When I reached school age I began to go to Bendigo alone for most of the school holidays; I was asthmatic as a child and the dry climate or some unidentified aspect of life in that inland city resulted in me never having an asthma attack there. Sometimes I would drive up with my parents, who would return to Melbourne the next day; sometimes I would travel with family friends and, best of all, when I was considered old enough, I would travel alone by train. My very first train trip saw me driven in to Spencer Street Station by my parents and then handed over to two nuns (my great-aunt and a companion nun) who were travelling to their convent in Echuca, via Bendigo. I remember being a little nonplussed in that they were already installed in two seats in a compartment labelled ‘Ladies’ at the end of the carriage, and I pointed out to my father that I was not a lady. He said it was alright for a young boy to sit there too, so I accepted the window seat which the nuns vacated and off we went.
In those days nuns wore so many layers of clothing, it was like squeezing in beside the contents of a whole wardrobe, the only bit of a person visible being the hands and face. The train left at 8.30 a.m. so we had all had an early breakfast and by midmorning I was a bit peckish, and assumed that the nuns were too. After the climb up the Great Dividing Range the train stopped at Woodend to take on water and passengers, and many passengers jumped off and raced to the kiosk on the platform to buy fruit and sweets. The same thing happened further on at Kyneton and at Castlemaine, but the nuns and I remained in our seats. My great-aunt produced some fruit and biscuits from a large black handbag but I alone tucked in: my parents had told me that nuns do not eat in public, and I found that not even the privacy of the Ladies Compartment allowed them sufficient latitude … at least while a young boy shared it with them.
When we arrived in Bendigo at about midday the train divided: the rear two carriages would go on to Swan Hill, the next two carriages would go on to Echuca, and the people in the front carriages of the train which were detached and shunted off to one side were divided up into batches and directed to the waiting trains to Robinvale, Sea Lake, Cohuna and Heathcote which all branched off from the main line at Bendigo. While all this shunting and bustling was going on, my travelling companions went on sitting in the Ladies Compartment, with the door and wooden window shutters closed, so that they could partake of the picnic lunch my grandmother had brought to the station in a large basket. My grandmother sat and chatted with them through the meal, but I was told to wait on the platform. I kept wondering whether nuns ever did need to eat and drink and wash their face and hands and so on, like the rest of us. After about half an hour in Bendigo we said goodbye to the nuns, their train set off for Echuca and we headed off to my grandparents’ house.
As a special treat for having been good and for waiting quietly during this episode, I was given my one and only ride in a horse-drawn cab, from the station to my grandparents’ house. At the time this occurred most people were using taxis, i.e. motor cars, for this sort of journey, but at major country railway stations such as the one in Bendigo, three or four horse-drawn cabs still operated and usually met the trains in the hope of stirring up some interest from holidaymakers and other less serious travellers. So not without some effort we climbed up into the cab and clip-clopped our way home. The cab was not a two-passenger ‘Hansom’ with the driver perched high at the rear and the passengers stepping in through the low front opening, but was rather the large four- or six-passenger type with the driver in front, almost on the roof, and the passengers climbing up two or three steps at the rear to the doorless central entrance. The only openings in the walls were this open doorway (which with the jolting movement of the cab made me hang on tightly to my seat for fear of being catapulted out of the vehicle) and a smallish window in the front; the seats ran along each side wall. Passengers either looked out the back and watched the world go by backwards, or looked forward to the framed view of the horse’s backside and the cabbie’s trousered legs. And I remembered how my father liked to crack his little joke about ‘the horse with the Hansom/ handsome behind’!
My grandmother was a quiet and kind person, as was my grandfather (who did not come to the station and who never seemed to leave the house other than to go to Mass or to his weekly game of bowls in the Upper Reserve). He had kind eyes behind his gold-framed spectacles and used to wear a waistcoat with a fob pocket on each side of his chest, the two seemingly linked to each other by a gold chain. In fact, the chain was fastened to the buttonhole in the middle and the ends, one in each pocket, were attached to two fascinating portable treasures: a gold pocket-watch and a gold sovereign case. I never ceased to be enthralled by the way my grandfather would check the time, fishing the watch out of his pocket without looking for it, somehow flicking the cover open and then glancing at the dial, all in one smooth seamless gesture. The more intriguing item in my grandfather’s fob pockets was, however, the sovereign case, smaller in diameter than the watch but a little thicker and which, with a mere gesture from my grandfather, would open and show a shiny gold sovereign sitting snugly inside … and then with another gesture would close, reopen … and the coin had disappeared! It took me some time to understand that the case could store several sovereigns, one on top of the other, and that the mechanism enabled my grandfather to leave all his coins stored behind the front panel, giving the impression that the case was empty, or to bring one sovereign into sight in the access panel.
My grandfather had an obsession with keeping things organised, neat and tidy. His workshop (actually the garage of his home in Bendigo: he never owned a car) was an extraordinary sight. On one wall he had hooks for all the rakes, brooms, saws and so on that could be hung up … an early ‘shadow board’, I suppose. The other walls were lined with shelves on which were ranged dozens of glass jars which had once probably contained jam but which he used to store nails, screws, tacks, drawing pins, fasteners and hinges etc., all graded by size and neatly labelled. In the middle of the old garage was a massive workbench, with a vice and a lathe on top at one end and row upon row of neatly labelled drawers underneath, drawers containing sheets of sandpaper, tracing paper, plans and diagrams, instruction booklets etc. … and in one drawer, a collection of empty cigarette tins and cigar boxes saved rather than thrown out ‘just in case they could prove useful one day’. My grandfather did not smoke so I suppose these items had come from his sons, all of whom did smoke, and from the shop (SMS)22 … just like the many biscuit tins also stored there and displaying faded and sometimes fantastical labels for ‘Swallow and Ariel’, ‘Guests Biscuits’, ‘Brockhoffs’ and so on. The cigar boxes boldly labelled ‘Havana’ probably first introduced me to dreaming about faraway places, and the biscuit tins with their brightly coloured swallows and parrots and Art Deco geometrical designs added to the wonder of the garage. This place seemed to be a real Aladdin’s cave full of treasures and I was allowed to play there on condition that I replaced everything I touched and left the workshop exactly as I found it. These always seemed sensible rules to me, although twenty-first century children, and even adults, tend to roll their eyes at the mere suggestion of this being correct behaviour!
Bendigo is an inland city with a dry climate. It is hot in summer and cold in winter. With its thick brick and stone walls, my grandparents’ house was always wonderfully cool in summer but in winter it was very cold. On the other hand, the kitchen was always cosy in winter because the wood-fired stove would be used instead of the gas one standing beside it. A fire was lit in the dining room in the morning, and after the evening meal (dinner was always in the middle of the day there) my aunt Nell, who lived at home with her parents, would scoop the coals and burning wood up on to a shovel and carry the smoking, flickering load up the hallway to the front room, tip it all into the grate and lo, instant fire! We would then add more wood, eventually a small Mallee root, and be cosy through the winter evenings.
The Millanes were inclined to be night owls, and sometimes we would listen to records such as ‘The Barber of Seville’, ‘Caruso’s Best Arias’ and ‘Selections from Sir Harry Lauder’ which were in my grandparents’ much-used collection. These records were played on an ‘His Master’s Voice’ gramophone, which was housed in a handsome polished maple box about 50 centimetres square and 35 centimetres high. The hinged lid, when swung upwards, became a sort of sounding board (I think it was the model where the dual-purpose lid had just been introduced as an improvement on the large trumpet-top seen on earlier gramophones). The volume of the music could be increased by opening either or both of two little twelve-centimetre-square doors in the front of the gramophone. Before playing a record one had to wind up the mechanism and insert a fresh needle into the head at the end of the playing arm. I was allowed to crank up the machine but not to put the needle in or to lower it on to the rotating record … until I was old enough to perform these more delicate operations responsibly!
At other times we would listen to ‘good music’ on the wireless, another large piece of polished timber furniture sitting on a table near the gramophone, and always tuned to the ABC. A much smaller wireless in the dining room was tuned to 3BO, the local commercial station in Bendigo, but that one was only turned on to catch the local newscasts. Only very rarely was I able to persuade my grandmother to play the piano in the front room (the rheumatism in her fingers made playing difficult) and in return I was expected to try to sing. The music cupboard was full of sheet music from the early 1900s, a piece called ‘The Rosary’, the words in both English and French appealing to me once I had started to study French at school. It was not the sacred music perhaps suggested by the title, but a rather sad little love song:
Comme une prière sont pour moi,
les heures qui nous ont unissés …23
And my grandfather used to sing that to my grandmother! … Sometimes we would all read, and I was encouraged to be adventurous in my reading and to join the local library so that I could borrow books while staying in Bendigo. Most of the books in the house were my Aunt Nell’s, about art, or had belonged to my grandfather and were about Ireland, or belonged to my Uncle Bert (who was away at the War) and tended to be novels by Conrad, Waring, Lawrence, and so on. There was also a wonderful collection of postcards sent to the house by various friends and family members travelling in Australia and overseas which I loved to pore over. Particularly fascinating (kept at the back of the cupboard and not discovered until I was about ten years old) was a large and attractive souvenir program from the Folies Bergères in Paris, no doubt belonging to my Uncle Ray – also at the War! At some stage during most stays I would take the program out of its tissue-paper wrapper and dream over the near naked men and women strutting so confidently across the Paris stage. I think it must have been about then that I gave up my idea of becoming a bishop or a sailor or a lighthouse keeper, and started to think about the theatre …
My grandmother would usually crochet while she listened to the gramophone or wireless, even while she chatted, as she seemed able to manipulate her needle and wools without looking at the work. She was always working on multicoloured woollen rugs which, on completion, she gave away, and all of the family and many friends treasured those wonderfully warm, light and colourful rugs for years.
In the late 1940s my uncle Bill arranged for his mother’s portrait to be painted by the Melbourne artist William Frater. He painted her while she sat in the lamplight, crocheting. It turned out to be a beautiful study, although my grandmother thought it made her look as if she had just died on the job … as this time she did look down at her crocheting, and her eyes do look as if they are closed.
Bill was the eldest son in the family. On leaving school he joined the staff of the Commercial Bank of Australia, where he was joined a year or two later by his younger brother, Frank. Frank spent his working life with the bank but Bill quickly found the life too restrictive and determined to go to the USA, then the land of the future in his eyes. Quite talented artistically, he supplemented his wages by giving violin and guitar lessons in the evening; by the mid 1920s he had saved enough for the fare to California and off he went, travelling on the Union Line’s ill-fated Tahiti.24 Bill spent five years working in San Francisco and three in Los Angeles. In 1932 he returned to Australia on another Union Line ship, the Niagara25 which, by some strange coincidence in his choice of ships, also sank some time after his passage on board. He finally settled in Melbourne where he took a position with a firm which imported electrical goods from the United States and also designed and made stained glass, wrought iron and other decorative pieces. That is where he met William ‘Jock’ Frater, a Scot generally credited with having brought French Impressionism to Australia. In time, Bill established his own company to design and make decorative lighting, and once financially secure he derived much pleasure from supporting and learning from Frater. He financed various painting trips to the Flinders Ranges in South Australia, to North Queensland and to Central Australia, often painting alongside Jock, watching and learning, and often being rewarded with the gift of one of Jock’s paintings. Bill never married, although he did have a number of passionate affairs with women met in Melbourne’s art world; when he died more than a dozen of these Frater canvases were found in his house, many others having already been given away to family and friends.
My Aunt Nell, the third child in the family, worked for twenty years or so on the local newspaper, the Bendigo Advertiser, as Social Editress: she was responsible for a full page of news, ‘Mostly For Women’ on each Tuesday and Thursday, and for two such pages on Saturdays. She worked from her study at home in the mornings, then in the afternoon from a big room she shared with her assistant in the Advertiser building in Pall Mall. I was always intrigued by the brisk and business-like way in which she handled the minor crises and deadlines of the job, using shorthand to record phone conversations and interviews, swiftly typing up final copy for the printing room, always calm and immaculately dressed … she seemed to me to be the very epitome of a lady journalist. Long after retiring from the Advertiser, she told me how she had come to take up journalism. She had moved to Bendigo with her parents in 1933 and after a year or so there doing nothing, had been urged by friends to apply for the newly established position of Editress of the ‘Women’s Page’. She had been called in for interview by the Board of Directors and apparently was in the process of impressing them as a well educated and artistic young lady, when one of the Directors suddenly asked her whether she felt she could handle the quite considerable amount of typing involved in preparing the social material for the printing presses. Nell told me with a twinkle in her eye that at that stage she had never typed a line in her life: typing and shorthand had not been part of the curriculum at Loreto Abbey in Ballarat when she had been a student. But realising the importance of the question and recalling the typewriters she had seen in the office and even on sale in the family shop in Hamilton, she had smoothly replied that it was ages since she had touched a typewriter, but she felt quite sure she would be able to cope. She was appointed to the position … and then rushed post-haste to a Business College in Melbourne to do a crash course in shorthand and typing, amusing the Principal there by saying that she wanted to become reasonably proficient by the end of two weeks. ‘The College wanted to stretch the course out over six or twelve months,’ Nell told me, ‘but the basics could really be picked up quite quickly if you wanted to, and I wanted to, so I did.’ She did more than cope, and ten years later was elected President of the Bendigo branch of the Business and Professional Women’s Club of Australia.
As Social Editress of the local paper, Nell seemed to know everybody in town, or at least their wives and daughters, so her list of contacts was very lengthy and useful. There were still a dozen goldmines working in Bendigo when as a teenager I spent my school holidays there, and one year I pestered Nell to arrange an underground visit for me. Nell, who had been down the ‘Big Deborah’ mine herself in the course of her journalistic work, knew that visitors were not really welcome and were viewed as something of a nuisance and safety risk. She put me off as long as she could but I persisted. Eventually she gave in and phoned the CEO of the largest mining company in town, whose wife and daughter were often mentioned in the columns of ‘Mostly For Women’, and a few days later I reported at 6 a.m. on a frosty May morning at the South Deborah mine for my underground tour, to be personally escorted by the shift foreman. My teeth were chattering with cold and my knees were knocking with fear as I stepped into the open-sided bucket/cage with the foreman, another miner and another curious visitor like myself, a visiting Indian schoolteacher. The rusty metal half-door clanged shut, and without further ado the cage started dropping down, down, down the narrow shaft. The little square of pale sunlight that indicated surface level soon shrank to nothing as we plunged on down in total darkness. At 2000 feet the cage stopped, we got out and with a clang and a bang the cage plunged on down to a lower level of the mine. We were standing in a sort of rocky foyer lit by a few naked electric light globes strung along the walls, revealing the dark, gaping entrances of three tunnels running off from the main shaft. The tour took us along these tunnels, up and down ladders leading to adjoining levels, through rock-strewn areas where blasting had recently been done and up to workfaces where miners were drilling into the granite walls to place further charges. At times we walked along narrow-gauge railway lines used to trundle small wagonloads of rock back to the main shaft for hauling up to the crusher on the surface; up there the sifting and sorting and cyanide treatment would eventually separate the gold from the mullock. Finally, when I was on the point of announcing that I had had enough of all the climbing and walking, the noise of the drilling, the clouds of rockdust in the air, the water dripping on us from the tunnel roofs, and the sheer claustrophobic atmosphere of the mine, the foreman pointed out to us in one of the rocky walls a line of white and black quartz zigzagging across the tunnel wall. It was the Deborah Reef, the reason we and the mine were there. When the lights were focused on the quartz, we could see a thin line of bright shiny gold, about a centimetre thick, squeezed all the way along between the layers of black and white quartz. It was strangely exciting, even beautiful, and I quickly forgot my complaints – cured by a touch of gold fever, I suppose! We made our way back to the main shaft and the bucket lift slowly hauled us up to ground level and the sunlight. We had been underground for nearly two hours and although it had, after all, been a wonderful educational experience and had at least taught me to respect and indeed admire the men who work in mines, I had to admit that Nell had been right when she had said, ‘I don’t think you’ll enjoy it.’
Journalism was not, however, Nell’s real passion. She was a free spirit, an educated, independent woman, something of a feminist, and at heart an artist. She painted in oils and in watercolour, mostly on canvas but also on silk, presenting her friends with exquisite hand-painted silk scarves; she drew with pencil, crayon and ink and often provided the drawings which appeared in the Children’s section of the Advertiser as colouring competitions for the local youngsters. She had studied art at the National Gallery School of Art in Melbourne and was a member of the Victorian Artists Society for most of her life, regularly exhibiting her paintings at their Spring and Autumn shows. In 1953 the Advertiser sent her to London to report on the coronation of Elizabeth II, which she attended in Westminster Abbey. After completing that assignment, Nell took leave for three years and stayed on in Europe. She completed various courses at the Chelsea Art School and then, using London as a base, travelled extensively in Europe, contributing occasional articles on life there to the Advertiser and on aspects of art to various UK magazines. ‘From Barbizon to Bendigo’ was one such article in which Nell traced the links between the Barbizon school of painters near Paris and Bendigo, where several important works by Corot hang in the Bendigo Art Gallery. In 1956 she returned to Bendigo and the Advertiser, just in time to give me a few tips on overseas travel before I myself set off for Europe in August of that year.
My holidays in Bendigo without the rest of the family began shortly after the start of World War II, when shortages of petrol (for cars) and of coal (for steam trains) saw limitations beginning to be placed on ‘non-essential’ travel. Enquiries would be made around school holiday time to see if any family members or friends would be driving to Bendigo and would be able to take me with them. On one occasion the matron of the local hospital said that her widowed brother-in-law would be able to take me as far as Castlemaine, where he was the owner of the Great Northern Hotel near the station there.
When we arrived in Castlemaine I was treated (at age eight) like a guest of honour in the private part of the hotel. A silverservice dinner was ordered from a menu and I had a table to myself in the dining room where a uniformed waitress bustled about between the white starched napery, the potted palms and the few other guests. I was installed in a nice bedroom opening out on to a balcony overlooking the busy railway station and the endless parade of huffing and puffing steam trains. I felt a vague sense of unease as I climbed into the bed, with the coldness of the white starched sheets and the fact that for the first time in my life there was nobody there to tuck me in or to say ‘Goodnight’. Life was turning out to be a learning process, learning how to grow up and how to stand on one’s own two feet. In the morning after a silver-service breakfast I was driven on to Bendigo and delivered safely to my grandparents.
My first precise memories of ‘The War’, as World War II was spoken of then, are of workmen arriving to dig an air-raid trench in our back garden and to install black-out screens on the windows. At the same time all the street lights were fitted with metal shades which allowed only a narrow strip of light to be directed straight down to the footpath and none at all to brighten the surrounding area. Air-raid sirens were installed on the roofs of the police stations and other strategically placed buildings; their ‘test runs’ sounded chillingly like the wailing sirens heard in the newsreels of the European War which we saw every time we went to the cinema. Our pantry cupboard in the kitchen was enlarged and stocked up with tinned food, and extra supplies of sheets and linen were brought in against the possibility that our house (where my parents, a doctor and a nurse lived) might need to become an emergency first aid post or dressing station. Petrol rationing was introduced. We began to see charcoal-burners and other strange contraptions attached to buses, cars and trucks to provide alternative forms of fuel. Air-raid shelters had also been dug in the school grounds at St Bede’s; we primary school children thought it great fun to practise ‘air raids’. We had to move quickly but in an orderly fashion from the classroom to the shelter and there sit on the benches along the walls and chatter away until the ‘All Clear’ sounded. There never were any real air raids in Melbourne and the shelters were fairly soon forgotten and left to slowly fill with rainwater.
The bright red Nestlé chocolate vending machines on suburban railway station platforms, where the insertion of one penny would see the machine deliver a red-and-gold-wrapped bar of milk chocolate, stopped operating and were eventually removed. Chocolate in any form became a rarity as most of it, along with most of the coffee, was sent to be used by the troops as emergency rations. While milk continued to be available for sale to the public (at three pence per pint bottle) cream was not, being used to make butter which was in turn tightly rationed so as to make supplies available for the troops. Food and clothing were rationed, electricity was in short supply occasioning frequent blackouts and all neon signs and electric advertising were turned off. Men in army, navy and air force uniforms began to be seen everywhere, and the Caulfield Racecourse, the Royal Melbourne Showgrounds, the St Kilda Football Ground, the Royal Exhibition Building in Carlton and numerous other large public places and buildings were taken over for military purposes. My mother’s three younger brothers enlisted soon after the entry of Japan into the war. Seeing them off on troop trains leaving Spencer Street Station for training in the north (mostly in Queensland) as a stage in posting to ‘the islands’ (mostly New Guinea and Borneo), as well as seeing them off after the leave which all three were eventually given, became part of the family routine.
Shortages of most things, even including bottled beer, and never-ending newscasts on the radio greatly worried my parents and our faithful Vera, especially in 1942 when Japan captured Singapore, bombed Darwin and sent a fleet towards Australia’s east coast. Vera’s reaction was to run towards my mother in the garden shouting, ‘They’re coming, they’re coming!’ Once Prime Minister Curtin had recalled the Australian troops dispatched to help the United Kingdom in its War with Germany, my father explained that the intervention of Australia’s new friend, the USA, in the Battle of the Coral Sea, had saved us from invasion.
When on leave, my mother’s brothers as well as many of their army, navy and air force mates made our house their Melbourne base. A distant Millane cousin in the US Navy stayed once; officers in the Dutch Navy who had become friends with my Uncle Bert posted to Dutch New Guinea came another time and several Indonesians in the Dutch Army and Navy, also friends of Bert, became quite frequent occupants of the spare beds in our house. My mother thought it proper for these ‘boys’ to sleep in a real bed with a soft mattress while they were on leave, so when there were more visitors than spare beds my sister, brother and I would sleep on the camp stretchers used on our caravan trips. If only one extra bed was needed, we risked having a bit of a squabble over who would have the adventure of sleeping on the stretcher. In fact, hardly a week went by without somebody in uniform being camped somewhere in the house, and my parents organising impromptu parties and singalongs around the piano in our living room for those lonely and no doubt traumatised young men. My mother loved music and was quite a good pianist herself. I used to pester her to play Mozart’s ‘La Marche Turque’ and other pieces she remembered from her Mary’s Mount days. Often an uncle or some other boy would play the violin and everyone else would sing, picking up the words of current popular songs like ‘I’ve Got Sixpence’, ‘A-Tisket, A-Tasket’ and slightly more martial ones like ‘Kiss Me Goodnight Sergeant Major’, ‘Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye’, ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’, ‘The Trek Song’ and ‘Lilli Marlene’ – the latter being a little bit controversial as it was really a German song. These gatherings became quite multinational, multiracial and even multilingual, as my Uncle Bert was a gifted linguist and had quickly added Dutch, Malay and Indonesian to the French and German learned at school. As a result, he could chat away and sing along in any of those languages, making everybody relax and open their minds to different cultures. We noted how our parents made no distinction between their guests on grounds of colour, language, nationality or religion. I remember my mother laughingly but gently explaining to Vera, who came from a conservative and rather isolated part of the country, that it was not appropriate to offer ham sandwiches to the Indonesian boys as most of them were Muslim and did not want to eat pork but could be too polite to refuse.
I think that this brief contact with normal family life must have greatly helped those lonely soldiers, with several of those who survived the War remaining in touch with my parents long after it had ended. One of the young Indonesian officers, Amin, visited us shortly after the end of the War, when he had been brought to Melbourne from New Guinea before going back to Batavia.26 It must have been a cold August or September day as he had on a Dutch army coat that seemed bigger than him. He wanted in particular to see Peter, my younger brother. When Peter came into the room Amin opened his greatcoat and, with a grin almost the width of his face, revealed a captured Japanese officer’s sword which he presented to Peter, who had apparently expressed an interest in seeing one … or was it really presented to Dad, or to everyone in the house, as a token of thanks for the hospitality received over the years by all those foreign boys?
Up in Bendigo my grandfather died a few months after the bombing of Darwin and the submarine attack on Sydney27 and from then until the end of the War there were just my grandmother and my aunt in the big Bendigo house, with Joan, the maid, coming in five days a week. I continued to go there for my school term holidays and would hand over my ration books to my grandmother for use when we went shopping. There were separate books for sugar, tea, butter, meat and clothing, and the shopkeeper would carefully cut out the appropriate coupon with each item purchased.
At one stage early in the War, my aunt used to take her turn one night each week as a volunteer plane spotter atop the lookout tower in Rosalind Park in Bendigo, where a rough shelter had been erected and where field glasses were supplied. I think that the futility of this exercise was soon recognised, as the spotters really had no proper equipment and no way of accurately identifying any aircraft, enemy or friendly, that they did manage to spot in the night sky. I used to see my aunt organising a thermos of tea and some sandwiches to take on her tour of duty and I always wanted to go with her … it seemed such fun to a schoolboy. Later there was a large wooden frame set up in the living room where my aunt and grandmother both spent some time most days weaving macramé camouflage nets which, when completed, were taken down to the Town Hall as a contribution to the War Effort. With three sons away at the War, my grandmother always wore as her sole piece of jewellery a small silver brooch issued by the Commonwealth to ‘mothers of the boys at the War’ and comprising a stylised rising sun from which was suspended a silver bar carrying three golden stars … one for each son enlisted. She was very lucky that the three sons all came home safely at War’s end.
The tide of war did gradually turn. Things became more cheerful and we were soon laughing as we played with the funny new banknotes the Japanese had planned to introduce once they had occupied Australia – crateloads of them must have been captured by the American/Australian forces after the battles off the east coast, with many of them brought home by the uncles and others as ‘souvenirs’.
Once the War was over my Uncle Bert, the youngest son, and by then 33, came home, resumed his job with the Bank of Australasia28 and lived with his mother and sister while working in the bank’s Bendigo branch. Bert enlivened the place. He seemed full of energy, whistling and singing around the house, teasing his kid sister Nell and my grandmother’s maid, Joan, and often gently chivvying his mother, to whom he was devoted, to get a move on … because of her rheumatism, she moved very slowly about the house. Bert always walked home from the bank for the midday meal, the main meal of the day, which Joan, who came in at 7.30 a.m. and left at 2 p.m. five days a week, always prepared and then shared (although like our Vera at home, she ate her meal in the kitchen while the family ate in the dining room). To return to the bank after lunch, Bert usually took a shortcut through Rosalind Park and Nell often walked with him as far as the Pall Mall gates of the park: the bank was across the road from the gates and Nell’s office in the Bendigo Advertiser building was just another block or so along Pall Mall.
After work of a summer evening Bert would often go swimming in the municipal baths in Rosalind Park or would play badminton or table tennis on the back lawn with another returned soldier and bank colleague, named Alan. As a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, I would join in if I was there and indeed these are my first memories of playing any sort of sport with people who did not instantly dismiss me as useless. Bert and Alan were always welcoming and great fun, so it was disappointing when after little more than a year the bank transferred Bert to a branch in Melbourne … and peace and quiet returned to my grandmother’s house in Bendigo.
I was encouraged to play with and socialise with local children, but my aunt and grandmother did not have many such contacts to suggest. There was a family who lived in the house over the back fence where the son, Terry, was four years older than I was and the daughter, Judy, at twelve, one year younger. I did go around for a first meeting which went off pretty well, it seemed to me, although they were more interested in rough and tumble games than I was. Then it was decided that we would climb their side fence and raid the apple-tree of the two elderly ladies who lived next door. We three were happily eating our stolen apples when Judy and Terry’s mother came upon us in her back garden … and immediately sent us around to the front door of the elderly ladies to confess our sin and to apologise. Somehow I lost interest in pursuing the contact, and by the next term holidays Judy and her family had moved away. My aunt had another try, this time sending me down the street to play with the children of a music-teaching friend of hers. In that household, however, ‘playing’ meant playing a musical instrument, and I was far from competent with the violin, which I was supposedly learning, while my new companions seemed able to play a variety of instruments very well indeed. I felt very inadequate and managed to get out of any repeat visits.
Next holidays, perhaps in desperation, my aunt asked me to go down the street and to help an elderly lady friend of hers, Miss Inez Abbott, to pick fruit in her garden. This turned out to be quite an experience. The Abbott family had made a fortune in the tanning business in the late nineteenth century and Inez’s father had been a member of Colonial Parliament for many years before becoming a senator for Victoria in the new Federal Parliament. The Abbots were important people in Bendigo; they had a large house out of town near one of the tanneries, and a handsome townhouse at the bottom of Rowan Street in the city. By the time I met Miss Abbott in her late sixties, she lived alone and was well on the way to eccentricity. She was tall and solid, with longish greying-brown hair elaborately and artistically swept up in a complicated version of a ‘French roll’. She was always well dressed and wore a gold-rimmed pince-nez attached to a black ribbon somehow fastened to her ample bosom, when not perched on her nose. I had never seen a pince-nez before and was fascinated by this aristocratic piece of equipment. I suggested to my aunt, my grandmother and even my father, who all used reading glasses, that they switch to a pince-nez … but alas, none did. Miss Abbott, being a young ‘gell’ of good family, had never had to work but she had studied painting extensively in Australia and France, where she had lived for nearly twenty years in Paris and in Provence, successfully exhibiting her work in Paris and becoming a very accomplished artist. Indeed one of her paintings was said to be hanging in the Louvre, or was it in the Jeu de Paume, in Paris. (My grandmother said, with that quizzical little smile of hers, that in the 1920s the gallery in Paris had approached the Australian Federal Government for examples of the work of Australian artists, and Inez’s father, the senator, had been able to offer one of his daughter’s works for the French gallery’s collection, at no cost.) Each year, when the big old flowering gum in front of the Capitol Theatre in Bendigo was covered in its deep-red blossoms, Miss Abbott would set up her easel and stool and, with an artist’s smock over her usual clothes and an outsized straw hat perched on her head to protect that nez from the sun, she would paint the scene, taking a couple of days to do it. She would sit there in busy View Street, seemingly oblivious of the passing trams, traffic and pedestrians. I wonder what became of those paintings! I believe some of them are now in the Gallery but as far as I know, Miss Abbott never sold any of her work nor gave any of it away.
I knew all this about Miss Abbott before I somewhat nervously rang her front doorbell and offered to help pick fruit. The door opened an inch or two and a very sharp grey eye examined me while I explained who I was and why I was there. She let me in. Did she say, ‘Come in, boy’? I can’t be sure that she said anything just then, but she did address me as ‘boy’ whenever she spoke to me. I had only ever met the term in Dickens’ novels and was startled to hear it applied to me. She rather brusquely led me through the house to the back garden and pointed to a huge old peach tree, laden with fruit. ‘Can you pick that?’ she asked. I thought I could, provided I was given a ladder to reach the fruit.
I propped the ladder against the outbuilding beside which the tree stood and on the roof of which many of the branches rested. I climbed onto the roof and started picking peaches for all I was worth, with Miss Abbot supervising from ground level. ‘To your right, boy,’ and ‘above your head, boy,’ and so on were fired up at me whenever I wavered in my choice of fruit to pick. We filled several baskets before it was time for me to climb down and enjoy, so I supposed, at least a glass of lemonade. In heading across the shed roof back to the ladder, however, I inadvertently stepped on an area where the rafters were rotten, the corrugated iron gave way under me and I partially disappeared from Miss Abbott’s sight. I dropped the basket of peaches, which went tumbling everywhere, grabbed at the sheeting at the edge of the hole, cut my hand and then managed to grip a stout piece of timber and haul myself to safety, inwardly cursing the rotten old roof and the silly old woman who had sent me up on to it.
‘You bloody fool!’ was all Miss Abbott said. There was no lemonade, no proffered handkerchief to bind up my cut hand, not even a few peaches to take home. I was shown through the house and out the front door as if I were a dangerous intruder. My grandmother, stifling her amusement, had one of those ‘I told you so’ smiles when told the story, and my aunt, whose idea it had been to offer my services, sort of apologised for Miss Abbott, saying that poor Inez by then had very few social contacts and had no experience of handling young people.
Perhaps as some sort of apology, the whole family was invited down to Miss Abbott’s for sherry before Sunday dinner when my parents were next in Bendigo. My mother, father, aunt and I were received in the front sitting room, crammed with quite beautiful furniture and antiques which must have looked much better in the larger rooms of the house in the country when Miss Abbott had been young. I was supplied with lemonade while the others enjoyed their sherry and biscuits. Miss Abbott was, as usual, immaculately coiffed and beautifully dressed, this time wearing some sort of tailored linen dress with light black and brown geometric motifs on a pale straw background. She seemed very at ease chatting with my father, deftly resisting my aunt’s attempts to steer the conversation around to Miss Abbott’s painting (there were several framed examples in the room) and seemingly oblivious of my mother’s clinically appraising eye. I, of course, the ‘boy’, was ignored. That was my last contact with Miss Abbott, although I did see her once or twice more sitting at her easel in View Street painting her favourite flowering gum. My mother concluded that Miss Abbott was not merely eccentric but drifting towards madness. My aunt (I know from my grandmother) tried to draw Miss Abbott out and back into social life, but without success. A few years later Miss Abbott was found on the floor of her hallway by the cleaning lady who came once a week; she had been dead for several days, having died there alone of a heart attack.
Another old lady with whom I had contact during my holidays in Bendigo was my grandmother’s neighbour, Miss Donovan. Maggie Donovan had started off her working life in the 1880s as a maid to Mrs John Crowley. The Crowleys had built the Shamrock Hotel and the Royal Princess Theatre in Bendigo and lived in some style in Marlborough House on the corner of Rowan and Wattle Streets, entertaining Dame Nellie Melba when she sang at the Princess, as well as most of the other notables who visited Bendigo, then in its ‘golden days’. When Mrs Crowley died, Miss Donovan was promoted to housekeeper and with the help of a ‘girl’ and a ‘man’, with the girl doing the housework and the man doing the outside work such as looking after the firewood (there were seven fireplaces, the woodfire stove, the boiler and the copper to keep supplied with wood) and the horses. Miss Donovan ran the house, did the cooking and looked after the widower and his two sons. John Crowley died in 1899 and the younger son, Cornelius, moved to Sydney after graduating in Medicine at the University of Melbourne while the elder son, William, by then a law graduate, stayed on in Bendigo and managed the family estate. Mr William Crowley never married. My aunt and grandparents moved into one of the seven houses adjoining the perimeter fence of the Crowley property in 1933, and became friendly with him. My father, when up from Melbourne on a visit to his in-laws, also called in on Mr Crowley; the younger brother and Dad had been in medical school together.
Fifty or so years later I purchased Marlborough House and, as an early retirement project, ran it for ten years as a bed-and-breakfast. My aunt, by then 85 and living in Melbourne, said with a sweet little smile that if she had ‘played her cards differently’ with Mr Crowley in 1933 (he died suddenly in 1937) she, not I, would have then been the owner of the Crowley home!
When young Mr Crowley died his will provided that Miss Donovan would continue to live in Marlborough House until she died, his estate paying all the bills and allowing her a comfortable income. In my memory of school holidays spent in Bendigo, Marlborough House was ‘Miss Donovan’s place’. Occasionally I would be sent next door with a message from my grandmother, and would have to brave Miss Donovan’s pet magpie which patrolled the back garden just as a dog might, eyeing the legs of nervous visitors and clicking its beak in a most intimidating way. It never did actually attack me, but always seemed to be about to … was it a master of the art of bluff, just having a bit of fun, or was it simply a well-trained security guard?
Sometimes from our back garden I would hear Miss Donovan singing to herself as she pottered about beyond the high dividing fence. Her house had a detached laundry where she would now and then light a fire under the old copper and make all sorts of strange soaps, oils and ointments, one of which (an intriguing orange-coloured cream that I was always tempted to try eating, it looked and smelled so good) was presented in a small white Pond’s face cream jar labelled ‘Miss Donovan’s Ointment’ and was apparently very helpful to my grandmother in reducing the pain of her rheumatism. Sometimes we would all go in to Miss Donovan’s for afternoon tea which for me would mean lemonade and a piece of heavily iced fruit cake – Miss Donovan was reputedly a great cook. Once, when Miss Donovan’s nephew Mick was staying with her and available to drive the Crowley car (gathering dust in the garage), my grandmother and I joined them and we all set off for a day’s picnic in the country.
Miss Donovan intrigued me. She seemed to have a quite grand lifestyle, the (perhaps guarded) friendship of my grandmother and family members and the respect of the Bendigo community. I once asked my grandmother why we never saw Miss Donovan at Mass on Sundays and was given the somewhat evasive reply that ‘she probably went to early Mass’ (we went to the 11 a.m. one). I developed the suspicion that Miss Donovan’s status as an independent woman even saw her miss Mass on Sundays with impunity whenever she felt like it. I suspected that my aunt would have liked to do the same, but she never would, for fear of upsetting my grandmother.
A few years after my grandmother’s death, my aunt leased the house and went to live in Europe, returning to Bendigo for half a dozen years and then retiring to a house she bought in Melbourne where her sister and brothers lived. My aunt told me that not long before she finally left Bendigo she had a brief chat with Miss Donovan, then in her 80s, frail and fading, living alone in that great house, and that Miss Donovan had kept repeating, ‘Tell me what to do, Nell, tell me what to do’. I think that Nell, like me later on, was shaken by the way even the strongest of souls can be brought low by age and weariness … and I doubt that she was able to give Miss Donovan any real answer to that most fundamental of questions: what comes next?