Janette Finn
To get this school down here, we had to picket in town

I’ve lived in Minto since the 20th of October, 1976 and I’m 58. We came from Concord originally due to the illness of my son. At the time, there was no way you could save a deposit for a house because he was just so ill. Sometimes I think it was for the better and sometimes I think it was not so good.

The Department told us that yes, we would get a school, a pool, a picture theatre and a shopping centre as well as a tram that went around the estate which, as you can see, has never arrived.

We had no buses here when we came, no doctor, no public phone. The closest public phone was at Minto Station, at the post office. The trains used to run one an hour in and out. If you wanted to go to Liverpool or Ingleburn, it was easier to walk to Ingleburn than to wait for the trains to come.

We watched the houses across the street being built and now we’ve watched them all get pulled down again. The other thing was there was no escape, you were here and you were stuck here.

To get this school down here, we had to picket in town. We got bus loads out of here and went to town. My father saw me on TV with a placard that said, ‘Please let us have a school!’ and he was horrified and one of his mates said, “I’ve seen Jan on the TV,” and he said, “Yes, don’t talk about it.” It was a thing they never did and it was the first time I ever did it. They thought you shouldn’t have to do something like that and I thought, “They need a school.”

We used to go to the school to work in the canteen and the library and help in the classrooms. We’d have to go with the kids in the morning and come back in the afternoon on those buses. Sometimes, that poor bus driver would stop four or five times and have to put kids off the bus because they were crammed in and they’d fight. It wouldn’t matter if it was the kid who started the fight or the kid who was trying to help the other one not get hurt, they’d all get thrown off. It was horrible, you feared for your own kid’s safety coming home.