Stories of my Family

  Manly, an interlude   I began Year 3 at Bowning, but early in the year we were on the move again, and we left the Commercial Hotel on 19 May 1955. It’s somewhat surprising to realise that we only stayed 14 months in Bowning, close to relatives and countryside that dad would have known well. Mum always got on well with dad’s side of the family. I can understand why Tallimba would not have been a long term proposition, with its heat and isolation, but not Bowning. The hotel itself may have been the problem, and possibly a financial struggle. Tooths Company file notes from the early 1960’s indicate that the license was transferred about every 12 months from 1960 onwards. One short-lived licensee, coming from running another hotel (in Barmedman) was described as “a really good type but with little cash”.    Perhaps that buy-in fee of £20,000 was just too much.   For the next 2 months, or a substantial part of them, we lived in Manly. It was a ground floor flat, in...

  It's a cheerful-enough looking place now, and well-reviewed through Trip Advisor for its good value 'country style pub meals'. And whoever looks after updating its Facebook page, does a good job at maintaining and extending this positive vibe. Physically, it looks well maintained, if a little bland and somewhat stark now that the upper verandahs have been removed. No doubt they were removed years ago, as age and rot took their effect. My dim recollection is that the verandahs were in place in 1968, when dad was the publican for a brief few months. And it was a run-of-the-mill country pub, true to type with lodgings for longer-stay and shorter stay travellers and a layout and 'vibe' that I was all too familiar with. But why was this pub the latest, and last, to enter into our family story? Following the sadness and debacle of the Terminus Hotel at Pyrmont, in mid 1964 we had moved to Maroubra. Mum had bought a 3 bedroom apartment in a newly built complex on the nor...

  Pyrmont

  Nowra   The thing about living in a hotel is that moving house is very easy. All you have to pack is clothes and whatever books and personal effects you own. There’s no furniture, no bed linen, no kitchen utensils or crockery or cutlery. Just yourself and your own ‘stuff’. Easy!!   In early January 1958,    the car fully packed with suitcases of clothes and boxes of our individual treasures, the front wheel off my bike so it would fit in, and Patch arranged in his own box on the front seat, dad set off. We were to meet him in Newcastle later that day, after mum and us three kids had made our own way there by train. And as usual in Newcastle, we would be staying a few days at Nan and Uncle Fred’s place at Waratah.   As the afternoon moved into evening, growing concern grew into alarm as there was no sign of dad. As night fell, still no arrival  

  Sawtell   Sawtell is a beautiful village and the climate of the mid north coast is very agreeable. We were to spend the next two and a half years there.    All I know about the background to our moving to Sawtell, is that we arrived on 14 July 1955. The files for the Imperial Hotel are missing from the Tooths archives and unfortunately there is no background information on the hotel nor its leasing arrangements.   Of as much interest is why we moved there in the first place. Everywhere else we had lived, from Newcastle to the Central West, was close to family. This was far removed from any family ties, in some ways an almost exotic location with its sub-tropical climate. Perhaps this was the attraction? As well as the business opportunity. In those days, Sawtell was a village just south of Coffs Harbour, but enjoying the benefit of being several kilometres off the Pacific Highway and thus not subject to all the traffic of that significant State road. A dirt ro...

  Bowning   Two months later, on 25 March 1954,    we moved into the “Commercial Hotel”, in Bowning. Bowning is still today a small village about 13km from Yass. So this move was right back into my family’s “heartland”, my paternal grandmother’s family coming from the Good Hope district on the other side of Yass, and then my grandparents living in the Bowning / Goondah / Murrumburrah-Harden area for most of their married life. The village was surrounded by productive agricultural lands, for both cropping and sheep.    The Tooth’s archives notes that “the trade of the hotel comes mainly from the local rural workers and is well patronised by interstate truck drivers who use the premises as an overnight and rest centre”. In those days, the Hume Highway ran through the village, although the hotel was not itself on the highway.   The Commercial Hotel was described as a “free house”, meaning that it could sell the beers, spirits and other products of both of...

  Tallimba   The Tallimba pub was, and is, an interesting one, and I have been able to draw on the substantial Tooth and Company records held in the Noel Butlin Archives Centre at the Australian National University in compiling the story of our lives in it, and indeed in the other hotels in which we lived. In the years my parents held hotel licences, the primary liquor licences for hotels were held by the big breweries – Tooths, Tooheys – and the only beer that could be sold at those hotels was that made by the company the publican obtained a licence through. And, fortunately for me, many of the Tooth records are detailed indeed.   My recollection of the “Tallimba Inn Hotel” is of a new-ish building. And so it was. A single story brick structure, built in 1940 by Mr W.S. Thomas, who held onto the ownership for many years, including when we lived there. The photo above is from the current Facebook page for the hotel, and the only difference from our time there is the cover...