Glad tells of the sights and sounds of the Cross and the city, and of the characters who lived at the Cross when she was young. Glad lived in a terrace house in Victoria Street, and later she lived in one of the first high-rise blocks of flats at the Cross, ‘Corinthia’. Glad’s father deserted the family, but her mother was a ‘very good manager’. Glad’s older sisters, who worked, ‘had to put their money down on the table, and get pocket money’. Her mother and sister owned a cake shop and café at the Cross for a few years from the late 1920s till about 1932, when the Depression caused them to sell the business. When the building on the corner of Kings Cross Road and Victoria Street was demolished, in the 1920s, ‘there was so many rats and that in those buildings that they tunnelled under the Cross, and of course some came up in our shop’. Glad’s mother also lived by doing a bit of SP betting: ‘Yeah, … she was very tinny. … mum was betting, studying the form guide, and that eventually meant we were able to afford to buy a car.’

Caveat: This video was shot on a Sony Hi 8 video recorder. It was not until 2010 that we could get the analogue tapes digitised. Despite careful storage in the intervening period there has been some deterioration in quality. While we have retained the original .mov files from the original digitization in the SRA Archive, by necessity uploaded here are .mp4 files. The video is raw and unedited, a primary source document recording the occasion.