Mrs Amy Everett recalls moving to Chipping Norton during the Great Depression, interviewed in 1986

Mrs Amy Everett, interviewed in 1986 for the 'Looking Back at Liverpool: An Oral History of the Liverpool Region 1900 to 1960' project, remembers her mother's reaction to moving to Chipping Norton from Artarmon in Sydney's northern suburbs, during the Great Depression.

Transcript

AMY: We lived in Artarmon; my father was a builder, was a carpenter actually. Work was impossible to get so they decided to try and get a farm. He had been a farmer earlier on and they had to ballot actually for this place at Chipping Norton, but they did get it, for a thousand pounds. They had to put their names into the Department of Closer Settlement and they were picked out of a hat.

INTERVIEWER: And what did you father have on his land?

AMY: Poultry.

INTERVIEWER: Was it successful?

AMY: They didn't make money, but they survived. My mother had lived in Artarmon for a long long time and she didn't greatly appreciate living in Liverpool. Chipping Norton was a lovely place to live but it was very isolated. There was no social life as such. She'd had a very wide circle of friends and been interested in church and Red Cross and all that sort of thing that a woman normally does in suburban life and it just wasn't her, especially in Chipping Norton. She didn't greatly like it. I think she got to like it afterwards but not at first especially. We'd had a very nice home in Artarmon, a very nice home, and we'd had to sell that and go. There was no work. You had this terrible feeling of failure, that you had to sell your home that you'd worked so hard for, and go out and start again, at that age, neither of them of course was young.