EVICTION RIOT

Hokitika Guardian, 30 June 1932, Page 6

EVICTION RIOT

DISTURBANCE AT NEWCASTLE

LANDLORD “ON THE DOLE.”

SYDNEY, June 28

There was ,a serious riot at Now cast, e ever an eviction for non-payment ot rent. The tenant, one of the unfor:unate unemployed, says that he • pa** rent for ten months after he hail lost his last job -(that is, till November, 1931), but since then ho has been unable to pay anything. Hearing that the tenants were to be tunned out, about 200 men armed themselves. with garden forks, razor Wades, iron bars, brickbats ’and loaded batons, and prepared to resist fh e officers of the law. There was a desperate and sanguinary fracas, and the police were reinforced to the number of sixty before. they got the upper hand. The mob behaved with brutal, violence, kicking and bludgeoning the police /■on they leu, and eventually twelve policemen and seventeen others had to be removed for first aid or hospital treatment. Many arrests' wer e made and charges of rioMug were prefeHecl against nineteen men, who hav e been remanded. Meantime ail attempt ibeing made by the Labour extremists at Newcastle—always a centre of “red” agitation—to organise a onedav strike by way of" protest against the action of the authorities.