38. These were critical years for her. She had gone
to Australia aged 20 and had a great home-sickness for England. Life
in those first few years cannot have been easy. While starting a family,
she had to adapt to a new country and to an Australian climate and way
of life for which her upbringing in England had scarcely prepared her.
She must have seen a raw side of life that was foreign to her. Journalism
in Sydney was a tough world. My father told me that one of his rivals
boasted that he had "broken all ten commandments." His work
was demanding and time consuming. There must have been times when she
was lonely. However, the Evening News was doing well under his management
and had become a strong competitor to the Sydney Sun, the more established
afternoon paper. He was close to the top of his chosen profession and
was now able to give my mother her two fondest wishes--a trip back to
England and a house on the brow of Kurraba Point overlooking the Harbour
with an acre of ground and a large water frontage.
39. The trip to England came in 1927.
It was part business, part pleasure. This was long before the days of
plane travel and the journeying was done by steamer and rail. We sailed
from Sydney as a family with a nursemaid called Biddy to look after
Titia and me and a number of large cabin trunks. Our travels took us
to Canada to buy newsprint and to the United States to see the latest
printing machinery. My father was always fascinated by new developments.
He understood the way journalism was heading and recognized the need
to invest in the future. I was only three and have no real memories
of the trip. It was, however, well documented with family photos. We
traveled extensively through England and Scotland and also went to Ireland.
Travel in those days was leisurely and it was accepted that businessmen
would be away from Australia for several months. The return trip took
us once again to the United States and Canada and at one stage we rode
on horses through the Rocky Mountains. I suppose I was carried on my
mother's mount. For years afterwards I received a magazine as a member
of the "Trail Riders Club."
40. While we were away the house was
being built. My mother told me that the trip back to England helped
her overcome her home sickness. She knew that she was not irrevocably
cut adrift from what she still then--and indeed throughout her life--saw
as her homeland. I think that the process of settling down in Australia
was also helped by moving into the house about the same time as having
a new baby, my sister Pamela born in August 1928. With two girls and
a boy she felt her family was complete and the house was in the best
sense of the words, her dream home. Upstairs it had four bedrooms in
the front, two of them giving on to covered balconies with commanding
views of the Harbor, and three rooms at the back. "Nin" and
her husband, now working as a married couple, used two of these. I had
the third. Downstairs a dining room and a drawing-room also overlooked
the Harbor. Unusual for pre-war days it had twin garages on the road
above and to the rear of the house. Beneath them was a bedroom in which
Nin's brother Cyril lived. The grounds were terraced down to the waterfront.
On the first level below the house there was a grass tennis court. On
the next level there was a vegetable garden, fruit trees and a chicken
run. At all levels there were flower gardens. On the waterfront, on
the Shellcove Bay side of Kurraba Point, a reasonably shallow part was
fenced off (later a concrete wall was built) to make a harbor swimming
pool. There was a boat shed with good deep water for a yacht and plenty
of rocks for fishing.
41. I am sure that the first few years
in this house were among the happiest of my mother's and father's life.
He had a yacht called the "Lara" some 30 feet long with a
small galley and bunks for four or five people. He moored it in Shellcove
Bay in front of the boatshed. It had sails but he preferred to use it
as a motor boat. His great joy was to take it to Brokem Bay some 30
miles north of Sydney and spend a week or two there with three or four
men friends. It meant a sea trip in fairly rough waters but he loved
the challenge. He did not enjoy swimming and, with poor eyesight, he
was an enthusiastic but only moderate tennis player. He was at the height
of his professional life and too busy to be a regular gardener but he
loved planning the property and building banks and walls. He was a good
driver and was very proud of his Armstrong-Siddeley sedan.
42. My mother loved the swimming and the tennis and
was an enthusiastic "green-fingered" gardener. In addition
to flowers and vegetables she grew passion fruit and nurtured a most
beautiful frangipanya tree. She was an animal lover and was never without
one or two dogs and a cat. Cocker spaniels were the early favorites.
My father insisted that as good Australian dogs they should live outside
the house. From the day one was found dead in the morning from a tick
in the ear dogs slept inside. My mother was tall (5 feet and 10 inches)
and bordering on being thin. She loved the warmth of the Sydney sun
but as a good English woman generally kept herself well shaded. She
had no fear of Australian insect and reptile life and one of my earliest
memories is of her shrieking with laughter as we ran away while she
held up a very big blue tongue lizard. She had her own little red two
seater baby Austin sports car.
43. There was a lot of social activity.
A group of 8 to 10 friends regularly played tennis on Saturday afternoons
and as a good Australian housewife my mother had to turn on teas complete
with sandwiches and cakes. She became in fact a very good cake-maker.
Once a year there was an all-day tournament with a substantial buffet/picnic
lunch. The tennis playing friends came from all walks of life. I can
recall two or three doctors, a journalist, a publisher and one or two
businessmen. Some were neighbors, some came from further afield. The
entertainment was always genuine and never ostentatious. There was a
very occasional party. The house had a large hall and I can recall one
very swinging New Year's Eve "do" which I was allowed to watch
briefly from the top of the stairs. My mother was still in her twenties
and loved dancing. My father gave her a gramophone with an electrically
drive mechanism which lifted records off a spool, placed them on a turntable
and then deposited them in a padded container. In this way eight or
ten records could be played in succession automatically.
44. The great economic depression of the 1930s brought
the golden days of life at Ladye Place to an end, at least for my parents.
In about 1931 the owners closed the Evening News and for the next six
years my father used his ingenuity and drive to make a living working
on his own. He edited two editions of Who's Who in Australia, published
Knox's Medical Directory, brought out a short-lived monthly news magazine.
Inevitably his income in this period slumped. The yacht was sold. Entertainment
was restricted to the tennis parties. Ambitious overseas trips were
out.
45. Paradoxically the closure of the
Evening News came when I was about eight and of an age to enjoy life
in a house on the harbor with a swimming pool and a tennis court and
adjacent to the still largely undeveloped Kurraba Point with acres of
open land to play in. Personally I was cushioned from the effects of
the Depression and the ills of the world. We were, however, aware of
the dole queues and the hardships of others. News always had a priority
in the house. We had wireless sets from the earliest days of radio.
The daily newspaper was delivered early in the morning by a man with
an open car. He twisted the paper and threw it like a boomerang into
the driveway. I usually got to it first. The unemployed came to the
house looking for work. Among them, I recall, an ex-vicar from England
who appealed desperately to my mother as a compatriot.
49. At home we were fully occupied. In
the early 1930s there was one other family on Kurraba Point--the Whites.
He was a successful timber merchant and race-horse owner and shrewdly
bought up much of the still undeveloped land. They had two girls, Babette
and Dell, and a boy, Baden, of about the same age as Titia and me. Baden
became a pilot in the RAAF during the War and was killed flying over
England. In childhood we swam and played tennis together and roamed
the harbor shore by our homes. As the Point was developed and school
friends came of an age to visit, so our circle of friends expanded.
Titia was a good tennis player and was coached at school. An eager older
sister she coached me in turn. We had a carefree, rather idyllic, life.
During the long summer vacation (December and January) we lived in bathing
costumes and khaki shorts. More often than not and by preference we
went barefooted. As I grew older my father encouraged sailing. Although
he had sold his yacht he had kept the 10 foot dinghy and he rigged it
up with a mainsail (later a small bowsprit and gib sail were added).
He taught me the "rules of the sea" (who had the right of
way etc) and the rudiments of sailing and then, when I was 11 or 12.
set me free to wander round the harbor with different friends. He believed
implicitly in self-reliance and trust.
50. We had very occasional holidays.
I got my first introduction to surfing when I was eight or nine and
we took a seaside chalet at Newport a few miles north of Sydney. As
the family budget tightened we had the odd week away at boarding houses
in the country--I can remember going to Bowral and a place on the western
slopes of the Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney. A visit to our cousins,
the O'Briens, at their Tumbarumba farm was memorable because another
car ran headfirst into ours going around a mountainous bend close to
our destination.
Fortunately my mother, a good driver, had managed to stop. We were going
uphill--the other car was coming downhill and didn't. No one was hurt
but our car's steering suffered and the rest of the journey was a bit
of a nightmare. We were not lucky with cars and holidays. On another
occasion we toured the south coast of New South Wales and got marooned
in bad floods at Narooma. Heading back to Shellharbour, closer to Sydney
and with better weather at the time, our old Armstrong Siddeley's clutch
packed up. Our father somehow got it back to Sydney where he did a deal
with his bankers and bought a new Ford V-8. This was in 1935 when his
fortunes were at a low ebb. I can remember his broad smile when he came
back to Shellharbour to pick us up. The purchase of that new car was
a great boost to his self-esteem . He loved the big generous gesture.
When Titia became quite seriously ill in 1936 with nephritis, a kidney
disease (diagnosed by a specialist called to the house by our parents
in defiance of the GP who believed that illness could best be cured
by nature and, failing that, the knife), he sent Titia with my mother
and Pamela by coastal steamer to the Barrier Reef, then an unexploited
resort area. My schooling could not be interrupted. As a consolation
prize, I accompanied my mother and two sisters on the steamer to Brisbane
and then flew back to Sydney. The aircraft was an old Stinson twin-engined
plane which carried a handful of passengers. I was the envy of my school-friends.
Few, if any, had flown. Even in the late 1930s aviation was still in
its infancy.
46. I had started school life aged five
at the Loreto Convent, Kirribilli, where my sister Titia was already
well installed. Occasionally our mother picked us up in the car but
generally we went by ferry boat--it was one stop from Kurraba to Kirribilli
and Titia must have been made responsible for me.
At the age of eight I started with the Jesuits at St.
Aloysius College. It was located at Milson's Point, adjacent to Kirribilli
so there was no change in the travel arrangements. A ferry from Kurraba
to Kirribilli and then a half mile walk. Sometimes I would meet a friend,
sometimes walk alone. Titia traveled at different times. In those days
children moved about independently. The streets were not considered
dangerous and it was accepted that we were wise to the ways of the water.
47. St. Aloysius was the Jesuits' day
school in Sydney and ranked below St. Ignatius (Riverview) their big
boarding school on the outskirts of the city. Riverview was one of Sydney's
eight public schools. St. Aloysius was in a group of grammar schools.
Both these sets of colleges were private and fee-paying and run by the
major Christian denominations. In the 1920s when family finances were
strong it had been planned that I would start at St. Aloysius and then
go on to Riverview as a boarder. By the time I started at St. Aloysius
in 1932 even its modest fees were met with difficulty. I was to stay
there for six years until we left Sydney for Melbourne. It was a good
school run on classical Jesuit lines. In the Junior school we started
in Elements, went on to Rudiments and then to Grammar. The Rector was
a Stonyhurst educated Irishman, Father Austin Kelly. The Prefect of
Studies was a dynamic little Australian priest, Father Thomas Hehir,
always known as "Tinny" (Greyhound racing using tin hares
was a big attraction in those days). To teach us, there was a seemingly
endless stream of Irish novices with a smattering of Australian recruits
to the Order. Australia was a mission post for the Irish Jesuits and
these young "scholastics" did their teaching stint and then
returned home to complete their studies and be ordained (it was a 15
year haul from entry to ordination).
48. The Jesuits kept us busy. Twice a
week after school we walked to a sports ground about a mile away for
cricket and football practice. Most Saturday mornings there was a match
for the under tens upwards. St. Aloysius specialized in Gilbert and
Sullivan productions from which I was quickly dropped but there were
debating clubs and plays. We had to take our turn at serving the tridentate
Latin Mass celebrated privately before school by one of the old priests.
There was frequent benediction and rosary for the whole school during
the day--attendance compulsory. We generally took sandwiches to school
and ate them in the playground. The alternative was to go to a local
shop which sold meat pies. Because times were hard in the Depression
the fee-paying schools suffered. Classes were quite small and I was
able to do reasonably well at studies and get into the various teams.
I was never bored.
