Living it Rough

Former Campbelltown resident Ron Foster sure did it tough in his early days living in Campbelltown. In an interview he did with Campbelltown Library in 1983, Ron described some of the places he lived in. Survived is probably a more appropriate word than lived.

Ron moved to Campbelltown with his family in 1931 aged 12. They came from Sutherland where work was difficult to find during the Great Depression and where Ron's father was on the dole and was unable to pay the rent. The Foster's took up a 12-acre block at South Campbelltown. Ron's father got work with Campbelltown Council in an arrangement where they worked so many weeks in a month, in replace of receiving dole payments. The family lived below where the rubbish tip was located at South Campbelltown. It was described by Ron as "very very rough" and a place where you 'existed' and lived the best way you could. The first place the Foster's lived in was nothing more than a tin shed. Ron further described it this way: "The fireplace consisted of one of those square galvanised iron tanks you know what they call ship tanks." The photograph below gives you some idea of what it was like. The water tank at the side of the 'house' was used as a bedroom!

Campbelltown City Library. Local Studies Collection (Keith Longhurst Collection). The boy in the photo is unidentified.

After a while the family built a slab hut on the 12-acre block. It was so small that Ron had to sleep in a tent. It had a kitchen at one end and a bedroom at the other where Ron's father slept while Ron slept in the tent! The two rooms were partitioned off with bags and nothing else. They had a stove and a stone fireplace. The hut had a corrugated iron roof and a floor made from stone from the bush with a skin of cement over it. Imagine living like this through a cold Campbelltown winter.

Ron was 12 when he moved to Campbelltown and 13 when he left the tiny Campbelltown South school (this building is now Kentlyn Public School). After working in different jobs around the town, including Tom Frost's dairy which included land where the current HJ Daley Library is, Ron got work on a farm at Eschol Park. Living conditions here were not much better. For ten bob ($1) a week, Ron was given a wooden stretcher to sleep on with no mattress or blankets! He eventually acquired a horse rug with another horse rug over him. All he had to eat was a plate of porridge for breakfast every morning and plum jam with bread for dinner. Work was seven days a week. How difficult it must have been living in those times.

Ron Foster died in August 1984, only one year after his interview.

Written by Andrew Allen