ABOUT THE BOOK

Paula Hamilton created the book Cracking Awaba Stories of Mosman and Northern Beaches communities during the Depression which provides much of the content for this website. Paula is an oral historian and Associate Professor of History at the University of Technology, Sydney. She works on community projects through the Australian Centre for Public History, which she co-directs.

WHY CRACKING AWABA?

The name Cracking Awaba came from a story told by Harley O’Regan and was chosen because it reminds us of both the pleasures and dangers of living in the 1930s.

Harley O’Regan's story…

My cousin, he had ideas that matched his stature, you see. He decided he was going to build the biggest billy cart that was ever made and we were going, to use an expression, crack Awaba Street... so we built this enormous thing which would sit three of us on it and it had brakes that you pulled on, and in theory you pulled the brakes on and you stopped if it was getting a bit dangerous… Captain Hall [Harley’s cousin] was in charge at the back of the brakes and everything like that, and I’m steering…So we started off at Moruben Road… and boy did we work up some pace, the brakes wouldn’t work, in fact they broke off ... I couldn’t steer the thing because it was just too much, we were going too fast and we shot into Stanley Avenue. I think one wheel came off and that skewed us fortunately, otherwise we would have kept on going down the hill. We went diagonally across and crashed into the wall of a house in Stanley Avenue. The board broke in half, the thing disintegrated completely but two of these big heavy wheels… kept bounding down Awaba Street. Must have been going 90 miles an hour by the time they got to the bottom and I can remember one of them because we had eyewitnesses accounts… one bounded over and went through someone’s roof and the other one kept on going down. You know down at the bottom there was a concrete wall about three feet high and a foot thick… this wheel hit that and it took off. Must have gone to New Zealand it was going so fast, but what it did do, it cracked this concrete fence and we used to look at that crack every time we went past with some guilt I might add… In later years I thought now what if that wheel had hit someone.