Introduction
The idea for what follows came about after I’d read the publication compiled by a high school classmate in 2018 for the Punchbowl Boys High School (PBHS) 1964 final year reunion. He’d asked all contenders to put together a page on their life post-1964 ‘no more than one page’. The parallel reunion, which I didn’t attend, went well, and generated more reports from other classmates. Reading the results of memories working overtime was both revealing and nostalgic. The majority were high achievers; many of them could probably have written interesting biographies.
Nowadays ‘friends’ to anyone born after the end of the 20th Century wouldn’t necessarily mean someone they’d met in person. In the pre-internet age one had friends and acquaintances. People you may have known through work, school, hobbies, clubs and sport could be classed as one or the other. You could work with someone for many years yet never really know him or her despite having something in common. The majority of people with whom you come in contact throughout life would likely enough fit into that category. Friends you lose take a chunk out of your heart while at the same time locking memories of them into your gray matter.
When I joined Facebook (FB), I never expected to come in contact with folk outside of my interests that include local history, book collecting, railroading, movie and television shows. People avoid joining FB for various reasons, number one being loss of privacy. Over the last decade many of life’s nice surprises have been generated via FB. This perhaps explains why I’ve had a desire to put down in words memories of things past, and friends who’ve moved on or departed this life.
More than two decades in a government job and
subsequent amateur publishing efforts have instilled in me a need to start from
the beginning. Over the past 30 years I’ve written a number of articles on
various aspects of the past. ‘Roughly chronological’ best describes the
resultant narrative. Early articles have been interwoven and may, probably
will, contain conflicting content.
The 1950s
Bankstown in the early 1950s remains in the memories of those of us who lived though what was seen later on as a turbulent period in the history of the world. World War 2 and its aftermath, followed by the chill of the Cold War and the possibility of nuclear war occupied the minds of adults. If you were a child, you were pretty much immune from such worrying matters. Radio provided the only up to date news with newspapers, both morning and afternoon through the week, adding to the mix of adult topics. For me the radio and newspapers provided only fun via their radio serials and comic strips. Ginger Meggs, Superman, Rocky Starr, Biggles, The Potts, Radish and many others fill the corners of my mind.
Sir Joseph Banks St, on which our home was situated, was fortunate in having a narrow strip of worn tar down the centre. There was no formed kerb and guttering outside no.74. A heavy rainfall would soon see the unmade gutters flowing like rapids and it was usual for kids to watch crude paper boats rushing down the hill until they disappeared in the drain near Heath St.
I was an only child but never recall feeling lonely. Dad worked for Australian pastoral company Dalgety’s (reputedly Australia’s largest wool merchant in the 19th Century) at Alexandria while Mum, like the majority of mothers with children at the time, was a housewife. On official forms such as the census, her occupation would normally have appeared as ‘home duties’ – see my family history chapter.
Cooking was done on a fuel stove, powered by chunks of coke (a refined derivative of coal) prior to the arrival of a modern ‘Carmichael’ gas stove.
Dad’s most expensive purchases at the time were a power mower and a radiogramme. The Ransom mower was similar to the type once common to bowling greens with a large roller at the rear and horizontal cutting blades; it cost almost 100 pounds ($200), a fortune at the time. Victa-type mowers hadn’t yet reached the general public and most people used push mowers, so our lawns were the smoothest in Sir Joseph Banks Street. The HMV radiogramme probably cost almost as much as the mower.
For those unfamiliar with the name,
it was a 3-speed (33, 45 and 78 rpm) record player with automatic changer plus
a radio (medium and short-wave), each situated in a pull-down enclosure, housed
in a handsome timber cabinet. The lower half contained speakers, below which
were two doors giving access to record storage.
The Family Home
A survey of the property at 74 Sir Joseph Banks St, Bankstown was carried out in 1926 and construction of the house began soon after. Dad’s dad, in partnership with a friend, set about building not one but two houses in Sir Joseph Banks Street, about 4 lots apart.
Opening the front door you were faced with a hall with the bathroom at the end. The lounge room occupied the left front room and the main bedroom, the right front room. My bedroom was next on the right. Opposite my bedroom was the dining room with the kitchenette down a step, a small sunroom between that and the rear back room, mentioned in the next paragraph. The back door had a covered entry and steps led down on the right to the back lawn, beyond which were the garden beds mentioned elsewhere. The brick outhouse contained a laundry with double cement tubs, a gas-heated ‘copper’, and on the southern side, the toilet. We had a pan service until the sewer arrived around 1960. To save money Dad dug many of the trenches and kindly sent us north for a couple of weeks to stay with Aunty Jane in Harrington.
Our home originally had an open rear verandah, filled in prior to my arrival. This room eventually contained elaborate benchwork constructed by Dad for my model trains. There were storage cupboards below with sliding doors.
The Rheem gas hot water storage heater occupied one corner of the room. Prior to its arrival, both the kitchen and bathroom had ‘instantaneous’ gas hot water systems. The 00/H0 Tri-ang trains circled the room, with a ‘dive’ next to the heater to allow access underneath the layout. There was a door at the far end of the room that became inaccessible once the layout was complete. At one stage I set up my chemistry set in the room but an accidental release of rotten egg gas throughout the house saw an end to my experiments.
Mum and Dad
Mum, according to legend, worked in the Rainbow milk bar on South Terrace, across from Bankstown Railway Station. Is that where she met Dad? They both loved the movies and with 3 cinemas often screening new programmes weekly in Bankstown, there were plenty of opportunities to share each other’s company. They married at St Pauls Church of England in Bankstown on Valentine’s Day, 1944.
During WW2 Mum worked on an aircraft assembly line, probably at Chullora. She was still listed as ‘aircraft worker’ on the 1958 electoral roll. Dad spent 5 years in the CMF being medically unfit for overseas service with time at Moorebank and Greta, mostly as a cook. His skills in the kitchen were unmatched by any other bloke I’ve ever known. After Mum passed away in 1964, he kept me well fed and never asked for help in the kitchen. He’d make me delicious cakes in the old aluminum ‘ring tin’. As soon as one ran out, he’d be onto the next. I was well and truly spoiled until his passing. Each morning he’d arrive at my bedside with a slice of cake!
On the 1958 electoral roll Dad was listed as ‘salesman’ but in the 1960s was employed at Dalgety as a storeman. He worked in the tobacco department at Mascot. Rothman’s eventually became his favourite smoke, following Craven A. These 2 killers certainly led to his death from emphysema in 1978.
In the later 1960s, Dad was moved to the spirits department and took charge until his redundancy. He was pretty much a non-drinker, having a beer or two only around Christmas. I came to know the great blokes who worked for him in the 1960s when they took it in turns to give me driving lessons in the company VW Kombi vans, wonderful vehicles to drive. This usually happened during holiday breaks until I obtained my driving licence in 1966. It was only after that event that Dad began taking driving lessons and bought a company car, an EJ Holden with all the extras.
Much-loved as it was, rust repairs saw it’s sale to our barber, Des, who’d always loved the old girl from afar. Des operated out of a little shop next to the 3 Swallows Hotel driveway on Rookwood Rd, later moving into the pub on the Hume Highway.
Primary School
Let me take you back to the early 1950s when I was a pupil at Bankstown North Public School. In those days the kindergarten and primary schools were separate entities. ‘Kindy’ occupied a new block at the rear of the large school grounds that fronted Liverpool Road / Hume Highway, to the west of the well-known water tower. Primary occupied the main two-story brick building on the highway and a number of so-called ‘de-mountables’ that were in use for decades.
Many people remember their first day at school. In my case there’s no memory of the day in question. Mention kindy to me and my mind conjures up the pleasant experience of finger-painting! Smearing bright colours over whatever we used takes me back to the early 1950s. Coloured pencils and plasticene brought joy to my heart.
There are no memories of playing team sports during those years at school. Among presents received was a badminton set and I developed a love of shuttlecock as we called it at the time. Within the box was a large rubber ring, known as a ‘circlos’, suitable for use on windy days using the same rules as badminton. This item developed a mythos over the decades. It was unknown at school and the day I took it for some long-forgotten reason, a teacher took an interest. Eventually the school purchased a number and ‘circlos’ developed a following, due to it suitability on windy days when a shuttlecock was uncontrollable.
The ancient timber demountables between the then near-new kindy and main 2-story building on the highway became our home for first and second years. My one vivid memory is the sad sight of a classmate who was compelled to sit on the verandah outside the classroom due to an embarrassing physical problem.
There was a young female teacher of the time who wielded what seemed to be a cane as long as she was tall. It was placed along the chalk trough (along the base of the blackboard) for all to see. During this period the trauma of the polio injection event over-rode other memories. A hot day standing in the sun in a long line of kids wouldn’t be tolerated nowadays but at the time it was the norm, and necessary due to the nature of the illness. In some ways it reminds me of 2020’s Covid trauma. I do remember making a woolen pom-pom that is still packed away somewhere.
Looking at the 1955 second year photo (below) indicates that both Ted Gott and Oscar Bucis had become good pals. Others
friends of the time were Ted Oram (who lived across the road from school) and
Bill Stephenson. Ted Oram recently turned up on Facebook, as did David James.
Bill Brennan lived several doors away opposite in my street, Sir Joseph Banks,
several minutes walk away from the school. I had to cross the highway to Frank
Smyth’s corner shop (still there), walk down Jacobs St, turn left into
Frederick St and left into Sir Joseph Banks St. Alternatively I’d walk across
the then unnamed block in front of the Wood’s mansion (as we called it) and
down Remi St and across the grass hill to Frederick St. There’s a lingering
memory of a savage dog located at the back of a Stacey St property that usually
precluded taking the shorter trip.
Many kids of the time owned a pushbike (as we called a bicycle) but I didn’t. What I did own was the best scooter available, a very special and much-loved Christmas present with pump-up tyres, no less, and had no problem out-performing the other locals on their old solid tyre bombs. Some years later, it turned out Dad had suffered a serious injury on a bicycle and hadn’t wanted me to suffer the same fate, by which time of course I had suffered an injury riding the scooter when I did a 180-degree flip over the handle-bars. As it turned out I was riding bicycles away from his gaze, courtesy of Ted Gott, who had a variety of models in somewhat variable condition. The most memorable of these was a tricycle with 28” wheels. I once rode it out to Bankstown airport via the shopping centre and it created a stir. Full size tricycles were extremely uncommon, apparently.
Grandma Byatt’s Home
We didn’t have a car so visits to Gran (Mum’s mum), 17 Hillcrest Ave, Chullora (now Greenacre) usually occupied a day out. I don’t believe McVicars ran a no.27 bus up Jacobs St and along Frederick St past the top of Sir Joseph Banks St until the 1960s. We had to walk up to Stacey Street and up to the highway then cross to the stop at the water tower. The journey ended either near the corner of Rawson Rd and Hillcrest Ave or quite close to Gran’s house if it was a Cardigan Rd bus that turned down that road at the Konrad’s house on Hillcrest Ave. This house, once the home of two of our greatest swimmers, John and Ilsa, still exists in 2020. Gran’s house also exists on the same footprint, quite tastefully renovated into a 2-story residence.
Legends abound around Gran’s house. In the mid-1950s onwards Gran was confined to a high brass bed from where she taught me to play euchre. Age has brought forth memories of those years. There was a dressing table on the window side of the bed with a wonderful snow globe thereon. This never ceased to entertain me. I’ve never been able to discover one quite so nice in all these years. Next to the dressing table was a commode chair but we never talked about that! On the other side of the bed were two wardrobes, one of which may have contained a number of dolls, possibly those of Auntie Beryl, the youngest of Mum’s sisters. I can’t recall viewing the other front room but assume it was Uncle Bill’s bedroom. The other bedroom on the south side of the house, probably occupied by newly married relatives prior to moving into their own homes, also remained a mystery.
We never used the front door, always entering the house through the back door, beside which was the outside pan loo with its hook containing a collection of old newspaper squares. Toilet paper was a luxury in those days. I once discovered a stash of MAN magazines hidden under a pile of newspapers. For those not familiar with that iconic Aussie magazine of the 1930s-70s, it was mildly risqué for the time with tasteful nudes, intimate details of which were airbrushed so as not to offend the innocent! The driveway led past a row of magnificent blue hydrangeas to the mysterious and never explored garage reputed to contain Uncle Jack’s Singer soft-top sportscar. I can’t recall traveling in the Singer but it appears in a photo of Aunty Jane’s home at Harrington. Jack was the younger of Mum’s brothers and another great bloke who set me on the path to historical research.
The only pet I remember at Gran’s was Rusty, a friendly brown doggie of indeterminate breed who liked to spend his time on the back step and that’s where I photographed him around 1960.
Uncle Bill once owned a motorcycle with sidecar attached. On one occasion he took Mum and I on a fast run along Liverpool Rd (aka Hume Highway) much to my delight but not so Mum when he almost collected a telegraph pole near the corner of Stacey St, momentarily forgetting about the attached sidecar. Bill was a keen golfer and in later years spent most mornings playing a round at Hudson Park, the golf course opposite Rookwood Cemetery. Bill’s cheerful gravel voice occasionally echoes though my mind and it always seems appropriate that his ashes ended up within a driver’s distance of the golf course where he spent many happy hours. At some time he owned a Ford sedan and this most likely took us on occasional family holidays to Toukley.
Returning to Gran’s house, the hallway passed through the dining room-living room, a room I never recall being used with its nice table and chairs. What I do remember is the settee with the seat that lifted to reveal a number of treasures, in the eyes of this child, anyway. I used to wander through a small collection of 1940s Aussie movie magazines, many of which had movie stars’ portraits ‘enhanced’ by rouged lips and cheeks. Aunty Beryl had been the keenest movie fan in the family according to Mum, from which I assumed she had been responsible for the added decorations. My regular interest in the magazines had been noticed so they were eventually presented to me, possibly one Christmas. From a small discovery began my lifelong interest in movies of the 1930s and 1940s. Occasionally I look through the magazines and try to recall what else occupied the settee, without success.#
NOTES Loaded 22.10.2021. Photos updated 28.10.2021 Same font and text size, excluding titles, in edit. Some paragraphs show up as smaller text online; reason nk.
