I began life not under a cabbage but at home, in my parents’ bed, where I was born. But before that happened my parents had to meet. My mother, Athen Millane, was a nurse and trained midwife and, along with a friend who had completed similar training in the same large Melbourne hospital, she had in 1927 opened ‘Mildon’, a small private hospital in a nice old house in the comfortably middle-class Melbourne suburb of Caulfield. It was more a convalescent home than a hospital, there being no operating room or serious surgical equipment, and the biggest medical events of any week would have been the births of the many local children who were safely delivered in its midwifery unit. The new mothers would subsequently spend a few days in the care of the small staff of trained nurses, the local GPs calling in each day to check on the recovery of their ‘middy’ cases and on the state of health of other patients booked in for overnight or for longer stays.7 These other patients would include people who had undergone surgery or treatment in one of the big fully-equipped metropolitan hospitals and who had been discharged after a few days to convalesce in a small private hospital, thereby making room for the admittance of more serious cases.
My father, Jim Mulcahy, was a young GP new to the area, and at Easter time of 1930 he accompanied a slightly older colleague to Mildon to meet the owner/managers, Sister Millane and Sister Donovan, and to decide whether he might in future refer cases to them. Fortunately my mother rather than her nursing colleague was on duty when my father was introduced. The meeting became a case of love at first sight and within a few months wedding plans were afoot.
My mother sold her share of Mildon to her business partner and set off for her parents’ home in Hamilton, 300 kilometres northwest of Melbourne, to prepare for the wedding, set to take place on the day after Boxing Day. December 27 had been selected as the wedding date so as not to greatly inconvenience guests travelling from distant places such as Melbourne and having to absent themselves from work for several days.
Four of my mother’s five brothers, my uncles Bill, Frank, Ray and Leo, were all working in Melbourne and they all travelled to Hamilton together for the wedding in Leo’s newly acquired Essex. The car had not been ‘run in’ and so had to travel at low speed. The fuel for the engine was fed by gravity rather than by a petrol pump, so climbing even modest gradients was something of a problem, with the petrol not keen on flowing uphill from the tank at the rear of the car to the engine in front. My uncles hit on the solution of reversing the car up the hills, with one of them walking in front and another walking behind to explain the situation to any other travellers on the road.
Having left Melbourne early in the morning of Christmas Day they had not arrived by sunset, and as darkness fell my grandfather set off walking down the Melbourne road swinging a hurricane lantern to guide ‘the boys’ home. He met them at the foot of the hill at the edge of town and was puzzled to see them and their new-fangled motor car facing towards Melbourne rather than towards Hamilton. He was not impressed by Leo’s contraption that had obliged his boys to travel so slowly, and often backwards, all the way from Melbourne!
The wedding went off without any other hitch and after the ceremony and reception my parents drove to Melbourne and sailed on the Nairana for a honeymoon in Tasmania. My mother was terribly seasick and so my father gave some thought to staying and setting up practice in Tasmania. But as he had already bought a house and started up his own practice in Melbourne, where his mother and sister lived and kept house for him, such a dramatic change of plans was not really practicable. So my mother returned, as she had gone over, on the Nairana, and was still seasick even after the ship had crossed Bass Strait, steamed up Port Phillip Bay and the Yarra River and had tied up at its berth at North Wharf behind what is now Southern Cross Station.
My father’s decision to marry had come as quite a shock to his mother who apparently had believed that he would remain at home with her as the comfort of her old age. When he announced his intention of bringing his new wife home, my father persuaded his mother that she should move out and a house about to be built in a nearby suburb was selected for purchase. Building work progressed very slowly, however, and my grandmother and aunt were not able to move into their new home until nearly six months after my parents’ wedding. As a result, the new daughter-in-law had to share house and husband with her mother-in-law. My grandmother seemed to always regard my mother as an interloper rather than as a daughter, and the six months spent together were very difficult. It was not until a little over two years after the wedding that the first child, my sister, was born and 21 months later, at the height of the Great Depression, I put in an appearance, the first son.
My mother once told me that I had barely stopped crying for the first six months of my life, and that a nurse friend had taken one look at me, had shaken her head sadly, and had declared, ‘You’ll never rear him.’ I can’t remember why I cried so much and indeed, unlike many others, I have no precise memories at all of early childhood, just those of a warm and loving existence with my parents and older sister. I would like to think that, if I was a total pain for my family for the first six months of my life, I made up for it by being a source of uninterrupted joy thereafter but, alas, that did not prove to be the case.
My younger brother arrived when I was just on four years old. All three children were born at home and I recall being brought into my mother’s room and seeing her lying quietly there in bed with a baby by her side. Some people remember being wheeled around in the pram; I only remember the pram as the one in which my sister and I took turns at wheeling our baby brother. Some people even claim to remember suckling and being weaned; I recall the day on which my brother, then about two years old and sitting on my mother’s knee as we drove along in my father’s Hudson, accidently dropped his dummy while waving it from the car window. ‘Gone,’ he declared, philosophically accepting that that stage of life was over and, as far as I know, cheerfully accepting his subsequent meals of the meat and three veg type. He would sit in a high chair in the kitchen at meal times, enjoying his food rather than splattering it around and, on another occasion, he had a photograph taken which my parents framed and sat on the piano in the living room. Beside it were photographs of my sister and of me, but they were pale and sepia-toned while my baby brother was in glorious colour, a process just then being introduced. He was dressed in a skyblue outfit and seems to have been in his usual sunny mood. The laughing and smiling that may then have seemed to be the product of the skilful photographer’s antics were, I now believe, the outward expression of my brother’s sunny disposition and sound philosophy of life, a sort of ‘Take it as you find it’, a ‘Make the most of it’ and an ‘Always look on the bright side’ attitude that has served him well. My sister and brother were both shown smiling or laughing at the camera, whereas I had a pensive, rather wan look … the typical problem middle child, I suppose.
Shortly before my fourth birthday I set off one day with our wonderful live-in maid, Vera, for a week’s holiday on her parents’ farm in south-western Victoria. I now realise that this arrangement had been made to get me out of the house while my baby brother was being born, as was my sister’s holiday at the same time (in her case, on the farm of one of Dad’s cousins near Tatura). Vera and I travelled by steam train and after four or five hours arrived at the tiny railway siding where we were met by her brother-in-law who, unlike most of the other small-scale farmers in the district, had a car. We were first of all driven to their place where Vera’s sister had a grand meal ready for us and then we went on to her parents’ farm, where they had a small dairy herd and grew a lot of potatoes. I slept on a bed behind a canvas blind on the front verandah of the little weatherboard farmhouse, discovering that a kitchen could also be a dining room, sitting room and playroom (the other three rooms in the house were all bedrooms), appreciating that a wood-fire stove could warm a whole family and their house as well as cooking the meals and providing hot water, and learning that candles and kerosene lamps were fun but not to be entrusted to children. Vera’s father and her brother Jack worked the farm while her mother and sister Nance did the housework and the cooking, and looked after the men. Life on a farm was (and still largely is, I think) hard, with early morning rises and long days in the paddocks, and even at that tender age I learned from my holiday just how lucky I was to be the doctor’s son in a comfortable home in Melbourne.
My father was the son and grandson of farmers and my mother was the daughter and granddaughter of country shopkeepers. Their marriage had come as something of a surprise to both families as they had each seemed to be engrossed in their professional careers, as doctor and nurse, and each had reached a relatively mature age … 35 for my father and 30 for my mother. It proved, however, to be a happy and successful marriage. One wet Sunday afternoon when my sister, brother and I were still primary school children, we persuaded our parents to write down the names of their first cousins: between them they produced over a hundred and, as most of them had, like them, married and produced children of their own, we children found that we had literally hundreds of first and second cousins. This is the earliest recollection I have of dabbling in family history and it was quite some time later that I realised that information about the lives of my cousins and of earlier generations of the family could be useful in understanding my own life. But at that early age I was neither philosopher nor historian and the opportunity of talking at length with my parents about their parents and grandparents, people who had actually known the family members who had travelled to Australia by sailing ship in the 1850s,8 was alas lost.
Many of my earliest memories of life involve my mother’s parents and their home in Bendigo, where they settled in 1933 after my grandfather’s retirement from business in Hamilton.9 Soon after we were born, we were taken up to Bendigo to be shown off to the proud grandparents (we were their first grandchildren) and each year thereafter we would all go up to Bendigo for the Easter holidays and the Bendigo Easter Fair. My grandparents’ house always seemed big and eerie to me. It had been built in around 1870 as a church or more correctly ‘chapel’ for the local Primitive Methodists. As a child I was always inclined to think that ‘Primitive Methodists’ were some sort of wild or barbarian Methodists, perhaps from Fiji or Tonga or some other cannibal isle in the South Seas, whereas in fact they were simply a breakaway group in early nineteenth-century England striving to get back to the pure ideals of early Methodism. (Though the Primitive Methodists still exist as a fundamentalist sect in the USA, the congregation in Bendigo, originally made up largely of Cornishmen working in the surrounding gold mines, had faded away by the early 1900s.)
In the 1920s the building, which was of triple-brick construction and on massive stone foundations, had been sold and turned into a private house by an enterprising developer. The steep iron roof was replaced by a Marseille-tiled one at a much lower pitch, the high Gothic-arched window above the original front door went, and a handsome bay-windowed living room was built right across the front of the building, the entrance hall on one side turning to run initially along the inner side of the new room and then turning again to run down the middle of the house, ending with a door into the back garden. A wide verandah was built across the front and the old church porch and steps were replaced by a rather grand entrance at one end of the new verandah, with sweeping steps rising up from the new garden. The whole building had then been rough-cast, or covered with a tinted wash of cement and small pebbles, ones which later on were the source of endless abrasions for a boy keen on climbing walls or asked to wash windows or to touch up the paintwork on the gables and architraves. One thing that I didn’t like about the house as a child was that I could not see out of any of the windows other than the bay window in the front living room (the only totally new window in the place). The other windows, although wide, were all too high for me to see over the sill. They had probably been built that way to help the Primitive Methodists avoid outside distraction and daydreaming while attending church services and to just let in ‘God’s heavenly light’. To a pre-school-age boy they seemed more designed to keep me in the dark than to encourage my mind to soar.
We visited my Great-Grandmother Fanny Sullivan shortly before her death at the age of 94.10 She was the only one of my great-grandparents whom I actually met and she still lived with her daughter, Mill, in Maryborough in the central Victorian goldfields where she had met and married her husband in 1861. My parents, sister and I had been staying with my grandparents in Bendigo and had ‘motored over’, as my grandmother used to say, to Maryborough for the day. It was quite an expedition as the road, although sealed, was a winding one and, taken at about 30 mph (the speed at which my father and most good drivers travelled in the late 1930s), involved about two hours of travelling time. The route took us through Harcourt, where we always stopped to buy a case of apples at an orchard gate, and then Castlemaine, where a stop was usually made to ease a carsick passenger (me) and to stock up on ‘Castlemaine Rock’, a local confectionery tasting somewhere between toffee and peppermint. A picnic lunch was the order of the day, sometimes taken in the Botanical Gardens in Castlemaine and sometimes in the park at Vaughan Springs, where at least one full glass of brackish-tasting mineral water had to be got down by us children before anything more appetising was allowed. We then went on through Carisbrooke to Maryborough, arriving after lunch. The timing was designed to spare my Great-Aunt Mill the trouble of having to provide lunch for a carload of visitors, or was it perhaps designed to give her ample time to set out the most splendid afternoon tea which would await us? When we arrived, my great-aunt somehow just happened to be on the front verandah and came out to the car to greet us, one hand raised to shield her eyes from the bright sunlight while she worked out who was in the car.
She was a tall, well-built woman with a deep voice and the wispy beginnings of a goatee; she was dressed in a severely tailored blue skirt with a white blouse ruched and buttoned up to the collar. Out of doors she always wore a white tennis shade with a green rubberised band around her head to keep the shade in place. I found this puzzling, as I never saw Auntie Mill play tennis. (Later on I did learn that in her younger days she had been a keen player, readily accepting invitations to play from her many nieces and nephews, some of whom were close to her own age, provided they dropped the title ‘Aunt’ when speaking to her at the tennis club.) She apparently wore the tennis shade outdoors because her eyesight was failing.
Once arrived in Maryborough we all poured out of the car and after hugs all round my father, with some difficulty, opened the double gates at the side of the house, rarely used as there was no car there, and drove in a little way to get the car off the road. Parking in the street was considered ostentatious.11
I slipped quickly into the house and headed for the living room, hoping for a preview of the afternoon tea which I knew would be set out and covered with light embroidered ‘throwovers’ in case of the odd fly. The living room was a long room, entered from the hallway at one end and with a fire burning in the hearth at the other, my great-grandmother’s favourite rockingchair always beside it. The room had a big window opening out to a shady garden beyond a wide verandah, whose overhanging roof tended to keep much of the sunlight out of the room itself.
I reached the room, saw the fire, the table, the covered party spread, and began to lift one of the throw-overs when a firm voice came from the shadows by the fireplace: ‘And what do you think you’re doing, stickybeak?’ My great-grandmother in her long black dress, almost invisible in the gloom, was suddenly standing right beside me. She pinched my arm and then gave a little laugh. I was more startled than had been intended, but by the time the others came into the room to greet Grandma, or ‘Ma’ as she was called, I was already enjoying the cream-filled brandy snap she had slipped to me. Brandy snaps have remained my favourite gourmandise ever since. None have ever seemed as good as the ones in Maryborough.
Two months later Auntie Mill was staying with us in Melbourne for part of the May school holidays. She had left her mother in the care of the maid and of friends and neighbours as she had been wont to do for several years at the urging of her mother (who insisted that her daughter take a break from her carer duties at least once a year). This time, however, a few days after Mill’s departure her mother suddenly felt unwell and told the ‘little maid’ (my mother’s words: I never knew the girl’s name) to ‘telephone Miss Sullivan in Melbourne and tell her to come home, as I’m dying.’ The maid did as she was told, phoning Auntie Mill at our house and then the priest and the doctor in Maryborough. Mill returned home immediately and arrived just in time to say goodbye to her mother who, even at the end, maintained her reputation as being a person who said what she meant and meant what she said.
Another of my early memories is of the time my grandmother and Miss Donovan, a neighbour in Bendigo, went to New Zealand on holiday. They were a little bit like Chaucer’s pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales as they combined their holidaymaking with attending a religious festival held in Wellington to mark the centenary of the landing of the first Catholic missionaries in New Zealand. I think that the highlight of the trip for my grandmother was, however, a visit to Rotorua where she found much relief from her rheumatic pains in the hot sulphur springs. Miss Donovan on the other hand had no need of sulphur baths and could not get away from ‘that damn stink’ fast enough. The Australian ‘pilgrims’ heading to Wellington travelled on the Huddart Parker liner Wanganella, which sailed from Melbourne in the evening, and our family went down to see them off. I vividly remember the music of the ship’s band, the streamers, the excitement of the people and my concern that we were not going to get off in time before the ship actually sailed. The coloured lights strung along the deck swayed as the ship slowly moved off down the river from its berth at South Wharf. Perhaps my own life-long fascination with ships began then.
I suspect that I may have been a nuisance with my carryingon about being carried away, because the next year my grandmother went for a cruise to North Queensland and the Barrier Reef on the new Kanimbla of the McIlwraith McEachran Line. I was not taken to the wharf to see them off and knew nothing about the trip until long afterwards. Similarly I was not taken to see Auntie Mill and a friend off on their Pacific Islands cruise on the Orama in the following year, although I did get to sigh over a few menus and other ship memorabilia when they returned and Auntie Mill spent a few days with us in Melbourne before returning home to Maryborough.
I was, however, taken to see the new P&O Strathallan in March 1939 when she was returning to the UK on her second or third voyage. One of my mother’s nursing colleagues, whom we called Auntie Glad, was going as far as Bombay, having been recruited through a big Melbourne hospital to ‘special’ the wife of a colonel in the British Indian Army. The colonel and his wife had come to Australia to buy horses for the army, and his wife had taken ill in Melbourne. (Years later my mother mentioned that the wife had actually suffered a bout of ‘dipsomania’, which my mother hinted was endemic among the upper echelons of the Raj at the time. Auntie Glad’s real job had been to sober up the memsahib before the ship reached Bombay.) I remember seeing the ship, one of the first to have its hull painted white rather than the traditional black, alongside Station Pier in Melbourne. It was floodlit and a hive of activity as the last of the cargo and luggage was loaded just before what was probably a 10 p.m. sailing. My sister and I did not get out of the car and were probably supposed to be asleep on the back seat, but as was the custom in those days the car had been driven right onto the wharf and was parked alongside the lift well and staircase giving access to the upper level of the passenger terminal. While the passengers and their friends filed upstairs and on board, I watched it all from the safety of the car, noting the huge nets used to lift and swing the cargo from the wharf up onto the ship, only to disappear down into the hold and then emerge, empty, and be swung down to the wharf again, ready for the next load. The luggage – cases and trunks and all sorts of strangely shaped packages – was carried up a gangway which ran from the wharf up to a door opening in the ship’s side at what must have been one of the lowest decks, while the passengers more majestically marched across from the upper level of the terminal to a reception area on the Promenade Deck. I don’t think my parents waited on the wharf until the ship sailed and I have no memory of the Strathallan pulling away.
The next time I saw Auntie Glad was six months later when she returned from India and presented me with a soft toy, a pale grey elephant, Queenie, which I immediately adopted as my very favourite companion. I think that Queenie was the name of the real elephant then kept at the Melbourne Zoo and on which my sister and I had a ride at about that time. A family friend owned the merry-go-round and sideshow stalls at the Zoo and after our ride on the elephant we were given a string of free tickets to have as many rides as we liked on the merry-go-round. I was more interested in the mechanism driving it than in riding on it; it had just been converted to an electrically-powered engine and the old steam-driven mechanism was still there, the big boiler and tall green and orange chimney-stack still in place. When I complained that the steam-driven one would have been much more fun, the owner replied that chopping the wood for the old boiler was not fun!
Late 1939 again saw us as a family at Station Pier, this time to welcome home a colleague of my father who had arrived with his wife from San Francisco on the Matson Line Mariposa, another white-hulled ship, this one with two funnels as against the Strathallan’s one. The travellers had gone ‘home’ to the UK on the Orient Line’s Orion earlier in the year. Though both were third-generation Australians of Irish extraction, it was then still fashionable to refer to the UK as ‘home’, and Ireland was then still supposedly part of the UK. They had spent some months in the UK and on the Continent, hurrying through Germany as that country prepared for war, and then had crossed the Atlantic on the Canadian Pacific Line’s Empress of Britain. They had travelled by train from Montreal down to New York and then across the USA to San Francisco to join the Mariposa for the last leg of their round-the-world trip. I was all ears as my father recited this itinerary on the way to the wharf and immediately began urging him and my mother to go too. (Much later I regretted this importuning when I realised that my parents had opted to spend their money on having and educating children, my brother and sister and me, while their childless friends were able to travel the world much more easily.)
A year or two later, during the War, the Empress of Britain made a brief call in Melbourne while serving as a troopship. Dad and I went down to the port to see her. At 40,000 tons and about the same size as the Titanic, she was at that time the biggest ship ever to have entered the port. The Empress was painted a war-time grey and anchored a mile or so out from Station Pier, perhaps because the water at the pier was not deep enough to handle her draft or perhaps for security reasons. Dad paid a fisherman to take us out in his little rowing boat and we circumnavigated the ship, which towered silently above us as we rowed around.
It was perhaps a little unusual for someone like my father who had grown up in the country to be so interested in ships; I think that like many a young boy I was infected by my father’s interest. I have since realised that his first sight of a big ship had probably been that of the troopship on which his cousin and best mate, Mick, had sailed for Europe in 1915. They had both volunteered to join the AIF at the outbreak of World War I, my father being rejected on medical grounds and Mick being accepted and going on to serve with distinction at Gallipoli and in France, only to be killed near Ypres in Belgium in 1917.12
Dad and I made another visit to the docks to see a big, grey troopship at the end of World War II. This time it was the Stirling Castle, a Union Castle Line ship which normally stuck to the Southampton-Cape Town run but had come to Australian waters with the happier task of repatriating troops and civilians.
By the end of 1940, however, I had my very own first trip by ship. My father’s mother was holidaying at Queenscliff and Vera, our wonderful general factotum, took my sister and me to visit her. We left home early in the morning by train, travelling into the city, and then at Flinders Street Station we changed to the ‘Blue Train’13 which took us down to Port Melbourne and right out onto Station Pier. There we boarded the PS Weeroona, of the Huddart Parker line, and at about 9.30 a.m. the ship set off down Port Phillip Bay to Queenscliff, across the Rip to Sorrento, back to Queenscliff and then back to Melbourne to arrive by about 6 p.m.
We got off at Queenscliff and spent a couple of hours with my grandmother until the ship came back from Sorrento when we got on board for the return trip. I don’t remember much about the visit to Queenscliff but I do remember the ship. The Weeroona was of about 1600 tons, a small ship but a big ferry (she was more properly referred to as a paddle-driven pleasure steamer). There were no cabins, just two decks of seats, promenades, a big lounge room or rather a ballroom with a dance floor in the middle, a bandstand, a shop and a big cafe/restaurant.
As the Weeroona pulled away from Station Pier, her paddles clunk-clunking as they beat the waters of the bay, the ship’s band played tunes such as ‘Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-Dee-Ay’, ‘The Lambeth Walk’, ‘Roll Out the Barrel’, and particularly ‘Goodbye, Melbourne Town’, the words and tune of which Vera must have explained to us and which I still remember to this day:
Goodbye Melbourne town,
Melbourne town goodbye.
I am leaving you today
For a country far away.
Though today I’m stony broke
Without a single crown
If I make a fortune
I’ll come back and spend it
In dear old Melbourne town!
In the middle of the ship, between the two big beige funnels, was what would now be described as an atrium, except that on the Weeroona you looked down rather than up … down at the engines. And this was the amazing thing: the Weeroona was a paddle steamer, with a large paddle-box on each side amidships and what the passengers were able to see down there were the two giant pistons or crankshafts, all gleaming steel and throbbing power. They lay parallel to the ship’s sides, one forward of the centreline and one aft, each one driven by an independent boiler and steam turbine. (The Weeroona had two funnels, burned coal, and made lots of thick, black smoke!) The business end of each crankshaft was attached to the drive shaft of a paddle: they were able to work in unison, to drive the ship forward or backwards, and they could work separately, one in forward and one in reverse, so that the Weeroona was extremely manoeuvrable, needed no tugs, and could virtually spin around like a top. As a child I did not of course know all this, but I can still recall the mixture of fear and excitement I felt on seeing and hearing those great oily shining steel arms and giant fists clenching the drive shafts and punching, pounding their way down the bay.
Only about a mile or so out from Port Melbourne we steamed past the Gellibrand Light, a few hundred yards away on our right.14 An extraordinary structure, it was both lighthouse and lighthouse keeper’s residence, an octagonal building sitting on wooden piles driven into the sea bed. There was a white-painted railing all around, with in the middle a normal-looking weatherboard house from which emerged, as we passed, a housewife complete with white apron and carrying a large basket of washing which she proceeded to hang out on the clothesline on the deck … which was her front verandah. Rising up from the centre of this otherwise ordinary-looking house was a tall metal and glass tower, at the top of which was the lantern-chamber housing the rotating light which guided ships up the bay and into the port. There and then I decided that I wanted to be a lighthouse keeper and to live on the Gellibrand Pile Light.
Not far from the Light the Weeroona steamed a mere hundred yards or so past the wreck of the Kakariki, a cargo ship which had sunk in a collision with another vessel three years earlier and which seemed to have just settled down to sit on the sea bed in a not very deep part of the bay. We had a good look at the top of the funnel and masts as we steamed by and my enthusiasm for a life at sea may have been dampened a little by this cautionary sight.
Early in the following year when I came home from primary school one afternoon, my mother called me into the living room with, ‘Come and meet your Uncle Ray.’ My mother’s second youngest brother had, at age 23, set off to work his way around the world, leaving Melbourne on the Union Line’s Monowai for New Zealand in January 1934. After about a year working in New Zealand (mostly as a manager of one of those new-fangled ‘cinemas’ in Napier, the whole town virtually rebuilt in Art Deco style after the great 1931 earthquake), he had signed on as a stoker on a coal-burning German cargo ship, the Augsburg, shovelling his way to Europe. He spent four years working there, mostly in England (where he met and spent much time with his father’s brother, Joe). With World War II about to break out he had managed with great difficulty (as his Seaman’s Ticket had been issued by a German ship) to get a job as a steward on an Australia-bound British cargo-passenger ship, the Armidale. Here was Ray, a strikingly handsome man, surrounded with an aura of travel and adventure, sitting and chatting in our living room. I was spellbound and knew that if I did not make a nuisance of myself with fidgeting or questioning I would be allowed to stay and listen to his tales of travelling the world, of living and working in London, and of meeting my Great-Uncle Joe in England.
The story I liked best, however, and one which I asked to be retold many a time over the years, was the one about my uncle’s arrival in Europe on board the Augsburg in June 1935. He had been on night watch as stoker and on finishing his shift he went up on deck for some fresh air and a smoke. After transiting the Panama Canal and crossing the Atlantic the Augsburg had entered the English Channel. Leaning on the rail and smoking Ray looked back and saw a large ship approaching from the west at speed. As the ship drew closer Ray realised it was going to pass the slow old Augsburg with no more than a few hundred yards between them. With dawn turning to day and the old Augsburg chugging up the Channel the great ship sped past with its unmistakeable streamlined white superstructure, three raked black-topped red funnels, tiered curved rear decks and gleaming black hull proclaiming it to be the French Line’s fabulous Normandie. At 80,000 tons and 32 knots, it was the largest, fastest and most luxurious ship in the world, racing home to France from her record-breaking maiden voyage to New York.
Ray said that he had never seen anything as beautiful, powerful, and elegant as the Normandie had been that morning. He resolved that once he had found work and saved some money in England he would go to France and visit the country and people that had produced such a wonderful thing … and I made up my mind that I would one day go to France too and see the Normandie and the other wonderful creations of the faraway land that Ray described. Ray did manage a quick trip to Paris but the Normandie was in mid-Atlantic when he passed through her home port of Le Havre. He could not stop talking about the beauty of Paris, the tree-lined boulevards and the cheerful people … all enhanced in his mind’s eye, perhaps, by the contrast with the grimness of life in pre-war Depression-ridden, smogbound London. Alas, by the time I myself got to France the great Normandie was no more.
Family outings when I was young involved more than excursions to Station Pier and the ships. My father’s mother, along with his sister, my Auntie Margaret, lived in a nearby suburb and on most weekends Dad would drive over after Sunday Mass, collect them, bring them to our house for Sunday dinner, and then drive them home again towards the end of the afternoon. We children usually went along too for the drive.
This routine was sometimes varied in that after dinner we might all drive to the Convent of Mercy in Coburg or Rosanna or Mornington, wherever Dad’s other sister, my Auntie May and a nun, happened to be stationed. I used to dread these visits as they involved long car trips (and I tended to get carsick) and required us to sit quietly on straight-backed chairs in highly polished and antiseptic convent parlours while the adults conversed endlessly about issues incomprehensible and people unknown. A small consolation was usually the very fine afternoon tea which the convents tended to produce, where economical but nonetheless interesting treats like daintily cut and wafer-thin slices of bread and butter, or somewhat thicker slices of bread covered with cream and sprinkled with sugar, or tiny home-made biscuits or, more rarely, fruit cake with almond icing, were served. I think I also enjoyed basking in the reflected glory of the deference always shown to my father by the nuns: it was always ‘Doctor this’ and ‘Doctor that’, ‘Good afternoon, Doctor’, ‘Goodbye, Doctor’ and so on. These convent visits were the only occasions on which my grandmother seemed to thaw just a tiny bit … not so far as to laugh or smile, mind you, but to look, just briefly, moderately confident and happy. I suspect now that she and I had then had something in common – the enjoyment of reflected glory – and I still feel sorry for the poor soul whose life was for the most part a sad one.
Another variation of the Sunday routine was when Dad’s Auntie Jo, my grandmother’s step-sister, would come to dinner and spend the afternoon with us. She must have been one of the babies of her father’s second marriage that my grandmother got tired of caring for. In appearance, Auntie Jo was quite like my grandmother, tall and white-haired, although she wore hornrimmed glasses all the time (my grandmother used her goldrimmed glasses only for reading). Other differences were that Auntie Jo did not dress in black, wore a little make-up, smiled often and was altogether much more fun. She even seemed able to coax my grandmother into relaxing just a little and that lightened the cloud of disapproval that always seemed to surround my grandmother when with her daughter-in-law and grandchildren. Auntie Jo had spent her working life as a clerk in the Commonwealth Public Service, joining it in Melbourne before the federal capital was moved to Canberra. As a young woman she had, in 1911, gone to Western Australia by ship (and any story involving a ship of course got all my attention). She had been so seasick on the way across that she stayed on and worked in Perth until the transcontinental railway was completed. She returned to Melbourne in 1914 on one of the first trains to make the trip (which, with its changes of gauge and train in Kalgoorlie, Port Augusta and Adelaide, with steam engines and wooden, non-air-conditioned carriages, would have been quite an undertaking).
For years and years Auntie Jo used to spend her leave from the Public Service on her brothers’ farms, cooking and housekeeping at harvest and shearing time. This involved long train trips to the country but Auntie Jo rarely spoke about herself and so remained something of a mystery to me. She had never married and for many years ‘had rooms at Mrs Turner’s’ in Albert Street, East Melbourne. I think that she gave much of her money and time to the poor. She would sometimes bring her needlework with her, carefully wrapped in tissue paper and carried in a large linen roll, and could talk and sew at the same time. The needlework was usually a set of vestments destined for some lucky priest, and Auntie Jo went to endless trouble making them beautiful enough to be worn at Mass. My mother referred to her as a ‘good woman’ and, considering whose step-sister she was, I think that was high praise.
The Sunday afternoons that I really enjoyed were the ones when we all piled into the car and went for a drive in the country, usually to the hills, i.e. the Dandenongs east of Melbourne. Sometimes we would take a picnic afternoon tea with us, sometimes we would stop at tea rooms in the hills such as the Red Mill near Kallista, with its miniature red windmill perched on the roof, the Log Cabin at Mount Dandenong (and the building really was made of logs) or at the Pig and Whistle in Olinda (I never saw either pig or whistle and always wondered about the name). These places specialised in serving Devonshire teas, with large quantities of strawberry jam and fresh whipped cream; I have never since had a Devonshire tea of equal quality … even in Devon itself. These tea rooms usually had a wonderful log fire going, as except in summer the Dandenongs tend to be cool, and each seemed to have a fireplace wide enough to hold two or three huge logs blazing away.
But I liked the picnic scenario the best. It often involved a walk through the bush when we would go looking for water and for firewood so that my father could get a fire going. Often in the Sherbrooke Forest in the Dandenongs we would find a fastflowing creek which had to be crossed on stepping-stones or by balancing along a fallen tree-trunk improvising as a bridge. We would take the billy to the stream, carefully fill it with water and then, guided through the forest by the sound of family voices, make our way back to where the car was parked. My father would get the fire going and once the billy had boiled would sprinkle the tea in, add a couple of gum leaves, and instead of stirring the brew he would, with the lid still off, swing the billy in a great arc over his head, smiling at our amazement that not a drop would be spilled. We were too young to know about centrifugal forces and I think Dad always enjoyed this little bit of theatrics. My mother would usually stay at the car, unpacking the cakes and scones and sandwiches and minding my baby brother.
Occasionally the drive went further afield than our usual haunts in the Dandenongs and there would be a picnic lunch and a major walk involved: the upper reaches of the Yarra River, Mount Macedon, and Hanging Rock with its mysterious pile of rocks and creepy caves were on the list of possible destinations. Sometimes the walk was turned into work (well, play work) in that we would take buckets and knives with us and go mushrooming, or blackberrying … according to the season and the location. Sometimes an unmarried aunt or uncle or school friend of my mother made up the party and would keep an eye on my sister and me as we walked through the bush.
My Great-Uncle Ray was one of these occasional weekend visitors, although he came more often in the evening to play cards than in the afternoon for a drive in the bush. He was the youngest child of my Great-Grandma Fanny Sullivan, and on leaving school he had gone on to join the bank, eventually rising to the level of Branch Manager. In his forties he had been sent (by ship, then the only available means of transport available) from Melbourne to Darwin to open his bank’s first branch in the Northern Territory. He had retired by the time I met him and rather exotically lived in St Kilda, by then a somewhat bohemian suburb of Melbourne. He lived ‘in rooms’, somewhat like a gentleman character from a novel by Dickens or Trollope, at first in a large red-brick place on Beaconsfield Parade called Hollywood, though it seemed to me much less glamorous than the name suggested, and then in The Gatwick on Fitzroy Street, a rather posh-looking establishment in those days with marble front steps and highly polished brass lamps at the entrance, quite in keeping with my image of a well-off man-about-town. (Half a century later The Gatwick was referred to in the Melbourne media as one of St Kilda’s most notorious drug dens and rooming houses!)
Uncle Ray was a handsome, well-spoken and well-dressed man and he quite often came to our house to play solo with my parents and their friends. He had never married; it seems that presentable single males were as much needed then as they were in Jane Austen’s day, if not as potential husbands then at least to make up a table at cards. I was puzzled one day when my mother referred to Uncle Ray’s glass eye. I had never noticed any difference between his two eyes but my mother insisted that one of them was made of glass. I asked for more information and was told that he had been attacked in the street one night as he was walking home in St Kilda and had been lucky to escape with just cuts and bruises … and the loss of one eye. (Long afterwards I learned that Great-Uncle Ray was gay and had been the victim of ‘poofter bashing’, and that my parents had done all they could to help him recover and to continue a normal social life.)
My parents were both quietly spoken people – shouting was just not done, and I think that they must have agreed to raise their children by giving a good example rather than by laying down the law. I can remember only one occasion when they argued and that was when we had returned by car from a visit to Auntie May in the convent at Kyneton, a country town 70 or so kilometres north of Melbourne. I was four or five, and had been violently carsick on the long drive home. Perhaps my sister had been too. My mother had cleaned us up and had organised a light tea (it must have been Vera’s Sunday off ) and then I saw my mother in the hallway thumping my father on the chest and saying it was all the fault of Auntie May, that the nuns had given us children so many sweets and so much afternoon tea that we had been sick. There were raised voices but no real shouting, and my father seemed to just hold my mother’s arms until she stopped complaining … but I was terrified! I had never seen them argue before and asked my sister whether we should go and get the neighbours or the police – someone – to stop them. My sister, a mere eighteen months older than I, airily replied that it was ‘nothing’, that grown-ups argued like that, and that we should just get on with tea and bed. So we did, and in the morning everything was, as she had foretold, back to normal.
A normal morning meant that Vera’s alarm clock would go off at 6.45 a.m. and I would hear her getting up and then setting out the breakfast things in the kitchen. After having her own breakfast she would start on the day’s work, first of all going to the newsagent next door to collect the morning paper and then making a start on chores such as polishing the floors in the surgery and waiting room, lighting the copper and starting the washing. My mother got up soon after Vera and would wake us children and see that we were dressed and breakfasting at the kitchen table before she arranged and carried a big tray up the hall to my parents’ bedroom and gave my father breakfast in bed. This she did every morning in their twenty years of married life, with an exception being made on Sundays to allow for attendance at Mass. The menu never varied: a bowl of cornflakes with a small silver jug of hot milk; the silver sugar bowl, salt and pepper shakers; a plate of bacon and eggs; a rack of toast; butter and marmalade; a pot of tea; the necessary cutlery … and a large white napkin in a silver serviette ring. My father would be sitting up in bed for this ritual and would tuck one corner of the napkin into his pyjama coat before eating. My sister and I would, if allowed by my mother, rush in before he had quite finished his bacon and eggs and beg for a ‘mopper’, a square of toast which he would impale on his fork, swirl around in the egg yolk, and extend to the favoured offspring. I think that this largesse was limited to one mopper per child per breakfast and that once the third child, my baby brother, came on the scene the ritual ended … or my mother would have had to serve my father a larger breakfast. With breakfast finished, my father would then read the paper, The Age, before getting up and heading in his black dressing gown (my mother’s was red, making them look more Stendhalian as a couple than they really were) for the bathroom, a shave, and the day’s work.
My father was a ‘general practitioner’, the traditional sort of family doctor in the suburbs. His surgery was open for consultations between 9 and 10.30, 2 and 3, and 6.30 and 7.30 (making an appointment was unheard of in those days and patients just queued up along the bench in the waiting room or at busy times overflowed into the front garden). After morning surgery my father would usually come into the house and have a cup of morning-tea and then set off in the car on his morning rounds, visiting patients in the local hospital or small nursing-homes and those at home who were too sick or too feeble to come into the surgery. A similar routine of afternoon rounds would follow afternoon surgery (with a short pause for afternoon-tea with the family).
Sometimes, when the rounds involved a longer-than-usual drive such as a visit to patients ‘out in the country’, my sister and I would be allowed to go with my father. The area where we lived was, in 1940, more or less the outer edge of the city and some patients lived on ‘acreage’ or small farms to the east, in between the urban growth slowly taking place around the stations along the main south-eastern railway line. I don’t think there were any doctors based between our outer suburb and the then country town of Dandenong: Springvale was serviced by the doctors from Dandenong, and Clayton by my father and his colleagues. Dad had patients living on small farms at Clayton that now form part of the Monash University campus. My sister and I were supposed to wait quietly in the car while my father went into the patient’s house, and for the most part I think we did. We had strict instructions not to open the doors nor get out of the car. To while away the time we often played at ‘driving’ the car (which sometimes became an aeroplane and we the pilots, sometimes a train engine and we the crew) and sometimes people would come out from the house being visited and would be nice to the doctor’s children, chatting to us with the window wound down.
My abiding memory of these visits is of the respect and even affection shown for my father by these people. I think that the experience underlined for me the message we were always given at home, to think of others and it probably kindled in me the ambition to do things when I grew up that would, like my father’s work, help others. Of course, as a child I was probably also attracted by the prospect of being praised for my actions: the phrases ‘what a good boy’ and ‘what a little gentleman’ and ‘just like his father’ were music to my ears. The fact that both parents were trained members of what are now termed caring professions (medicine and nursing) perhaps inevitably oriented me more towards being helpful than towards being financially successful, towards idealism rather than towards realism. Money matters were never discussed in front of us as children and I had no idea that our comfortable lifestyle depended on the amount of money my father’s work brought in.
On one of these country visits my sister and I were sitting in the car while Dad went into the house to his patient. Growing a bit bored we opened the car door … precisely why I do not recall and, as if for our disobedience, we were invaded by a large, smelly, noisy white billygoat which had somehow broken free of the long leash attached to the farm gatepost. My sister and I could not get the animal to retreat and were more scared of it than of the expected scolding for having opened the door. When Dad eventually emerged from the farmhouse after seeing his patient he had to summon help to prise the animal out of the car.
We could accompany Dad on his rounds only before we started school, of course, and only in daylight. He was often called out at night and we would not know of this until next day, if at all. My father was fairly deaf in his right ear and so my mother persuaded him that he should normally sleep on his left side. As a result, he did not hear the bedside phone ring in the dead of night and my mother, who slept on the phone-table side of the bed, would answer the phone, filter the calls, and virtually decide whether or not to wake my father. I don’t suppose she was really able to save him from many midnight call-outs, but they both enjoyed telling this little story of their teamwork when the question of out-of-hours calls came up with their friends (and it often seemed to, as many of their friends were also doctors and nurses).
Working from home was in those days the norm for most doctors, only a small number having their surgery or rooms at a large hospital or in Collins Street, where most of Melbourne’s specialists were established. I think my mother was never really keen on having ‘the public’, i.e. the patients, sauntering up the garden path at virtually any time of day or night, even though they did veer off to the side of the house where a surgery and waiting room adjoining the house had been built shortly after I was born. The system did mean, however, that we children saw much more of our father than would otherwise have been the case; we had all our meals together including lunch and afternoon-tea, and we were on hand and able to go with him for a drive on calls taking him into the country … or even into the city, where he sometimes went to visit patients who had had to be taken to one of the major hospitals. As we lived in the catchment area of the Alfred Hospital, that was the one most visited and as many of my father’s patients were Catholic, St Vincent’s and St Benedict’s (which later became the Cabrini Hospital) were also on the list.
Another fascinating destination was the Good Shepherd Convent a couple of kilometres from our house (and since demolished and replaced by the Chadstone Centre, the largest shopping mall in the country). The convent was a huge, grey building set well back from the road and surrounded by a high grey wall and acres of farmland. The path from the front door to the front gate had been replaced by a long masonry ‘tunnel’ or enclosed walkway at the end of which was a massive outer front door opening directly on to the footpath. There was a ‘Judas’ or small grilled window in the door, so that when answering a ringing of the doorbell the nun inside could slide open the wooden panel, look through the grill at the visitor, and decide whether or not to open the door. The door always seemed to open almost immediately for my father (who had probably been telephoned and asked to call) and I had visions of a little nun roller-skating down the tunnel’s highly polished tile floor from the convent proper to the door and breathlessly opening it to my father. I often wondered how long less-distinguished visitors had to wait, and longed to see someone arrive, ring the bell, and be turned away … but that never happened.
My father was the government-appointed Medical Officer of the institution attached to the convent … a ‘home’ for young and old women ‘in trouble’. My parents were always a bit vague about the precise nature of this trouble. I slowly worked out that it included more than being orphaned and recalled my mother saying that ‘there were too many keys’ in use, that some of the girls had been referred to the home by the courts and that spending time in the institution was seen as a happier alternative to spending time in jail … I assumed that they had been caught stealing or throwing stones or something of that sort and much later on realised that prostitution was at that time a crime and that some of the inmates had been ‘working girls’.
The Good Shepherd nuns had been founded in France in the early 1800s with the mission of caring for poor and destitute girls, of which there were many in the years after the social upheavals of the French Revolution and the subsequent Bourbon Restoration. The aim was to provide a safe home and a basic education, and to teach skills which would enable the girls to earn a living when they ‘graduated’. The order’s first convent in Australia was established in 1863 on a large piece of farmland beside the Yarra in Abbotsford, Melbourne, and the nuns had soon taken into care over a hundred women and children. The place grew to become a huge establishment providing, a hundred years later, a home to over 1000 women and girls and 100 nuns. The Good Shepherd nuns had come at the invitation of Melbourne’s first archbishop, who was particularly concerned about the large numbers of women and children being more or less abandoned in the town by their menfolk and breadwinners who were heading off to the gold rushes in Ballarat and Bendigo. After twenty years at Abbotsford the nuns opened a branch in a small farming settlement on Dandenong Road beyond the eastern edge of Melbourne. The branch was, I only recently discovered, destined to become a ‘Reformatory for Female Adolescents’ and was a very big place indeed by the time I came to visit it with my father in the 1940s. The convent stood on a hundred or so acres of land, some of which was used as a dairy farm where a herd of Friesian cows could sometimes be seen wending its way up the hill to the milking sheds, where the nun in charge, in her white habit with black veil, soon merged into the herd of black and white cows. There was a large flower garden in the front of the main building (but behind the perimeter wall) and a very large vegetable garden beyond the back wall. On another part of the property was a huge steam laundry, where many of the girls worked, and the big green vans with ‘Good Shepherd Laundry’ painted on each side in gold were seen all over Melbourne collecting the city’s dirty washing and returning the washed and ironed items a few days later. My grandparents availed themselves of a similar laundry service provided by the Good Shepherd convent in Bendigo, laundry services having become the main source of income for Good Shepherd homes all over Australia.