbish building.

OH: [laughs] Pat, another heritage issue that you were involved with was the Aurora Heritage Group. Can you just briefly outline the situation?

PS: Yes. I had no intention of being deeply involved. I went to a protest meeting because that’s easy, and at the protest meeting they said, Right, you’ve all come here. If you really want to protest we have to have a picket to keep the demolishers out, so come here and sign if you want to be part of the picket. I didn’t want to be part [laughs] of the picket, it didn’t sound my cup of tea. But I thought, You’ve got to put your money where your mouth is. So I did go and sign up. The union had promised not to cross a picket line so for some, I can’t tell you, there’s a book about [laughs] trying to save the Aurora which you can look up proper facts in, but for some weeks the picket line did hold off the demolishers.

One morning I was on the, there always had to be two people on the picket, and the person, the woman I was with said, I have to go now, you’ll be alright won’t you? and I said, Oh yes. I was sitting out the front being the picket and a man came up to me and said, Do you realise they’re knocking down the hotel? and I said, What? [laughs]. I went and around the back there was an extension build-on, and indeed there were bulldozers knocking that down. Down the road was a phone box, and we’d always been told if anything happened ring up the chief people in

Aurora and get help. There was someone in the phone box and I twigged that he was probably the developer who – this is before mobile phones – who knew that I wouldn’t be able to ring up while he was there. So I dashed down, there’s a service station there, and I said, Please, please, can I use your phone? And rang up Hamish Ramsay who said, Calm down, calm down. So everybody came around and talked to the demolishers and they said, This isn’t really part of the hotel, this is just an extension. But they did stop.

Then the developer threatened the President of Aurora and other people I think, with suing them for all they had, which would include their houses, if they didn’t back off, so they did, and I don’t blame them because I think in a way probably that hotel was always going to come down, and I wouldn’t have sacrificed my home [laughs] for it, but it was a horrible position for anyone to be in.

OH: And the Aurora Hotel, what was the significance of that? We’re talking about 1983, and I understand that that campaign went on for many, many weeks, but the significance of the hotel, and the location?

PS: Well it was a whole lot of things. It was a nice hotel, lots of people drank in it. It had originally been called the Black Eagle, and it was where lots – whether it was owned by a German pub keeper – but lots, it was an accommodating place for lots of German South Australians, or South Australian Germans, including Hans Heysen, and I think people found that out after. They didn’t say, Oh, we must save this hotel because Hans Heysen drank there, they wanted to save the hotel especially because in John Clarke’s3 plan there’s a sketch of Hindmarsh Square and what Hindmarsh Square should become, which included keeping that hotel and making this a very nice, low key café, eating, drinking, nice place, and he’d drawn in, or whoever illustrated it, put in the hotel. When Wendy Chapman was Lord Mayor, they did, the City Council did a land swap with someone who owned land down the other side of Victoria Square.

OH: Victoria or Hindmarsh?

PS: Well no, I mean ... well the other side of King William.

OH: Oh, sorry.

PS: You know that other side of town I think, I’ve forgotten, but they sold land. The City owned land in Hindmarsh Square, I think, and anyway they did this swap so that the people who bought it were able to develop

3 George Clarke, City of Adelaide Plan, 1974

it. That’s what they wanted, that was their understanding, so the City was compromised and couldn’t, whatever then anyone’s feelings were, they couldn’t back saving that hotel because then that would have been bad [laughs] faith with the people they’d made a lot of money from, I think.

I’m not au fait with all the details, but all I know is when I was on the picket there was a table, and behind you was a picture of the building they were going to build, and did build. It was a rather bad photocopy of a photo. And I asked somebody what were they really going to build because clearly someone had drawn the ugliest building that they could conceive of, just to encourage people to save the Aurora, and they said, No, that’s what they’re [laughs] going to build. And I really felt they were pulling my leg because it is the most boring building.

After the Aurora was demolished, the people who tried to stop it formed themselves into a society called Aurora Heritage Action. They wanted to register Aurora and they said, No, taken. OK, Aurora ... They went through endless names, it’s like race horses, people have got in first, and so they went on for a long time battling valiantly to save various threatened buildings, and using publicity to highlight which buildings would be demolished, because people often didn’t realise what was about to happen until it was too late, which is part of the art of demolition, is not to tell people if they don’t ask, and they don’t ask if they don’t know.

The actual fight for the hotel was only weeks, not months, and it had huge backing from The Advertiser. Chris Russell was a journalist on The Advertiser and he really wanted [laughs] to save that building, and so he would feature stories about the hotel in The Advertiser. It didn’t save the building but it was very nice to feel people like in The Advertiser cared.

OH: Thanks Pat for that really interesting account. I was also interested to know about your involvement in the move to have a North Adelaide Library.

PS: Okay, I’ll try to be brief. You can say enough already if I go on. In the mid-70s, because I wanted to get back into the workforce I did a library course, and one of the assessments was you had to write the history of any library of your choice, so I chose the North Adelaide Institute Library, which was this very small old-fashioned library with very few members, a very sweet secretary who was very helpful and gave me all the, he had all the old Minute Books from way back. He was very sweet and very kind. They had this library with very few members and the lovely, what had been a lovely hall at the back, which was made for lectures – it was opened in 1883 ...

OH: And the location?

PS: Oh, in Tynte Street, North Adelaide, next door to the Post Office. The government built the Post Office and Institute Building, it was pound for pound subsidy for the institute, so the government paid half and their citizens had to pay the other half. The building was opened in 1883, but the citizens hadn’t paid up their money yet, but they did eventually.

Anyway, it had been this ... They had a library, it was the old Mechanics’ Institute, it was a way of educating working class people, but the hall, anybody could use the hall, anyone could use the library but it was thought that working men could educate themselves. Unfortunately right from the jump, they had what one disgruntled correspondent called yellow backs in the library, meaning rubbish sort of paperbacks. The hall was used for dances and all sorts of things, and then in 1916 I think, they started showing silent films in the hall, and that was their income for years and years and years until they built the Piccadilly [laughs] and then ... I don’t think that finished them off, I think somebody showed pictures there for a while, but that was the end of lots of money.

Anyway, when I wrote this history I found that the hall – which was then being used as a warehouse, which seemed a terrible waste –it was being used as a warehouse for very low rent. I was cross that North Adelaide didn’t have a proper library, and I was cross that someone was getting away with gypping the community by fooling the people who let it. They didn’t realise what a commercial rent was [laughs], he absolutely did, so I was very cross and I went to Norman Etherington and told him about it.

OH: Who was Norman Etherington?

PS: Norman Etherington worked in the History Department at Adelaide University, and did things. Norman got things done. Norman had started the History Trust, he was just a doer.

OH: And he was also on the Council at one stage?

PS: Later.

OH: Later.

PS: Anyway, Norm said, Huh, I will join the Institute. So he joined the committee of the Institute and he asked his friend, Michael Armitage, to join the committee of the Institute, and me, slowly. Norm’s lovely, they all loved Norm. Gradually, gradually they weren’t realising it, that the original committee was outnumbered by other people, and so when it came to the point of reletting the hall at the old rent, we all said we

couldn’t agree to that, and Norm said, This is something that has to go to the main Institutes, and the old committee was sweet and said, No, no, no, we’ve always just rolled it over, don’t worry about it. Norm, I couldn’t have done it, he said, Nope, that is the ... He read out the constitution, This is in the constitution, any letting has to be renegotiated after a certain period. Anyway, then the cat was among the pigeons [laughs].

In the meantime lots of people in North Adelaide had been lobbying for a proper library that would be a Council funded library. The Council didn’t want to fund a library, and the North Adelaide Institute didn’t want a funded library because they wanted to go on providing what they thought, generally thought, was a good service. They had loyal customers and they knew the books they liked, there were hardly enough of them, but very understandable that they didn’t want to see their baby killed.

The North Adelaide Society encouraged people to join the library so that when it came to the vote, they could vote that it should be handed over to the City. Lots of Councillors did not want this because it is a big expense, and it’s an expense other Councils were happy to pay, or did pay, and the City always said, Look, there’s a library in town, jolly well come into that. You don’t need a library you lazy people [laughs]. We thought we did need a library, and people voted, the people joined and they voted overwhelmingly that it should be given to the City, so the Institute Library was dissolved, the building was handed over to the City in, I think 1985. I don’t remember exactly when the library opened, but late-80s I should think.

One of the lovely occasions, in order to try and draw attention to the fact that North Adelaide needed a library, on the occasion of the centenary of the library, John Bray, the lawyer, who was the grandson of the Premier who had opened the building originally, Premier Bray, he came and made a speech about to celebrate the one hundred years, and to hope that we might have better [laughs], better books in the future.

OH: That’s quite a story for campaigning for the library.

PS: Yeah! Oh, it was great fun. We had a flyer, I have a spare one so it’s downstairs in, they’ve got a lovely glass case, I think it’s down there, and it said, Come to this event, there would be Perryman’s pies and J J Bray, and someone said to me, Oh, is that a ... No, jazz, Perryman’s pies and J J Bray and so on [laughs], said, Is that a jazz band, J J Bray [laughs]?

OH: And what about the hall, what happened to the hall?

PS: Well the hall, the Council put a library in and for a long time the hall, which needed a huge amount of renovating, I think it needed a new floor, I’m not sure, but it hadn’t had money spent on it since forever, and it was in a very bad way and you don’t blame the Council for balking at it, but a lot of locals lead by Lucy McDonald – Lucy McDonald was one of the people who Norm had got on to the committee to get us a decent library – and she campaigned and jostled and bustled to get proper use of the hall that is now very much used, I think, for all sorts of community education and people hire it for parties. The North Adelaide Society has their Christmas party there.

See I don’t go now, I don’t know whether they have all their meetings there but they often do. They used to have them in the North Adelaide Primary School, and I think they have them here now. Anyway, it’s a very useful place to congregate, and we all feel very proud that we got rid of the warehouse [laughs] and got what’s really a very good library now. It’s linked to all the other libraries, when they haven’t got anything they’re absolutely splendid about ordering it in and emailing you and telling you it’s arrived, so I take my hat off to them.

OH: That’s great! Pat, in the last interview we talked about your role as researcher working with Tom Sheridan over a number of years, on his book, but I wanted to move a little further in your working life and ask you to talk about the other roles that you had after you left there, because I understand that you were firmly immersed in the world of history as an employee, along North Terrace mainly. So maybe chronologically if you could just outline your roles.

PS: Okay! Well I stopped working for Tom when he finished his book, he had a grant for a research assistant. We went to England, and then I spent a year after I came back involved in helping to get rid of the Institute. Then in 1986 I applied for a job half-time, because I still had kids, with the History Trust, so I went to be half-time researcher at what was then the Constitutional Museum. In the course of that first year it changed its name to Old Parliament House because the powers that be in the History Trust thought that nobody could say Constitutional Museum, or remember it, it was all too hard, and Old Parliament House had a nice ring to it. And to this day, people say, Oh yes, that used to be the Constitutional Museum. If ever they see that building, so that name. They had huge money for advertising when it opened.

OH: Could you just explain how the History Trust of South Australia got set up?

PS: Yes [pause].

OH: I understand that there was an Act?

PS: Yes. Well Peter Cahalan was the first person who ran the Constitutional Museum. 4 so initially that was what was formed, a museum in the building next door to Parliament House. It was called the Constitutional Museum, and Peter Cahalan ran that. Once that was set up he thought we needed more museums. We could do with a Maritime Museum, we could do with a museum in the country. And so in order for that to happen and to get money for that, the government passed an Act to found The History Trust, and so Peter Cahalan left being Head of the Constitutional Museum and moved to premises in the Institute Building, on the corner of Kintore Avenue and North Terrace, yes.

So he moved up there with a staff which then proceeded to set up what they hoped would be three museums on the site behind them, behind the library. There were going to be three Social History Museums, a Museum of Migration, and a Museum of Adelaide. I’m not sure whether they planned the Police Museum, but anyway there was a Police Museum, because that was the old Police Barracks originally, and the money ran out, so they only ever actually did the Migration Museum. The Police Museum was there for a while, run by volunteers, so they had no money for that, and the museum in Adelaide, which was going to be sort of Social History of Adelaide, was never started.

When they were planning those they asked people to give stuff, dresses, furniture, cutlery, anything they had that they were willing to part with that was old, and so the Migration Museum has this fantastic collection of stuff that’s not just to do with modern migration but to do with English migration [laughs] from way back, and that sort of thing was meant for the Museum of Adelaide. So they have a wonderful collection, but it’s very time consuming and onerous to control it, so they set up the Migration Museum, that opened in 1983, they took over Birdwood Museum when that was about to close, because that was privately run and they ran out of money, and they founded the Maritime Museum down at Port Adelaide. They also had a museum in the country which they eventually had to get rid of because they ran out of money. So the History Trust was founded to oversee all these other museums. The Constitutional Museum went on but with a different Head.

OH: When you started at the Constitutional Museum what was happening at the museum, what did people see when they went there?

4 The History Trust of South Australia was founded by Act of Parliament in 1981. Its predecessor was the Constitutional Museum Trust established in 1978. Dr Norman Etherington was a driving force in making history more accessible to the general public through museums and became Chairman of first the Constitutional Museum Trust and then the History Trust. (see Wakefield Companion to South Australian History for more details)

PS: When it opened, when it originally opened, it was sold to the government by a group of people – sorry, I’ve never known who they were – but a commercial lot who said, We will set up this museum. Once we’re set up you need never spend another penny. We’re going to put in a sort of ... what people who didn’t like it called it a Disneyfied version of South Australian history, but you paid your money and you went in and they had voice recordings, and a room that was set up as if it were on The Buffalo. Somebody was seasick in there, they had sort of noises, they were very good noises, and people swore that it moved, it didn’t, but you went through The Buffalo and then, so to speak, you’d land, and then in the next room was the Governor’s office, and various portentous things were said over loudspeakers.

Then you walked upstairs into the old Council Chamber, and you could sit in a chair – school kids really liked this I think. They played bits of old debates and they would spotlight people, so they’d say, You have the floor Mr So and So, and a spotlight would appear on that child, but it was all very passive. Then you went through and the last bit of this Disneyfied version was a film called Bound for South Australia, which went through South Australian history. When I went there this was all getting a bit tired and they redid that with talking heads, which was very new and a great feature. When the company sold this to the government and said, Someone at the door will take your money and that will be it! Historians protested and said, That is not enough, we want this to be a place of debate, and a place where people find out things they didn’t know, not just this ‘been once’. And they said, Look, they’ll come once, they’ll never come back, why would they come back? You think it’s history on the cheap, but it’s a stupid way to do it. So they devoted the other rooms to exhibitions, changing exhibitions.

When I went there the exhibition they were planning was called Six South Australian Firsts, and it was about secret ballot, votes for women, Housing Trust, and I can’t remember the others, and really interesting, but they also had, and the thing people protested about most when it was closed down I think, [was] Speakers’ Corner. Any organisation could go and give the world ... It was a small room but there was room for 12 panels I think, and if you were Friends of the Earth [laughs], you could spruik your message.

The WCTU (Women’s Christian Temperance Union) had an exhibition there, they were then mostly elderly women. Jennifer Cashmore came and launched that exhibition, and she gave a very moving speech about, she said, You may think we’re all a lot of a fuddy-duddies, but the WCTU were hugely important in gathering signatures for votes for women, but secondly she remembered her grandmother who was a grocer’s wife, having to give credit to women so they could feed their children because their husbands had drunk the whole pay packet on the

first day and they had no money, and she said it was people like that who saw the harm drink could do.

Fourth interview with Patricia Stretton recorded by Madeleine Regan

19 April 2013 at the North Adelaide Library

for the City of Adelaide Oral History (Extension) Project 2012/2013

Oral Historian (OH): Pat, we were just talking about your role as researcher in Old Parliament House, and I wanted to ask you were there any other exhibitions that stood out for you.

Patricia (Pat) Stretton (PS): There are a couple. There was one that we did about Adelaide and it included the story of Holden’s, and until I had to research that I didn’t know that Holden’s had started off as saddle makers, and their shop in town had a huge white horse out the front – presumably with a saddle on it, I’m not sure – but the horse’s head had been kept and given to the Birdwood Motor Museum, because that museum had a whole lot of, well I suppose that was car related in a sense because Holden’s then moved from harness making to car making, auto buggy making presumably, and then to car making.

OH: And where had Holden’s been located when it was in the City?

PS: It was in Grenfell Street. Anyway, we could borrow the horse’s head to put in this exhibition about Holden’s, so that was great fun. The history of Holden’s was interesting because the reason they’d taken off at all because there were various motor car firms, and linking up with General Motors helped them. But before that, they’d made their money ... because during the First World War you weren’t allowed to import You could import engines but you couldn’t import chassis, so they started making car chassis because they knew how, because on account of [laughs] making buggies. Then they built a huge factory in Adelaide, which is now flats, and don’t ask me where it is because I can’t remember the street, but anyone can look that up [laughs] and find out.

We also in that exhibition, this was a Heritage Exhibition, we did have a lot about the South Australian Hotel, and we had a lot about the Theatre Royal, and about people who’d performed there, and especially, this was the time when Alan Bond was going broke and refusing to pay the people he owed money to, saying that he had no money – still has no money apparently – and so we featured a wonderful theatre entrepreneur who had performed in Adelaide and had gone broke in the 1850s, and

left Adelaide owing a lot of money. What he did was to go to the goldfields and make money on the goldfields, came back to Adelaide, and paid everybody twenty shillings in the pound, and took them out to a great big dinner to say thank you. It was such a lovely [laughs] contrast with Alan Bond refusing to pay people. We pretended we were just telling people nice things about their city. But really we were [laughs] we were trying to poke them in the eye too.

And the other exhibition that I was, I mean a group of us did it, and I loved doing, was the exhibition about celebrating 100 years of votes for women, because we just talked about the changes for women. This was in 1994, and one of my colleagues had the brilliant idea of having handbags over that period, and what you would have found in them, so ending up with credit cards – I’m not sure whether there was a mobile phone – but oh, the pill, the sort of things that would drop out of a woman’s handbag now, and what you would have had in the beginning. We were stymied for weeks trying to find what an 1894 handbag ... We looked at all the pictures and all the fashion books and just couldn’t find any, and finally talked to a costume expert who said, in a very squashy voice, Of course you wouldn’t find one, handbags were out [laughs] in that year. Before that and after that women carried little dillybags of sorts, but in the early-90s dresses had deep pockets in them and you put your hanky and whatever you needed, in the pocket under your skirt, so there would be a slit in the skirt and it went into the pocket in your petticoat. She made us one, so that was our 1894 handbag. That was great fun.

Rupert Murdoch waived the costs of letting us use old newsreels especially Pete Smith’s specials from the ‘30s and ’40s, which were just so rude about women, and that was hugely effective. You saw mothers and daughters standing in front of it, and there’s this voice saying, Oh, look at the little darlings. Look at the bathers they’re wearing this year, ho, ho, ho. Or laughing at the hats. It was very kind but it was demeaning, and the daughters were saying to the mothers, How on earth did you put up with people speaking like that? And the mother saying, I’m so shocked, but we didn’t even notice, we weren’t aggrieved when we saw those. She said, Looking at it now [laughs]. I’m really angry. It got this marvellous sort of interaction between generations, and we did stuff about how work had changed for women, and salaries before equal pay, so stuff like that, so I loved doing that.

We featured, I think I talked to you about this, but we featured jobs that women now did that they wouldn’t have been allowed to, and one [laughs] of the people was Di Laidlaw, who was the Minister for Transport. We found a quote from the debates about why women shouldn’t have the vote saying, How would women know anything things like railways [laughs] or whatever. So we were rather shocked

when a government, which included Diana Laidlaw, came along and before they ever said anything to us – we met the measurers measuring our rooms. We said, What are you doing? They said, We’re measuring, and we said, Why are you measuring? They were very cagey, but they were measuring it up to see how much room it would afford the Parliamentarians if they took it over, and they did take it over. We were moved to Edmund Wright House, and called the State History Centre, and we had many exhibitions there. They got rid of most of the staff, all the guides, because didn’t need guides, and anyone else who wanted to leave, so there were a few of us who moved over there.

Two or three years after that the History Trust moved from the Institute Building into Edmund Wright House, so that became the home of the History Trust. Then they absolutely didn’t need these remnant people [laughs] from Old Parliament House, so we were offered packages. We said, No, thank you very much, and so in the end I went to be a guide at the Migration Museum. I was a good guide because I knew a lot of history, and what I did there was basically doing school teaching and taking school groups around. That was, that was delightful and especially, I especially loved the primary school children that we took.

We had, still have, a thing they do called 19th Century Children, where they dress up in pinafores, the boys dress up in smocks, which annoys some of them [laughs], and play, play 19th century games like hoops and sticks, hopscotch, and knucklebones, but they also get to know what, if you’d been an Aboriginal child, what you would have been learning then, either if you were back with your family that you would have been learning how to hunt and how to fish, and how to throw, and we’ve got old boomerangs and stuff to show them what you would have been doing, and what the girls would have been doing. And it’s especially appropriate there because that was originally the site of the second Aboriginal school in Adelaide. You can tell them that and show them that.

Then they also find out what the English migrant children would have been doing, and what toys they probably brought with them, and we had the great good fortune, someone gave us a German – because there are lots of Germans in South Australia – and someone gave us a German doll. I didn’t know German, some German dolls anyway, are made of leather with a porcelain face but a leather body. It’s so wonderful because it can do things, it’s all hinged, the elbows and the knees are hinged, so she can do terrific things [laughs] that doll. So lots of, lots of good things to show kids and to interest kids, and especially primary school kids are just lovely because they’re just, they soak up knowledge, and when they get to Year 9 they turn into something absolutely horrible. They don’t want to know anything, and even if they could answer a question, they wouldn’t demean themselves by answering a

question, and the only thing that most of them will ever say to the teacher is, When are we going to McDonald’s? [laughs] which is a bit depressing.

OH: And Pat, you had a number of years there as a guide I think, from 1999- 2010 when you retired?

PS: Yes.

OH: And then you kept on as a volunteer at the Migration Museum.

PS: Yeah, I’m still a volunteer. The Migration Museum has the most exceptional Education Officer called Rose Garcia, and she is just absolutely brilliant. She devised 19th Century Children. She devised a program called Survivors to try and teach children why people might risk their lives on boats to come here, because there are a lot of children who have been brought up in very racist families, and they just know, they know all asylum seekers are (a) illegal, which the government has taught them, and (b) they have no right to come here. So part of this program is just to tell them what Australia signed up to when it signed the Refugee Convention back in the 1950s, and really if you disagree with that well you should un-sign it. You can’t say, Oh yes, we’ve signed this and then not do it.

This promoted the government to bring a We love refugee launch to our museum to show children that they really did love refugees. The government does bring in a lot of what they call legal refugees, so they were featuring how kind they are to refugees, and this was apparently in response to some unpleasant letters from school children. We rather hoped they were from our school children [laughs] who’d been shocked by doing Survivors, and certainly a lot of the teachers and parents were shocked, and that’s a role play. Some of the children were put behind a rope and had to get on a boat, and had to give, they’re given money and they have to give all the money they’d been given to a people smuggler, and then they were not necessarily welcome when they got ... It was all done very cleverly with not Australia and not Afghanistan, but just sort of fictional names, so it was quite clear really that what you’re talking about, that it could have been anybody coming from anywhere.

Anyway, I worked, did research for her, and she’s just the most imaginative teacher. She also devised a program about the history of white settlement as seen through Aboriginal eyes in South Australia, mostly with the use of paintings, old paintings, and old recordings of songs that had been handed down through generations by Aboriginal people, and finally recorded in the 20th century, but they are, they’re songs about seeing ships on the water. One of the songs is about how this great, great white bird on the water had to be tied down so it

wouldn’t fly away. They’re just beautiful things, they’re just ... and this program was originally just for school children to say, You learn all about white settlement, but this is, but you don’t know how it affected Aboriginal people. So this was just telling the story from the other side.

Now that program is delivered for people in the court system, for magistrates, and judges, all sorts of people who pay good money to go and find out [laughs] Aboriginal history, because they have to deal with a lot of Aboriginal people who they feel they don’t understand very well, and a number of Aboriginal people come with Rosa to add their particular expertise. She really, she is a great force for good in South Australia

OH: And certainly in the Migration Museum, and you’ve obviously enjoyed your association with that?

PS: Very much.

OH: We’re going to change tact quite a bit here, but to talk about another person who’s quite inspirational in terms of history in South Australia, and that is Dr John Tregenza, whose dates were 1931-1999. Pat, I know that you knew John Tregenza, and we’re just going to go through some points about the influence that he had in South Australia in terms of the context of history, because for my part I think John was important because of his role in establishing this Oral History Project at the Adelaide City Council, and these points that we’re going to talk about now come from a talk that he gave, the 25th anniversary of the formation of the Historical Society of South Australia.

The first thing that John thought that was really important for a society, a historical society, to be involved with was about the preservation of buildings of historical interest. Could you say a little about that?

PS: Yes, and I only know a little. When you told me that John had initiated this Council Oral History Program, I didn’t know that. I mean John did so many things in so many areas, and he was, never blew his own trumpet and didn’t go on about himself and all sorts of things that I know he initiated other people get the credit for. I won’t say they take it, but they get it because they’re the person, Oh yes, I remember so and so. Oh yes, X did that. John’s there in the background and he never said, Excuse me, [laughs] that was me, where some people do, or, Excuse me, that was me when they hadn’t even done it. But he was just a lovely, lovely man.

Yes, very important through his interest in Art and early paintings and photographs, but just knowing so much about the City of Adelaide; very important that John rode a bike, so unlike motorists ... He did have a car

but he got around Adelaide on a lovely old-fashioned bike with a great big, old-fashioned basket in the front.

OH: And Pat, we should also mention that he had studied History at the University of Adelaide, is that right?

PS: Yes.

OH: And then he taught History at the University of Adelaide?

PS: Yes, indeed. He went off and wrote his PhD somewhere else, and he wrote about an educator called [Charles] Pearson, but then he came back to Adelaide and taught History in the History Department, which is how I knew him, but because he rode a bike he saw things [laughs] that, unless you were a walker where you would, and he walked too I think, that motorists don’t see and don’t notice, except when the light is red, so he knew Adelaide better than most anybody I know. He could match it with his reading in History, and he used his history knowledge which just enhanced his interest in the buildings, so when anyone proposed knocking things down or doing anything to any building, John was the go-to man because he knew stuff.

He noticed when Mr Bubb in the City Council was getting ready for the MATS (Metropolitan Adelaide Transport Study) Plan and was widening Frome Street in the City, and in order to widen that you had to knock down some of the Elder Cottages which were working men cottages. Mr Bubb hated old buildings, and especially old working men [laughs] buildings, and in order to widen Frome Street some of them had to come down, but he was taking the opportunity to knock the lot down. John noticed that and went to the City and complained and enlisted, among other people, Bill Hayes, who was on the Council, to step in and say, Excuse us, you don’t have permission, Frome Street is not going to be that wide [laughs], and so they stopped. I think there were originally 70 or 80. There aren’t many left now, but the ones that are left are because of John intervening initially. Now he could have complained and nothing happened. I mean other people helped, I’m not saying he alone did it, but if he hadn’t noticed, nobody else cared. To everybody else they were just old buildings, but if you can tell people the history, they were built with philanthropic intent by a good Adelaide person, Elder, and so, and they were still workable buildings. So he noticed they were going, saved them. I should think he was involved in every save this and that that ever was.

OH: And that’s interesting because he was a member of the Lord Mayor’s Heritage Advisory Committee, from 1981-1984.

PS: But the fact that there was any committee at all was partly because of people, John and people like him, saying, You must [laughs] you must

save as many buildings as possible. Originally, I am told, I’m not sure when that Advisory Committee, whether this is the right date, but John Bowen was certainly the Lord Mayor at some stage, and he said, Yes, yes, oh yes indeed, we should have a Heritage List. He had envisaged about saving, I think he thought 80 buildings, and he was absolutely appalled when he found how many they were proposing. Perhaps now I’ve got the wrong person.

OH: Well ’81-’84 was just after Bowen was Lord Mayor.

PS: Yeah. Well no, sorry, yeah, I missed him because he’s got so many, so many first names, ’79-’81, it was him, and he, I think, I think it may have been John who said, Oh yes. He said, yes, there’ll be about 80 buildings, and this committee came up with oodles, but it was a wonderful thing that that happened, and it was because of things like the Theatre Royal and the South Australian Hotel that people were willing to say, Yes, we need, we need a Heritage List.

OH: Pat, you’ve told me before about two significant buildings that John identified in terms of the use, and the first one was Old ...

PS: Was Old Parliament House. Well it was when, it was years after it stopped being used as a Parliament House at all, in 1936, when they finished the other half of Parliament House. It had been the Legislative Council Building, and they moved into a finished-off Parliament House that left the building empty, and it was going to be knocked down then. They said, There exist the plans for the garden that they were going ...

They designed a very nice garden, very nice ’30s garden, and in the front was a statue they’d commissioned of George V, which is now down in the Park Lands opposite the Memorial Hospital I think, but down ... because they couldn’t put it [laughs] in the garden they didn’t build, and they would have knocked it down then except the War saved it, because they hadn’t got around to knocking it down. I lied, they moved into Parliament in ’39 I think. They got the money for the Centenary in ’36 but they actually hadn’t finished, so in ’39 they moved in, and then the War started so it became the Recruiting Office.

Then after the War they’d forgotten about the garden and it became, certainly it was Motor Vehicles Registration for a while, and then it became the property of the Railways, and it was the Railway Union’s meeting place. They used to hold dances up in the chamber upstairs, so it was just this sort of rubbish building which was let get very dirty. They cleaned it up for the Queen’s visit because it was disgusting, the stone was all dirty, but nobody really cared about it, and it was any old thing you could put in there.

Then John, because of his picture knowledge, and because times changed a bit in the ’70s and people were more interested in history, he worked out that embedded in that building was the original Council Chamber, which you can see in a [S.T.] Gill painting of North Terrace, a little red brick building which was the first Legislative Council Chamber. People were first nominated and then only the rich could vote for people, so it wasn’t terribly democratic but it was our first sort of semi-democratic chamber. There it is in the Gill painting and there it isn’t anymore, so everyone said, Oh yes, that was demolished, yes.

John noticed that the dimensions of one of the rooms in the old Legislative Council Building appeared to match the old brick chamber because you knew when they commissioned it way back in 1841, 3, whichever, you knew how big it was, so he measured it all up and said, I think when they built the new building for the Democratic Parliament in the 1850s, I think they incorporated that building. Nobody else had any knowledge or I don’t know how much people believed him, but they let someone drill through the stone, because John said, If you drill through and there’s brick, then I am right, and they drilled through and there was brick. It’s like CSI [Criminal Scene Investigation] except it’s not a body.

Then, because there was all this huge interest now in this Adelaide’s first Legislative Chamber uncovered, Don Dunstan was interested in doing something with the building, and turning it into a place of history. John wanted … had all sorts of suggestions about what could be displayed there, old anchors and various things from Adelaide’s early history, but his plan was a very sort of static, like the museum, if you know what I mean, only with history things, so not very ... And this is the time when everyone’s going interactive and high tech, so instead of what John planned, the Dunstan Government embraced the idea of historic building but said, It will be a celebration of South Australian political history culminating in the triumph of Don Dunstan abolishing the property rights to the Legislative Council, because everything that was at all progressive, since the beginning had been blocked by the Legislative Council because it had a, you could only vote if you owned so much property. So anything that was at all impinging on the rich was just blocked, all sorts of things Dunstan wanted to do.

One of the great things about Dunstan was he said, We are going to get rid of the property franchise, we are going to make the Upper House democratic. His minders came back to him and said, We’ve polled voters – I think it’s in the 20s – but 20-something percent – Know, there are two Houses, about 15% can name them, and only 6% give a toss, so to speak, so forget it. And Dunstan said, Right! He had a huge rally in Light Square I think, and 10,000 people came to demonstrate about wanting proper democracy. So that’s what he wanted to celebrate in the

Constitutional Museum, and it was the fixing of the Constitution.

Well see John is [in the] back of all that in finding, in giving other people the levers to interest people in the building and say, This does give you all the history of our democracy. It wouldn’t not have happened if he hadn’t. But he’s hugely important, and in the same way – this was after they’d decided to use the Migration Museum buildings for a museum, so he didn’t start the museum.

But he came and looked them over, and from his picture knowledge said, I think this wall is the last remaining wall of the Aboriginal School. All the rest got knocked down but this wall and this doorway, and these windows, are the front of the Aboriginal School. He measured all that up, because you could, and looked at all these old paintings, [S.T.] Gill pictures and photographs, later photographs, and it is. That was built in 1845, it was the second Aboriginal School because the first one was across the Park Lands in the Aboriginal research, and was run by missionaries. Then the Governor wanted the Aboriginal children next door to him, so across the way, so he could monitor their progress.

John did that, and this knowledge, his knowledge, then made him start gathering this fantastic picture index, which is now in the State Library, the Tregenza Picture Index, which shows you by, I think they’re by acre numbers so gathered into acres, which is how the City always used to list things so you know – not by streets because they change but the acre numbers never do – just acre by acre all the drawings, all the photographs. And you can look at them and see how buildings have changed, how streetscapes have changed. It is the most amazing resource for historians.

See John could identify that school, the Gill picture just said Aboriginal School Park Lands. It could have been anywhere, just anywhere, and people assumed, I think, that it was maybe the school that the Lutherans had built across the Park Lands, but John, because of his picture knowledge, he knew where it was, and that has just been fantastic for historians, and for Aborigines. I mean it’s lovely for them to, not that it was a nice school for them, but it’s nice for them to know where it was.

OH: And Pat, John had a role as Curator of Historical Collections at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

PS: Yes, yes.

OH: And he was responsible for identifying the use of a building there.

PS: Well no, I don’t think. I think people knew that building, it was, well they knew it had been the Archives. John may have identified it as the ...

OH: This was the building directly ...?

PS: At the back that you can see when you’re sitting, eating [laughs] in the restaurant, and it’s now called the Ron Radford something or other, but it was, in my memory, was the South Australian Archives, dear little building, not many archives, and before that that was part of the Police Barracks. I mean originally, 19th century, it’s a lovely old 19th century building, and John could have worked that out from pictures and whether he, I don’t know whether other people knew that, they may well have. People kind of knew about [laughs], the Police knew about the Police Barracks more than other people, but it was, ask anyone in Adelaide 50 years ago and they would have said, Oh, that’s the Archives Building. Well when the Archives ... Initially they moved, the State Archives were moved into the State Library, and they were in the bowels of the State Library in their basement, where they’ve got all their book storage now. I once went to apply for a job there – they wouldn’t have given it to me because you needed more qualifications than I had – but I wouldn’t have taken it because you would be underground the whole time, it would have been horrible.

Anyway, when that moved out the building was empty, and John was working in the library and said, That would be a wonderful place to display South Australian pictures and South Australian history. Now this is – and I’ve read and I’ve forgotten – but I think that’s where he had the printing press there, the first printing press in South Australia, where the first things that were printed here, the first newspaper, was rolled off, and various other just historic things about, about early South Australia, and early Gill paintings. It was, it was very much sort of Art and History meeting each other, but the ...

One of the most important things he ever did was to get the History Trust to display the Duryea panorama in the round. I haven’t told you this already?

OH: Not in this interview.

PS: Right!

OH: But where was it displayed in the round?

PS: It was displayed in Old Parliament House. You could walk into the middle and I, I think he did it for the History Trust, so it wasn’t in this historic building.

OH: Could you just explain really briefly what the Duryea pictorial image was?

PS: Yes, yes. I can’t remember his first name but I will in a minute. Mr Duryea was one of Adelaide’s leading photographers, and when they were building the Town Hall Tower – which they hadn’t in the beginning, like Adelaide is always poor so the tower had to go on, and this was 1865 I think – well, when they built the tower it had scaffolding around it, and he appears, John worked this out, to have climbed up the scaffolding, had some sort of platform, and taken 14 pictures of Adelaide with his wet plate camera, which would have involved taking the picture, probably running down [laughs] to the bottom to put it in, because you had to put it in chemicals, and it was very precise to get the right chemicals and the right exposure. He moved around avoiding the sun through the day, and you can see from the shadows how the day is changing as he took it, so he moved, I think anti-clockwise, and if you join these pictures together you can make a circle. What John did was to, he made this big circle mounted in a frame, so you could stand in the middle as if you were on top of the Town Hall Tower.

Up until then it had, many people had bought it, and it was displayed in various places, but stuck on a wall in a row, so you walked along, you got no sense of being, of seeing it as he saw it. But they are wonderful pictures, and you can identify, for example, one of the buildings that’s now St Ann’s College you can see. You can see them building Stow Church right up close to him, near the Town Hall, just down below, and it’s ... An American who visited Old Parliament House said to me, They haven’t been able to make a camera that could do what his camera and exposures could do, as in clear near and far. You either had cameras that could do very precise close or very precise far, but if you had precise close you had fuzz. Well he had clarity all the way, beautiful pictures.

OH: And where is it now?

PS: Well I think that it was, eventually after many moons it ended up, after Old Parliament House closed down, it was taken into the Adelaide Arcade, and it was upstairs in the Adelaide Arcade as a sort of historic thing you could look at. Someone had a fire, it didn’t burn down, but I think it got smoke damaged, but you can still, if you want to, see it on the internet. If you Google Duryea panorama you can make yourself giddy because it will go really fast if you want it to.

What John did was to get – it was quite expensive so he had to be a good talker – to get these existing photographs that weren’t negatives, they were positives, on people’s walls, got the best set which I think perhaps was in the library, rephotographed it as transparencies, so you get this ... and lit it from behind, so it’s ... I can’t describe how beautiful it was, and he used his knowledge to identify underneath, so there was a sketch of what, the photograph was as it was, but underneath was a

sketch of all the buildings with, named, and what they’d been, so in that I think the Aurora [Hotel] maybe is named as the ‘Black Eagle’. Lots of buildings you can’t work out what they were because of the angles and because of where he was, but it’s a just fascinating glimpse of Adelaide. And it appears to be empty, and you think, There must have been some people. There’s nobody.

The only person – I was going to demonstrate for you but you can’t, you can’t see on this recording – is a man with rather a big fat bottom, bending over reading a newspaper hoarding and he is almost the only person in it, and because it was a time exposure, anyone who was moving is fuzzed out of the picture, so there are no clear pictures of people. There are clear horses in the middle, which were sort of the taxi horses I suppose, waiting for custom. It’s a very hot day and they’re all looking dismal, but there’s this lovely man reading the headlines. Oh, and a man up a ladder, or maybe he’s not, maybe the ladder is there and he’s gone off for lunch, but it does look like an empty town, but a two- storey town with church spires every now and then, but a really interesting town.

Anyway John, John was responsible for that, and a big sadness I think, he would do all these wonderful things and then, and then they would, other people who hadn’t been involved, wouldn’t care. The panorama was displayed in the library for a while. It may have been in the library first and then it came to Old Parliament House, I think that’s right, but it was first made for one of the South Australian celebrations, anniversaries, and then it came to Old Parliament House, but it was the sort of thing people would say, Oh, we haven’t got room for it. Or, It does take up a lot of space. And you’d think, You’re nuts. You have what I think of as a treasure beyond price, and you’re grizzling about it. So yeah.

OH: Pat, we’re going to have to kind of come to a close about John.

PS: Oh yes, I’m sorry.

OH: But one of the things that he said in that speech that he gave in 1999, was that he thought that it was really important to encourage other people to take an interest in all matters historical, and he includes individuals, teachers, local Councils, and governments, to lead people of South Australia to discover how interesting their own history can be. What do you think of John’s comment there?

PS: I couldn’t agree more. I think in a funny way it’s happening without people being chivvied into it. When it says, Teachers, local Councils, governments, there’s more interest at the moment in history than there ever was because of genealogy. The Library and the Migration Museum,

and I’m sure oodles of other places, we’re bombarded with requests for help with tracing ancestors, but the people who come, they’re trying to find Great Uncle Thomas. But they have already discovered in hunting for him, all sorts of things, and they’re saying, I never realised that such and such had happened.

We had someone ... at the moment the Migration Museum has a John McDouall Stuart Exhibition. Someone came in because their ancestor was, oh, not an engineer because you wouldn’t call it that, but he had a particular skill that had meant he went on that expedition, and this person wanted to know (a) how to find out more about him, and (b) if we wanted [laughs] to know more about their ancestor. So it was a two- way thing, which is very satisfying for people, not just to be preached at, because they could contribute stuff to us. I mean every ...

Sometimes it’s a bit sterile if you feel you’re being preached at, but the History Trust is doing, has been doing lately, this wonderful thing about having open buildings, and the Town Hall does a lot with that, with people coming in seeing the Queen Adelaide Room. I think, I mean people are richer so they’ve got more time for tourism. You need to be, you need to have provision to help their interest. It’s no use them being interested, but if they go to the Town Hall they’re told to ‘piss off’, so to speak. [laughs] Nothing to see here. I mean it’s lovely if you can be told that there will be tours at these particular times. I think because of education and because of more wealth in the community, people in my experience are, including me, much more interested in history than they, in local history, than they ever used to be.

OH: In terms of John Tregenza’s contribution to the way that history was perceived in Adelaide, what would you say?

PS: I can’t, I can’t think of a [laughs], how to praise him enough. I think, I think he underpins so much of the history that’s now being dealt out, and he had lovely, he devised, because of liking the bicycle, he devised a bicycle tour of Adelaide with a brochure which I was hunting for to show you, and I can’t find it – probably the library has got it – but a great big ... it had a penny farthing on the front, but this numbered buildings and what they had been built for, whether it says what they are now I’m not sure. So it wasn’t just ivory tower academic, this lovely ... they were organised, I think he organised bicycle tours so people would, in groups, sort of with him as a guide.

If we’re stopping, I don’t know whether I talked about it, but perhaps the most important, one of the most important things he did, was to identify the fact that Colonel Light, that the house people said was his, wasn’t his, and the house that was his [laughs] had been demolished,

and that he didn’t die in poverty, that he owned Thebarton, so he was really quite a rich man when he died.

But John just, he had a really sort of keen brain and a way of looking at things that, that other people didn’t, so he found out all sorts of things that other people didn’t. I wish, I wish there was more celebration of him, but I don’t think naming things after people helps much because people just say, Oh, who was that? I don’t know how you do it, but I know that I will always be grateful to him for what he taught me, and what he left behind as a legacy for other historians. I think a lot of them don’t, don’t realise how much they owe him, because once, once you’ve learnt what a picture really is, then you think that’s your knowledge [laughs] and you don’t, you don’t bother about the person who actually made it available to you in the first place.

OH: I think that’s a lovely place to end this interview, talking about John Tregenza and his contribution, so thank you, Pat, for that.

PS: Thank you. Well thank you for letting me ...5

5 After review of the transcript, Pat added: ‘The longer John Tregenza is dead, the more people don’t remember him.’

Fifth interview with Patricia Stretton recorded by Madeleine Regan

19 April 2013 at the North Adelaide Library

for the City of Adelaide Oral History (Extension) Project 2012/2013

Oral Historian (OH): Pat, we’re coming to the end of the interview, and I wanted to ask you some questions about your relationship to the City of Adelaide. How would you describe your relationship to the City of Adelaide?

Patricia (Pat) Stretton (PS): I love the City of Adelaide. When I was a child I was ashamed that I lived in Adelaide. Melbourne and Sydney were proper towns, and Adelaide was just rubbish [laughs]. I really wished I hadn’t been born here. The older I get the more I’m so glad I was born here, and I’m so glad I stayed here, because it’s a lovely size town. It’s full of lovely buildings, and we do things like Writers’ Week much better than anybody else because of the size of the City that you can, and because of the Park Lands, that you can have that same venue. Sydney and Melbourne have wonderful people come and speak but you have to go all over different places. I just think it’s a very, very special town.

OH: And for you, if you had to describe some of your favourite places in the City, including North Adelaide, what would they be?

PS: Well just for nostalgic reasons and because they’re lovely, I love the North Adelaide Park Lands. We had a daughter who kept a horse there so that was wonderful for her that she could have a tiny garden where you couldn’t possibly have kept a horse. But to have a horse within feeding distance! It’s a beautiful place just to look at sunsets, I love that very much.

In the City, I think my favourite building, just because it’s so cute and quaint, is the Stock Exchange Building – well it isn’t that anymore but it used to be. It’s just [laughs] sort of a ridiculous building, but all tucked away where you don’t see it if you’re not looking for it, so I dearly love that.

I’m getting to re-love North Terrace. I loved it the way it was, I loved all the trees, and I was so angry when they chopped them all down. They have made a different sort of beautiful thing, but I can never forgive they cut down the Pittosporum tree in front of the State Library that had

the most heavenly smell. Anywhere in Adelaide that has Moreton Bay Figs I love, Hindmarsh Square, and I wish they’d plant more of them. Why they can’t plant them in Victoria Square, I’m not sure [laughs].

OH: What do you think is important to preserve in the City and in North Adelaide?

PS: Well that’s a hard question. People always like what they know, and I love what I know, and I love old buildings, but you can build beautiful new buildings like the [Adelaide], Festival Theatre I think is a beautiful new building. One of the reasons heritage was so strong in the ’80s anyway is because we had pretty ordinary architects, so when they did knock down something they replaced it with something yuck or boring. Every now and then they’d get it right, like the Fire Station6 is lovely. It’s very hard to say, Under no circumstances should these buildings be demolished.

I think for North Adelaide what’s really important is height limits. If you start raising the height limits you will encourage much more demolition, but you’ll make it a less pleasing residential place. You could cover it with high rise towers and it would be like Surfers Paradise [laughs] but it’s not where I’d want to live. It’s just lovely because there are so many trees and it is a liveable height level. Any particular old building I’d be in there saying, Don’t knock it down, don’t knock it down.

I was really, in retrospect, I wasn’t present but there’s – I’ve forgotten his name – but there’s a ’50s building, built by one of Australia’s most famous architects, that’s on the site of what obviously was a beautiful old building, and everybody celebrates this new posh building. I’m sorry I’ve forgotten the name, but it is one of our most prestigious architects, a Sydney architect not an Adelaide architect [laughs], and I know that I would prefer the old building, but you can’t tell people what they can do with their land.

OH: Was that in the City of Adelaide?

PS: No, it was in North Adelaide, and I’m sorry I’ve got a blank about the architect. By the end, if you give me two more minutes, I might have remembered. Ask me a different question [laughs].

OH: What do you think is going to happen say in the next 10-20 years in Adelaide, and in North Adelaide?

6 Adelaide Fire Station in Wakefield Street

PS: Before I answer that I’ve remembered, it’s a Robin Boyd house, so everybody says, Ooh ah, Robin Boyd, and I know that I would have preferred what preceded it.

OH: Where exactly ...?

PS: It’s in, I think it’s in Strangways Terrace. I’m sorry, I’d have to look it up and see, but it’s one of the houses that’s often an open house, when you can go and look at people’s houses.

OH: So it’s still there now?

PS: The Robin Boyd house is [laughs], yes.

OH: In Palmer Place?

PS: Yes. Is it? Probably. It’s down that way, but I’m sorry I can’t exactly think. I can look it up, you can look it up.

But in the future, I don’t know. I dread what seems to be happening at the moment because when the City Council was in charge of planning for Adelaide and North Adelaide, I didn’t always agree with what they did, but they did have the George Clarke Plan that had been amended, but it was a plan. It did have height limits, people knew what they were buying, where they stood, and now the State Government, at the moment anyway, just hops in whenever it feels like it, defines something like the Le Cornu site as a site of – there’s a name for it and I’ve forgotten – but of great importance, that they therefore have the right to interfere with it.

The City Council went to great trouble to find out whether people did want higher rise on that site. I’m thinking I think that perhaps they did and it was, you know people mightn’t want to stick to the height levels that were in the Plan, and they got an overwhelming response from the citizens saying, We want no more than three storeys, thank you very much, which is what the Plan said. It was after that that the State Government stepped in and just overrode all that, and gave permission for a much higher building, which will impinge, you might say it won’t matter in O’Connell Street though I think it will, but it impinges on the residential people around about to suddenly ... I find it very odd that people who believe in private enterprise [laughs] and capitalism and commerce, should dud people who have paid their own good money for their property on the understanding that there are planning rules, for the government suddenly to step in to change the rules for particular people. It seems to me just wrong and against all the things they profess to believe in. I feel very strongly about the Le Cornu site and I wish somebody would come along and buy it and turn it into housing or low- level shops [laughs].

OH: And Pat, in closing, are there any other items or comments that you’d like to add that we haven’t covered in the interviews so far?

PS: I was thinking about all the things that have changed after talking to you, and the thing, one of the things that changed the most and everybody talks about it, but it is something that people will rapidly forget, is how lovely pubs are now – except the ones with poker machines – and how revolting [laughs] they used to be. They had sawdust on the floor like the butcher shop often, and the Oxford [Hotel] which is now, or was for a while anyway, ever so posh, used to be a place that no proper citizen would put foot in, and people went in there, elderly, alcoholic men, went in there, only men, at 10 o’clock in the morning, whether they stayed in all day. But it was just, it was awful, and the thing about women not being allowed in pubs.

I was campaigning for something and this is after women, women did go into pubs, but in the pub that used to be in Margaret Street, there was a Ladies Lounge at the back, so any ladies went and drank in the Ladies Lounge. They were not to come into the front bar on any account. They weren’t banned legally but it was not thought nice. I went into the front bar with my petition to ask, because it was about something that was happening in North Adelaide, and I wanted the proprietor’s signature [laughs]. I didn’t want all the customers, I just wanted him to sign because he was a local. He would not make eye contact with me. I thought, Well I don’t care, I’m just going to stand here and I won’t say ‘Ooi’, I’ll just stand here because eventually he’ll have to acknowledge me. I don’t know, it took, I don’t know how many minutes, but it felt like forever, and I was very embarrassed, I felt awful, but eventually he said in a very surly fashion, what did I want. So I showed him the petition, which was something that would have been ... it was probably to say, Don’t widen Margaret Street [laughs], which would have abolished him. Anyway, then he was all smiles and signed up like anything [laughs]. Those days are long ago and far away now, but on the other hand pubs are horrible if they have poker machines, so maybe we’re going full circle. That’s the only thing I was thinking about that I hadn’t talked about, that I wanted to.

OH: Well thank you very much, Pat, and I really appreciate all the perspectives that you’ve presented in your interview, and for making a contribution to the oral history project.

PS: John Tregenza’s Oral History Program [laughs].

OH: Exactly! So thank you very much, I really appreciate it.

PS: Well thank you because you’re a nice interviewer. I don’t think I’ve ever been interviewed before, so I can’t say you’re [laughs] the best or the worst.

OH: Thank you very much, Pat.