Union Street. A novel of 1931. by J.C.M.Hood.

Union Street is my latest novel, with much of it waiting to be written.

Here are the opening paragraphs.

"Tom Lawson

Tom Lawson left his digs early one morning, just after sunrise, closing the door carefully behind him in case he woke the other two occupants of the house. Normally he would make the short walk to King street and take a tram to the university. On this morning, however, he turned and began to walk along the length of Union Street. It was time to speak out against the lies.

Union Street, Newtown, in June 1931 was a fairly typical street in Sydney, a street without trees, a row of narrow houses, many with a picket fence in the front, two small rooms on the ground floor, one behind the other, and two above. Each had a separate kitchen shed near the back lane, along with a small outhouse that held ‘the dunny’. There were no cars parked in the street and no telephones, for few if any residents of working-class Newtown owned such luxuries. Many of the residents of Newtown were unemployed. This was, after all, the time of the Great Depression.

 He soon reached the house where the riot had occurred. There was little evidence of the mayhem and violence he had witnessed, when a thousand bystanders had shouted in anger as the police carried out their eviction order with drawn revolvers. Saturday’s newspaper had described it asthe most sensational eviction battle Sydney has ever known. Now, the street was empty, the house boarded up, the front door secured with a chain, the men who had fought against eviction locked up in Long Bay. 

Something winked at him in the morning sun, and he stooped to pick up a pistol cartridge. If there was any doubt, the brass cartridge was evidence of the brutal nature of the conflict. So, too, were the bricks and lumps of concrete still scattered about the street, the weapons of desperate men. He had seen the prisoners dragged from the rear of the house, handcuffed, their heads streaming blood, two of them with gunshot wounds."