The history of Sydney's Surrey Hills is in many ways typical of inner-city suburbs around Australia.

Today it's a trendy, expensive enclave full of restaurants, galleries and extravagant renovations.

A hundred years ago though, Surrey Hills was a slum, populated by newly

arrived immigrants from all over the world. It heaved under the pressures of overcrowding

and poverty. We're joined on Australian True Crime today by our friend Michael Adams from the

Forgotten Australia podcast for a story from early 20th century Surrey Hills,

a place unrecognisable from our modern perspective, but all too real only a hundred years ago.

This is Australian true crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which

this podcast is created, the Wurundri Woi Warang people of the Kulin Nation.

And a warning, this episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.

Surrey Hills was called in one of the newspapers at the time, a discreditable rookery. A rookery is kind of like a

slimy place that's filled with birds that poo everywhere. So it really was, it really was

a slum. Even by Sydney standards, it was considered a disgrace. What, I'm assuming there's a lot

of crime. This sounds like a recipe for crime to me. Look, there is crime.

I mean, there's crime everywhere, but when there's crime in working class suburbs, it gets a lot more

attention. There's also another worry, which is immigrants, or not immigrants, because we still

have the white Australia policy at this time, but Chinese people who've lived in Australia for

generations and are still working and living in and around

Surrey Hills. So the fact that this was a place where Chinese people lived because, you know,

the market's haymarket was very close and that sort of thing would have also, you know,

lowered its estimation in the eyes of, you know, mainstream conservative, white dominated newspapers.

And that is where the story actually starts in a

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