thanks, Geoff for that interesting article

Alistair Hulett - Back from Down Under by Mel Howley From The Living Tradition magazine - Issue 34, Sept 1999 ... Twenty-odd years in Australia fostered in Hulett a taste for the "old" Australia, and its politics - and in his song "The Siege Of Union Street" there is a case of direct action from the times of the depression. "Somebody gave me a pamphlet and said that I might like to read it 'cos it was about the street I was living in at the time! I read it and it amazed me. There had been a struggle to prevent the eviction of a war widow and her children, and over a thousand people had fought in the streets for three days against the police and the landlords, and managed in the process to ultimately get the law changed." Alastair was given a copy of a taped conversation with a man by the name of Jim Monroe who had been a founder member of the Unemployed Workers Union, the organisation which had waged the Union Street campaign. "One of the things he said was about the solidarity amongst the people fighting to prevent this unjust eviction - they were grand old days on the barricade! - and I knew that that was the angle I wanted to write from. After that, the song just wrote itself."

video- Alistair Hulett & Dave Swarbrick live at the Trinity Sessions, Adelaide March 31 2007.