The 1931 Union Street Riots: Newtown's Fight Against Forced Evictions
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In the depths of the Great Depression, Newtown residents took a stand on Union Street against forced evictions, creating a protest movement that changed NSW history.
By Matt Murphy
At the height of the Great Depression, many tenants, unable to pay their rent, were being forcibly evicted. While the government was supplying ‘sustenance’ to the unemployed, it offered no rent assistance. Many families including WWI veterans and men who fought at Gallipoli, once evicted, had nowhere to go. Consequently, it also meant that many houses remained vacant as landlords couldn’t find a paying tenant. During the 1930s, Newtown was very much a working-class suburb, putting it at the forefront of the crisis.
Newtown resident Phyllis Ackland, in her submission to a parliamentary enquiry into the dilemma, wrote:
My father was an invalid pensioner and things were desperate at home. We’d come from Lismore to bring my brother down for treatment. He had polio. My mother went up to Newtown one day shopping and when she came home they’d come in and taken all the furniture for the twenty-two pound she owed. It was the law.
The Unemployed Workers Movement, disparagely labelled communists by the scaremongering press, had been haphazardly formed as a means of solidarity, primarily against forcible removal of premises of unemployed tenants. In early 1931 the UWM’s first protest was at Douglas Street in Redfern, soon followed by another in Starling Street, Leichhardt. A much larger protest occurred in Brancourt Avenue in Bankstown where 16 members of the UWM barricaded themselves in a house for three weeks to support a WWI veteran facing eviction.
The stand-off only ended when the police lost patience and stormed the house, arresting the picketers who were then charged and convicted, receiving token jail terms. It was this drawn-out battle that caught the public’s attention, particularly in and around Newtown where the rate of evictions was the highest in the city. Consequently, the UWM’s membership, again particularly around Newtown, swelled. Whether it was by chance, or a deliberate tactic, the next UWM protest was to be held in Newtown – and it was big.
In June 1931, 18 men barricaded themselves in a house at 143 Union Street Newtown and, on the 19th of that month, the police moved in to turf them out. However, the local constabulary, who knew many of the protesters and sympathised with their plight, refused to be involved and police officers from Manly had to be transported in to complete the task. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that it was ‘the most sensational eviction battle Sydney has ever known’. The number of combatants was similar to that of Bankstown – approximately 40 police versus 18 heavily barricaded protesters. The difference here was that an estimated 400 people, hostile to the police, had filled the streets in support of the squatters and started attacking the police before they reached the small terrace.
Police opened fire to disperse the crowd and shot at the balcony where protesters, armed with building rubble, were standing behind crudely built barricades. Once the protesters retreated from the balcony the police moved in from both the front and the rear and rounded them up. All 18 protesters were heavily wounded and needed hospitalisation. One picketer received a wound from a bullet that skimmed his head and another was shot in the arm; another two were reported to have fractured skulls, someone a fractured jaw, and a further two were concussed. Fifteen police were also wounded. There was also one death; a supporter collapsed in the street and died of a suspected heart attack. While there were many rallies during the depression years, the crowd that turned up in support of the evictees in Union Street was by far the greatest demonstration of the era. The Union Street eviction riot, in no small measure due to the press it received, proved to be the UWM’s greatest triumph. Within a fortnight of the Newtown riot, new branches of the Unemployed Workers Movement were established, and other anti-eviction conflicts were fought throughout Sydney and also in Newcastle.
The rioting paid off. The 18 evicted and arrested at Union Street were released without charge as it was proven that the police had fired upon them before they retaliated. The police insisted they only commenced shooting to get the men off the balcony but this was criticised in the subsequent enquiry owing to the plethora of submissions from witnesses – both those inside the house and those in the street – who expressed alarm and shock at the police’s use of gunfire so soon after they had arrived.
Within two months the Ejectments Postponement Bill was pushed through state parliament, which granted evictees who could prove their impoverished circumstances up to six months to find alternative accommodation. With growing support, the UWM not only reached its zenith at Newtown but thanks to people power it no longer found the need to function and soon after subsided and never posed a threat to police or the government again. The barricades, the police, the resistance against an inequitable situation and the fact that the insurrection actually brought about a change in legislation, meant that the Union Street anti-eviction riot is often favourably compared to the Eureka Stockade. The 1984 YA novel, The House that was Eureka, by Nadia Wheatley, also draws a link between the two events.
