Geelong was hustling and bustling in the eyes of those arriving from small towns. Street-trams turned sharply around the corners, even passing our house. In the early mornings a regiment of workmen cycled towards the Ford motor factory, the fertiliser works and the new wheat silos in one direction and the woollen mills in the other. Their bikes occupied so much of the road that the few cars could barely pass them. There was an urgency in the way some people, when pedalling, rang their little bells fixed to the handlebars.
Sunday in a small country town was quiet, but in Geelong the numerous church bells pealed, though our church in Newtown owned no bell. In front of most churches a noticeboard announced to passers-by who would preach that day, at 11 a.m. or at 7 p.m., and which particular text from the Bible would inspire the sermon. By Saturday night, the noticeboards were lined with texts from Corinthians, Romans and Revelation, as if these would persuade people to abandon their own church and visit another.
From the verandah of our house on the slopes of Pakington Street we glimpsed the bay and the rugged You Yangs. The hoot of cargo steamships was sometimes heard when the wind blew our way. Along streets near the wharves many Scandinavian and a few Indian sailors sometimes strolled, while a few young people from the Pacific island of Nauru always were studying in the town: Geelong had close links with that phosphate island close to the equator.
John, Joan and I were enrolled at Newtown, a state school about a kilometre from our home. Miss Mockridge, who presided over the younger classes – she lived to be 100 – looked at our reports and concluded that Joan and I should be advanced a grade. John was already three grades above me. Year after year, we were each among the youngest in our classes or forms. In my crowded classroom maybe seventy students were taught by the one teacher; and the keener students were enlisted to help those who lagged in their lessons.
At Newtown State School the female teachers seemed more animated than the male ones, some of whom were returned soldiers and perhaps affected by their experience of war. One languid good-natured man opened our gates of knowledge in the morning and wearily closed them well before the day was over. In one year the most rewarding lesson was in gardening. A few of us were allowed to turn on the tap at the top of the schoolyard and let the water flow down the irrigation channel we dug in the soil. The garden sometimes blossomed.
It is easy to forget how vulnerable we were. In the street or in a shop an adult could rebuke us sternly and sometimes unjustly: adults had more moral and punitive authority than they have today. Even in the school’s playground an older bully could snatch our bag of marbles or small bundle of football cards and run away, knowing if he was big that he might never be pursued.
On the whole we must have liked school. During one year I did not miss a single day of attendance, even sacrificing the chance to visit the distant city of Ballarat in the family car. That afternoon, however, I trudged home to the empty house and wished that I had missed school.
In wet weather, at recess time, groups of boys assembled in what was called the shelter shed where they gloried in a game called ‘hoppo bumpo’. The custom was to fold one’s arms, hop forward on one leg, and try to bump over a rival boy who had hopped forward from the other side of the shed. At playtime in winter a makeshift football was produced from somewhere, and the game of kick-to-kick prevailed. As leather footballs were expensive, a small, cylinder-shaped ‘football’ was made from a rolled-up newspaper. Imitating our heroes in the Geelong Football Club we would swagger around, making important gestures with the paper ball in hand, and taking an inordinate time before we kicked it.
In the year we moved to Geelong, I first watched its team play football – the game of Australian Rules of course – at the old Corio Oval, not far from the bay. A few years ago I went there; and to my surprise the football ground in the hollow below the Botanic Gardens had completely vanished, leaving no sign of the two grandstands, the steep embankments where the spectators stood, or even the oval itself. That they have vanished does not really matter, because I see the scene vividly.
My first visit was on a dull winter day and I went with my father. Setting out late we could hear the intermittent roars of the crowd as we came closer to the Corio Oval. Walking past the rows of parked cars, we paid our silver coin to enter the ground, and walked up the earthen embankment. Suddenly, as we neared the top, the green grass and the thirty-six players in bright colours came into sight. Instantly I thought it was a magical scene. Geelong was playing South Melbourne and the navy blue and white of the Geelong footballers’ guernseys and socks contrasted strongly with the red and white of the opponents. The bright colours and the painting-like quality of the scene captured my imagination.
Back in Leongatha we had sometimes watched the local team but knew nothing about big-time football. I did not even know the names of most of the big league teams in Victoria. When suddenly we were confronted on the embankment of the Corio Oval by the sound and sight of people roaring their support for Geelong, I did not even know whether I should be on their side. For an hour or so I was inclined to support the opposing team, its colours being brighter, but by the end of the game I was a Geelong supporter and have remained so.
In the course of that year I became totally infected with the local enthusiasm for football, and by the time the 1938 season commenced I was determined to see as many as possible of the nine games that were played at Corio Oval in that year. Dad bought a membership ticket that entitled him to sit in the smallish grandstand and to take several children with him; and from the flat wooden benches I could see the marshes and the bay. I could smell the burning wood that, at little makeshift stalls behind the grandstand, boiled the water that heated the saveloys. From the footballers’ change rooms below came wafting the smell of eucalyptus. The cheap universal medicine, eucalyptus oil was used to rub down the arms, legs and backs of footballers and also, in the form of a few drops soaked in white sugar, as a magical cure for our coughs and colds.
If we arrived early at the oval, we could see the last of the players arriving individually, with their footballing clothes packed in their small Gladstone bag. An afternoon at the football was a special outing; and numerous spectators dressed for the occasion in their Sunday suit – their only suit – and wore that wide-brimmed grey felt hat without which a man, in those days, was considered ill dressed.
Nowadays barrackers like to wrap themselves in their team’s colours. Before the Second World War, however, virtually nobody except the footballers wore the team’s colours. I did not once see a Geelong flag or banner carried by a spectator to the football ground. I knew no child who owned even a scarf in Geelong’s colours of navy blue and white. In fact young boys were inclined to see the scarf as ‘sissy’ and to be worn only by girls.
As boys we longed to wear a Geelong guernsey, but they could not be bought at the clothing shops, and in any case would have been too expensive for most families. A few mothers, however, were coaxed into converting worn-out school jumpers into football guernseys, and to affix a number to the back. Sadly those home-stitched jumpers did not look remotely like a football guernsey, for in those days the real one had a collar. Seeing the coloured beanies, scarves, flags and jumpers of a modern football-going family, whether poor or rich, makes you recall the frugal era when new items of clothing were expensive. Maybe most of the nation’s children in the 1930s wore second-hand clothes.
The team mementos that I did possess were precious. Small cards, larger than the present credit card, they displayed on one side the photo of a footballer, either in black and white or full colour, while the other side provided details of his footballing skills. Originally they had come in packets of cigarettes, one card to each packet, and were known as cigarette cards. By the 1930s they were issued with tiny packets of chocolate and also with slim packets of chewing gum, which was then the juvenile fad. Somehow I acquired 200 or more of these cigarette cards from the wife of a returned soldier. She explained that her boys, growing up, no longer collected them.
I divided the cards into the twelve teams of the Victorian Football League and treasured them. My brother and I even devised a game in which the cards lay in an oval-shaped section of the carpet in the best room (only the best room had a carpet) with players of one team in their set positions resting alongside players of the other team. A round marble served as the football; and the player cards kicked the ball towards their own goal. I kept a notebook in which the final scores of each match were recorded. When I was the umpire and the sole court of appeal, the Geelong team did well in this imaginary code of football.
When the Geelong team was playing in Melbourne, and the match was important enough to attract a radio station, I prepared to listen to the large ‘wireless’ in the sitting room – and operated my own scoreboard. In those days a game of football usually started at 2.45 p.m., so that people who worked in the morning could have time to go home, change out of their working clothes, and then proceed to the football ground. When the time for the radio broadcast came near I was in a state of tension, hoping that the sound of the broadcast would be clear and that Geelong would win. The football ‘match of the day’ on ABC Radio was introduced by a military band playing a Strauss tune, and the band was allowed to play uninterruptedly for a minute or more before the announcer on duty advised us that ‘we are now crossing’ to so-and-so ground to hear a broadcast of the match. The idea of playing classical music as a prelude to the broadcast of a popular football match would now be seen as highbrow.
I kept the scores not only on my homemade scoreboard but in my memory. Long afterwards I knew by heart the quarter-time scores, half-time scores and final scores of every match in which Geelong had played when I was a boy. Nowadays when I return from a Geelong football match, I write the final scores in my diary, knowing that otherwise I might forget them.
Soon I devised private games that imitated football. When walking on my own along Aberdeen Street to school each morning – members of our family all left home at separate times – I would play an imaginary match of football. Cars travelling one way served as scores for Geelong, and cars travelling in the opposite direction served as scores for, say, Collingwood. If the car was a pre-l930 model it only counted as one point whereas the latest Ford or Willys counted as a goal which equalled six points. Likewise, when I entered church on Sunday morning just before eleven o’clock, I looked at the board that listed the numbers of the four hymns to be sung. To me they were, when translated, forecasts for the football scores on the following Saturday.
Not until later years did I realise that my father, in attending the football, was carrying out his pastoral duties though he also enjoyed the game. His church had footballing links and he thought it his duty to take an interest in whatever attracted the members of his flock. The most famous footballing family in the history of Geelong were the Rankins, and they belonged to our local Methodist church. Teddy Rankin, as some called him, is said to have been the inventor, in a match against Fitzroy, of that sensible custom, when running with the ball on a wet day, of not bouncing it on the sodden ground but of leaning down and briefly touching the grass with it. His ingenious solution became a tradition of the game. One of his sons, Cliff, captained and coached Geelong to its first premiership in nearly four decades, and Bert was the champion goal kicker in the league.
Ted Rankin, his footballing days long past, sang each Sunday with his wife in the church choir, which stood in a high gallery looking straight down on the faces of the congregation. Alongside Ted in the choir stood his youngest son, Doug, who at that time was a promising Geelong forward.
Almost next to our house, in a side street, lived a fair-haired boy named Jimmy Knight. He was so slender that he might not be selected today in a senior football team but he was quick and courageous and very fit. He became a rover for Geelong just before the Second World War. On some Saturdays soon after lunch we saw him set out for the Corio Oval with his Gladstone bag. Often he said ‘Good day’ to us which we counted a privilege. Once he agreed to take to his team’s training room my new red-backed autograph album; and a week or so later he returned with the autographs of all the Geelong players. When Japan entered the war he enlisted in Australia’s air force and, serving at Goodenough Island in New Guinea in October 1943, he crashed his plane and was killed. Four decades later, after I praised him in an article in Melbourne’s evening Herald, his sister wrote me a letter of reminiscence.
Only once did we attend a football match in Melbourne, though that city was barely 70 kilometres away. We attended the 1940 grand final between Melbourne and Richmond, and the crowd was so large that those of us who were young could see almost nothing until the last quarter when the crowd began to disperse. Hitler controlled nearly all of Europe, and yet here was a huge crowd behaving as if it were peacetime, and as if the real enemy was the umpire. Sixty years later I was invited to a large dinner in honour of some of Melbourne’s premiership teams of the past, with Ron Barassi speaking for the 1960 team and Percy Beames for the 1940 team. Being a football historian I was invited to speak on behalf of the 1900 team because all its players were dead. Later, around the table, I listened with fascination to the three surviving players of the 1940 team discussing the ups and downs of their grand final. In the course of the evening I learnt more about that match of long ago than I had seen as a submerged spectator.
In the provincial cities the churches were the focus for social and sporting activities. When the younger boys of our church decided to field a cricket team, Ted Rankin borrowed much-used stumps, bats, pads and ball from Geelong College, where he was the head groundsman, and entered us in the under-age section of the Protestant cricket association. We played our first match on a matting pitch, and our opponents came from a small farming village called Stonehaven. Being young, we failed to realise that the two umpires would not make certain decisions unless we first appealed to them by shouting, ‘How’s that?’ So the umpires remained silent through all kinds of near-fatal errors by the opposing side, until Rankin advised us to appeal in loud voices. Our match, like scores of others, was reported in the Geelong Advertiser which listed the low scores that we each had made.
Next to the church was its own tennis court where we taught ourselves to play. In every sport we had to teach ourselves: there was no coaching. My brother John taught himself with high success and when very young could play a straight bat, bowl accurately, and kick a long drop kick. I had no sense of style, and did not learn how to imitate others. But at tennis for a time, maybe through sheer determination, I was skilled beyond my years.
One weekend the Australian tennis stars John Bromwich and Adrian Quist, along with Harry Hopman, came to Geelong to play exhibition games. It may have been just before they won the Davis Cup against the United States, and a big crowd was expected. The Geelong tennis chieftains decided to appoint ball boys, and though aged only eight or nine I was one of the boys selected, along with John, to fetch the balls and throw them back to the players. My parents told me to clean my tennis shoes – in those days they were painted by hand with the aid of an old toothbrush and a kind of white liquid. Spick and span I appeared at the tennis courts. A highlight for spectators was when Quist hit the ball so hard, in such an unexpected direction, that it almost knocked me to the ground. More memorable was the end of the tournament when I was presented with several shillings for my day’s work.
The matinee at the cinema was a high point of the social calendar in suburban Australia, and groups of children, perhaps on a birthday outing, arrived in their neatest clothes and were ceremonially shown to their seats by an official and – if they were late – escorted to their seats by an usher shining a torch into the darkness. I felt only a small attraction to the cinema, unless the film was an adventure or firmly historical. On those few Saturdays when I was invited by friends to attend a ‘movie’ matinee at the West Geelong picture theatre, I usually resented the waste of the afternoon. One visit was part of the birthday of a friend of my sister. The main film starred Shirley Temple, displaying her curls and dimples, and performing her dances and songs with a pert cuteness. In 1938 she was Hollywood’s top star but boys of my age disliked her. As I owned no watch, I thought the Shirley Temple film would never end.
The theatrical event of the year took place in our own house on the morning of 25 December. A Christmas tree, consisting of a green branch of a pine tree brought from the country on the previous day, was tied to the wall and topped with streamers and silver paper, and on the branches we placed a present for each member of the family, bought with our own money. At that time no family of our acquaintance erected a Christmas tree. It was our mother’s belief, not our father’s, that we always must have a Christmas tree. Curiously the Methodists, viewing the exuberant celebration of Christmas with distaste, did not honour the day with a special church service unless Christmas fell on a Sunday. Accordingly the whole day for us was usually free of duties.
The Newtown Methodist Church was rather stately, of yellow sandstone and white limestone, with two aisles separating the lines of ornate wooden pews. The minister’s wife and family always sat on the left side, halfway down: that was presumably the tradition. Each Sunday morning one of the stewards or ushers, waiting at the front door to shake the hand of adult members of the congregation as they arrived, deemed it his duty to escort my mother and her four children down the aisle and show us to our regular seat. Methodism was proud of its friendliness, and the shaking of hands but not the kissing of faces was the custom at every opportunity, before and after divine service.
The sense of togetherness on which Methodists prided themselves was audible in the singing of hymns. A congregation was judged worthy according to whether its singing was ‘hearty’ – a ubiquitous word in Methodism – and not lukewarm. From an early age I joined eagerly in the singing.
My father preached in our church building about every second Sunday morning, for other churches nearby also demanded his attention. In his absence his fellow ministers or laymen conducted the service and delivered the sermon. One of the laymen was J. J. Peart who lived within sight of the church. A rural headmaster, long retired, his manner was stately, and his authority unchallenged. When he walked slowly down the wide carpeted aisle to his favourite pew with Mrs Peart at his side he resembled a reigning monarch. He had once been the headmaster of the goldfields school at Majorca where the Nicholas children were pupils; and after two of the Nicholas boys became the manufacturers of Aspro, the most popular patent medicine in all Australia, they sometimes gave money to Peart’s favourite charities.
J. J. Peart was the first speaker who made me feel that a poet was worth admiring. He centred a few of his sermons on talented poets and hymn writers who were in their heyday when he himself had been a young teacher. He would recite religious verses composed by Christina Rossetti and Frances Ridley Havergal and link the verses to episodes in their lives. He largely controlled his strong emotions when speaking, and that made them the more powerful. For the closing hymn at our church he would occasionally, from the high pulpit, call on the congregation to sing with all its heart Miss Havergal’s charming hymn ‘Master, Speak! Thy Servant Heareth’. He would recite expressively the first verse, as the custom was, before the pipe-organist was allowed to play the opening. On the rare times I hear that hymn on the radio, I see him facing the congregation, an image of an elderly King George the Fifth, his face slightly radiant.
For most Australian children of that era, Sunday was a special day though it was seen as a day of duty as much as a holiday. I observed the atmosphere of Sunday morning, even at maybe the age of five. There was a silence in the streets, and almost everything was closed. It was different to the other days, and we were allowed to read in bed until a slightly later hour; and Mum and Dad by their attitude announced quietly that they were not completely in charge of us. I suspect that they both had imbibed the religious text that, in full colour, was printed in flowery style on pieces of cardboard framed on the walls of countless Australian sitting rooms or placed prominently on the kitchen mantelpiece: ‘This is the day which The Lord hath made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.’
When we awoke we saw our Sunday clothes laid out ready for us to wear. On such a morning I used to rub into my windblown hair a sweet-smelling yellowish oil called brilliantine, which almost kept it in place. To have your hair neatly parted, in a straight line down the side or right down the middle, was a high priority. On the previous evening we had to clean our shoes, rubbing the black polish into them and then shining the leather. My father, however, cleaned his shoes almost every day of his adult life – except Sunday when he gave them just a flick with a cloth. Another ritual of Sunday morning was an inspection of faces and behind ears by our mum. She presented each of us with pennies to place in the ‘collection’ plate passed around at a certain stage of divine service. Though we did not know it, we were helping to pay our father’s own salary or his ‘stipend’, as it was called. A few years later our parents decided that we should be paid a larger sum of weekly pocket money, and that from that sixpence or ninepence we should personally set aside our own money for the collection plate. This indirectly served to diminish our dad’s stipend.
The whole family was out of the house for much of Sunday. The custom, however, was that the back door should not be locked.
When Mum had a new baby, she carried it in her arms to church. Crying babies – so long as they did not cry continually – were welcomed in the congregation, though if they happened to bellow during the prayers or sermon they would be taken outside and patted on the back, rocked to and fro, and perhaps fed a little milk from the breast before being carried back into church.
Dad was fond of classical music and made financial sacrifices so that we could learn the piano. Miss Wyatt used to ride her bicycle with a stately posture down the hill to attend evening services in the Newtown church, and she taught the piano in an elegant house with verandahs fronting the wide Virginia Street. At about the age of nine I was enrolled as one of her piano students. Instructed to play the piano each morning at home, aided by the rhythm of a metronome she lent me, I found the piano practice a burden, and instead used the metronome to mark the time in some football game I had ingeniously contrived.
The highlight of Miss Wyatt’s year was an afternoon gathering – almost a soiree – at her house where the young students in turn played the piano with the sheet music before them and plates of chocolate biscuits – then a luxury – arranged as a reward. I played her chosen piece and was also granted permission to play ‘My Old Kentucky Home’, one verse only. My parents, observing with their own ears that their money was being wasted, readily met my plea that the lessons should cease.
I was too young to show more than a flickering interest in history. When I was aged eight, Geelong celebrated its centenary, and children had to take a role in the civic rejoicing. At the Corio Oval, where in winter the Geelong team played in all its glory, a festival was arranged, and we were dressed as golliwogs and our faces were darkened with a sock-like black mask with holes for eyes. On the arena I heard for the first time Percy Grainger’s jaunty tune ‘Country Gardens’. Of popular music I knew almost nothing – moreover that tune was not yet so popular as it later became.
Sometimes I would ride down to the nearest wharf to see deep-sea ships coming and going. Many coastal freighters, grimy or rusty, used the wooden piers close to the main streets. Each afternoon at 4 p.m. the tiny SS Edina, said to be one of the oldest steamships in the world, for she was built in 1854, set out with passengers for Portarlington and Melbourne. The one-way fare was a mere two shillings and the signboard on the wharf was cautionary, always announcing that she would sail ‘circumstances permitting’. The port had its seasons and as I loitered around the wharves, watching and listening, I realised that there was a regular season for the overseas wool ships which mainly used the Yarra Street pier and another for the overseas grain ships which often tied up at Cunningham Street pier.
On some Sunday afternoons, Mum would walk us down to the port with Ellis, then the youngest child, sitting in a pusher. It was exciting to examine the stern of a ship and see, above the propeller, the painted name of its home port. Yokohama or West Hartlepool, when painted in white on a half-rusty strip of iron, seemed exotic. Sunday was a kind of open day in the overseas ships berthed alongside the piers; no loading of cargo took place, and an officer, more neatly dressed than on weekdays, might be on duty at the top of the gangway. Visits by parents and their young children were often welcomed, and we would walk carefully up the steep gangway and from the deck look over the side of the ship to the water that seemed so far below and, if we were lucky, be shown the captain’s quarters or the wireless operator’s room. In Japanese ships the officers, usually dressed in white, spoke no English but were notably friendly.
One weekday afternoon, holding my bike and dawdling at the piers, I watched the grubby coastal ship SS Saros taking in her heavy cables from the wharf and being towed into the shipping channel of the bay, and a day or two later I read in the newspaper, to my astonishment, that she had been wrecked somewhere beyond Wilson’s Promontory. After the interstate ship Orungal was wrecked on a reef close to the headland at Barwon Heads, I cycled to see the strange sight of a stranded ship onto which the waves were breaking. At home one wall held a coloured map of the British Empire, alias the world, on which were drawn the main sea lanes; and when I heard that a departing ship was about to sail to a foreign port I would ride home and inspect the route it was likely to follow.
The family suffered one serious mishap at Geelong. Dad, perhaps through overwork, caught measles and then rheumatic fever and had to lie on his back and keep his head firmly on the same pillow for eight weeks. On Sundays members of the congregation poured into the house to visit him and wish him well. ‘The Geelong ministers stood in to a man,’ he recalled. We crowded into his room to share Christmas dinner in 1940.
An exciting event of my childhood now seems trivial, but then fell like a gift from heaven. It involved Grandpa Lanyon, whom I must now introduce properly. Henry Maynard Lanyon was his full name but he called himself Maynard, the name coming from his grandmother – one of the three Misses Maynard who, Protestants by religion and seamstresses by trade, had emigrated as teenagers from Wexford in Ireland in the early 1840s. On the other hand, the Lanyons were Cornish. Our grandfather, the son of a Cornish-born farmer, had been reared on a wheat farm on the north-western plains of Victoria near Boort. Eventually he became a teacher and moved around Victoria, becoming the head of larger and larger schools. While he usually wore an orthodox grey suit and a grey felt hat, he favoured what was called the batwing collar which meant that he wore no tie. He displayed what my mother called the longish ‘Lanyon nose’. He was the only one of our relatives whom we met in nearly every year of our childhood, and we rejoiced in his visits.
I did not yet know how public-spirited he was. When the new language called Esperanto became the rage – an artificial East European language that was intended to end all verbal misunderstandings and even to terminate all wars – he embraced it. He taught my mother and her brothers and sisters how to read and write it. Not long before the First World War, he was spending a large sum in posting picture cards, with Esperanto messages written by his own children, to penfriends in Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Warsaw and other Central European cities where the new language was being hailed by many professional families as the saviour of humankind. Dozens of his penfriends must have died in the First World War.
In 1917 when victory in the war was not yet in sight, he addressed a manifesto, printed in Esperanto, to selected soldiers of the warring nations and even to President Wilson of the United States, outlining his plans to end the war and to prevent future wars. He advocated not only a United Nations organisation but also the creation of a strong international army and navy to intervene for the sake of peace. These steps, if successful, would be followed by a general disarmament around the world. A printed version of his manifesto was widely discussed in Australian newspapers. His was a long-range plan; he did not wish to halt the recruiting of more Australian soldiers for the depleted armies in France and Belgium.
On controversial topics of the day his interest was intense. A wall of his house displayed a framed certificate proclaiming that he had voted at the referendum held in 1899 to decide whether Victoria should enter the proposed Commonwealth of Australia. When a few years later the federal parliament, meeting temporarily in Melbourne, had to decide which was the best site for the new capital city, it could not make up its mind and toyed with a dozen sites in south-eastern New South Wales. One summer, my grandfather set out on his pushbike to inspect nearly all the sites, travelling hundreds of kilometres along hilly gravel roads He carried his few possessions on his bike and, if I understood him correctly, regularly posted his stained shirts and underclothes back to his wife who was living in Corryong in north-eastern Victoria. When he reached a town with a draper’s shop he bought a few more shirts and pairs of socks. This procedure relied on a hardworking wife.
When young he rode a motorbike; but an accident permanently stiffened one of his arms, and even the act of putting on an overcoat became awkward. He then travelled everywhere by train until, at about the age of sixty, he bought a streamlined Plymouth. This American car miraculously appeared outside our house in Geelong during a school vacation. Grandpa asked whether any of us would like to travel with him on the day-long journey to Bendigo, and the two oldest were selected. So one fine Saturday morning in May 1938, we joined this enthusiastic driver, my brother John in the front seat and I in the back.
At a speed that would have shocked our mother, we were soon charging along the road towards Ballarat. We boys knew enough about cars, our father being a very safe driver, to realise that we were travelling with Jehu. It only enhanced the outing. In no time we were in East Ballarat where old Aunt Polly was providing hot tea and cake while her silent husband, much older, sat by the fire, a black iron poker in his hand. A few hours later our fast car left for the gold city of Bendigo. This was the first time I had ever seen signs of goldmining; and in paddocks alongside the highway were mullock dumps of clay or stone, many of them fresh, the search for gold having been revived during the Depression of the 1930s.
We reached the outskirts of Bendigo soon after sunset. Our favourite Jehu, his one useful arm tugging at the steering wheel, eventually reached his own mother’s house in the suburb of Quarry Hill. After we had rung the doorbell and waited for what seemed an hour she came to the front door. In a kindly way she instructed us, to our juvenile astonishment, to put the horses in the stables before we came inside. Her memory was failing, and she assumed that we had come in a horse-drawn vehicle. After all, she herself had travelled over much of the western half of Victoria when roads were unmade and the horse was king.
Once inside her rambling house, my brother and I were not in the least interested in questioning her about her slow dray-journey, long ago, to become one of the first white women in a new farming district. Instead we longed to know who had won the football, for Geelong was playing at Richmond. From her wireless, after much tuning in, we heard the final scores.
The next day passed with a visit to the Quarry Hill church and all kinds of short excursions in the bright-green car. On the third day we left for home. As we sped along the narrow bitumen road towards the spa town of Daylesford we were full of merriment, until Grandpa picked up a swagman who had hailed the car. Thereafter, to our resentment, the two became absorbed in adult conversation. Our wonderful journey was almost over.
Grandpa neither smoked nor drank but had a craving for confectionery. Wherever he travelled he carried a white paper bag containing boiled lollies, acid drops, aniseed balls, humbugs and other tooth-breaking sweets. On the occasions we met he would take us on long strolls, handing out sweets, telling us simple jokes. His way of laughing was eccentric; and when his enjoyment of a joke was about to fade he could prolong the laughter for a few more syllables. On meeting a stranger, his common mode of address was ‘My good man!’ A child was sometimes greeted as ‘My little man!’ Unlike some of the stern, unbending teachers of that era, he was fond of children.
He taught us how to play chess, long before we had the patience that was demanded by that slow-moving game. When we visited him in Melbourne the chessboard was brought out, too early for my liking, in his darkish ground-floor study. There he kept a pleasing library including heavy volumes called The Historians’ History of the World which he read assiduously. Their prose was too oratorical to appeal to the young but his reverent attitude to the books was noticeable. He especially liked statistics about Australia, and he presented to me at an absurdly early age his copy of the 1935 edition of the Official Year Book of the Commonwealth with its thousand pages of statistics in fine print, along with the odd press clipping that he had pasted on the appropriate page.
Knowing much about history, Grandpa helped to infect me. Like most people then, his knowledge of Australia’s history came less from books than from the reminiscences of relatives and acquaintances. That line of contact conveyed him back to the 1840s with ease but in the convict era he showed no interest: the convicts primarily belonged to New South Wales and Tasmania whereas he was a Victorian. He accepted an invitation to write and print a history of his local Methodist church in time for its fiftieth birthday in 1933; and when several decades later I read his book I belatedly realised his restless talent. The topic of his history was narrow but was enlivened by his numerous asides and his high ideals: ‘Why are we Australians just now waking up to the needs of our own aborigines? Why do we still inflict on our children the barbarism of English spelling, and the difficulties of our system of writing? Why do we keep up the language barrier between nations when there is a way out?’ His way out was, of course, Esperanto.
In this book he chattered on, praising the cheerful morning greeting from a neighbour, the prose of the King James Bible, and the hymns which ‘set the warm blood flowing’. He celebrated Australia’s brilliant skies and wide spaces which, he hoped, would give rise to ‘a spiritual individuality’ that no other nation could express. He rejoiced in ‘the glory of the clouds, the splendour of the sun, and the sweet quiet beauty of the moon’.
His wife Mabel was not often seen in the fast green car. Thin, neat, and practical she was always busy. Her thoroughness was evident even in her way of eating: she methodically chewed every morsel of food. A feeling of duty hovered over her during nearly every waking hour, and she did good works in every town she lived in, but there was a natural kindness mixed with the sense of duty. Though she had not received much formal education she read widely and seriously.
After she moved from the country to the Melbourne suburb of Box Hill she became active in this and that worthy organisation. The various missions to the Aborigines, Fijians and Papuans received money from her purse and also coins she collected from others. Becoming prominent in the local branch of the United Australia Party – the dominant conservative party – she baked scones, poured cups of tea, handed out how-to-vote cards on election day, wrote out the minutes of meetings, handed out petitions for indignant and passive citizens to sign, and put together the bouquet to be presented to the wife of the visiting speaker. When she died unexpectedly in 1942, R. G. Menzies reportedly said that her death was a blow to his political party which by then was in the doldrums nationally, though not in the suburban electorate where she had laboured.
Mum taught us to be independent. In many ways she was less protective of us than was our father, but more encouraging when we took risks.
In Geelong we were encouraged to earn pocket money. Along the narrow street running at the side of our house was a large bread-bakery and its team of delivery horses. It does not seem entirely hygienic for the stables and the sweet-smelling bakehouse to have been side by side, but the health inspector ensured that the stables were freshly hosed. Sometimes I took a wheelbarrow or a billycart there and in the vegetable-growing season I would deliver manure to backyard gardens of neighbours for a small fee. I also collected sauce bottles, jam jars and soft-drink bottles and sold them to a man who came round with his horse and flat-topped cart, calling out ‘Bottle-o’ in a high voice. As Dad did not like us to collect beer bottles – he was an ardent teetotaller – that eliminated one source of revenue.
I longed to be allowed to sell newspapers at busy intersections, after school. There was something exciting about this frontline activity. All the time the boys shouted aloud, ‘Herald, Herald’, and jostled potential customers or thrust the newspaper almost into their face. A tip occasionally was pressed into the hands of the newsboy. ‘Keep the change’ was one of the swashbuckling sayings of the era. As street newsboys were cheeky, many parents thought that their own sons would be ‘keeping bad company’ if they joined those selling newspapers on the street corners. It was considered more appropriate to be riding a bike and delivering newspapers to selected houses in street after street – a form of delivery called a paper round. In this lonely task there was little chance of mixing with the rough and tough and learning bad language. Nothing more distinguished that era than the determination of large numbers of parents and teachers to prohibit or frown on swearing and bad grammar and their confidence in denouncing it, when confronted by swearing in a public place or in the presence of women. It was astonishing that the son of a nonconformist clergyman, Bob Hawke, did much when prime minister to make swearing seem respectable; but then he, as a social rebel, was rebelling against a taboo that must have been imposed on him as a child.
At the age of ten I inherited an afternoon paper round from my brother John, delivering papers to a zone of narrow streets in West Geelong on each weekday or on the much busier Saturday. My employer, Mr Chapman, rented a shop close to the railway station; and my first task was to collect the heavy parcels of newly printed newspapers that had been tossed onto the main railway platform from the guard’s van at the rear of the Melbourne express. I picked up the parcels, some heavy and some light, and carried them to my bike and, after precariously arranging them on the handlebar, pedalled swiftly to Mr Chapman’s shop. On Saturday evenings my arrival was anxiously awaited, for already the shop was half-filled with customers eager for the latest news. Chapman pulled out his knife and swiftly cut the whitish rope that bound together the various bundles. Placing some Heralds on his counter and selling them to the waiting customers, he carefully counted the other copies before handing bundles to me and the various other newsboys to deliver. Then I rode along the narrow streets of my ‘round’, placing the papers at the front gate or door of the regular customers. In winter the evening papers were distributed after dark. Fortunately they were light in weight, for a shortage of newsprint was thinning the large-sheet Herald down to a mere sixteen or so pages.
As newsboys we each on our bike carried a few spare newspapers in case a passer-by wished to buy a copy. Every now and then we would shout our wares, calling ‘Herald Sporting Globe!’ as if it were one rather than two newspapers. The Herald then cost one-and-a-half pence, and some male customers handed over twopence and said, with a burst of generosity, ‘Keep the change.’
On Saturday nights, I also delivered copies of the pink-coloured Sporting Globe which printed vivid descriptions of that day’s league football matches, maybe to three-quarter time, with the final scores appearing in a column kept vacant on the front page and known as the ‘Stop Press’. Most readers turned to this column before they read the headlines. The phrase ‘stop press’, no longer used, indicated that the actual printing of the newspapers had been stopped so that the latest piece of news could be added. It was one of the exciting phrases in the language during the dark months of the war, and in that little corner of the front page were the latest snippets about the bombing of London or – if no news had arrived ‘by British Official Wireless’ in the past few hours – lesser items of news from the front line.
In the winter of 1940 the war was at a crucial stage, and on some evenings many residents would be waiting at their front gate for their copy of The Herald. It announced dramatic events: the German troops entering Paris, the collapse of Belgium, Italy becoming our enemy, and the latest aerial battles in which ninety or more German planes were reportedly shot down from the British sky. There was even talk that Hitler would invade Britain any day. The headlines often selected the good news, and it was my understanding that the Germans were losing the war. I did not realise that so many people were waiting for me at their front gates largely because they were fearful that the Germans would win the war.
I followed the disasters and the occasional triumphs of the Allied side in the European war every day except Sunday, when newspapers were prohibited by law. My fascination with the war in France became so intense that I tried to recreate it in a shaded corner of our side garden. In sandy soil where nothing seemed to grow, I began to dig a line of miniature trenches facing each other. No deeper than a forefinger, and paralleled by sloping sticks that I intended as tank-traps, the trenches were an imitation of what I thought was happening on the fighting fronts in Europe. Trenches were more the hallmark of the First World War than of the Second. In the early months of a new war it is the previous war that is likely to inhabit the imagination.