Melbourne – down memory lane
We’ve been in Melbourne for a few days, near the place where we lived during our years as ten pound poms and quite close to Williamstown, where my brother Brian and I went to school.
On first impression, Melbourne has changed beyond recognition, with a new skyline of futuristic glass towers and a huge amount of civil engineering works in new bridges and motorway flyovers. Digging a bit deeper, many of the little old Victorian houses in the side streets around the Botanical Gardens are still there, and places like St Kilda and Port Melbourne have also retained quite a bit of period charm.
This part of the trip had poignant memories for me, with recollections of a lost boyhood, of good friends and the many ploys and escapades that we enjoyed. The years spent in Australia were very formative, amongst other things, the freedoms that we enjoyed helped shape my attitudes to friendship and self reliance and the central importance of the extended family. Click this link if you would like to read about our experiences during our time in Australia during the 1950s. This is a draft extract from my autobiography, please overlook any typos or grammatical howlers.
We rode the tram system to get around; it works really well in Melbourne and shows what can be done when a city does joined-up thinking on transport policy (are you listening Edinburgh?).
One of our jaunts was to Little Lonsdale Street, the erstwhile site of my second job as a ‘Granville’ type errand boy for J H McGrath and Co, radio components wholesaler. Fifty-three years ago, the place was tastefully situated one floor above a brothel (closed during office hours!) and very close to a lead works and shot tower where molten lead, poured through perforated sheets, fell fifty metres or so into a bath of cooling water and was then used in the manufacture of shotgun cartridges. No Health and Safety regulations then, the noise and fumes generated during the process were a constant reminder of the way in which the city was outgrowing the original planning and zoning laws.
Amazingly, the shot tower is still there (no record of what happened to the knocking shop!) and is now incorporated into an up market boutique type mall, complete with a small museum to the lead workers.
Another side trip was to Williamstown to look at the site of my old school. This was a very useful cathartic because I hated the place fifty years ago and I wanted to see if time would mellow my opinions. As we stood in the dusty and rather drab school precinct, my feelings were complex but unchanged. I still felt resentment against the system that had virtually written me off as a no-hoper and I wanted to show them that I was still here, still standing.
While in Williamstown, we made a speculative call at the address of Thelma Burnell, one of Vera’s very distant relatives, a woman who married into the family mentioned in this rather spooky story, and who lives in the actual house mentioned in the tale. Amazingly, Thelma was still alive and able to reminisce about the family and those far off days.
Photos for this part of the trip are here, but beware, this is a fairly boring group of pics that will only be of interest to Hipkin family members.