Marrickville in the 1940s
In the middle of the war, the biggest crowd anyone had seen at Marrickville Oval turned out for a game of cricket. The embankment is full to the top, the terracing behind the low white picket fence is full, and beyond the ground fence stand the rows of terrace rooftops and a factory chimney that tell you exactly which suburb this is. Grade cricket, in 1944, with the fielders spread wide on a turf wicket and a district's entire idea of a Saturday banked up around it.
That factory chimney was doing well out of the decade. Fowler's pottery, in Marrickville since after 1906, appears again from the air — the ring of conical bottle kilns around long saw-tooth sheds, a tall smoking chimney, a cylindrical tank, stacked pipes in the yard and a watercourse down one side. The company had been making the plain and necessary things since 1837: drainpipes, chimney pots, bricks, laundry tubs.
The army is here too, and it is not the recruiting-poster version. First-day recruits in slouch hats stand about a yard at the Marrickville depot, looking into a jeep with its bonnet up while others crouch beside a motorcycle and covered trucks wait behind them. Later in the decade — 1948, the war over — a hoarding goes up in a park: *Learn Leadership — Join the New Citizen Army Today*, a painted soldier pointing out of a tank, with the units listed underneath for anyone still interested.
