Our Place: Surry Hills, Darlinghurst & Paddington Interviews

Our Place - Surry Hills - Warren (Whacker) Richardson b. 1944

Whacker is the second youngest, of a family of nine children, and the family lived in Dawson Street, Surry Hills.  he also spent a great deal of time in Woolloomolloo, where is best mate lived and whom he hung out with at the Woolloomooloo Playground. He excelled at basketball, earning his nickname, Whacker, in the process. We had a two-bedroom, two-storey terrace house, with three rooms downstairs: a lounge room, you walked into a lounge room, a dining room and a kitchen, and there was two bedrooms and a verandah upstairs. We lived there up to about 1960. There was a little group of five houses, all terrace houses. My parents only ever rented. There was a factory opposite us and all around us. He was interviewed in March 1995 by Sue Rosen as part of the South Sydney Social History Project.


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.