Burnished: Burnside Life Stories

BURNISHED:

BURNSIDE LIFE STORIES

A collection of life accounts from residents of Burnside Children’s Homes, Sydney.

Compiled by Kate Shayler

Published by MoshPit Publishing at Smashwords

http://www.moshpitpublishing.com.au/

Copyright 2011 Kate Shayler

http://www.kateshayler.com/

Cover photography: Janette M. Cave

Cover layout: MoshPit Publishing

Every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge copyright. However, should any infringement have occurred, the publisher tenders its apology and invites any copyright owners to contact them.

Smashwords Edition

License Notes

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BURNISHED:

BURNSIDE LIFE STORIES

burnish: to polish, shine, buff, rub.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THANKS

WHAT IS BURNSIDE?

1. GEORGE

2. COLIN

3. NOEL

4. JACK

5. MONTY

6. WILLY

7. NORMA

8. RICHIE

9. STUART

10. CHARLES

11. PETER

12. STAN

13. BRON

14. HELEN

15. ROY

16. BILL

17. ANALISE

18. IAN

19. JIM

20. SUE

21. KERRY

22. TONY

23. MICHELLE

24. NICK

25. GREG

26. DEE

FURTHER READING

WHO IS KATE SHAYLER?

INTRODUCTION

Burnside opened its doors to care for children in 1911. Its history has been recorded, to a large extent, by people other than the children themselves. The Federal and State Governments, as well as some churches and care agencies, apologised in 2009 to the so-called Forgotten Australians, and many other Australians wondered who the forgotten ones were. The British Government offered its apologies to child migrants who became Forgotten Australians too, and again people wondered.

When The Long Way Home, my own story of childhood at Burnside, was released I was overwhelmed by the response. I received so many compassionate, caring letters from strangers and acquaintances and found myself wishing other homes kids could have that healing experience too. As I did a series of book talks, I was often surprised by the comments and questions of my audiences.

‘Why did you have to go to a home?’

‘I didn’t know Australia had places like that!’

‘Mum used to drive me past those lovely castles and I’d imagine all the magical things that went on inside them.’

‘What happened to you when you left the home?’

Then: ‘Bloody hell! You had it easy there! You ought to hear what happened in the boys homes.’

So I did hear. I listened and, although I will never agree that I had it easy, I did find a huge range of experiences and reactions to being in a home and to life outside. Not all the kids were there because a parent had died, as I had assumed.

‘Why don’t you write our stories too?’ suggested Analise, who I’d caught up with again through my writing, for the first time since she left Burnside some forty years ago.

I advertised for people who were willing to have their story included in this book. A few agreed to but when it came to reliving the pain, they withdrew their offers. A few said their spouses were going to write their stories as best sellers one day. Many have no contact at all with Burnside now and would not have seen my requests.

Here then are the stories of the ex-Burnie kids who allowed me to record their lives as they relived them to make this book.

‘Are there any success stories?’ I’ve been asked.

‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘They are all successes.’

How do we measure success? Is it the achievement of wealth, being a good citizen and the raising of children who are good citizens too, the ability to live without being a burden on society, or simply keeping on putting one foot in front of the other through a life whose early traumas have not healed? There are as many definitions of success as there are single oats in a bowl of porridge.

Each of these chapters is a success story. I am grateful to the people who so generously offered their hospitality and their stories, and I’m glad I know them all.

I want to remember here the people who did not make it, the ones who took their lives under burdens too heavy to keep on carrying. John, Peter, Helen and David, to name the few I have known or heard of. And Jimmy, big brother of my Dave, who died alone in Parramatta Hospital, aged seven.

Thank you for reading these stories. As C.S. Lewis wrote, 'Literature enlarges our being by admitting us to experiences not our own'.

Hopefully these stories will enlarge, enrich and result in Forgotten Australians being remembered. Childhood is a precious time in which children need care and love and belonging, play and laughter too.

Kate Shayler

Hazelbrook 2011

THANKS

I want to thank the people who shared these stories and their hospitality with me. I am proud to know them and I salute their courage. I thank their spouses and families too.

Thanks to Caroline Jones AO whose enduring compassion and humanity warm my soul.

Thanks to Kim Swivel who edits with such insight and sensitivity.

Thanks to Stuart Shepherd of Hunter Shoe Store, Springwood, for his enthusiasm in helping us with children’s shoes!

To the Mosher team for their tireless work and commitment to this project.

Thanks to Dave who supports, proof reads and bears with my absences in mind and body. I am blessed.

Kate Shayler

Hazelbrook 2011

WHAT IS BURNSIDE?

To begin, Burnside is not what it used to be.

The Very Reverend R.G. Macintyre, the first manager and a Burnside board member, wrote in 1947 that, ‘Burnside is not tied down … like a boy not allowed to outgrow his child-suit. It exists for the benefit of needy Australian children and is free to meet their need in whatever way it may arise. … need, not creed, is the basis for admission’.

This freedom meant that Burnside did keep changing, which you will see as you read these stories.

The first needy boys arrived in 1911 after James Burns (later Sir James) had conceived the idea and rallied supporters to fund the high quality buildings in which children would be taught to become worthwhile citizens of earth and Heaven.

Burnside was an almost self contained village on Pennant Hills Road at North Parramatta. It included vegetable gardens, dairy, hospital, church, pool, public school, laundry, outdoor staff cottages and the children’s homes, each of which housed up to fifty children together with two or three staff members.

While there were roughly eighteen homes for the children to live in, at any point in time this could change as different uses were made of various buildings over the years. During the period Burnside existed as a residential care facility, approximately eleven thousand children passed through its doors, with up to five hundred living there at any one time.

In later years, Burnside even had a holiday home at Huskisson, but sadly it was sold and more recently burnt to the ground. Many other Burnside buildings were sold too in response to changing needs, but they can still be seen along Pennant Hills Road.

Along with changing needs and services over the years, Burnside’s name changed too. It was for a time the largest children’s home in Australia. Gradually it became known in Sydney as ‘Burnside’, no longer needing to be referred to as ‘Burnside Orphans Homes’, ‘Burnside Children’s Home’, ‘Burnside Presbyterian Homes for Children’ or ‘Burnside Homes for Children’.

Freedom to change resulted in Burnside not being a residential establishment any more. The process of evolving to family houses began in the 1960s. At the time of writing it is known as ‘Uniting Care Burnside’ and families are now helped as a unit, rather than children being removed from their families.

Please see the reading list at the end of ‘Burnished’ for more information about Uniting Care Burnside.

1. GEORGE

We lived in the scrub at Liverpool in a house made of hessian bags all sewn together. It was pretty tough and you had to make do with what you could get. There’s a grog shop there now and my family must have put a lot of money towards that.

Dad was an alcoholic. He worked at Ashcroft's abattoir for a time and they reckoned he was the only bloke who could roll a barrel of tallow, he was that strong. I once fell in the offal pit there and they had to fish me out. Mum had to walk through paddocks of wild cattle to get to the railway station when she was going to work. She had to work as well because Dad could never hold down a job. The grog got him.

I’m told I was the apple of his eye, and I do remember his sense of humour. One time us kids were having a brick fight with the neighbours’ kids and our side was getting the worst of it so we all ran to Dad to tell him. ‘Keep going,’ he said. ‘They might throw enough bricks over so we can build a shit house.’

Mum was a lovely person with a great sense of humour. She didn’t go to church but she used to say her prayers every night. Her father was a Methodist minister. She had seven children, and I was second last.

The time came when Mum couldn’t look after all seven of us and decided that the younger two would have to go to an orphanage. I was five and Betty, the youngest, was three. It was 1922. Mum said that Betty and I were going out with her and Laurel, our eldest sister. They dropped us off at Burnside Hospital to be checked over before we could be accepted. Betty and I never had a clue that we were going to stay there.

Mum and Laurel shot through, and that’s when the bellowin’ started. They put it over us! We bellowed through the medical check and we bellowed all the way over to Number Eight Home (also called Ivanhoe). For a while I had nightmares about that day. It was bad.

Dad was in the asylum by then and Mum was suffering from a ‘nervous disability’. It says that on my papers from the homes. The only clothes we owned were what we had on. Mum sent money for our keep when she could but soon they were writing to her reminding her that she'd got far behind in payments. Poor Mum. She wasn’t off living it up somewhere! She did menial work when she could but there wasn’t a lot of work around then, and the Great Depression was just around the corner. Mum couldn’t read or write much; someone had to write her letters for her.

At Ivanhoe Miss Nance was the matron and Miss Raven was the assistant who did the cooking. If cooking was a disease she’d be in the best of health: the food was shocking. Betty had a weak tummy and she’d sometimes vomit into her plate, the food was that bad. But they’d stand over her and make her eat it. That’s fair dinkum. I saw them do it.

One time Mum came when we were having dinner and they let me sit with her to eat it. We were having stringy old beans that stuck in your mouth and teeth, and Mum said, ‘Have you got to eat that?’

I said, ‘Yeah.’

She pulled a face and said, ‘Here, give them to me.’ She’d taken an envelope out of her bag and emptied it, put the beans in and got rid of them for me.

We’d go to bed reasonably early and someone might talk in bed. The matron would come out and say, ‘Who was talking?’ Naturally no-one would say who it was. She’d pick out six or eight kids and tell them to go into the bathroom, giving each one a piece of soap as big as her finger to chew up.

‘Don’t you swallow it,’ she’d say. ‘Spit it out. Now rinse your mouth out but don’t drink the water.’ You’d have soap stuck in your teeth all night. It’s a wonder it didn’t kill someone, that Lifebuoy soap, but I don’t think the matron would have cared if it had.

The little kid in the bed next to mine used to wet his bed every night without fail. Poor little bugger would get the strap for doing that. I used to feel so sorry for him. He knew he’d get a hiding every morning when he woke up. Another boy in the home woke up with an erection and the matron saw it and flogged him because she reckoned he’d been playing with himself. I said to the little bloke next to me, ‘I hope I never get one of them.’

He said, ‘Me too!’

Betty was only a tiny kid and I had to look after her, so I didn’t make friends with the other kids. She’d get picked on and she’d race over to me for help and I’d have to fight the other kid.

Mum would come to visit when she could but it was not often because most of the jobs she had were out of Sydney on sheep stations and that. Sometimes when she came I’d be behind the door, in trouble again, and I wasn’t allowed to see her. I didn’t know she was there, so it didn’t matter. Fin, our brother, came up to see us a lot, and he and all the older kids tried to help Mum out with money.

Other visitors came too and picked out kids to give treats to. The first motorcar I ever saw, a Chrysler, belonged to some of them – they picked out Betty and her little mate Patty Rhodes. Whoever was picked would be given a picnic and we’d all be standing around watching. For a time I thought the visitors were my parents and they didn’t want to know me.

The bigger kids used to toss me into the rubbish bin to get all the good stuff out. Apple cores, orange skins, cake papers, anything we could eat. Mind you, I wasn’t stupid. I made sure I had a gut full before I started throwing anything out to the others.

I used to get into all sorts of strife. I’d fight anyone and the older boys would sool me on – when the matron wasn’t looking, of course. In particular, there were three brothers, the Priests. I could beat the two younger ones in a fight but I could never beat the eldest one. He was too big. Now and again, their father would come and take them out of Burnside to live with him and everything would be sailing along peacefully, then someone would say, ‘Guess who’s back in Burnside!’ Oh crikey. Here’s more fights coming, I’d think to myself. I didn’t really enjoy fist fighting and I only did it because the older boys sooled me.

I got sent off to live in Glencoe, another of the homes at Burnside, when I got too big for the girls, worse luck. One of the matrons there at Glencoe, Miss Tarling, was all right to a point but she could wield the strap like she must have been Jack Dempsey’s sparring partner. One time she went away and one of the boys thought he’d get rid of her strap. He threw it up into the manhole above the dining room. When Miss Tarling got back she couldn’t find it. None of us knew where it was! Unfortunately she went and got another one made.

The matron at Glencoe used to come around with a bloody great teapot the size of a bucket and it was full of diluted Epsom salts, supposedly for our digestion. When she came around with that teapot or with the castor oil, you’d walk around pulling faces as if you’d had some already. But then someone’d pimp on you: ‘He hasn’t had any Matron.‘ You bastard! you’d be thinking. Then there’d be another fight. You’d give him a belt in the mouth for pimping on you. We had kerosene put through our hair too, for nits. The matrons had a bad habit of dragging you by the ear to have your head drenched. It hurt too.

Around this time I also started my schooling at Burnside and I was a pretty good scholar. Never had any trouble with the work. I could do sums or whatever they wanted me to do.

When it was time for Betty to go to school, she was moved to the War Memorial Home and I used to wave to her across the dirt track that separated us. That track was only used by a few people who’d walk up and down it back then. When I went back years later I wondered how they could’ve moved the War Memorial Home to the other side of the road but they’d just rerouted the dirt track, widened and sealed it and called it James Ruse Drive.

Sometimes a few of us boys’d shoot through to Parramatta to pick up bumpers – cigarette butts. If they were long enough we’d smoke them but if they were short we used to get the tobacco out and smoke it in whatever paper we could get our hands on. They made us so crook but we never told the matron why we were crook. It’s a wonder we didn’t end up with TB or something.

We’d shoot through down to the lake too – Lake Parramatta – but one time a boy drowned. He jumped in but he couldn’t swim. Ronny Cullen was his name. I’ve always remembered that. Another two kids, the Price boys, got pneumonia and the one called Donny died. We saw his funeral go past.

Burns himself – James Burns, the founder of the children's home – died when I was still in the little kids home, Ivanhoe, and we’d had to make a guard of honour on the roadside. I knew what it was all about, I think, not that I cared. They gave us biscuits and that’s all that interested me. I wished he’d die every day. These days, when we go back to Burnside for reunions, some of the women say that Burns used to scramble money to the kids but I don’t remember any money. He scrambled lollies.

I’d always wondered where Burns’ grave was, until I found it in the scrub up near his place, Gowan Brae, one reunion day. His wife was buried there too, and one of their sons, who died in the Great War, has a cenotaph there. As a kid I never saw it when we used to sneak up around Gowan Brae – mostly to go bird-nesting. We took the eggs from nests in the scrub and swapped them for what we wanted off other kids, like pictures of Les Darcy. Everyone wanted pictures of Les Darcy but there weren’t many about. We’d sneak down to the tip and look for papers that might have pictures of him and we’d look for pictures of other people too, like cricketers, footy players and other boxers but Les Darcy was the one we really wanted.

My brother Fin kept up visiting me and Betty as often as he could. He'd give us whatever copper money he could afford, which we’d then give to the matron, who’d put it in our money boxes. She’d get it out for us with a knife if we needed some, like when the ice-cream man came. Peter we called him, and he used to come up in a horse and cart on Saturdays. There was a bloody good peach and plum orchard nearby too. One day we were sitting on a rock with fruit we’d got and all of a sudden a bloke leapt out and shouted, ‘Got ya!’ It was the bloke who owned the trees but when we all bolted off in different directions he couldn’t catch any of us. We knew all the shortcuts through the scrub.

On the playing fields at Burnside, we used to play footy, but at some point the matrons went crook that our clothes were getting all torn and dirty so they made us play soccer instead. Our home won a competition and the prize was a wind up gramophone, the first one I ever saw, and one record: it had ‘The Prisoner’s Song’ on one side and ‘The Runaway Train’ on the flipside. With that gramophone there were more fights over who’d wind it up, who’d put the record on, who’d put the needle down, who’d turn the record over. We all had to line up and have a turn. Once, when the matron was on holidays, the big kids got all the waste needles and crept into her room, rolled back her bedclothes and tipped all the needles in. We never heard anything about it. She must have been waiting for the boys to ask but they weren’t bloody going to do that.

Sundays and every other day we went to church. No wonder a man doesn’t go now. I still believe in a supreme being, but the way the Masons do; I belong to a lodge rather than a church. My most vivid memory of the ritual at Burnside was passing this bell on top of a pole on the way to church. I don’t know what it was for but we’d sneak off to it whenever we could and load our pockets up with rocks and we’d give that bell a work out! It must have driven the matrons mad trying to find out who was ringing it. Clang! Clang! Clang!

There was another matron at Glencoe who could swing the strap as good as Miss Tarling. She made you go into the room where the shoes cupboard was and strip off all your clothes for a belting. I used to cop it all the time. Then one day the biggest bloke there said to me, ‘Do you know why you get hit so often?’

‘No.’

‘Because you don’t cry.’ I wouldn’t let myself. ‘When she’s hitting you, let out a bella!’

So next time she waved the strap I let out this bloody scream and frightened hell out of her. She never hit me that time. I got in before her.

But that shoe cupboard! That’s when the fighting would be on. They’d open up the cupboard in winter time and all the boys had to find a pair to fit. Well, one bloke would have one of a pair and another bloke would have the other one, so they had to sort it out. We hardly wore shoes anyhow. We were supposed to wear them all through winter but we used to take them off. They were that uncomfortable and stiff from being shut in the cupboard all summer.

When one of the matrons went on holidays once, we had a relief matron called Miss Gracey. She was lovely. She had a boy of her own in a Masonic home somewhere. She also had enormous bosoms and she used to give us cuddles and we’d snuggle into her. She was the only one who did that.

All of us kids had a shanghai, as we called them, a slingshot that we made ourselves. I don’t remember where we got the stretchy elastic stuff from but we used to find old boots at the tip and cut the tongue out to use for the sling where we put the rock we wanted to hurl. This kid saw the matron half asleep on the verandah one day and he loaded up his shanghai with gramophone needles and let them fly at her, but she must have heard a sound and put her hand up to her head just as the needles whizzed past. Crikey, he could have hit her!

The tip was a great place for getting what we needed, like cotton reels and bits of wire, bucket handles that we straightened out for billy cart axles. All sorts of things. Our billy carts could have got some idiot killed. There was a real steep hill where you could get up quite a bit of speed. One bloke found two big pram wheels for his cart and I used to go down on the back with him.

Another time, when the sub-matron had been left in charge, we made traps in the grass to trip her up. We’d pull the grass across the track and tie it in a knot so whoever came by would catch their foot in it and end up arse in the grass. We drove her mad and we caught Miss Raven like that a few times too. We liked doing that to her pimps as well. They’d be running along with her trying to catch up to us and saying, ‘I think they went this way, Matron.‘ It was real good when they tripped. My golly we gave her a hard time, that Miss Raven. We weren’t scared of her. We were scared of that Miss Tarling, though. She could do some floggin’!

Meantime, Mum was still struggling to make ends meet. She and the family had moved to Sydney to find work, and Burnside wrote to her in March 1927 and again in the June reminding her that she hadn’t paid anything for our keep for six months. They sent someone out to talk to her and this is what he wrote after, part of it anyway:

She informed me that both herself and her two sons were out of employment for some months. Both herself and her daughter left their employment at Sydney Hospital, the daughter to be married and the mother for no stated reason and the son had left the Railways to go rabbiting with a younger brother. Their horse died and they returned home and both had been out of constant employment for the last three months. There is yet another son employed on a farm at Peak Hill and he pays the rent for them and they live the best they can ... no hope of paying either maintenance or arrears owing.

Mum wanted to take me and Betty out of Burnside but she couldn’t: she wasn’t allowed to because she had ‘signed them over until they were a certain age’. Still, she wanted us and, besides, she could get 10/- per week for each of us from the state government and that would help her a lot. The person who’d talked to Mum also wrote, ‘She appears to be a very respectable woman, and I would recommend that she be given permission to take her children out of Burnside.’

A few months later they sent someone out to see Mum a second time and they caught up with her where she was working once again at Sydney Hospital. She was a wardswoman there and she got paid £2.3s.- ($4.30) a week and out of that she was paying 22/6 rent and supporting our sister Marie, the next in age up from us, who was still at school. Robert, the eldest, was at home too and he got work at the Railways sometimes and was waiting for a permanent job there. Dad hadn’t given Mum anything for seven years and he was in Callan Park Mental Hospital by then. This time they said they were sure she was doing her best and couldn’t pay more than she was to Burnside.

Of course Betty and I didn’t know any of this and we just carried on as usual at the home.

I was busy throwing rocks at Mr Marshall, the caretaker. We had fun with him. We used to bombard him with rocks and he’d lie on his back and fend them off with his feet. He enjoyed it more than us boys did, I think. He was the gardener who lived with his wife in the cottage beside the creek in Masons Drive, and Mrs Marshall worked as a relief matron when she was needed.

I was also busy avoiding this big white leghorn rooster that would charge at me out of the chook yard I had to pass every day on my way home from school. That rooster hated me. And I was scared of him. There was a kid there who used to bully me too. One day I was coming home from school for dinner and I was running late. I came down past the chooks and the leghorn comes from one direction and the bully comes from the other. I start running from the bully, then I see the chook coming, so I run from it right at the bully.

When I finally got home, Mrs Marshall, who was relief matron at the time, said, ‘I want to see you.’ I thought I was in more trouble but she said, ‘You’re leaving us, Georgie. You’d better go and have a bath.‘ I got in the bath and there was a dreadful red rash all over me. I didn’t tell them because I thought they might not let me go. I found out later that it was a nerve rash. Too much excitement.

I was ten when we left. I don’t know where my father was by then but Laurel and Mum came up in the train and the bus and got Betty and me. While we were waiting for the bus we saw Patty Rhodes coming home from school and Betty gave her her toy Singer sewing machine. That was the last time we saw Patty.

***

We went to our elder brother Jack’s place in Stanmore first, where Jack gave me a haircut. I remember that well. Next we were taken to live with Laurel in Punchbowl. She was only twenty-one and she’d just married Wal, a policeman. He’d been in Mittagong Boys Home and he was a hell of a nice bloke. They’d had their honeymoon at Urunga near the beach and when we came to live with them, Wal was still complaining about his sunburn. It was so bad he could hardly walk but he carried Betty, who’d fallen asleep, all the way from the station to their house in Wattle Street. That’s a decent bloke for you, to come back from his honeymoon and get his wife’s little brother and sister out of an orphanage.

Laurel couldn’t get us to talk for a while. She was bringing out books and comics and all sorts of things but she couldn’t get us to talk. We’d been trained not to at Burnside or we’d get a belting. Betty and I would whisper to one another but we didn’t talk.

I went to Bankstown East School for a fortnight or so. Wal would walk me some of the way to school and as soon as he was out of sight I used to climb up onto an electrical box beside the railway line, to walk along it. There was this pair of twins that would bully me to get off the box, until one day there was only one of them and I gave him such a beating, they never gave me any trouble after that!

At that time, there were rumours going around that the country had no money. On the way to school we’d see hundreds of people lined up outside the bank hoping to get their money out. We were all right because Wal had the job with the police, and by jee he fed a lot of people. He had Betty, Marie and me and then Fin and Jack, and his own brother would turn up too, and they’d all get a feed. Laurel and Wal were like that. They fed the lot of us. Laurel was so lovely. So was Wal’s sister Mona. When she visited, she’d give me and Betty a sixpence each. She was a real lady – we never swore while she was around.

There were riots in the streets sometimes then. Political ones. There’d always be people on soap boxes or fruit cases saying their bit and the opposition would be saying theirs. Sometimes the mob that was listening would let fly with rotten eggs or tomatoes and the police, such as Wal, had to break them up. Us kids didn’t know anything about politics and we’d cheer for anyone.

From Punchbowl, Mum took me and Betty to Nulla Nulla Creek, about 110 miles from Kempsey, where her brother Jack had a farm. Marie had gone on ahead of us, and we all stayed there for a while with Uncle Jack, his wife, Aunty Louie, and their lovely daughter Gwen. I got up to sixth class in school at Nulla Nulla Creek. It was a one-teacher school, the one-teacher was called Mr Knight, and Slim Dusty’s elder sisters were in my class – Shorty Ranger, the songwriter, was too. For a time, we moved with Uncle Jack and his family to Cooranbong, near Lake Macquarie, then back up to Nulla Nulla again, until, finally, Uncle Jack lost the farm altogether and we had to go back to Laurel and Wal in Sydney, to their new place in Yagoona.

Not long after we got there, another of my elder brothers, Bill, asked Laurel if I could come out and keep him company on the block of land he’d just bought at Londonderry, near Richmond. It was a virgin block of twenty-three acres and it needed clearing. He said he’d give me his bike if I worked for him. I was up there for about three months and I was so happy – I thought I was going to leave school! But then one day Bill disappeared to West Wyalong, in central New South Wales, for harvesting work, leaving me to just about starve on my own. I never saw the bike again and never saw Bill for a couple of years. Wal come up and took me back to Yagoona. I was only thirteen.

I settled back into school; it was never really a bother for me. I used to do my homework on the way there in the mornings. When I was fifteen I got a prize for Boys Highest Aggregate from Bankstown North High School. It was a book and I’ve still got it. Then, around this time, my brother Bill reappeared. He’d sold his land at Londonderry and wanted help pulling the house down, to move it elsewhere. But the thing was, Bill no longer owned the house – he’d sold it with the land. So, really, he had me helping him bloody thieve it! Bill always had a scam going and it didn't matter whether he was conning family or a stranger.

After that, I went back to school again, to Bankstown Commercial High School where they taught a lot of woodwork and so on. But with that time away at Londonderry house-thieving, I’d missed a few months of school so now I wasn’t as bloody clever as I thought I was. They had an exam and I came thirty-third in that. I’d always come first before. But as it turned out, I was only there for half a year anyway. Mum, who’d moved up to Queensland for work, wasn’t earning enough to send any money down for our keep and it got too much for Laurel and Wal. This’ll do me, I thought. No more school if I go up to stay with Mum. So I made the decision for Betty and me.

Mum and Marie were working for the CSR sugar mill at Broadwater up on the Richmond River. Mum was the housekeeper and Marie was the assistant, waiting table and so on for the chemist who worked in the mill. When Betty and I went up to stay with them, they had nowhere to put us, so Betty got sent to work for board on a property out of Bellbrook, back over the border in New South Wales, and I got work with a bloke called Jack Collier at Wardell near Kempsey, on a dairy and cane farm. I did that for ten months and got two kicks in the bum for my wages.

Betty was always a good worker and a real nice person who everyone loved and respected. She ended up staying in the Bellbrook area for the rest of her life. She took a long time to talk after we left Burnside and she had never turned into much of a talker. It was really instilled in her. She married a real good bloke called George but not until after the war. He was a lot older than Betty and quite rich. He had a place called Elsinore at Bellbrook. It was a fabulous place, quiet and pretty.

I ended up moving around a lot, and I did all sorts of work as a young bloke, mostly farm work, labouring, fencing, clearing brush and so on. There was a bad drought on and one of the worst jobs I had was having to kill calves that were starving because there was no feed around for them. At one point I went down to Sydney and got work in a furniture shop, then back to Nulla Nulla for more dairying work. You went anywhere to get a job back then. The standard pay was your keep and five bob a week. That’s fifty cents! The only reason you’d work for people was to get your keep and your bed that was usually out on a verandah. I never thought about where my life going then. All I was concerned about was earning my keep. I definitely didn’t think about getting married. I was real scared of sheilas back then.

I was working at a butter factory in Toorooka not far from Kempsey when I got a telegram from my brother Bill down at West Wyalong, telling me he had a good job for me and he wanted me to be best man at his wedding. So I thought this sounds all right, but when I got to West Wyalong Bill reckoned I was too slow getting there and the job was gone. I think it had only been a trick to get me there to work for him, which I did. I bought a horse and cart so I could pick up mallee roots and sell them. They were good burning. They burn like coal and send out a lot of heat. I did anything I could in those days to earn a shilling.

Next, I got a job in the hospital at West Wyalong, working for the nurses, cutting wood, milking cows, carting hot water and I became the matron’s pet. I had my own room, beautiful food and a pound a week! That was the most money I’d ever got, and the best job, scared as I was of sheilas. Like a fool, though, I left that job and went back to Laurel and Wal’s in Sydney, to another job at the Eta Peanut Butter factory, where I got a pound a week, but I also had to pay board out of it.

Who should turn up again but my brother Bill – in a beautiful big Oldsmobile car. This time he wanted me to go to Temora with him, not far from West Wyalong, and he reckoned I’d own an Oldsmobile soon too if I did. I was about twenty then and I fell for it – again. Bill only wanted me to work for him, in his new business buying and selling scrap. He bought me a truck that was in his name and he said, ‘You work for me and when I reckon you’ve earned it, the truck will be yours and we’ll call it quits.‘ He had no intention of doing any such thing. He was conning me.

But it was at Temora that I met Mary, the girl who would become my wife. She was the sister of Bill’s wife Myrtle, and had come to help out while Myrtle was expecting. That first weekend in Temora I somehow got the courage to ask her to the pictures, and after that we gradually got to know one another. Mary had done it tough as a kid. She was born in Ganmain in May of the same year as I was born. Her mother had died when she was about ten and her father remarried soon after. The new wife didn’t like Mary and didn’t mind letting her know it. She treated Mary like she was nothing, and Mary was a defiant kid, which probably didn’t help. She was a quiet person and I liked that, but she was also independent – she didn’t care what anyone thought. She got me over my fear of sheilas.

Mary would come out on the truck with me when I went out buying scrap bottles, bags, rags and bones, anything there was a zack in that I could sell on. She used to come anywhere with me and nothing was a problem for her. She was a real good sort and she’d come out shooting with me of a Sunday too. She wasn’t too proud for anything I had to do: I’d have a load of stinking meat scraps from the butcher and there’d be maggots as big as your finger on it but Mary didn’t care – she’d help me bag it all up. We’d be bouncing down the main street of Temora with maggots falling off and jumping off the truck and it never worried her. We enjoyed each other’s company, never had much money to go out on dates.

I think we both just knew we’d get married. We didn’t have to. We just wanted to. Neither of us was happy living the way we were and we both thought being with each other would be a big improvement.

Mary went to Sydney and stayed with Laurel before the big event. Bill said he’d bring me to Sydney for the wedding and bring us back home too if I put the petrol in his car. So I did that and away we went.

We were married at the Presbyterian Church in Bankstown, and afterwards we had a party with lots of music and dancing. We were so happy.

Next morning. Bill had taken off without us. He didn’t tell anyone he was going. We found out later he’d gone to Queanbeyan to start up a cordial factory. Thanks for the lift home, Bill! Lucky for us, Wal drove us back to Temora.

I went back to buying scrap but I didn’t do very well because the place was just about cleared out of anything to sell by then so I went wheat carting to earn some money, and meet my payments to Bill for the truck. I’d send him a cheque every month but one time I didn’t take my cheque book carting with me and missed a payment. Next thing I know the sheriff turns up with a summons to the District Court in Queanbeyan. Bill wants his money and it’s him who got the summons issued.

He ended up with nothing from it though, because I enlisted. It was February 1941, the Second World War was on and all servicemen’s debts were legally waived. I wasn’t patriotic and I didn’t see that I had anything to fight for except Mary. She was pregnant with our first child and we didn’t have any money to spare. I joined up to get money for my wife and kid. I had to pay the solicitor sixteen guineas to deal with the summons. It was a bloody lot of money. Bill, that bastard, could have got me killed and nearly did a few times.

I ended up joining the Air Force, after they’d told me down at the RAAF Woolloomooloo recruitment office that all they needed was cooks. I’d said, ‘Well, that’ll do me. I’ll get a bloody feed!‘ Along the way I met up with a few blokes I went to school with who were becoming pilots. If they could pass the pilot exam, I’d have romped in with the education I’d had. But it turned out that being a cook probably saved my life: a lot of pilots got killed in the war.

But the good thing was, Mary was going to be better off financially with me in the Air Force. All the wives of servicemen were better off because they were sure of their money coming in. They’d pick it up from their local post office. I was getting five bob a day when I first joined up and I arranged it so that three shillings a day would go to Mary and I’d have two shillings. Mary would get some kind of government money for the kid too. Leigh Robert we named him and we were thrilled. I was a father! We went on to have three boys, Leigh, Johnny and Tony, during the war and a girl after, Dianne. Mary would manage all right through it all.

But with no help from Bill. When I told him I’d enlisted in ’41, I said to him, ‘Just sell the truck and give the money to Mary.’ The money would do her while we waited for my first service pay to come through. I was a fool to trust him again and May never saw a penny of it.

***

My first training with the Air Force was at Richmond Recruitment Depot. Cooks had to do all the physical training and guard duty just like the rest of them, as well as the cooking work, and while I was there I got into boxing too. I’d been interested in the sport since I was a kid searching the tip near Burnside for photos of Jack Dempsey and all.

In the gym at Richmond I met a bloke called Aub Gillespie. We were both keen on boxing and we became real good mates. Aub was born in the same year as Mary and me, and the three of us would stay friends all our lives. Aub was a real gentleman and he could be a larrikin too. But strangely enough, the first time I heard that he’d been in a home as a kid too was at his funeral a few years ago. He’d never mentioned that or that he’d never known his father. In all the years we were friends neither of us ever mentioned the homes to each other.

Throughout the war, we both loved our time in the ring, and I won more bouts than I lost. Blokes used to put money on me. I’d be sparring partner for Aub and some of the other blokes too. When I was in one camp later on, the night pilots used to come back from a mission and I’d make them a cup of coffee or cook up something for them. I wasn’t supposed to but they were all good blokes, gun pilots. One time I said, ‘I don’t know how I’d go as a pilot.’ I think one of them thought I was a bit gutless or something. Anyhow, some time after that he came back and said, ‘I owe you an apology.’ He’d got up to date with my boxing career.

For the first few years of my time in the Air Force, I worked in various camps on the mainland, from Mildura in Victoria, to Townville in North Queensland, cooking for various squadrons, and, of course, boxing whenever I could. But there came a time, when I’d been up in North Queensland for quite a while, that I had to ask my Commanding Officer for a change. I wanted to serve overseas, a request that was quickly granted.

I was sent off to Torakina, one of the Solomon Islands. The Japs were all over the islands at this time and bloody nearly made it to Australia. My first look at Torakina made my tummy hit the floor. It was the most dazzling place I’d ever seen from a ship. It was that beautiful.

There’s a big volcano on Torakina that smoked all day and night and you’d feel earth tremors every now and then. The first night I was there I slept on the ground and in the morning I woke up and my fingers were all cut up. I’d been grabbing at the coral ground in my sleep, thinking I was falling out of bed but it must have been the earth tremors. And the rain! I’d had no idea what rain was until I went there. You could just about set your clock on when it’d start.

While I was in Torakina I got a package of letters from Mary. She always numbered her letters so that I’d read them in the right order. Letter number one had a newspaper clipping with it that said new houses were going to be won in a lottery type of ballot. Mary wrote that she’d put our name in the draw. Letter number two had a newspaper clipping that said, ‘The house has been won by Mrs Mary McMartin.’ Crikey! That was us! We had a house of our own, in the suburb of Granville. Mary moved into it while the war was still going but it wasn’t all finished. It was in a pile of rubble and there was no clothesline and no fence. Granville was still quite rural then and there were tree stumps everywhere from the land clearing. Luckily one of the builders knocked a clothesline up for Mary because we had two kids by then and another on the way. What a life!

Although I had a lot of good times during the war, and that’s what I like talking about best, I had some hard times too. I lost a lot of good Air Force mates, pilots, in the effort to stop the Japs getting to Australia. There were the 75th and 76th Squadrons at Milne Bay and Port Moresby. The 75th was getting a new CO just about every day because they kept getting killed. It was a terrible time. You’d hear about them dying either because they didn’t come back or because other blokes would tell you. By jeez I met some good blokes in those cook houses. The officers got nothing from us if they were crook on the men. They were starved.

Next, I was sent to Nissan Island, about five miles long and half a mile wide. It’s between Bougainville and New Ireland off the coast off New Guinea. There were thousands of Japs on New Ireland, only about a hundred miles away, and our blokes used to get half full in the mess and fly planes over and land on their landing strip then take off again, just for bets. They’d get shot at and everything. They were all mad.

I did a stint on Bougainville after that, and then I shifted to Jacquinot Bay up near Rabaul on New Britain. If I thought the rain was bad at Torakina, it wasn’t any better here. We had thirty-six inches in thirty-two hours at one time. It just kept on raining. Our clothes went mouldy. I had my rifle stowed in the V under my camp stretcher and I pulled it out to clean it one day: the bloody thing was full of mud from when my stretcher had sunk down into it. Another time I pulled the rifle out to clean it and it was full of little black ants that had made a nest in it. It would have been nice if they’d put me on guard duty that day.

While I was in the islands, we weren’t supposed to give away our location in letters home – and if we did let anything slip, the information was censored out. Some letters would have so many bits cut out of them they looked like a bloody pianola roll. Our families generally didn’t know where we were. They only knew the camp number. But sometimes we found ways to tell them where we were. For example, in one letter I sent to Mary, I said, ‘How’s Mrs Butt going?’ Mary read it to Laurel, who jerried my code straightaway: she guessed I was in Bougainville because Mrs Butt is the name of a type of Bougainvillea.

When the war ended we were sent home to Townsville, and then on to Bradfield Park in Sydney. My brother Fin met up with me there, having been in the RAAF too – so was my brother Jack. As we were getting through our discharge requirements, we were asked what we did before the war and what we needed to get started again. I was offered a truck at cost price but I turned it down: I didn’t want to go back to dealing, All Fin wanted was to go back to bush carpentry and his wife Elsie and happy family. He was a happy man, a good bloke.

We were all given £2.10s.- for a suit on discharge, so you’d see everyone walking around with a Donegal Tweed on. That’s all you could get for £2.10s.- .You got other clothes and basic rations too. Everyone was living with strict rationing.

After my discharge I went home to Granville, where Mary had set up the house she’d won for us. I was pleased to see the new house and of course Mary and the boys. It was strange to be in a house with my family, though, after all the company and noise of the Air Force blokes. I couldn’t sleep in a bed either. I slept on the floor for a while.

There was a lot of work to be done on the place and I had to earn a living too, so I went to work on the Sydney trams, out of the Dowling Street Depot. I didn’t want to be a driver sitting up front by myself all day. The pound a week extra they got wasn’t worth it. So I became a conductor.

I met all sorts of people when I was working on the trams. One time a chap come up behind me and said, ‘God bless my soul! It’s little Georgie.’ It was Mr Knight, my teacher from way back, at the Nulla Nulla Creek school. Another time, about to leave the stop outside Sydney Town Hall, a bloke hopped on the back of the tram and whistled; I turned around and it was the CO from Bradfield Park, Mr Ellis, and we had a good natter. After that he used to ride around on the tram with me at night, once he knew I was on them. I think he was quite lonely and went around town looking for someone to talk to. He’d been in the First World War too. A lot of blokes did that, rode around just looking for someone to talk to, I think.

I’d had to go and see a psycho myself, as part of my discharge and repatriation. One of my mates who already seen this doctor, and who’d also been through Burnside, warned me: ‘He’s pretty hard. Don’t bullshit to him. Just tell him the truth. He’s only a young bloke but he knows all about the war. He knows more about it than we’d ever know even though he’s never been to it.’ So I go up all worried when it’s my turn but all we talked about was boxing. Even today I belong to the Veteran Boxers Society. The doctor was a bit of a pug himself. He didn’t ask me anything about the war. After about an hour or so he says, ‘Jeez, I’ve got another client out there. You’d better go.’ I didn’t have to go back to him.

When I was on nightshift on the trams, I had to get Mary to stop the kids playing under the house during the daytime because I’d be trying to sleep and they’d be banging away under there. Another thing about nightshift was that it would finish at midnight and then I’d have to find a way to get home to Granville. One time I walked from Central. I got as far as Flemington and I heard clippety-clop, clippety-clop behind me. A bloke pulled up in a sulky and gave me a lift home. Turned out he lived over the back fence from us and he was the pound keeper. He kept his horse in the yard and he’d throw the manure over the fence for our garden. We had the best bloody garden in Granville. I didn’t know many people around the place then because I’d just got back from the RAAF, but I gradually found my way. I bought myself my first motorbike at that time, a Harley Davidson.

Mum stayed with us quite often and she was with us when Mary went to hospital to have our longed for daughter, Dianne. All our kids loved Mum. I had to make sure I didn’t swear in front of her, though, and Laurel too. Mum would give me a clip over the ear if I did.

Mary and I, as always, were great mates and we had a lot of fun. When we had that big old Harley Davidson, we’d round all the kids up and put the two youngest in the sidecar with Mary, while Leigh rode pillion with me and away we went. We’d go here, there and everywhere. I also got a car, a 1929 Chrysler, and we used to pile