The Battle For Union Road
When I was studying to be a Minister of the Gospel my student churches were two small adjacent wooden churches in the inner slum areas of North Melbourne. For seven years, during the 1950’s and 60’s, the people of those inner slum areas were my parish.
Having just been appointed a probation officer, I was closely involved with all the young people in the area who were in trouble with the court system. I was the only probation officer in the entire area. At one stage I had over 100 boys on probation.
Most of these boys came from desperately poor homes, the worst of Melbourne’s slums. Most of them lived in the narrow, 18 foot wide little wooden houses that were so damp and dingy, with windows broken and paint peeling. The landlords who owned these houses knew that they had been marked for demolition twenty years earlier and therefore did not spend a penny on them. They just kept raising rents and the poor people that lived in them grew up in unhygienic and unhealthy surroundings.
Most of the boys looked a bit like the old houses: battered, laden with care and worry and totally lacking self esteem.
Now the church in the area was happy that I should spend much of my time trying to help those young delinquents. The church paid me 16 a week which was hardly enough to buy petrol for my motor bike, but somehow or other over the years we survived with very little income and a very big responsibility. We gathered the boys from the streets and brought them into a youth club held in the church hall. Right from the beginning we designed it so that there would be plenty of physical activity because these young fellows needed somewhere to expend their energies. We had every kind of physical game you could imagine, tunnel ball, overhead ball, tag football, competitions, games and square dancing – anything to use up people’s energy. For some long period of time we ran competitions with people diving over rows of seats and landing on thick mats on the floor on the other side. Running diagonally from one corner of the hall a boy stripped to singlet and shorts would run up to six or seven rows of high backed wooden seats and dive over them all, hitting the mat with a somersault before standing.
One of our few rules was that there was no alcohol allowed on site and over the next seven years very rarely did we ever have problems with boys bringing grog to our club. They were just exuberant, noisy and often fairly messy. One had a beat up FJ Holden with a straight out exhaust. Another had a Volkswagen which was also incredibly noisy. But apart from creating noise the boys in our club were well behaved and were a positive contribution to the community. Quite a number of them became committed Christians and active in Christian service, and they were really not a trouble to the community at all except after club.
At 11 p.m. it became a ritual to walk down to the classier end of town in the Union Road shopping centre, and to the only milk bar open at that hour. The milk bar was in the heart of the better part of the shopping centre and it had two pinball machines. For sixpence or a shilling the boys would get four steel balls and play the pinball machines racking up huge scores. Others would stand round watching or drinking bottles of Coca Cola or eating “Four and Twenty” pies out of paper bags or “Chico” spring rolls.
The trouble arose over the paper bags and the Coke bottles left lying on the footpath. In those days there were no public rubbish bins. Before the television campaigns no one thought very much about rubbishing Australia and it was quite customary to see men throw away their tram tickets or newspapers or cigarette butts onto the ground. The council employed people who, every day, would sweep the streets.
However Monday mornings, when the shops opened in Union Road, became a time of frustration for the shopkeepers. Along the footpaths coming from the Ascot Vale cinema and from the pin ball parlour and milk bar would be a trail of lolly wrappers, pie bags, Coke bottles and Chico roll wrappers. The first thing the shopkeepers had to do was to sweep the footpath. Gradually that caused resentment. The Union Road shopkeepers’ Chamber of Commerce complained to the police about the messy boys who left their papers on the footpath. So we began to be visited regularly by the police.
I worked quite closely with the police in those days and knew many of them by name. I saw them regularly on Monday mornings at the North Melbourne courts. However, they were not very impressed with the young people with whom I was working. The police called on us several times to inspect the FJ with the noisy exhaust and the VW with the shattering sound. Then the police would turn up at the pinball parlours, and in those days before instructions were given about assaulting citizens and individuals were given rights to complain about the police, the police took a very physical and active part in dispensing justice on the spot.
We often hear these days about the good effect that used to be obtained when a policeman could give someone a good kick in the pants or a cuff over the ear and send them home. I witnessed many of those kicks in the pants and cuffs over the ear as well as punches to the chest, to the top of the forearm, and other threatening blows. A bitter hatred grew between the boys and the police and even more so for the shopkeepers who persistently complained to the police and caused them to be on their tail. The police were unarmed except for exercising great authority, and resentment lay deep in the hearts of our young delinquents.
After one apparently very messy weekend, where much of the newspapers that littered the road came from men after the races on Saturday and from the nearby evening trots and not from our boys at all, the Union Road shopkeepers’ Chamber of Commerce sent a very stern letter to the local police station urging a clear up of “the young hoods” who prowled the streets at night. It was these “hoods” that were lowering the tone of the area and changing what was once a respectable and quiet shopping centre into a vandal plagued delinquent playground.
The following Sunday night after church the boys moved up to the Union Road milk bar, as usual, to play the pin ball machines and to have a pie and Coke in those days before there were McDonalds or Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets. Then suddenly two police vans pulled up and the police immediately sprang into action taking down names and addresses, questioning everybody, frightening some of the young girls who were with us and generally ordering the streets to be cleared.
Everybody began to move away simmering, but Big Vic, a fairly quiet lumbering sort of fellow moved off asking his mates if they had boxes of matches. Very soon he had collected several boxes of matches, which was strange because he did not smoke.
Big Vic was going to extract his own revenge. Closely followed by young Trevor, a small weedy fellow who used to hang round in Big Vic’s shadow, he started moving from door to door along the Union Road shops. I must admit that I was more concerned about cooling everybody down and getting them to head off home quietly after the police raid to have noticed what Big Vic and little Trev were up to. They simply paused outside each shopkeeper’s door and then moved on. I did not know it, but after they had travelled the length of the street on both sides, they then moved into the laneways at the back.
The following morning was a typical Melbourne autumn morning, bright sunshine with swirling mist in the Ascot Valley rising from the Maribyrnong River. There was a crisp feel in the air. I was on my motor bike heading up Union Road towards my Monday morning work in the police courts of North Melbourne when I noticed that the Union Road shopping centre was crowded with people.
My first thought was that the Essendon “Gazette” had had a special supplement with sales advertisements and everybody was waiting for the stores to open for the sales. But closer inspection indicated that the people standing around talking, waving fists in the air and becoming agitated were not shoppers but shopkeepers. The papers and bottles and “Four and Twenty” pie bags and “Chico” roll wrappers were still blowing in the wind. They had not been cleaned up at all.
Then I realized that not one shop in Ascot Vale was open. Various shopkeepers were coming around from the back calling out, “They have done over the back doors as well.” I slowed my motor bike down and pulled up alongside a knot of people. I took off the leather motor bike helmet I used to wear and goggles in order that I could hear what was being said. A few people were standing near the gutter where I stopped and so I asked them what was the cause of all the problem. In words that contained more expletives than I would be allowed to use with you, they explained to me that during the night someone had gone along to every Yale lock on every door and every padlock on every security shutter, and jammed the keyhole with broken off match sticks. No one could insert a key and the entire shopping centre was locked up.
I decided that it would be in the best interests of all of us if I left rather suddenly. I pulled on my motor bike helmet, goggles and gloves and kick started the big BSA 500, hoping that no one might ask me if any of my boys had been round the street the night before.
With his very simple method Big Vic had jammed the locks on every shop and the wheels of commerce ground to a halt.
His plan was so simple and yet so effective.
During that week I had several meetings with our boys and tried to put them right on their relationship with the shopkeepers. The shopkeepers were not impressed with the work they blamed upon the Newmarket “hoons”, but the “hoons” knew they had won.
I extracted promises that there would be no more revenge. The battle for Union Road had been won. That week there was absolute jubilation in the youth club run for the delinquents from the slums but I managed to have the commitment that the battle with the shopkeepers would now cease. From that time on our boys became exemplary in putting their Coke bottles, “Four and Twenty” pie bags, and “Chico” roll wrappers into a bin which we asked the milk bar proprietor to provide. A simmering peace came upon the Union Road shops.
GORDON MOYES
