Christine and Sean Burridge
There was a police chase on and we got held hostage in the house…

Christine Burridge is 21-years-old and has lived in Minto for 20 years, while her husband, Sean Burridge is 22-years-old and has lived in Minto for 17 years.

Christine: My mum’s English and my dad is German, Aussie and Aboriginal.

Sean: My mum’s Australian and my dad’s English. It’s good here, learning about other people’s cultures. My happy memories were just living in Sarah Way, riding my motorbike and gocarts around and having fun on them with all the kids in the street.

Christine: Our happiest memory would have to be when we met in Minto and we lived together, and we got married and had kids in Minto. So Minto is a big part of us. We lived in Sarah Way and my dad has lived there the whole time. He has never moved. Now that he’s had to move, he moved to Westmead. I was on Goodwin Crescent and now I’ve just left there and gone to St Andrews. That’s just on the other side of Minto.

When we were little, living in Sarah Way we used to leave our doors and windows unlocked. You could go up to the Mall and leave your door unlocked and know that nothing was going to happen. As we got a bit older, my brother got kidnapped from our backyard. He was 10 years old. He was playing with the little dogs we had, and someone jumped over the back fence because we had an alleyway behind us. We got him back luckily, later on that night. He was screaming down a street a couple of hours away. He told a lady our phone number and she rang us and we rung the police, and they brought him home.

He was going through a lot of hassle then and he was scared but Sarah Redfern Primary’s Mrs McBride was wonderful. She gave him counselling and helped the whole family out. He’s over it now. That was our worst time but we had support around us.

Sean: Going back about nine years ago, when me and Christine first got together, we were living in Calton Way and there was a police chase. We got held hostage in the house there by someone the police was after. The guy had no weapons. He made us go upstairs so he wouldn’t get found. The dog squad was there. The police tried to take me, but our neighbours helped and said that I’d been there the whole time, that it wasn’t me, and they found the bloke hiding in our bathroom upstairs.

Our daughter is three in August. She’s been living in Minto since she was born. Her name is Angel. We’ve just had our second daughter, her name’s Tamaka and she’s three months old. In the meantime, we got married in Ingleburn, the next suburb from Minto.

The house we moved out of a week ago, the front was facing a paddock and our back was in our street. In Sarah Way where my dad used to live, he lived straight across from the school. We used to think, “Oh no!” As soon as he looked out the backyard he could see us at the school so there was no way we could be mucking around in the playground without him seeing us. We felt a little ripped off when we’d try and play and he’d say, “I can see you, get back to school”.

Christine: It’s amazing because half the people I used to hang out with in my street, I’m still friends with to this day, so it’s good in that way. When we were little we used to live in the same street, then [my dad] moved away and I stayed, then he came back and we ended up uniting again. So it’s a bit of a weird story.