In May 1931 unemployed workers throughout the Illawarra demonstrated against the presence of police at food relief depots. At Port Kembla an unidentified man addressed a crowd at the corner of Allan and Wentworth Streets, only to be arrested by a squad of police from Wollongong. The police also charged the crowd and arrested Alexander Slade for indecent language. Slade, an unemployed labourer who was camped at Port Kembla, was typical of the itinerant men who flocked to Port Kembla during the Depression. *

In Wollongong the local labour movement and its supporters engaged in a lengthy dispute with the Wollongong Council over the right to hold meetings in the main street of Wollongong – Crown Street – from 1929. The conservative council had rightly gauged the symbolic importance of the main street of Wollongong, and charged protestors with unlawful assembly and participation in unauthorised processions to assert their control over this space. **

see Illawarra Mercury 15 May and 3 July 1931 *
see Richardson, L. The Bitter Years: Wollongong during the Great Depression, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1984, pp 75–100 **

Source: Eklund, E. Representing history in the Main Streets of New South Wales, Locality Vol. 9 No. 1, 1998