Marcia Wordsworth: Good morning Shirley.

Marcia Wordsworth: My name is Marcia Wordsworth. I live at Cabramatta and I was born January 1927.

Marcia Wordsworth: At Kogarah, New South Wales.

Marcia Wordsworth: Presumably it was a small hospital in those days. Although I think there has been a hospital there for many years.

Marcia Wordsworth: Mum always said Kogarah so I don’t know. Anyway.

Marcia Wordsworth: About 33 years.

Marcia Wordsworth: No, sorry. Not 33. Hold everything. I came here in 1933 so I have been… I have lived here 60 odd years. Isn’t it?

Marcia Wordsworth: I was seven, I had my sixth birthday when I came here and now I am 75

Marcia Wordsworth: St Johns Park.

Marcia Wordsworth: Yes, public school.

Marcia Wordsworth: Yes, I remember Mr Gill. I was terrified of him. He had a huge big cane.

Marcia Wordsworth: Yes, they did. And Mr Cavanaugh, he was the headmaster. There was this beautiful lady Miss Meadows, who was a local... taught Kindergarten. And I remember her, she was such a sweet thing, I’m not sure, she might have died by now but you could still see her walking around here up to a few years ago. Miss Meadows, she was a well known identity.

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Marcia Wordsworth: She was always the Miss. Yes, and …

Marcia Wordsworth: Yes, there was one brick part in the middle, then I think after I started there they put the wooden one up you know. They used to call it demountable.

Marcia Wordsworth: It has always been there. I remember we started a bit of a little garden in there and it was ever such a small school. The Headmaster used to live next door. Mr Cavanaugh. And then, there was another teacher too, he had a funny name. I can’t think of him. But anyway, I stopped there till sixth class. There were a few people I went to school with, but I didn’t sort of really mix a lot because I used to walk to school and walk back. My mother expected me home a quarter of an hour after I left school sort of thing…or twenty minutes. I didn’t drop off to play anywhere or anything like that, I just came straight home with my friend Dawn Fay … And we used to go to school together, come home together and then she’d swing off up into Lord Street and I’d swing down home. And I… so she is really the only friend I remember from the school. I remember a couple of others, we had a reunion here a few years ago and my brother did…blow up all photos of them and everything for school because he used to work for the Telegraph then. He blew up lots of old photos he had and everything you know but… I remember Dawn Smith and Jean Rickwood…they are old families from around here although the Smiths have moved Jean Ryder and Mona Ryder...that’s about all I remember.

4:00 minutes

Marcia Wordsworth: I didn’t play any, I used to sit and read a book.

Marcia Wordsworth: Yes. They used to have a privet hedge and I used to get up under the hedge and read books. I have been a bookworm all my life. A thing they used to play vigoro and we used to do I think eurhythmics you know… I don’t know how long it lasted.

Marcia Wordsworth: That was what we… they had these huge gum trees, massive gum trees in the yard and they had little seats around there and sometimes I would go and sit under there, but I think the boys used to do a bit of kicking the ball around and things like that, you know. But I didn’t sort of… I wasn’t a sporty person you know.

Marcia Wordsworth: Oh, I had gone up to high school by then. Yes, I was six … eleven I think when I left there. So I would have… would have… that was before the war. Wasn’t it? '34, (thirty)six…round about there. I don’t remember much about the war. I remember when it first started. I remember hearing the first lot of sirens go off. I nearly died of fright, but my brother was a scout and he went rushing off…they had to be air raid wardens or something and poor mum she was petrified.

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Marcia Wordsworth: That was probably the night… the first night when we heard the siren. I remember I was terrified.

Marcia Wordsworth: We just stood at the back door looking out, I think there was a searchlight or something going across the sky.

Marcia Wordsworth: I think my father was wasn’t terribly impressed with it all. He said, ‘no need to worry, they are not here’. You know it was down in Sydney as far as he was concerned, but I do remember my father saying that if the Japanese ever invaded .. He always said, ‘don’t worry about the Japanese’ even from the first war and he said, what we were going to do, was to head off into the mountains and get down in all those valleys and we would be all right.

Marcia Wordsworth: Yes, he thought we would kill rabbits and eat and we would take supplies with us and live off the land and he was quite convinced, and he was going to take the gun and if they eventually over run us he was going to shoot all of us. So I remember him saying that. You know, he was quite strong about that. He never said it to me but to Mum in the other room. And so that was all I remember of that. And then of course… then I joined the Army when I was eighteen.

Marcia Wordsworth: ‘45 or something, 1927 and I was 18… ‘37.

Marcia Wordsworth: No the war was on. I joined the AAMWS. The nursing Corps

Marcia Wordsworth: Yes, yes, I was too young to go overseas and I just turned eighteen and I joined and I was working in Challenge Woollen Mills at Liverpool and that was a protected industry but you could leave it to join the Army and that’s what I did, strangely enough. I was camped at Ingleburn and then I got posted to the Blood Bank. The Army had just taken over the third floor of Sydney Hospital at the Blood Bank and I worked with Major Roger Walsh and he was doing a lot of experimental work in the Blood Bank. It was something to do with that RH negative and all that, I don’t know whether he worked all that out. And then I was nursing in the camp hospital at Liverpool for a while as an AAMW(S). And then the war was over…

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came over, my husband came home from New Guinea. Because naturally, we got married and that was it.

8:23 minutes

Marcia Wordsworth: When we first came here?

Marcia Wordsworth: When we first came here, it was steam trains. McBurneys was established opposite the railway, they had a produce store, grocery store and he used to look after… like he was the main grocer except there was a shop out near Cooks Park that was moonshine as we used to call it, a shop there called Tooheys, and then further back down near Harrington Street another little shop called Knights, they were the only shops that we used to go. Oh, then Mrs. Gilmore down on the corner of Meadows Road and Cabramatta Road, she had a mixed business with ice creams and stuff in there. I remember her.

When we first came to Cabramatta there was Miss Williams had the post office and library which was in the square at Cabramatta right in the middle there. There was somebody else in there, I don’t know that Wheatleys were there originally when we first came, I think they might have moved on the corner at the square in Cabramatta Road. There was the hotel, the Cabramatta Inn, there was a hardware store called Henderson’s next to that, there was, I don’t know whether there was another shop in between, but there was the billiard salon and barbers there and then Mr. Smith, he had a boot makers store, I think, where the bank is now. There’s a bank still at Cabramatta Road, just in the town there, I think it was the Commonwealth or Commercial something came there. And then, I don’t know what came after that. There was a fire engine, the Fire Brigade on the right hand side just almost up at Hill Street.

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Marcia Wordsworth: The police station was just a box in the square. There was a horse trough in the square, and then there were wooden steps both at the railways in the other end from where they are now, and it was like just in the middle of the square but on the outer footpath near the railway. It was just a black and white box; it was more or less just a phone box.

Marcia Wordsworth: Not really. I suppose, well, there was just this police box and there was this policeman called McMasters was the policeman then. I can’t really remember when the first police station came. But where it was…but there’s one around in down there in the corner of Park Road and whatever the other road is, McBurney Road isn’t it? That was people called Popes sold out to the police department. I don’t know where they were before that.

11:53 minutes

Marcia Wordsworth: I remember the name.

Marcia Wordsworth: Yes, Bulls. Charlie Bull used to sell fruits and vegetables in the spare block of land there somewhere near Arthur Street. There was no Arthur Street in those days, so that was going up Cabramatta Road, and then you came back and there was this… Williams had the library in the post office. Then you went round the corner, I don’t remember what was there, but a little bit further up, there was another hardware store, quite a big one, that was Swains, I think was their name, and up from them, there was a fish and chips shop, a bit further up, and then I think the original Chinese restaurant started up there too, just up from Park Road, up to the right and there used to be.. Who else? I am just trying to think when we first came here. There wasn’t McBurney. Oh, on the corner, there was a chemist. Bookalil I think their name was.

Marcia Wordsworth: Yes, I am not sure but I think they were the original chemists. And next door to that, there was a cake shop, run by Donny Matheson. He had been in the navy, and he was there, and then there was a little tiny bank, the Commonwealth Bank, and there was McBurneys. Well then the cake shop folded a fellow called Wearne, W-E-A-R-N-E he had an estate agency there. That was along there, and down past McBurneys, there was the produced store, then there was a house. I think it belonged to some people called Ashcroft. I am not sure, and they had a butchers shop there. There was a butcher shop, there was a house. Then there was Levine’s paper shop and then there was another shop on the corner that used to sell children’s clothes and everything and when we bought Levine’s out a few years later, my husband bought the block of land next door, where the butcher’s shop was, and he got headlines in the local paper "Most money ever paid for a lineal foot of land." and I paid some price for it and he built our shop there. Two storied building. Only 18 foot wide.

Marcia Wordsworth: Yes. It’s still there.