CHAPTER 1

THE MOVE

COLLINGWOOD PROBABLY WASN’T their first choice.

As inner-city suburbs went, it wasn’t as trendy as Carlton, as hip as Fitzroy or as leafy as Clifton Hill. It was a rough-and-tumble little pocket on the edge of the city, with lines of unrenovated workers’ cottages alternating with small factories, just a few minutes’ walk from the Richmond housing commission flats.

But it was cheap, and that’s likely the main reason 28-year-old Suzanne Armstrong was drawn to the small house she found in Easey Street to share with her friend, Susan Bartlett, and her young son, Gregory. Nothing fancy, it was neat and roomy enough for the now single mum, her son and her best friend to share comfortably. Her bike could even tuck in on the porch, just under the front window.

Not long back from Greece, where Greg had been born just over a year ago, Suzanne was keen to make a fresh start in Melbourne. And who better to do that with than her old ally Sue? The two had been friends ever since high school in Benalla, a country town in north-eastern Victoria. Bright, vibrant young women, they seemed to balance each other, each confident in their own way.

Suzanne had already spent time overseas, travelling through Asia, the United Kingdom and the United States between 1972 and 1973, on what, from her letters home, sounded like quite an adventure. She even admitted she had smuggled a suitcase of ‘emeralds’ that was really cocaine from Bogotá to Florida for two men she barely knew. Far from home and running low on travelling funds, the $400 they promised to pay for the illegal journey obviously appealed to her. But she never saw a dollar. ‘I am so naive sometimes, I should be drawn and quartered,’ she wrote to a friend. When she returned to Australia, Sue was in Greece. Suzanne began working as a taxi driver to save enough to be able to afford another trip and catch up with her mate, who had written to say what a great time she was having.

The pair reunited in August 1974 and cruised the Greek Islands together: Aegina, Delos, Hydra, Mykonos, Paros and eventually Naxos, where Suzanne met Manolis Margaritis, a handsome young fisherman. When Sue flew back to Australia in early 1975 to resume a teaching position at Collingwood Education Centre, Suzanne stayed on.

The reason for this was soon apparent. ‘We’ve just been to Athens and I’ve seen a doctor there and he said I was definitely pregnant,’ she wrote to her sister, Gayle, early in 1975.

I am going to marry Manolis. I’ve decided it’s the best thing to do. I know I won’t lead the same sort of life I would if I was in Melbourne, but it will be a very simple life and I hope I will have all the comforts and conveniences I want.

We won’t be living here forever though. We’d better not, anyway … We have ordered our wedding rings; they are 14-carat yellow gold, with fine lines.

Romantic optimism started to fade a couple of months later. A prolific letter-writer, Suzanne confessed her concerns to Gayle as cultural differences became increasingly apparent, especially around her pregnancy. ‘Boy, the things I get told not to do here, you wouldn’t believe it,’ she wrote. ‘I’m not supposed to run an inch, not supposed to sit with my legs crossed or reach up or sit cross-legged on the bed (maybe they think the baby will fall out!) I’m not supposed to lift up Zebby [her dog] or lift anything, it’s really incredible.’

Navigating an international maze of bureaucracy also proved disheartening; the documents required for Suzanne, so far from home, to marry a young Greek man proved impossible to organise, a futile pursuit. ‘I don’t know when we are going to get married,’ she wrote in early May 1975. ‘The priest here is such an old bum, and sometimes I don’t know that I care all that much.’

The birth of their baby boy brought the couple joy, and Suzanne’s mother, Eileen, was there to help with the new arrival. With her partner, Bruce Currie, she visited Naxos to welcome her grandson into the world, and her presence was a relief for her eldest daughter. But they couldn’t stay on the island indefinitely, and an increasingly unhappy Suzanne realised that a decision loomed.

Leaving the island to return to Australia with her son, and without Manolis, was a huge step to take, far from an easy choice for any woman, especially for a new mother in 1975. Social mores were shifting, but raising a child alone still posed problems, and it must have been emotionally wrenching. Initially, perhaps to soften the blow, she told Manolis she would just be leaving temporarily, to celebrate Christmas with her family in December 1976. But this plan changed, she admitted in her last letter to her mother from Naxos. ‘I know it will break his heart when I tell him I’m not coming back, but I will tell him then that the best thing is for him to come to Australia; if he makes it there, he will deserve another try. He keeps asking me if I am coming back and of course, I have to say yes. It’s awful.’

Suzanne bought a one-way ticket home.

Even before leaving Greece, she must have realised that she needed support for this next major step in her life. She knew she could call on Sue for that support. It’s probably safe to assume that her long-time friend wasn’t surprised when Suzanne asked just a couple of months before Christmas in 1976 if she wanted to move in with the new mother and her son when they returned.

If Suzanne was somewhat impatient to forge a new path, Sue was revelling in teaching art and the strong circle of colleagues around her. Respected in her role as an arts and craft teacher at CEC, where she had been working for nearly five years, Sue loved the vibrancy of the inner-city high school and enjoyed the short drive from where she was living, in Richmond, with another friend. She drove a VW Beetle, and often dined in the city’s Greek restaurants; long a fan of the cuisine, she was no doubt savouring her recent holiday on the Greek Islands. When her old schoolfriend reappeared in Melbourne with a baby boy, keen for her to share a place that was even closer to her school, Sue didn’t seem to take much convincing to make the move, despite her mother’s reservations. The two friends had gone to school together, come of age together, seen the world together; she and Suzanne clearly enjoyed each other’s company, knew each other’s history, and shared as a bedrock their upbringing in Benalla. She loved children, too, so her friend’s toddler posed no problem.

While they had grown up in country Victoria, both women knew Melbourne well. Before travelling overseas in the mid-1970s, Suzanne had lived in South Yarra, then back across the river in inner-city Carlton, with its new ‘alt theatre’ scene at the Pram Factory and La Mama. While she was facing a struggle of sorts to re-establish herself in the city without a guaranteed income beyond her single mother’s pension, she must have been eager to jump back into that world, as well as into the effervescence of Lygon and Brunswick streets.

As an old family friend recalls, it was an exciting time to be living in a big city, and the girls likely looked forward to making the most of it. For seven years, Gary Biddle lived next door to Sue, her mother and her brother in Mitchell Street, Benalla, and he has never forgotten the family. ‘We got to know Martin very well, and Susan. When Mum and Dad used to go out, Susan would come and babysit us. I think she was about four years older than us – that was me, my twin brother and my sister. They were the most wonderful neighbours. She and Martin always had kind words to say, they never put anyone down.’

Gary has never forgotten Sue’s passion for the new music of the era, especially a certain young band from Liverpool. ‘Susan was a Beatles freak – she loved them. She went to their concert in Melbourne, I do remember that, at Festival Hall. She might even have gone with Suzanne.’

Sue’s brother, Martin, confirms this trip, which the girls took down the Hume Highway. By bus. ‘In those days there weren’t a lot of bands, and the girls were in Benalla, and it was just one of those things; I mean, they were teenagers and The Beatles were just a phenomenon at the time.

‘It was more their generation than mine. Even though there’s only three years difference,’ he says, mischievously, with a quick grin. A robust, handsome man now in his sixties, he loved his sister deeply. ‘I was the Rolling Stones, which were just a bit later. I think I bought every Rolling Stones album. It was a bit of a hobby; import records from the UK when they were what they called “gold pressings” and stuff.’

Sue’s love of music extended to live bands, which she went to see regularly while she was teaching at Broadford, before her move to Melbourne. Martin credits his mother, Elaine, as the cultural influence in their lives, noting her involvement with Benalla’s local theatre and her genuine love of needlework and sewing. ‘My mother and sister were both arty and crafty.’

To Gary, Sue epitomised the swinging sixties and effervescent seventies. ‘I remember my mum going off one day about her,’ he says with a laugh. ‘She was wearing a miniskirt! Back in the early sixties, right?’

The stories tumble out, words a jumble, as he relives days as a youngster looking up to the girl next door. ‘She was really what you’d call a trendsetter, because she was just with it. Finger-poppin’ bubbly, just lovely,’ he says, describing her ‘Elizabeth Taylor–like’ beauty and stylish dress sense. ‘It’s just something that stays with you. She was just with it, all the time.’

Gary remembers Suzanne Armstrong, too. ‘Suzanne’s [dress style] was more Flower Power. I can still picture her now, fifty years on. She was the kind of young woman every young man wanted to take out.’

It really didn’t matter to Sue that her mother didn’t like the idea of her moving in with Suzanne. Even though the girls were close, the two families were not. And mothers are mothers, after all. It’s their inherent duty to worry about what their daughters do, who they spend time with and where they live.

So there was certainly discussion within the Bartlett family about the friends moving in together. Martin clearly recalls talking it over with his mother. ‘Suzanne Armstrong had just come back from Greece and she was sort of like, “Oh, I don’t know what’s going to happen, because I’ve brought Greg back,”’ he says. ‘Obviously she’s done a runner and she didn’t know what the repercussions would be from the father of the child. So there was some sort of concern there from my mother and me; I mean, that’s what we discussed.

‘And look, Sue Armstrong was sort of pretty desperate to find a place and someone to share it with and my sister [was] probably more accommodating than most and she probably felt, “Oh, okay, I can help her out.” So that’s what she did.’

If Elaine Stanton Bartlett sensed that desperation in her daughter’s friend, her concern would not have been eased by the girls’ choice of suburb. ‘Susan was living in The Crofts with another girl [when] Suzanne came back … At the time, my mother said, “You’re in a good spot in Richmond.” It was just off Punt Road, opposite the MCG, and a nice house. I remember her saying, “Collingwood?” My sister said, “No, it seems to be a fairly quiet street.” Which it was. But you know ...’

It was Collingwood.

And the ‘runt end’ of Collingwood at that, with major construction underway at one end of Easey Street as the already busy Hoddle Street was widened to feed into the new South-Eastern Freeway. If that wasn’t disruptive enough, a health clinic was being built in the street behind them, its brick back wall bordering the yards of the first couple of houses in the street.

The history of the suburb was not salubrious. The area had been split in half in 1842 by surveyor Robert Hoddle and renamed ‘Collingwood’ and ‘Fitzroy’. But east Collingwood, especially, dropped away to the boggy river flats that reached the Yarra. Some subdivision occurred on the higher ground, but ‘Collingwood Flat’ wasn’t filled until the 1850s.

From the start, the suburb was dispatched to struggle. By 1861, some 13,000 residents had moved in. But just thirty years later Collingwood had the dubious distinction of recording the city’s highest death rate – no doubt due to the ‘noxious trades’ for which it is still remembered. Tanneries sprung up next to brewers and brickmakers, providing employment for many semi-skilled and unskilled workers, who moved into the cheap housing built to accommodate them. Unions such as the Victorian Boot Operatives were born, and Collingwood resident Charles Jardine Don was elected as the state’s first openly working-class MP in 1859.

When Collingwood Football Club kicked into action in the 1860s, it quickly became the heart and soul of the suburb. The hallowed playing ground remains significant today, its ardent benefactors following in the famous footsteps of John Wren, whose controversial career started with the illegal Collingwood Tote, a gambling venue that he ran from the back of a teashop on Johnston Street for more than a decade, from 1893.

Intriguingly, this social balance has always been one of Collingwood’s most endearing traits, with various organisations set up to support the poor alongside the suburb’s more salubrious elements. A free medical dispensary was opened in 1869 by Dr John Singleton and continued for an extraordinary 108 years, until its doors closed and the Collingwood Community Health Centre took over in 1977. Singleton is well known, too, for setting up a night shelter for women and a home for ‘fallen women’. One of Australia’s first creches also opened its doors in the 1880s, to assist mothers who worked locally.

Despite such a schizophrenic profile, Collingwood’s council was keen to market itself as the ‘premier suburban city in Melbourne’. Perhaps to back that claim, the rather ostentatious Collingwood Town Hall was built in 1886, smack bang in the middle of Hoddle Street.

For decades, it cast a positive shadow: some of the suburb’s most dilapidated houses were torn down after the 1890s depression, and Foy & Gibson’s department store moved in, just ahead of the new century. By then, Collingwood’s Smith Street had become popular, the most important retail strip outside Melbourne’s city centre, with business strong enough to support G.J. Coles opening its first variety store there in 1914. Trams carried passengers up and down the busy thoroughfares of Johnston, Smith and Victoria streets. Yet the ripple effect of the Wall Street crash of 1929 eventually reached Australia, and Collingwood felt its aftershocks particularly hard. Local employment dried up in the 1930s – and with widespread unemployment a national problem, the suburb again became a centre for cheap accommodation. Dirt cheap, it would seem. Historian Jill Barnard wrote, ‘The pervading memory that many Collingwood residents had of the 1930s was the smell of “Collingwood Coke”, burning leather offcuts collected from the dustbins of boot factories and used instead of wood.’

Ponch Hawkes, a prolific Australian photographer and artist, grew up in the suburb, on the southern side of Johnston Street. Her father worked in the laundry at the local convent for thirty-five years, and trained greyhounds as a hobby for most of his life. He would tell her about walking the dogs around Studley Park and bumping into John Wren, heading to town from his mansion, Raheen, which still overlooks the river from Studley Park Road in nearby Kew.

Ponch remembers Victoria Street before the Vietnamese families moved in and opened restaurants, turning the strip into one of Melbourne’s key culinary destinations. More vividly, she recalls going to the grocer’s as a child to buy broken biscuits. ‘They’d sell you the biscuits that were left in the tin,’ she says, juggling a hot chocolate in the Ladybird Café on the corner of Johnston and Wellington streets. ‘You know, it was SP bookies [territory]. There was this underground gambling and betting activity kind of everywhere. And it was an area where people knew everybody. You knew that person, and they knew that person. Of course, I’m looking back on it now, [but] as a kid, it was normal. It’s just what it was. It had no “side”, you know what I mean? There were no fancy shops or nothing that you’d imagine any middle-class person going into or anything.’

And when the locals had a night on the town, they stayed local. ‘If you went out with your parents, it was going to the dogs or going coursing, or going to visit their friends. If we went to play ourselves, [it was] Studley Park, we went there all the time. And my brother went to Collingwood Tech.’

Ponch Hawkes left the house her parents had lived in ‘for a million years’ when she went to Monash University in 1964. And slowly, as this nascent photographer started capturing all that was happening at the Pram Factory in Carlton and helped set up Circus Oz just around the corner, her old stomping ground started to change shape.

The little inner-city pocket bounced back. Again. This time with the unexpected influx of migrants, who also found the cheap housing appealing. By 1971, overseas-born residents comprised more than 40 per cent of the population, and with several generations of that Greek, Italian and Indo-Chinese infusion, Collingwood has never looked back.

Over the next two decades, whole blocks of houses were razed and replaced by medium- and high-rise flats, the widening of Hoddle Street and the construction of the F19 Freeway (now known as the Eastern Freeway) to Doncaster placing a physical divide between Collingwood and neighbouring Clifton Hill. University students and middle-class professionals eventually noticed how handy the area was in terms of transport, how big some of the blocks were, how the historic buildings added grace and history to the surrounds and how much impact fledgling radio stations 3CR and 3RRR were having from their knockabout studios in Collingwood and Carlton. Workers’ cottages were renovated for the first of many times, old warehouses transformed. Such was the air of reinvention that American artist Keith Haring visited the neighbourhood in 1984, gracing the free-standing side of Collingwood Tech with one of his renowned ‘dancing man’ street murals.

Beyond Smith Street, Fitzroy now beckoned. But only for hardier souls. ‘I had my [photographic] studio there for fourteen years, and I remember some people at the Pram Factory had this idea of buying a row of four terraces in the street beside it,’ Ponch Hawkes recalls. ‘And they were terraces that came right into the street. I just said, “They’re slums.” That [was like] going back to the slums to me. Of course, you’d be a millionaire if you owned them now.’

When Suzanne Armstrong and Sue Bartlett moved into the suburb right next door to Fitzroy in late 1977, they must have sensed they were on the cusp of Collingwood’s reawakening, its second act.

They loved the area. There was a milk bar on the corner, a good bus service, a couple of hospitals nearby – and the rent was affordable, maybe half of what some were paying in Carlton. Suzanne posted the $100 bond and the pair moved into the three-bedroom cottage in mid-October 1976.

The house was simple but comfortable, boasting the layout of so many inner-city rentals at the time, with three rooms running off the hallway to the right and a small lounge room at the end, the kitchen and bathroom at the back of the house. House-sharing was the ‘new norm’, the way thousands of young Australians were living in cities around the country, sharing rent and food and household chores, within the shifting cultural landscape.

The girls settled in quickly, Suzanne choosing the front bedroom, with a window that looked out over the front porch and onto the street, and Sue taking the third, with a window that opened to the side laneway. Gregory’s cot was in the room between them, also used as a sewing space.

They set up a couch, a television and a stereo system in the small living room. The phone hung near the door that opened to the hall. The compact kitchen was brimming with energy too, little Greg’s painted wooden highchair under open shelves lined with travellers’ trinkets; a couple of ceramic jugs sat above a mounted snow globe and a seashell that had perhaps jetted in from a Greek Island beach.

Off to the side of the kitchen was the narrow bathroom, a large floral mat matching the carnations and roses adorning the shower curtain hanging in the bath.

Outside, the yard, with its thatch of grass and Hills Hoist, meant that Mishka, the fourth member of this new family – a cheerful young dog with a long white blaze over her left eye – was well catered for, her kennel tucked under the kitchen window for outside shelter.

So it wasn’t fancy, but it was a home, and from all accounts a cheerful one that those who visited felt welcome in.

As Melbourne’s wet spring edged towards summer, the girls had a quiet housewarming and, several weeks later, with Christmas holidays in full swing, Susan Bartlett’s teaching colleagues made up the numbers at their New Year’s Eve party. They had a barbeque going in the backyard and music playing. Maybe Chicago X was on the stereo; Pete Cetera’s short, lovelorn ballad ‘If You Leave Me Now’ was a central part of that summer’s tapestry. That is, unless the hosts were into local groups like Skyhooks and Jo Jo Zep and The Falcons. It was an explosive time for inner-city music, with indie punk groups Bleeding Hearts and Stiletto on the ascendency. But whatever they were dancing to, friends there that night describe two happy young women embracing the crackle of change in the air and the community around them. It was invigorating.

Su-lin Loh remembers Sue as a powerful presence in her family’s life. Sue was friends with her mother, Morag Loh, an academic and co-author of The Immigrants, and the Lohs would stay with the Bartletts at their beach house at Inverloch. Sometimes Nick Dimopoulis, Sue’s boyfriend, would be with her. ‘When she and Nick came to the beach, they just slotted in and were really nice to be around; he was Greek and terribly proper, a gentleman.’

Su-lin also met Suzanne Armstrong at the Easey Street housewarming. She left quite an impression on the teenager. ‘I only met her once, but I remember it really clearly. Suzanne had on a pair of white trousers and a green extended boob tube. She had beautiful hair, very seventies hair.’ She laughs. ‘And I remember thinking, “You’re beautiful and you look amazing.” She just seemed like a lovely person too.

‘My memory of them both is that they were happy, confident, friendly, outgoing – and enjoying life. Sue Bartlett was just brimming with confidence. She wasn’t a small girl, but she was completely comfortable in her own skin and how she looked. She was a good teacher too, she was respected at work.

‘They were girls of their time, very much so. But they weren’t wild “party girls”. They were nice, really nice. If they had a few boyfriends and had a party, I just think good on them.’

Martin Bartlett was at the house for both gatherings and recalls a pleasant, low-key affair on New Year’s Eve, a gentle, unassuming welcoming-in of the year ahead. ‘Every time I went over there, there weren’t people knocking on the door, or dropping in or phoning and saying, “Hey, can I come over?” or “Are you going to do this?” I mean, very quiet, very quiet. It was not a party [lifestyle].’

His sister was looking forward to consolidating the career she so loved, and enjoying a friendly, if casual, relationship with a young salesman, successful enough to have purchased a white Mercedes, which he occasionally parked in Easey Street. Well and truly standing out. For Suzanne, too, the start of the new year must have felt like a positive point.

Keen to reshape her life in Australia with her young son, she had reunited with her family – especially Gayle, the oldest of her two younger sisters, who had a son just two weeks older than Gregory. A few days after the New Year’s Eve gathering at Easey Street, in fact, Suzanne went on a blind date with the brother of Gayle’s boyfriend. They hit it off, and went out twice more, each time with her toddler in tow, culminating in Sunday-afternoon lunch at his sister’s house a couple of suburbs away. They took the portable television outside and sat on the lawn with his family, and made plans to have dinner together two nights later.

Her new beau took her home that Sunday night, 9 January 1977. He met Susan over a cup of tea, and her friend, who’d parked his car out the front. As he left, he promised to call Suzanne the next day.

And he did. Many times.

But no one answered.