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Anne's Family History

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Anne's Family History

Category Archives: Albury

In memory of lost homes

19 Sunday Jan 2020

Posted by Anne Young in 52 ancestors, Adelaide, Albury, Ballarat, Canberra, Castlemaine, Lilli Pilli

≈ 2 Comments

The cynical French epigram “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (The more change she is paid [when shopping], the more a lady will choose…)* describes it nicely: someone who has money left over from his purchase of a house will use it to choose additions and alterations and then, unsatisfied with the change he’s got out of it, will bowl the whole thing over and build a new home for himself on the cleared site.

* [perhaps I have not translated exactly 😉 ]

Many of the houses I recall from my childhood and later years have been destroyed by their new owners.

Of course the new owner is entitled to rebuild, and – who knows? – the new house may be more comfortable. It is not cheap to maintain an old house, and some new houses may be measurably better in every way. Even so, it is sad to see a place you knew and loved simply discarded like a worn-out shoe.

The house I grew up in and where we spent the first 30 years of our married life was bulldozed by its new owners.

Arnhem Place Red Hill May 2003
Arnhem Place Red Hill May 2003
20100321 Arnhem Place in afternoon 001
3 Arnhem Place dining room 2010
3 Arnhem Place sitting room 2010
3 Arnhem Place study 2010
3 Arnhem Place verandah 2010

The beach house my parents built when I was a child was badly damaged by termites, which had penetrated the concrete foundations. This was discovered too late for the house to be saved and it had to be torn down.

old St Barbary

My parents’ beach house when it was newly built in the 1960s

My paternal grandparents’ house in Adelaide was bulldozed by the people to whom it was sold.

deCrespigny 1959 81 Esplanade_0002
deCrespigny 1959 81 Esplanade_0001
deCrespigny 1959 81 Esplanade_0003
81 Esplanade abt 1966 (dating based on other pictures nearby including Nicholas)
81 Esplanade abt 1966 (dating based on other pictures nearby including Nicholas)
Me as a young child on the verandah of my paternal grandparents' house
Me as a young child on the verandah of my paternal grandparents’ house

My maternal grandparents’ house was extensively renovated after their death.  Although parts of it remain unchanged, the re-modelled house has quite a different feel to it.

19 Ridley Street about 1966

Me on my scooter outside my maternal grandparents’ house

The house of my mother-in-law, in Albury, was sold after her death. Then her pretty garden was cleared. Soon afterwards the house itself went.

Hovell Street Albury
front garden Hovell Street
Hovell Street bird bath
Hovell Street Peter's first steps on front fence
Hovell Street back garden with lemon tree
Hovell Street Peter back garden
Hovell Street Peter Charlotte gardening
Hovell street grandchildren gardening
Hovell Street Marjorie bush house

Greg’s mother Marjorie Young nee Sullivan in front of her bush house in the back garden

Hovell Street Greg 1966 Jim Windsor's car

1966: Greg sitting on the bonnet of a 1959 Plymouth. Jim Windsor, a family friend and the car’s owner is behind the wheel. Not sure who is in the passenger seat, probably Greg’s mother Marjorie. The car is parked in the street outside the Young family home.

Hovell Street Greg 1966

Greg outside his home in Albury 1966

My children liked playing in the garden, my son took some of his first steps clinging to the front fence, and there was the most magnificent and prolific lemon tree in the back garden.

Greg’s maternal grandparents’ house in Castlemaine, which he remembers as a lovely old place with chooks and a vegetable garden, has gone. Next door there’s now a car-wash. Down the road is a large estate of new houses, all made out of ticky-tacky. They all look just the same.

Sullivan Home 19 Elizabeth Street Castlemaine

There is an exception. The house of Greg’s early childhood in Ballarat still stands. Out the back Greg can remember a large stable. It’s still there.

505 Drummond Street about 1993

Ballarat snowman back yard 1949

1949 snowman in the back garden of the Ballarat house

For the most part the houses as physical structures have gone, but I will continue to remember them as warm homes I used to know and love.

Fishing for the right word

10 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by Anne Young in Albury, class, Fish, Greg Young, religion, Sepia Saturday, Young

≈ 10 Comments

This week’s Sepia Saturday prompt image is of a small boy with a fish. I invited my husband Greg to write an entry for my online research journal.

Sepia Saturday 397 fish

Our Sepia Saturday theme image this week features a small boy and a large fish. The identity of the boy is unknown (and, come to think of it, the precise identity of the fish is also unknown) but the photograph was seemingly taken at the Bon Echo Inn, in the Bon Echo Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada. The photograph forms part of the Flickr Commons Stream of the Cloyne & District Historical Society.

 

In Australian country towns you used to know your place. We were Upper Lower Middle Class (somewhere, perhaps, on George Orwell‘s mocking scale), which meant for one thing that although Dad worked as a labourer on the railways—transhipping goods from five-foot-three inch gauge Victorian trains to four-foot-eight-and-a-half NSW trains and vice versa—his wages reached Mum on Friday night untaxed by the six-o’clock swill at Ryan’s Hotel. It helped to be Protestant too. We looked down on the Irish Catholic kids next door, whose father, a plasterer’s labourer, weaved from side to side on his way home along Macauley Street.

That made them Lower Lower Middle class, the necessary foundation of our superior status. But when their old man got a skinful of Victoria Bitter and sang Roll out the barrel‘ with his mates in their backyard, they got indulged by their parents, at least at the maudlin sentimental stage of the booze-up, while we could only peer through the paling fence in jealous disapproval.

This principle also applied to the way we spoke. Rough kids had a richer and freer vocabulary, but we knew how to employ the second-person plural personal pronoun correctly and that to use the wrong form marked you as an ignoramus, destined for an early exit from schooling followed by a dismal apprenticeship in panel-beating or something of the sort.

One day my brother and I, fishing in the river, began talking to a boy—we were about 10 or 12 years old—whose smart rod and reel but shabby clothes and worn shoes marked him as the usual product of poverty: combined parental indulgence and neglect. When he got a bite and missed he damned the uncooperative fish as a ‘bloody black Assyrian bastard’.

We were profoundly shocked and delighted. Here was a phrase crying out for use and re-use. It had alliteration, rhythm, a racial slur, and two powerful swearwords fore and aft. The ‘Assyrian‘ bit was a puzzle, but it seemed to imply contempt for foreigners, a good thing, and it sounded Biblical too, so as a bonus it was probably also sacrilegious.

I am grateful to that Lower Lower boy for introducing me to his splendid incantation. Over the years I have found it very useful for opening screw-top jars and starting small petrol engines.

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