There was a primary school known as St Anthony’s attached to the Good Shepherd convent, and when it came time for me to start school I was disappointed to find that that was not to be my destination. I loved the mysteriousness and vastness and silence of that great, grey place and the contrasting marble and stainedglass splendours of its huge chapel/church. I imagined that the primary school would share these wonders and did not know that in fact it was located in modest, even nondescript premises on the edge of the property. We lived right in the middle of town, and a new convent and primary school had been established just one block down the road in the year I was born. This convent had also been founded by a French order of nuns, an off-shoot of the Marists.15 Their convent near us was next door to the parish church and whenever there was no priest available to say early morning Mass in the convent chapel the twenty or so nuns in the community would take up the two front rows on the right-hand side of the parish church to attend the public Mass. I used to be intrigued at the way in which they avoided distractions and the temptation to look around, and at how they could still move surefootedly up to the altar rail to receive Communion, by unfolding their black veils forward to cover their faces almost as completely as do the burkhas of Muslim women.
Although the new primary school was next door to the convent and so only a few hundred metres or so down the road from our house, there was a bus stop across the road from our house and a bus service from there to the bayside suburb of Mentone, where the buses stopped outside the Brigidine16 convent and Kilbreda College. My mother had an aunt who was a nun in the Brigidine convent, so my sister and then I were sent the six miles by bus to start school ‘with family’ rather than to either of the two local convent schools. I now suspect that there were other issues involved in this decision; the possibility of contact with adolescents from the reformatory may have weighed against our attendance at St Anthony’s, and the just-built parish school across the road was a surprisingly modern and stark structure surrounded by a quite small, tree-less concreted playground in which crowds of seemingly unruly, poorly-dressed and perhaps poorly-fed children could be seen milling noisily around. Was it suitable for the local doctor’s children to join in? I wonder.
We not only had a great-aunt who was a nun in the convent in Mentone but we also had one of my mother’s cousins, Miss Ellie Sullivan, who came to the convent one day a week as a visiting teacher. Ellie made her living as an elocution teacher (nowadays I suppose this specialisation is referred to as Speech and Drama). She had private students who called at her house in North Melbourne for lessons and she visited a number of schools where she both took classes and gave private lessons to individuals. When I was in Grades one and two at the Brigidine Convent in Mentone, Miss Sullivan must have taken only the secondary school level for classes, as I don’t remember her in front of my class. She did, however, have responsibility for the drama part of the end-of-year productions or Annual School Concert put on by the whole school, and I remember taking part in two of them. In a dramatised version of what I suppose was Little Red Riding Hood, I was the wolf. No dialogue was involved – I just had to come on stage, on all fours, dressed in an extraordinarily realistic-looking and rather frightening black wolf ‘s outfit, with big white teeth and bright red tongue lolling out of the jaws. My task was to creep towards centre stage, be shot by the hero, and then to roll on my back with all four paws pointing heavenwards in death. I was not very keen on the part, particularly not on being shot, and it took some coaxing for me to continue. I can still hear the producer, Miss Sullivan, losing her temper at a rehearsal and shouting, ‘Where’s that bloody wolf?’ Perhaps the good nuns overlooked this outburst because Ellie was the niece of a nun in the convent and she was there again for the following year’s production … and I was too! I don’t remember the name or story of this production but for my second stage appearance I was dressed in the black soutane, with purple buttons and purple sash, of a bishop. I had a nice gold pectoral cross on a gold chain and a purple biretta ( both items of episcopal regalia kindly loaned for the occasion by the then Bishop of Ballarat, a friend of a friend of my mother). I quite liked this outfit, and then and there decided that I would be a real bishop when I grew up. Again, as I recall, I had nothing to say and had just to walk slowly and look solemn … and not to move my head too much lest the biretta, far too big for me and accordingly partly stuffed with paper, slipped down over my face and blinded me. Perhaps that is what did happen as I do remember falling flat on my face on stage, developing an egg-sized lump on my forehead and being cosseted by an anxious nun. I can still see Miss Sullivan standing in the middle of the hall in producer mode, bosom heaving, arms waving, long blonde hair slightly awry, her voice carrying like a trumpet-blast as she drilled her little performers and her accident-prone young relative.
I had three years of schooling with the nuns in Mentone and then, as co-education did not extend beyond Prep, Grades One and Two at that time, moved on to St Bede’s College, run by the De La Salle Brothers,17 a few more bus stops down the road from the convent and just across the street from the beach. At St Bede’s I was taught in Grades Three and Four by an elderly but very lively Brother Malachy, who placed great emphasis on spelling and multiplication tables and sitting up straight in class in silence, arms folded, and on lining up neatly and in silence outside the classroom … an old-fashioned disciplinarian, I suppose. As I found that I was able to do whatever was expected of me in the classroom, I enjoyed school and rarely had to join the queue of boys lining up to hold out their left hand for a punitive whack from Brother’s strap or ruler.
There was, however, one poor soul in the class who never seemed to do things correctly, either schoolwork or behaviour, and was forever in the queue. This chap, Norman, was twice the size of any of the other boys, several years older, a boarder and was repeating the year. (Much later on I realised that poor Norman must have suffered from a then-undiagnosed handicap and was not simply the ‘slow learner’ he seemed to us to be.) One day Norman was particularly slow and just could not add up the column of figures Brother had put on the blackboard. Or would not, according to Brother, who for once seemed to lose his temper and all sense of proportion, finally ordering Norman to drop his trousers, bend over the front desk, and be belted on his bare backside. The rest of the class of nine-year-old boys watched in stunned silence while Norman tearfully did as he was told. Then Brother presumably came to his senses and suddenly said, ‘All right, that will do, go back to your place …’ which Norman did, adjusting his clothes as he shuffled back to his desk, soon resuming his usual sunny smile and getting on with his day. I can still recall my own fascination at the scene, a vague feeling of guilt that I was enjoying something that was wrong, and my disappointment that Norman never actually did bare his backside for the beating. I now wonder whether this had been for me the first awakening of sexual arousal and even of an interest in mild S and M?
In Grade Five I was taught by a much younger Brother Matthew, whom I quickly grew to admire as an interesting teacher … and a handsome young man. Brother Matthew placed great emphasis on reading, and while others in the class may have still been struggling to acquire the skill, I was already at the stage of reading easily and for enjoyment. Brother often read to us, as well as requiring individual pupils to read aloud to the class, and I can still remember his calm, deep voice and the delight of hearing its changing shades in his expressive storytelling. Brother Matthew introduced us to poetry, too, and again showed us how the sounds of the words and the rhythm of the lines could be as interesting as the meaning of the poem. He read Longfellow’s ‘Hiawatha’ to us and we (or at least I and some of the class) delighted in learning off by heart great slabs of it and of other similarly musical poems, A. B. Patterson’s ‘The Man from Snowy River’ among them.
At home we children had already been introduced to the excitement of books, and parents and visitors were regularly beseeched to read bedtime stories to us in return for our going to bed early (around 7.30 p.m.) when we knew the adults were just starting to relax over a long, leisurely dinner or game of cards or round of drinks with friends. I remember C. J. Dennis being a very popular writer with my sister and me, and how we would badger someone like our Aunt Nell to ‘read it again’ when she had got to the end of the story/poem in the expectation/hope that we would have fallen asleep. Other bedtime favourites were Enid Blyton’s The Green Goblin Book, Phyllis Morris’s Willy and Nilly and, strangely perhaps, Heinrich Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter with the original illustrations. Hoffman’s unforgettable cautionary tales would nowadays probably be considered too gruesome for young children (who would nonetheless be exposed to television clips and video games showing all manner of far more gruesome suffering, death and destruction, fact and fiction, around the world). But I think that in Grade Five, Brother Matthew consolidated my interest in words and reading, and showed me how reading was the key to learning, to enjoying living and even to being happy.
I was not at all happy, however, when my father decided that as from Grade Six, I should transfer to attend the nearest school run by the Irish Christian Brothers (who had taught him in Ballarat), namely, St Kevin’s College in Toorak. My younger brother had just completed Grade Two at Kilbreda, travelling down to Mentone with me on the bus. The new plan was that he would travel with me each day to school in Toorak, and as St Kevin’s did not offer Grade Three, he had to ‘jump’ a year and start in Grade Four. We started off together in the 1945 school year, catching the train and then the bus from the station to the college, then located at the corner of Orrong Road and St George’s Road. (In later years, these buildings were demolished and a new college was built on land near the playing fields in Moonga Road.)
Two years earlier had seen my sister change school, from Kilbreda Convent in Mentone to ‘Mary’s Mount’ in Ballarat, which she attended as a boarder. I think that this move was made because my mother had such happy memories of her time at Mary’s Mount, but my sister was not alarmed by the prospect of attending a boarding school far from home. Perhaps the deal was one, common enough in those days, that the mother could choose the daughter’s school while the father could choose the school for the boys. At all events, the changes were made, the preparations for my sister’s departure for Ballarat involving an incredible outlay of energy (and, I suppose, money): new ‘Loreto blue’ uniforms, of course, plus a vast supply of linen, pullovers, underclothes, socks, stockings, shoes, hats, gloves, scarves and so on … all having neat little name tags waiting to be sewn on. I did not want to leave St Bede’s, but my sister was quite keen on giving Mary’s Mount a try. Some compensation may have been afforded by the fact that another of my mother’s cousins was a nun at Mary’s Mount and Mother Judith, as the cousin was known in religion, was enlisted to keep a family eye on my sister.
For the following six or so years we used to drive up to Ballarat in the middle of each term for a family visit and my sister would join us for midday dinner at the George Hotel, at the Provincial Hotel, at The Wattle Restaurant and Tea Rooms or perhaps at Craigs Hotel which looked, and was said to be, the grandest of all but which had, it was also said, a dining room that had ‘gone down’. These Sunday dinners were quite formal affairs, with a profusion of starched white linen tablecloths and napkins, gleaming silver cutlery, highly polished glassware (for the adults’ wine and for the children’s lemonade) and arrangements of fruit and flowers placed strategically around the rooms. Uniformed waiters and waitresses moved silently about, bringing and removing the various courses and each dining room was supervised by a Maitre d’ (or Manageress in the less expensive establishments). My sister would be in her school uniform and so we all had to be on very best behaviour lest the reputation of Mary’s Mount for gentility be in any way threatened. My sister had to be back at the convent in time for Sunday Benediction, usually at about 4.30 p.m., after which we would set off for the drive home. Mary’s Mount made a deep impression on me with its fine buildings and beautiful chapel18 in their peaceful setting by the lake, and the seeming serenity of the nuns there may well have contributed to my feeling that joining a religious order (well, one that had establishments akin to Loreto Abbey in Ballarat) had to be considered seriously as a possible future lifestyle.
Once enrolled at St Kevin’s, my brother and I used to catch the 8.03 train to the city each morning, changing trains at Malvern as the .03 then ran express to the city, and then we would alight at Armadale and catch the Glenhuntly-City bus along Kooyong, Irving, Albany and St George’s Roads to Orrong Road where St Kevin’s then stood. The trip in the morning was always a bit of a hassle, as neither Peter nor I liked getting up early and we often had to rush for the train which, after a few stops, would be crowded with adults going to work in the city and so we schoolboys would give up our seats and stand for the last few stops. There were never any seats available in the bus in the morning, but the trip home each afternoon was much less crowded and more relaxing. I always loved the bus ride along those leafy roads which in the 1940s and 1950s were still very largely lined with the nineteenth-century mansions for which Toorak was famous. From the vantage point of the bus windows, we could often see over the high perimeter walls and enjoy the fabulous gardens and architecture of the homes of Melbourne’s rich, the merchant princes and the descendants of the early squatter barons. Many of the properties had an acre or more of garden, with tree-lined carriageways curving in from massive entrance gates to the houses themselves which, apart from the rooftops and chimneys, would usually be screened from the sight of passing pedestrians.
Sing a song of Melbourne!
Money by the sack!
Fifteen hundred squatters
Squatting in Toorak.
Heaven all about them;
Hear the angels sing
‘Strictly no admittance here:
God Save the King’!19
One mansion I particularly remember was called Nareeb; it was in Kooyong Road and had been built in 1888 during the boom of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’. It had a front fence that must have been close to 200 metres long20 with, at one end, a monumental entrance, two beautiful wrought-iron gates set back in a crescent-shaped masonry wall, the pillars at the inner and outer ends of the curving walls being surmounted by curiously shaped wrought-iron lanterns. Behind the high front fence was a double row of evergreen trees (cedar? pine? monkeypuzzle?) which would have provided an impenetrable screen, had they not by then been so tall that the bottom three or four metres of their trunks were bereft of branches and greenery. As a result one could, from the bus, glimpse the house a hundred metres or so beyond the trees, its classic-revival architecture partly hidden by a veil of Virginia Creeper, green in spring and summer, russet in autumn, and a spidery grey network of tendrils in winter. The place made me think of Dickens’s Great Expectations and of that mysterious, cobweb-covered house, Satis, and its owner, Miss Havisham.
The then-owners of Nareeb, two spinster daughters of a nineteenth-century gold-rush millionaire, eventually died and in 1964 the property was sold. The two Rolls Royce cars and a huge collection of antique furniture (there were 35 rooms including a ballroom, drawing room, music room, library, dining room, parlour and seven main bedrooms) were auctioned at Joels. Despite public outcry, the house was demolished, the trees cut down, and the land subdivided into a street and 24 housing lots … only the wonderful wrought-iron gates survived and were moved to the Botanical Gardens in Melbourne where they now guard the Domain Road entrance.
Another great house we used to pass each day was Werndrew, in Irving Road. Much of its land had by then been sold off to developers and the house itself could easily be seen from the street. Its most striking feature was the beautiful pillared entrance and the large cupola, or dome, in the centre of the house – apparently over the ballroom, built by an indulgent father to help launch his daughters into society in the 1880s. Next door, on the south side, was another mansion, Southdean, this one still surrounded by an enormous and well-tended garden, and sporting a wrap-around, pillared, double-storeyed verandah, all hidden behind an immaculately-clipped cypress hedge. This was the property of the three bachelor brothers Connibere, well-known philanthropists in the city. Sir George and Sir Charles having died in the 1940s, there was only Mr Ernest left to enjoy its splendours by the time I started observing the place from my bus window. Alas, Southdean and Werndrew met the same fate as Nareeb and nothing remains of them now … except, perhaps, in the minds of passers-by like me, a memory of something beautiful, of what can be achieved in domestic architecture – money and council regulations permitting.
Further along the bus route we used to pass the more modern 1920s homes of the Coles family, which I always thought of as mansion-size versions of English thatched cottages. Both were, in a word, pretty; two-storeyed with an irregular roof of tiles made to look like wooden shingles, tall curling chimneys, diamond-paned casement windows and beautiful ‘cottage’ gardens made them look so homely, despite their size. Cranlana, the home of the Myer family in Clendon Road, along which we walked when going from St Kevin’s to St Peter’s (the Toorak parish church) was an early 1900s mansion, set well back from the road in a huge formal garden and behind another set of beautiful wrought-iron gates. Further along Clendon Road and nearer to the Toorak station (where the workers rather than the squatters and merchant princes lived) were Coonac, once a Baillieu home, and Mandeville Hall, built in 1878 as the home of one Joseph Clarke but as of 1926 the Loreto convent and secondary school for girls. Coonac had been battered and bruised during wartime use by a government department but Mandeville Hall had been carefully maintained by the nuns.
When in 1967 I visited my mother’s cousin, a nun there, I was stunned by the grand entrance hall and the elegantly furnished drawing room. She delighted in pointing out that the large stained-glass window on the first landing of the grand staircase had the letters ‘J C’ worked into the decoration, originally the initials of the owner but now interpreted by the nuns as standing for the new lord of the manor, Jesus Christ!
It was usually possible to get a corner seat in the train on the way home from school and I soon developed the habit of reading in the train; over the eight years that saw me making the trip I think I would have devoured more novels than in the rest of my life. Books like Tom Brown’s School Days convinced me that life at St Kevin’s was much pleasanter than life in an English public school, so I quickly settled in, had some wonderful teachers (including one rather grumpy old Brother who had taught my father in Ballarat and who, as the sportsmaster, never failed to tell me how my father had excelled at sport while I barely knew how to hold a cricket bat).
I think that my sister had a somewhat similar experience at Mary’s Mount in that some of the nuns there had taught my mother and made it clear to Marie that she had high standards to emulate. The difference was, of course, that while I couldn’t hold a candle to my father’s sporting achievements, my sister was easily able to equal and then surpass anything her mother had done academically. By special arrangement with the Mother Superior, a visiting teacher was engaged to give private tuition to Marie in Chemistry and Physics, subjects not then available at Mary’s Mount (as they were not considered necessary or perhaps even ‘suitable’ for young ladies … and my sister was already planning to go on to study medicine after matriculating). Mary’s Mount was less known for its focus on academic standards than for giving a well-rounded education balancing religious, social and academic issues, while St Pat’s and St Kevin’s, both run by the Irish Christian Brothers,21 focused more sharply on the bread-and-butter issue of academic achievement and entry to the better paid levels of the work force.
When I look back at my schooldays, I realise that my happiest memories are of a handful of friends made, of half a dozen great teachers and of learning experiences thoroughly enjoyed. I loved everything in primary school, and in secondary school I loved History and Geography lessons, and English, French and Latin lessons; I quite enjoyed Religious Instruction and Physical Instruction (gym) and tolerated Maths and Science (but not being really interested I was not so good at them). We were never taught Art or Music and I have always regretted that. We were not taught any sport either, but were expected to play football or cricket one afternoon per week. I never could catch or kick or hit a ball and didn’t really want to, so for me ‘Sports Afternoon’ was the one part of the school week I loathed. In retrospect I think that this was unfortunate. I feel no guilt about my total lack of sporting prowess or even of interest in games, but I do regret that no teacher noticed that some students needed to be taught before they could be expected to play. Perhaps like Lady Catherine de Bourgh who, in Pride and Prejudice, listens to Elizabeth Bennett playing the pianoforte and opines that ‘If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient,’ I may have been a great football player had I ever been taught!
All but four of my teachers during twelve years at school were Brothers or nuns, all of whom were, I think, competent. I say this now at the end of my life after having trained as a teacher myself and after working with many competent and many incompetent teachers in Australia, England and France. One of the disadvantages of attending Catholic schools, at least in the 1950s, was that as there was no government funding at all and schools had to be self-supporting, class sizes were large and equipment was often poor. This lack of financial support was, however, usually compensated for by the skill, commitment and hard work of the teachers. Moreover, the stability and continuity of the teaching staff in the Catholic schools gave them an immense advantage: children could quickly feel personally secure and almost ‘with family’ when they realised that some of their teachers had taught their elder siblings or cousins or even parents, if not in that particular school then in one of the other schools run by the same order of Brothers or nuns … and security is a vital component in the personal growth and development of the child. My twelve years passed without any hint or rumour of any form of sexual misconduct on the part of teachers with their pupils and I was amazed and saddened to learn, many years later, what had been going on in other schools.
In Form IV I had a wonderfully enthusiastic young Brother teaching me French and English. In those days English was taught as two subjects, English Expression and English Literature, and a pass in English Expression was essential to obtain an end-of-secondary-school certificate … and university entrance (Matriculation). While English Literature, at least in the form of popular novels and plays, interested most of the class, ‘Mac’ (Brother McCarthy) skilfully convinced us that without an understanding of the mechanics, i.e. of English Expression, we would be severely disadvantaged in understanding what we read and even in expressing verbally or in writing our own thoughts. Hence the seeming trivia of spelling and parsing, the mastering of tenses and of punctuation and even the correct use of the apostrophe all took on new importance … and weekly exercises in composition, precis-writing and clear thinking became an intriguing challenge. This approach to English was also a sensible and easily understood explanation of the importance of mastering the mechanics of French. Until then, studying French had consisted of little more than every night learning ten words of French vocabulary plus one of the seemingly endless list of irregular verbs, and struggling during the day to put together, or to decipher, tricky sentences. Mac stressed that French was a living language just like English, that a hundred million people in the world spoke it effortlessly every day, and that there was a whole, new literature and culture out there waiting to be discovered … if we would only master the basics! He invited native French speakers to the school (I had never seen a real live Frenchman until then), had us listen each week to ‘French for Schools’ on the radio, encouraged us to become involved in the Alliance Française in Melbourne and even introduced us to the worlds of French cuisine and French cinema. I cannot swear that he urged us to go to the touring version of the Folies Bergères which played at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne that year (with tenor Jean Sablon and his hit song ‘Le Fiacre’) but he certainly enlivened French classes as no other teacher ever did. I was hooked, and remain a Francophile into my twilight years.
Mac was transferred to another Brothers’ college the following year, to my regret, and a new Headmaster arrived at St Kevin’s to replace the outgoing Brother, who had been getting along very well with my father and whose transfer came as quite a surprise. I later learned that the outgoing Headmaster had been ‘demoted’ because a senior Brother on an inspection visit had discovered that he did not always get up for early morning Mass. For this he was considered by his superiors to be giving a bad example to the other Brothers in the house. Ironically enough, the ex-Headmaster shortly thereafter left the Christian Brothers, studied to become a priest, and was in due course appointed a Parish Priest in a neighbouring diocese … and able to say Mass, rather than to attend it, at whatever hour of the morning he pleased. Rather inexplicably, unless it was from some sort of solidarity with my father’s choice of friends, I resented the new Brother’s appointment, and let my feelings show. I also bridled at a remark of his soon after his arrival that while Rostrevor College in Adelaide (where he had previously been stationed) was the leading Catholic boys college in that city, Xavier College, being a Jesuit college, was the leading Catholic boys college in Melbourne … rather than St Kevin’s. I saw this remark as disloyalty to St Kevin’s and to the Christian Brothers, so for two years I waged a quiet war of resistance, never allowing myself to acknowledge the new Headmaster’s gifts as a teacher or his skills in school administration. Brother gave as good as he got, while always treating me fairly and patiently, despite my simmering hostility. I often recall what may well have been his final piece of advice to me, and his only veiled reference to my war campaign: ‘Understand this, John, the world is not black and white, as you seem to think; it is very, very grey.’ How right he was and how much time and energy I and others like me have wasted in not accepting that fact of life, in trying to classify everyone and everything as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ and in trying to force square pegs into round holes.
Schooldays are, for fortunate Western children, interwoven with holidays, and for many children the planning of coming holidays and the remembering of ones completed constitute major incentives to getting through the routine of the school day. My sister, brother and I did not need to find paid holiday employment until our mid-teens and enjoyed what I now see was a rather indulgent and easy lifestyle. Once we had started school our holidays were, of course, restricted by the school timetable.
The term holidays, two weeks off in May and again in September, as well as the six or seven weeks of the Christmas holidays each summer, were often spent away from Melbourne, as my parents thought it desirable to give us city children some good, fresh, country air. Sometimes this was achieved by going caravanning, and a couple of times we rented a house at the beach, once in Mentone and once at Edithvale; another time it was a house in the Dandenongs between Monbulk and Olinda, but I doubt that that sort of holiday was very restful for my mother, who ended up doing more housework and cooking on holiday than at home. The house at Mentone was a large, rambling, verandahed turn-of-the-century rendered brick place with a huge front garden and sweeping lawn, one on which I can still remember rolling in the warm summer evenings. The smell of the warm mown grass and its soft touch to my arms and legs, the sensation of my body rolling, rolling, free of any control or contact other than the pleasurable smell and feel of the grass, was perhaps the first awakening of sensuality in me.
Sometimes we went to Tatura and spent the term holidays on the farm of Dad’s cousins, Mick and Nora. My brother Peter and I had a wonderful time on the farm, ‘helping’ with the milking in the morning, learning how to separate the milk and to clean and assemble the separator, feeding skim milk to the calves and hay to the other animals. While Mick had recently bought his first tractor, a grey Ferguson, most of the traction on the farm was still provided by horses, who would haul the dray around the paddocks while we broke open the bales and threw off armfuls of hay for the sheep or cattle following hungrily behind. Sometimes one of the horses would be backed in between the shafts of the gig and we would set off at a spanking pace along the country roads on various errands. Peter and I loved being allowed to take the reins and to ‘drive’ in a way we never could with my father’s car!
Mick had a faithful retainer called Old Jim who worked on the farm with him, and it was actually Old Jim who introduced Peter and me to much of farm life. He had apparently arrived at the farm some fifteen or so years earlier, a ‘swaggie’ tramping the country during the Depression of the 1930s, and had asked for work and food … and had just stayed on since then. He lived in what had been an old horse-drawn caravan parked under a peppercorn tree in the farmyard and came into the house only for his meals, which he took in the kitchen, with Mick and Nora or on his own there when they had visitors such as us, and the big dining room next door would be used. Somewhat intrigued by these rules of etiquette, I remember asking whether Old Jim came into the house to have a bath or shower. Nora laughingly replied that he did not, and that as far as she knew he had a swim and a wash in the dam on Sunday mornings when the family was away at Mass. I had until then been a bit envious of Old Jim’s rather gypsy life but the thought of washing in a chilly dam in the depths of winter, when there was a nice bathroom with hot water in the house, made me glad that, if I worked hard at school, I would be able to get a job that produced more comfortable living conditions.
Mick and Nora had two dogs, Shep and Smoky, and a black cat, Sooty, and all three animals had learned a few ‘party tricks’. In the evening after tea Mick or Nora would pull open a wide, deep drawer in the kitchen and say ‘Bedtime, Sooty,’ and the cat would jump into the drawer and curl up on the cushion there ready for sleep. Then they would say ‘Prayers,’ and ‘You forgot to say your prayers,’ and the cat would jump back onto the floor and lean, forepaws on the top edge of the drawer, as if in prayer. It was very funny to watch.
With Smoky it was the word ‘Poss’ or ‘Possum’ that produced an amusing reaction, an excited yelp as he understood the signal that Mick had decided to go possum hunting. There was a small swamp or lagoon which separated Mick’s farm from his neighbour’s, its waters being a favourite stopover for passing wild ducks and its many big old river-gums being a popular residential site for the local possums. In the evening, after Sooty had gone to bed, Mick would take down his rifle and, with Smoky scampering along at his heels, would head for the swamp. He had only to say the word ‘Poss’ now and Smoky would run from one tree to another, sniffing around the base, suddenly pulling up in front of one tree and looking upwards. Mick would then shine a torch up into the branches and there, sure enough, would be a possum, big round eyes looking down at us and seemingly transfixed by the torchlight. A single rifle shot from Mick or Dad would see the possum tumble from the tree and be instantly retrieved by the ever alert Smoky. Whether Smoky shared his reward with Shep, who took no part in this, I can’t recall. A farm, it seemed to me, was a great place to learn not only about the realities of life and death and the food chain but about the many other interesting and indeed often vital things that were never covered at school.
The farmyard, or home paddock as Mick used to call it, was located more or less in the middle of the property, with a long red-earth drive leading into it from the road. Within the home paddock and separated from it by a chicken- and sheep-proof fence, was the half acre or so of house and garden. Entirely dependent upon rainwater caught on the house and barn roofs and stored in corrugated iron tanks alongside each building, Nora had struggled to develop a garden and to surround the house with trees, greenery and shade. Inside, the house was very comfortably, if a little sparsely, furnished. The dining room was very large with a table that seated twelve people and there were five or six armchairs and a coffee table near the fireplace. While we were there Nora would organise a couple of family meals so that the many relatives we could not visit in a short space of time could come over and catch up with my father and his young family. These meals were always midday dinners and most of the people attending would leave by around 3 p.m. so that they could be home on their own farms in time for the evening milking – dairy farms run to a rather inflexible timetable.
In one corner of the dining room was a big open fireplace and that was where we would all sit after the evening meal in winter. Mick had a strange and wonderful home-made bellows which Peter and I loved to use to freshen up the fire; instead of a pump action it was driven by winding a wheel (probably a remnant of an old bicycle), a little like the way an old-fashioned egg-beater worked. The faster you wound the wheel the stronger the draught and the louder the roar from the bellows … and the higher the flames would rise. Another thing that used to intrigue us at Mick and Nora’s was the lighting system. Candles and kerosene lamps were still used and could be carefully carried from one room to another but in the three main rooms, the kitchen, the dining room and the sitting room (rarely used and full of the ‘best’ furniture including a piano) there were ‘Gloria’ lights. This was a system where a tank of petrol on the side verandah was connected by pipes in the ceiling to a central ceiling light in each room. Mick would pump the mechanism on the verandah every couple of days and that pressure would send vaporised petrol through the pipes to emerge with a hiss into a ‘mantle’ (which looked like an incandescent globe but was made of white fabric instead of glass) in the room. A lighted taper applied to the mantel turned the hiss into a loud ‘whoosh’ followed by a ‘pop’ and then silence and a very bright white light as the vaporised petrol burned. There was at least one other brand of vapour light (called, I think, ‘Aladdin’) and I couldn’t understand why we had to make do with the far less interesting electric lights at home in Melbourne.
Out in the farmyard beyond the wire fence of Nora’s garden roamed a few dozen chooks, a dozen or so turkeys, and a large family of ducks (which shared the dam with Old Jim). Finding and gathering the eggs each day was fun and we city kids were always intrigued by the way the birds would come back each day to lay an egg in the cosy nest they had created … but which was systematically robbed to supply the kitchen. Dumb birds! Not so dumb, however, were the roosters and particularly the turkey gobblers, who seemed to be able to detect nervous visitors like us and were prone to fly at us squawking, gobbling, and otherwise bluffing their way to the centre of their hens’ attention. Another of the dogs’ tricks involved these very hens. When Nora had decided that roast chicken would be on the next day’s menu, she would walk over to the farmyard with Smoky or Shep in tow and would choose her bird, pointing it out to the dogs. They would then chase the poor bird around the yard, grab it by the neck and bring it over to Nora, and in next to no time the axe would have fallen, the chook would be dead and the scalding, plucking and cleaning would commence. This was a part of life not for the squeamish and I think I do prefer to get my chicken from the supermarket, tasteless though it may be.
There were so many relatives to visit in the area, so many farms pioneered by Uncle Mick or Uncle Jim or Uncle Johnny and so on, and so many afternoon teas and suppers to be enjoyed, that a visit to Tatura was something of a scheduling nightmare for my parents … impossible to accept all the invitations and difficult to accept some without offending other relatives … but Peter and I, at least, never grew tired of the farming experiences nor of the endless supply of jelly sponges, cream puffs, iced biscuits and so on with which each farm kitchen greeted us.
At other times we all went and spent the term holidays in a hotel or guesthouse somewhere (a more expensive solution but a more restful one for my mother). We stayed one time at a family-run guesthouse in Healesville called Le Château on the Don Road. The meals were wonderful and my father and I were able to indulge a sweet tooth by working our way through the list of alternative desserts on each day’s menu. Another time we stayed at beachside Mount Martha in Dava Lodge, then a guesthouse but subsequently a licensed hotel, and on another we stayed in Mildura at the Grand Hotel, then managed by one of Dad’s cousins.
The biggest adventure of all would no doubt have been the summer holidays when we went to Sydney for three weeks. A school friend of mine came with us and we all travelled up on the Adelaide Steamship Company’s coastal liner Manunda, my friend and I returning home on the same company’s larger liner Manoora; my father and sister flew home (in a 21-passenger DC3 operated by ANA, one of the pioneers of commercial flying in Australia, then barely out of its infancy), while my mother and brother had sleepers on the overnight train from Sydney to Melbourne. In Sydney we stayed in the Norwood, a family-run guesthouse at Milson’s Point near the bridge and overlooking the harbour. We had a wonderful time, sightseeing, going to the beach, and visiting friends and relatives. A school friend of my mother’s was by then the Reverend Mother of the Loreto Convent at Kirribilli, and there was the family of my father’s youngest uncle, Uncle Lar (who had died the previous year) to visit at their home on the Hawkesbury River. At the insistence of my Aunt Nell, my sister Marie and I called on Dame Mary Gilmore, the poetess, in her flat in Kings Cross. (Dame Mary was the aunt of my mother’s cousin Rupert, see Appendix 5.) Marie had read some of Dame Mary’s poetry at school, whereas I had not, and I still squirm with the remembered embarrassment of having to pretend knowledge of and interest in the works of the poor woman. All in all it was a great holiday, one that must have cost a great deal of money, but as it turned out to be the last holiday we would spend together as a family, it was probably money well spent.