For over a hundred and fifty years, the inner suburbs of Melbourne have been the first port of call for new immigrants. The first wave of immigrants was mainly working class and British. The 1895 list of students at Princes Hill gives the names of the pupils in grades 4, 5 and 6; it also notes how far each student travelled to school, and from which direction. Acting Head Teacher McShane added each child’s birth date. English, Scottish and Irish names predominate.1
In 1895, most of the school’s students lived in the newly developed areas within half a mile of Arnold Street. We can only guess at their family backgrounds and lifestyles. Some of the professionals and well-to-do businesspeople who lived in the grander houses bordering Princes Park, along Royal Parade and Bowen Crescent, sent their children to Princes Hill. Most of the students, however, came from poor, working-class families who were attracted to North Carlton and Princes Hill by cheap accommodation.
During the 1890s depression, Carlton began to deteriorate, both physically and in reputation.2 Miss Smart, who taught at Princes Hill in the 1930s, remembers being warned by her mother about gangs armed with chains, who were rumoured to be roaming the streets of Carlton in the early years of the 20th century. The first official study of substandard housing in Melbourne was undertaken by the 1913 Joint Parliamentary Select Committee, which reported that cheap rental cottages were crowded into the back yards of existing Carlton houses, and branded areas of Carlton as ‘slums’. In the 1910s, the Webb Government boosted immigration, accentuating the housing shortage and causing further overcrowding and dilapidation. In 1937, the Victorian Housing Commission began its campaign continued intermittently until the 1960s to reclaim and redevelop the ‘slum’ areas of Carlton and North Carlton. In the 1940s, the Prest Survey found that 87.9 per cent of all accommodation in the City of Melbourne was occupied by tenants.3
For all their modern amenities and renovations, the houses standing in Princes Hill today are mostly those in which the first generations of Princes Hill students lived.4 The broad streets of North Carlton, Princes Hill and South Brunswick are lined with large, graceful Victorian and Edwardian villas, solid brick, single or double-fronted, detached or terrace-style intermixed with rows of utilitarian, single-storey, single-fronted, late-Victorian terraces, which were built by speculators for profit, with little generosity of space or light. Each had its living room, kitchen, bathroom and assortment of bedrooms. Usually the living and sleeping areas were at the front of the house; the kitchen was a narrow, ground-floor galley at the back, and the laundry and toilet were outside. Gardens varied in size, depending on the size of the block and the number of outbuildings. There were few sources of warmth in winter. The Moyes household in Arnold Street, for example, had a copper in the laundry and a gas stove in the kitchen, while a colonial oven warmed the living room. Only the grander houses boasted fireplaces in the bedrooms. Electricity was connected in the 1920s.
Without the student register, we cannot-know how the students’ parents were employed before 1928. The Carlton Forest Project, however, has surveyed the occupations of the Carlton workforce between 1875 and 1910, and provides a breakdown of ratepayers’ occupations in the Smith and Victoria wards, which would have included many people with children at the Princes Hill schools. The survey suggests that there were relatively few professional, managerial and white-collar workers for example, doctors, lawyers, clergymen, manufacturers, policemen, council employees and the like. Artisans, service workers and unskilled labourers predominate, indicating the working and lower-middle-class status of the community. Reflecting the large amount of building going on in the area, there are large numbers of artisans associated with the building industry - plumbers, painters and builders, for example - all of whom would have been particularly hard hit by the collapse of urban construction during the 1890s depression.5
The picture did not change a lot in the twentieth century. Mr Moyes was a stonemason who worked in the city: one of his tasks was to polish the marble of Victoria’s Parliament House. Mr Cook, father of Vera and Eve and brother of William Cook, Councillor for North Carlton in the 1920s, was a builder. Besides building the Wonthaggi and Rutherglen Primary Schools and Beechworth Asylum, he did handiwork for his beloved Carlton Football Club. The Dagleys ran an adhesive factory ‘Beta Blacking Co’ from the rear of their McIlwraith Street home. Others were tradesmen, such as Mr Michie the plumber. Mr Younger ran the ‘Handy Shop’ grocery in Richardson Street. Jack Lewis’s dad was the local bootmaker, situated next door to the present Lygon Street fish-and-chips shop. Harry White’s dad operated the Bowen Crescent railway gate. Constance’s father was a public servant. After a period on ‘susso’, Marjorie’s father began a blacksmith’s business in South Melbourne, and was ‘in on the ground floor when General Motors and Holden amalgamated’. Graham’s father was a fitter and turner. Florence’s father, unsettled by the depression, became and remained a wanderer.
Before the Second World War, a significant proportion of the parents on the school register were mothers, probably heads of households, who identified their work as ‘home duties’. In 1928, the proportion was 20 per cent of the 203 new enrolments; in 1931, it was 14 per cent of 279 new enrolments. Many of these women would not have had any paid work; some would have taken in washing and ironing to provide the family with an income. Others would have cleaned offices in the city, worked in the area’s numerous apparel factories or slaved over sewing machines as pieceworkers at home.6
In 1941, the proportion of mothers engaged in home duties had decreased to 10 per cent of the 183 new enrolments, as women moved into the paid workforce during the Second World War. By 1943, some 760,000 Australian women had replaced men as wartime civilian labour in most fields of work, as bread carters, tram conductors, railway porters and ticket collectors, unskilled factory workers, and in the munitions industry.7
In low-income families, many of the children also too paid work. Although the Education Act of 1872 demanded that students attend school for thirty to forty days per quarter, the compulsory provisions of the Act were slow in taking effect. In 1886, 1884 children were prosecuted for truancy in Victoria.8 In 1889, 20 per cent of the 5000 students enrolled at Carlton’s six schools failed to attend for the minimum number of days specified under the 1872 Education Act. The Departmental truant officer, whose territory extended from Carlton to Sunbury, had little hope of apprehending culprits.10 In 1890, a new Neglected Children’s Act established draconian penalties for habitual truancy: Justices of the Peace were given the power to commit habitual truants to truant schools or neg1ected‘children’s schools for a period of up to six months - or, for those judged to be beyond parental control, until they reached the age of fourteen. The parents were charged ten shillings a week for maintenance.9 But in the depressed 1890s, many children continued to evade school. It was not until the turn of the century that regular attendance began to match the annual enrolment.
There were a number of reasons for absenteeism. Some children, members of transient families, just moved on; others were ill; a large number roamed the streets of Carlton accosting citizens, molesting the aged and decrepit, riding the passing trams, stone-throwing, stealing and generally taking part in the ‘larrikin pushes’ of the time.11 Economic necessity compelled others to work during the day, after school, or at night typically, as delivery boys, shop assistants, domestic servants and factory hands. Selling newspapers, especially on trams, in pubs or on a prized city corner, was a favourite source of income for many boys. Another was prowling the back lanes of North Carlton and Princes Hill collecting empty beer bottles.12
By the turn of the century, the Department of Public Instruction had realised that a punitive approach alone would not solve the problem of absenteeism. An ‘Attendance Certificate’ was introduced in 1901 to encourage and reward regular attendance.13 Arthur Sparks was uniquely rewarded at Princes Hill. His photograph was hung alongside those of past Head Teachers in the school hall, with a notation recording that he had not missed one day of school in nine years.14
Not all the names on the 1895 list of students are English or Celtic. European names are also found, and their proportion increases on the register index, reflecting the influence of Australia’s twentieth-century immigration programme on the North Carlton and Princes Hill communities and schools.
Approximately seven million immigrants have landed on Australia’s shores in the twentieth century.15 While innumerable individual motives move migrants to undertake vast journeys into diaspora, two recurring reasons dominated Australian immigration: refuge from political persecution and religious hatred; and refuge from the tyrannies of abject poverty, famine and debilitating hopelessness. According to John Bluthal, whose family arrived from East Poland in 1938, Australia was a wonderful, lucky country that offered peace, stability, security and hope.
The first half of this century was dominated by immigration from Britain. "Aided by the ‘assisted passage’ program, seduced by the Victorian Government’s generous land prices, and prompted by intense pro-British nationalism, some 137,500 Britons settled permanently in Victoria.16 In 1947, 71 per cent of Victoria’s immigrant population had been born in Britain or Ireland.17
The 1930s’ Depression virtually halted immigration. It was Arthur Calwell’s ‘populate or perish’ policies after the Second World War that stimulated and shifted the focus of immigration to Europe. A plethora of nationalities and a flood of numbers followed the pre 1940 European trickle to Australia. Asian immigration, however, was still restricted. In the 1970s and 1980s, the postscript guilt of Vietnam and the micro-economic business-migration programmes of the Fraser and Hawke Federal Governments have only slightly altered Australian attitudes towards immigration. We are still waiting for the promised demise of the infamous and discriminatory ‘White Australia Policy’.
Before the Second World War, Jews from Central Europe were the largest group of European immigrants. As a world community, European Jewry has suffered more than any other from hatred and persecution. Pogroms in Central Europe before the First World War and the horror of Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s took a heavy toll. Between 1900 and 1933, 3525 Jews settled in Victoria: 1460 from Poland, 1387 from Russia, the remainder from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.18 In the 1930s, many Polish, German and Austrian Jews ‘read the writing on the wall’, packed their belongings and abandoned their homes. Of the 11,000 refugees who satisfied Australian immigration requirements - good health, good character, £50 landing money, and assurances that they would not deprive Australians of jobs 5000 came to Victoria. In spite of strong opposition to any immigration of displaced European Jews immediately after the war, Calwell negotiated the entry of 2000 survivors of the holocaust under the ‘close relative scheme’. Between 1946 and 1954, another 9230 Jews arrived in Australia.19
No European people escaped the ravages of the Second World War. The continent was stricken by years of military madness and political disorder, and the insecurity, fear, famine, pain, sickness and death continued after the war. In May 1947, Australia joined the International Refugee Organization. By 1954, 250,000 ‘displaced persons’, predominantly from central and eastern Europe, had migrated to Australia.20
While humanitarian in its intent, the ‘displaced persons’ programme also initiated Australia’s post-war economic plan to bolster the supply of ‘factory fodder’. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, ship after ship deposited ‘new Australians’ in the port cities. Families, fathers pining for wives and children left behind, and young single men and women from every European country made the voyage. The largest groups Italians, Greeks and Yugoslavs - arrived en masse in the 1950s and 1960s. The 33,632 Italians resident in Australia in 1943 had swelled to 227,689 in 1961, and 373,966 in 1971-2.21 By 1971, 214,304 Greeks had arrived, as against 12,500 in 1943 and 91,000 in 1961.22 Similarly, 156,277 Yugoslavs came to Australia between 1945 and 1971.23 Many other ethnic groups migrated in smaller numbers.24 All were escaping a war-devastated, jobless and poverty-ridden Europe.
Understandably, many of Melbourne’s new denizens settled in North Carlton and Princes Hill. The inner suburbs of the larger Australian cities have long been the first resting places for successive generations of immigrants. In North Carlton and Princes Hill, the Anglo-Saxon wave was overwhelmed by ‘New Jerusalem’, which gave way to ‘Little Italy’, and then to a strong Greek community. Although the Jewish community has never been a large portion of Carlton’s population, Carlton’s role as an assembling point of Jewish immigrants since the last century was sufficiently felt, especially in the 1930s and after 1945, for North Carlton to gain a reputation as a Jewish area. As the first Jewish arrivals prospered and fled across the river to the south-eastern suburbs, new Jewish immigrants supplanted them. This trend continued until the 1960s, when the Jewish community constituted 13.3 per cent of North Carlton’s population. This had decreased to 5.2 per cent by 1971.25
Between 1951 and 1961, 33,537 Italian immigrants had settled in North Melbourne, Carlton, North Carlton, Fitzroy, Brunswick, Northcote, Collingwood and Richmond. Italians made up 27.6 per cent of North Carlton’s population in 1961, and 28.5 per cent in 1971. As Italian immigration petered out, Greeks and other groups continued to arrive. In 1961, 4.3 per cent of North Carlton population were Greek; by 1971, it had increased to 8.1 per cent.26 In 1976, the Carlton Community Health Service published a survey of the main language groups among Carlton’s 16,000 population. The ethnic composition included Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, Arabs, Serbo-Croats, Turks and Asians.27
The area’s attractions for migrants were varied and interrelated.28 One attraction was cheap accommodation, whether for rent or purchase. Many migrants - individuals and families had as their first ‘home’ a rented room or a leased house; both parents worked to scrape together the deposit to buy a home. A pattern of ‘chain migration’29 developed, creating a ghetto phenomenon: family, friends and acquaintances. from the same village or town followed the first, brave immigrants, often residing briefly with the host or sponsoring family. When the later arrivals moved out, they often took houses within the vicinity.
Proximity to the city was another attraction. People could walk to save fares, and the area was well served by public transport. There was work for women in local clothing and textile factories, while car-pooling arrangements transported neighbourhood co-workers to their workplaces. Working parents, distrustful of outsiders and without formal child-care facilities, left their children with a mother or an elderly woman minding the neighbourhood young.30 Familiarity with the surroundings tempered the insecurities of an alien land and a gabbled language, and there were plenty of local delicatessen-style milk bars catering for particular culinary tastes or dietary requirements.
Gradually, each community surrounded itself with cultural, religious, educational and philanthropic organisations to ensure its continuance. The more enduring Jewish community has left landmarks in the memories of older Carlton residents: synagogues; schools, such as the Hascola Talmud Tora in Rathdowne Street, the Bialik in Drummond Street, and Stone’s in Pitt Street; the Kadimah cultural centre in Lygon Street; the Chevra Kadisha, the Jewish funeral parlour, and space in the Melbourne cemetery; and welfare offices such as the Welcome Society, to assist new arrivals.31
The Italian and Greek enclaves also set their mark on the suburb. Delicatessens, coffee bars and restaurants replaced kosher butchers’ shops. Pastel-coloured houses brightened the streets, and Italianate architectural features, terrazzo and wrought iron rejuvenated tired, rundown Victorian terraces. The Cavour Club, the Matteotti Club, the Dante Alighieri Society, the Comitato Assistenza Italiani (The Committee of Assistance for Italians)’ and the Catholic Church especially Sacred Heart in Rathdowne Street, Carlton, and St Brigid’s in Nicholson Street, Fitzroy tended to the Italian community’s language, cultural, philanthropic and religious needs.32
The Greek community in North Carlton and Princes Hill centred itself around St John’s Church in Drummond Street, North Carlton, founded in 1958. Weddings, christenings, religious guidance, Greek language education, historical and national celebrations, social welfare, deaths, were all catered for by this one institution.33
The majority of Jews who arrived from the 1920s came from Poland, the Ukraine and Russia. Some came via Palestine, others via France. Usually poor and barely educated, most left small villages and towns that offered little hope of a secure or improved future. They arrived without money, often without a trade, and without a knowledge of English.34 Their jobs varied: Esther’s father, who arrived from Poland in 1929, became a bricklayer; Fay’s parents became food retailers. Tess’s parents left Russia in 1926. Her mother took in sewing at home, while her father began work as a hawker before opening a small clothing wholesale and manufacturing business. Mr Ernest was the local baker. John Mann’s parents were highly educated, both with doctorates from the University of Warsaw and the Sorbonne he in law, she in dentistry. Neither of their qualifications was accepted, and they had to start again. His mother’s fluency in a number of European languages served her well, and many North Carlton migrant patients came to her rooms in Rathdowne Street.
The migrants who arrived in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s from Southern Europe and the Middle East had been attracted by the Australian government’s glossy advertisements promising a better life. Many had escaped destitute, peasant backgrounds to fulfil Australia’s need for unskilled labour. In 1961 and 1971, more than 50 per cent of North Carlton’s population were non-Australian, and 62.9 per cent in 1961 and 52.2 in 1971 were craftsmen, labourers and production workers.35 My own father spent years among the foundries of General Motors-Holden and Dunlop Tyres, and laying railway tracks in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. Others worked at Ford, on the trams, and as labourers on building sites. My mother was a machinist in textile factories. In time, the more enterprising, particularly among the earlier arrivals, broke from the confines of wage labour and opened their own businesses.
A new type of ghetto was created in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the Victorian Housing Commission. Although the Commission’s grand scheme was ultimately thwarted by concerned local action groups, the Commission succeeded in building several large estates of high-rise flats. Here, thousands of families were thrown together in cheap accommodation encased in sky-scraping concrete cells. Out-of-order lifts, bottles falling from the sky, petty larceny and violence by mischievous, aimless and bored children, and the degrading lack of privacy, all nurtured the alienation caused by inconvenience, fear and frustration.36
Ironically, the attraction of cheap inner-suburban housing also initiated the last wave of migration into Carlton, North Carlton and Princes Hill: the so-called ‘gentrification’ of the inner suburbs. Students, academics and professionals began moving into the area in the late 1950s and early 1960s, attracted by the area’s proximity to_ tertiary institutions, hospitals, city employment and recreational facilities, and the low cost of dilapidated housing with character which could be renovated in preference to the costly building of a new home in the outer suburbs. The new residents were predominantly Anglo-Australian and young. A romantic mixture of Bohemianism, flourishing arts, a European atmosphere of bright colours, children in the streets, foreign tongues, and even the unfashionability of poor conditions, served as a magnet to young non-conformists who had rejected the ‘great Australian ugliness’ of suburbia.37
In the early 1970s, the Carlton Association won a signal victory over the Victorian Housing Commission’s designs to redevelop some 400 hectares of Carlton into high-rise flats. This guaranteed the area against any similar future assaults, but also secured the inner suburbs’ continuing transformation. The giddy inflation of the 1970s and the increasing demand for inner-suburban housing pushed prices to unimagined heights. Many migrant residents, keen to move into middle-class suburbs, found the necessary cash in the deep pockets of professionals who were attracted to the suburb or housing speculators who could gamble confidently on housing prices increasing in the future. Approximately half of the 132 children who enrolled at Princes Hill Primary School in 1988 had parents involved in professional occupations, including education, law, journalism, commerce, social work and medicine, business and the arts. In many cases, both parents were working.38
The Princes Hill school population has reflected the changes in the neighbourhood over the past century. The decreasing numbers in the inner suburbs in the late 1930s were arrested by post-Second 1/World War immigrant enrolments, creating a cosmopolitan amalgam in the school.39
The loss of the pupils’ register precludes determining Princes Hill School’s migrant composition before 1928, though the register index, which begins in the 1910s, does give some indication of the increasing number of obviously Central and Eastern European names. Of the 203 new admissions in 1928, two emanated from Russia, six from Poland, two from the Ukraine, and two from the United States of America. Others came from England, Glasgow, Palestine and interstate.40 By the mid-1930s, approximately one-third of Princes Hill students were Jewish.41 The numbers were so great that on religious festivals the school almost emptied of students.42 To Australian children like Marjorie, it seemed that ‘all’ the Jewish people in the world had come to Princes Hill. The Jewish domination persisted into the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. The 1963 form 5 class list shows that Jewish students were the largest single group, with other European students second, and Australians third.43
In line with Australia’s post-war immigration policy, French, Belgian, Israeli, Russian, German, Polish, Cypriot, Swiss, Greek and Italian students were among the 293 new enrolments of 1951. By 1961, Hungarian, Yugoslav, Maltese, Chinese, Austrian and Borneoan can be added. At the primary school, Polish, Greek and particularly Italian children predominated. The form 4 of 1972 boasted seventeen different ethnic groups. New inclusions were Arabic, Czech, Dutch, Spanish, Latvian, Serbian and Macedonian. In 1975, forty-four different languages were represented at Princes Hill High School. Portuguese, Lithuanian, Turkish, Lebanese, Rumanian, Syrian, Egyptian and Bulgarian joined the ‘babel’ at Princes Hill.
The ethnic composition of the secondary college is still diverse in 1988, as new nationalities have replaced those that have left. While Greek and Italian-speaking children still predominate, the majority of them are now Australian born. New arrivals include Arabs, Armenians, Cambodians, Chinese, Chinese Laotians, Chinese Timorese, Chinese Vietnamese, Indians, Japanese, Malays, Thais and Vietnamese.44 At the primary school, an absolute majority of migrant children are now second-generation Australian-born. Small numbers of immigrants come from Taiwan, Fiji, Central America, Singapore, Yugoslavia, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey, Hong Kong and the United States of America. In all, some seventeen different nationalities are represented at the school.45
While the broad cultural and social spectrum of students has enriched the primary and secondary schools over the past decades, the schools’ working-class, migrant complexion was accentuated by the arrival of children from the Housing Commission flats in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1971, approximately 10 per cent of the high school students had parents receiving maintenance and free requisite allowances from the government.46 A survey conducted among form 3 students in 1977 revealed that’, among fathers, 10 per cent held professional occupations, the same number had a trade, 30 per cent were unskilled, 15 per cent were unemployed, and the occupations of the remaining 35 per cent were unknown. Among mothers, 10 per cent were professional, 25 per cent were unskilled, 60 per cent were occupied with home duties, and the occupation of 5 per cent remained unknown. Half of the children sampled lived with one parent only, and 140 students in the school were receiving maintenance because of the depressed economic circumstances of their families. Similar developments were reported at the primary school.47 In the late 1970s, it was estimated that approximately 20 per cent of primary school children lived in Housing Commission estates.
The poor situation of both schools in the mid-1970s their few resources, the poor community, and the tradition of lower education achievements and lower retention rates at the higher levels made them eligible for inclusion in the Commonwealth government’s Disadvantaged Schools Program. Princes Hill Secondary College is still receiving funding.48
Paradoxically, the recognition of the primary and secondary schools as disadvantaged coincided with the beginning of gentrification in the Princes Hill and North Carlton communities, as Anglo-Saxon children of professional families replaced the declining enrolments of migrant children.
By 1979, only 25 per cent of the school population were migrant children born overseas.49 Although figures cannot be substantiated, folklore estimates that one third of currently enrolled children at the Princes Hill schools are from professional and business families who could afford private education. Others are leaving elite schools to enrol at Princes Hill.50 The main reasons for this are, first, the parents’ political and philosophical commitment to state education and, secondly, the schools’ social and educational image. As a consequence, while enrolments at inner suburban schools declined, Princes Hill Primary School and Secondary College in 1988 remained at full capacity: there were 676 students at the secondary school and 430 at the primary school. Indeed, Princes Hill Primary was the only state primary school in Victoria to impose zoning to control enrolments into the preparatory classes.