DURING the Great Depression hundreds of Hunter people lived in makeshift humpies cobbled together from whatever materials their owners could scrounge. Some of the camps were Nobbys Camp near Horseshoe Beach, “Texas” in Carrington, “Hollywood” (also known as “Doggyville”) at Jesmond, “Coral Trees” in Stockton and Platt’s Estate and “Tram Car” at Waratah.
Thirty years later the trail cars became housing for unemployed men.
According to researcher and author Dulcie Hartley, writing in her book The Hungry Thirties, Tram Car camp housed 17 men in four tram cars.
The pictures below show the birth of Tram Car camp. These photographs were among a collection of pictures gathered by the late Ken Magor. They were taken by former Newcastle Sun journalist C.K. (Charlie) Thompson, a well-known Waratah identity, author and amateur photographer, and were accompanied by a letter giving Mr Magor the background to the pictures.
“It was during the 1929-32 depression and before all the Newcastle district councils were amalgamated,” Mr Thompson wrote. “I’m pretty sure that Sid Webb was Mayor of Waratah at the time. Waratah Council secured several old steam tram cars from the dept and hauled them to the bush at Waratah, gutted them and furnished them as homes for single male destitutes. The work was done by members of the Waratah-Mayfield Unemployed Association, and all the blokes in the snapshots were members of that association.”
In 1974 John O’Donoghue, a lecturer in English at Newcastle College of Advanced Education, wrote some reminiscences of Platt’s Estate and the tramcars. He recalled that “about a dozen” old steam trams had been placed “where the pipeline passed under the railway” in a location that would in 1974 have been “in the middle of Rankin Drive.” They were home to single unemployed men, each of whom had their own compartment. One of the residents was Jackie O’Donovan, who had come to Australia on the same ship as John’s father in 1926.
They had intended disembarking in Melbourne, but upon arrival in Melboure, my father found a letter waiting for him from an Irishwoman named Molly Maguire, who had been living in Newcastle for about a year. Molly came from a village near my father’s village in Tipperary. Her letter told of a “grand” steel works in Newcastle just crying out for workers. On the strength of this letter my father, Jackie Donovan and about another half a dozen Irishmen came on to Newcastle. However, as most of their time was to be spent standing outside the gates of the “grand” steel works, Molly’s advice was often wryly ridiculed.
Molly Maguire had been evicted from her home in 1932 and lived at the other big unemployment camp in the area, Hollywood, at the back of Jesmond Park. John recalled walking to visit her and passing the live hare coursing track near what was later to become the university’s main entrance.
John and his family lived in Vera Street, Waratah, from 1934 and his earliest impression was of the big Platt’s Estate unemployment camp, in the area now known as Waratah West.
It was a great big jumble of humpies, shanties and hessian bag tents. No road led into it as Lorna Street ended at its present junction with Maud Street.
A story about the tramcars and Tramcar camp appears in our book, Travelling Through Time.
A post about another Depression settlement, alongside the Hunter River, can be found here.
thank you ray for these wonderfull glimpes of eras long gone