MURIEL JOAN CASEY Laurel Belcher 10/05/2001 E0480 0:56:00 Judith Hockenhull 16/06/2015 City of Joondalup 1:01:57 Interview with Muriel Joan Casey at her home in Quinns Rocks, on 10 May 2001. Interviewer is Laurel Belcher. Muriel is an original settler in the Heathridge area. LB: Muriel where were you born? MC: Belfast, Northern Ireland LB: Thank you. It’s a long way from Ireland to Perth, Western Australia what happened in your life to bring you there? MC: Well, back in 1950 our mother passed away on the operating table in the hospital, Queen Victoria Hospital, Belfast and from there on our family was tossed around a little bit from one place to the other and by the time my youngest brother Harold got to 16 he applied to come to Australia under the Big Brother Movement which brings young chaps out and puts them on stations and trains them in all sorts of jobs to obviously give them a new start in a new country. And he seemed to settle in very, very well so two years later my brother Ken, who at this stage was 21, arrived in Australia and I was left in Ireland nursing grandparents. I never went to work before I got married. My father was in hospital for eight years so I had quite a tragic sort of childhood inasmuch as we weren’t together as a family. And so on 24 April 1968 I married this young seaman who I’d met at the Missions to Seaman in Belfast and his name was John Casey and he was only 19 years old. On our wedding day we actually sailed on the Ulster Queen which was the ship that he was working on at the time and got a great reception from the crew, VIP cabin and big dinner with, everybody was there, the whole family travelling back to England. John’s family were English and we had a lovely trip that night but I just cried, that was the last time I saw Ireland which is 33 years ago and we made our way to Southampton and had a few days in a beautiful hotel there and sailed on the Fairstar on the 28 April. LB: Why did you choose to come and live in Heathridge? MC: Right, we originally went to Sydney to my brother Ken because I had lost touch with my brother Harold. Quite interesting story was we were coming through the points or the heads or whatever they called it in Sydney and there was a man walking towards me and I kept saying to my husband ‘That looks like my brother but we aren’t in port yet’ and he was getting closer and closer and I was getting very embarrassed because I hadn’t seen him for about six years and it was actually my brother. He had come out on the boat to meet the Fairstar, the pilot boat, because we were sponsored by the Hunter’s Hill Rotary Club. We didn’t need a sponsor because we had saved hard and we had enough money but they wanted to sponsor us and my brother’s future father-in-law was a member of that club so we were in the Gladesville Times in Sydney as, you know, new people who had arrived and there was a picture of us in there so we ended up in Sydney for three and a half years. In that time we had our son Shaun and all our friends seemed to be moving out of Sydney. It was a very hard place to get ahead, it was a very lonely place when you were used to your family and friends and I find my brother Ken was the only person and his wife he married a year after we arrived, were the only people we really seemed to know there so we decided, when we found out that my brother Harold was in Perth. I hadn’t seen him at this stage for 11 years, we get on the Indian Pacific and make our way right across Australia and meet up with him. His wife had come across to Sydney to meet us and that’s what sort of give me the urge because we got on very well. So we arrived in Perth about three and a half years later, so round about 1972 and rented a house in Leederville which no longer is there, there’s a bridge that runs into that garden from the freeway, it’s in Tower Street, Leederville and then we ended up with a few little moves in between. We lived in Bayswater down near the Swan River and then we bought a house in Embleton which is now a child care centre facing John Forrest High School. We got a little bit tired of the pressures that we put ourselves under so my husband one day looked really fed up and he was working in retail and I just said to him ‘What would you like to do?’ and he said ‘I’d like to take off around Australia’ and I said ‘Yes, so would I.’ So we went home, sold our house that week, sold everything we owned, bought a brand new Kombi van and just wrote our address as Australia and at this stage we had two children, we had Sean and Virginia and so anyway we took off around Australia and thought we were quite clever. Only in our twenties and free and easy and no worries and don’t own anything except our Kombi and we were both quite experienced retailers so we didn’t worry about jobs too much and ended up in Sydney and my husband got such a good job he ended up as a floor manager in David Jones in Sydney and we were living in a Kombi van in my brother’s driveway. So every day we would have to jump out of bed while the Kombi van as a cot full time and we would drive off to work in our home so we were street kids, but no we were really at my brother’s house so that was going so well and his job was just doing so well that we ended up having to go and rent a house in Gladesville and it was going along nicely except we were really itching to get on with our trip and go up to Queensland. So John resigned from the job and we were about to take off that weekend when on the Thursday night my husband took really ill and ended up with a collapsed lung but when he got taken to hospital nobody realised what it was, we thought he had had a heart attack at first, they said no, sent him home. Anyway the other friends of ours that we had over in Sydney still, Heidi and Mike Bevan, who now live in WA, took us to a friend of theirs who was a specialist at Concord Hospital and John was operated on immediately. He’d had a collapsed lung that whole weekend and nobody had woken up to it. So anyway we had to stay in Sydney until he got that done so to this day I have never seen Queensland. I just wanted to get back to WA back to where I feel my home is and my heart is and so when he was well enough we drove back with the two children, rented a house in London Street and decided once he was back working with Myers or whoever it was at the time, because he seemed to float between Myers and Aherns quite a bit, that we would invest our money back into some land, sell the Kombi as quickly as we could and get back to reality. So we went looking for some land one day and we drove out to Padbury and spoke to someone there and they said oh there’s a new development just happening up the road, the auction was yesterday but you know there’s a lot of land still available in Heathridge. So off we went to Heathridge and of course it was just sand and nothing much else but you know there was great little plans there for us to look at and the land was, you know, looking nice and good size blocks, reasonable prices and we bought our block of land in Cruise Court that day and paid, I think about $8,200 and so off we went looking for the best home for the best price to build on it and because we had four years. Everybody had four years to build their house and in that time you weren’t allowed to sell it either. This was the restrictions on the blocks, they wanted to stabilise the area so they could put in the schools and everything else, they didn’t want a lot of land lying empty so we bought, it would have been 1976 we bought our block. I have got a picture of me standing on our block with my flares with these two tiny little children who are now 31 and 20 years and very big and it was a nice cul-de-sac, it was quite an interesting thing because you felt like a bit of a pioneer. The house that we decided to build was an Abode Home and everybody around us was building the Pacesetters and all the other, you know, names that were around at that time so I got to know most of the houses in the area which helped me later on when I went into real estate because I knew everybody’s house, I had walked through them when they were being built.