WHEN Norma Rodgers of Sydney moved house last week, you could say she was bucking the trend in the Australian rental market.

The average Australian tenant is 25-35 years old, and lives in the one property for between two and three years.

Norma is 80 and her family has been renting the same Victorian terrace house for more than 85 years.

When Norma’s family moved into the three-bedroom house in Waterloo in the 1920s, the average rent in the inner city Sydney suburb was $1.63, or the equivalent to $59 in today’s economy.

The view has remained the same — Norma has lived across the road from Redfern Oval, the home ground of the South Sydney Rugby League team, the Rabbitohs — but just about everything else has changed.

Today, the average rent for a three-bedroom house is about $800 and the average occupancy is three people.

When Norma was growing up in the 1930s, there were 15 people living in the house.

“There were my grandparents upstairs, my aunt Elsie on the front veranda, which was closed in, and my parents, Florence and Alfred, in the front room,” she told news.com.au.

Ten children shared two bedrooms, boys in one, girls in the other, and according to Norma, it was so quiet in the house at night “you could hear a pin drop”.

While Norma grew up in the house, she did leave, once married, to raise a family of her own, and then eventually returned to the family home.

In recent years she has had to endure a succession of noisy neighbours renting the house next door.

Norma’s father Alfred worked as a labourer in an era when the average male factory worker earned $409, worth $12,775 in today’s money, and women earned $6200, compared with the average factory worker in 2013 earning $38,000.

When her family moved into the house, some time before 1927, Australia had six million people — just under a quarter of today’s population — and was becoming more materialistic with half a million cars, 400,000 telephones and one radio for every 20 people.

Bread cost about four cents, the equivalent of $1.54, for a 2kg loaf and people worked a 44-hour week.

Like the rest of the world, the country was about to endure the hardship of the Great Depression.

The South Sydney league club was on a winning streak — taking seven of the eight premierships from 1925-1932 — and Norma remembers Redfern Oval surrounded by a wooden fence.

Despite the burgeoning popularity of automobiles, few people around working class Waterloo owned cars.

The house was put on the market earlier this year following the death of the matriarch of the family which owned the property and another terrace next door.

But when Norma moved out of the house last week, she didn’t go far.

“I’m still living in the same street,” she said.

Redfern Oval in the 1930s. Picture: Sam Hood, NSW State Library

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