A garage in Murrumburrah

 

Murrumburrah, where memories begin.

My birthdate, 16 February,  strangely echoes other significant family events. It was on this date, 16 February 1848, 99 years before I was born, that my great, great grandparents, Thomas Cleary and Bridget Heffernan, arrived in Australia. They had disembarked at Melbourne, having left Ireland at the height of the “great potato famine” in that country, and you can find their story in this link to our relative Maree Woods research.  

Also on this day, 16 February 1932, my father’s youngest sister was born, in Yass : Eileen Faith Cleary. Sadly, little Fay, as she was known, died in 1934, aged 2. She is buried in a Dawes family gravesite in Yass cemetery, together with her grandparents John Henry Dawes and Mary Ann(e) (Duffy) Dawes.

 This photo I have of her  shows an apparently normal healthy toddler, but that bubbling little girl contracted a skin infection which became toxic and this led to ‘acute nephritis’ (kidney infection) and her death. All totally preventable with modern medicine. My cousin Lorraine (McDermott) Bateman recalled coming across our grandmother weeping behind a bedroom door on one of the anniversaries of Faith’s death. I was particularly close to my grandmother, and I wonder now how much of that closeness was built on this incredible connection to her youngest daughter, my aunt, and our common birthday. I wish I had known this so much earlier.

 Although born in Newcastle, I have no childhood memories of living there. I would have been 2 when we moved to Murrumburrah, and that’s where my own memories begin.

 Murrumburrah is a funny place, being one half of the ‘twin towns’ of Harden-Murrumburrah. Each is a separate town, although with the same postcode,  and in turn separated by a street running between them. One side of the street is Harden, the other (southern) side is Murrumburrah. Each town has a railway station, although the Murrumburrah station has not had a train stop in years, and each has its own Catholic church and, for many years, own Catholic school. It’s a strange situation.

 

Murrumburrah was the first settled, in 1848, being one of the earliest settlements in southwest NSW. “Murrumburrah North”, however was a better place for a railway station, and was soon a major railway depot on the main southern line, and in the late 1870’s this station was named ‘Harden’, after the man who surveyed the area. For some reason, the station at Murrumburrah was built 2 years later, in 1879, but being at the bottom of a steep climb up the hill to Demondrille probably contributed to not being used as much as the Harden station. From my grandparent’s place, you could hear trains struggling up that hill – much like the children’s rhyme of the little train “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can”.

 

Harden became the commercial centre of the twin towns, and Murrumburrah settled into a gentle decline which was apparent from as long ago as my childhood visits to my grandparents. My guess is that this decline began around the time we were living there.

 

Dad and mum moved there so that dad could take up a partnership in running a garage and motor dealership with Dave McKinnon. The advertisement above is from a booklet produced in September 1951 which provides an excellent little history of the twin towns. Dad had been working as a Motor Mechanic in Newcastle after being discharged from the army, and this partnership with Dave was a further step in that career. In later years I knew Dave McKinnon and always found him a very nice bloke. He and his wife Betty stayed in Harden for the rest of their lives, and mum and Betty always exchanged Christmas cards with news of family happenings.

No longer a garage, but in 2023 the same building

I do wonder if Dave McKinnon may also have been a distant relation, as a McKinnon family owned an adjacent property to dad’s grandfather Dawes property at Good Hope, and dad’s great aunt Ellen, older sister to his grandfather John Henry Dawes, had married Donald McKinnon. Yet another line of enquiry, one of these days, down the endless and interconnected  burrows of family history research !!!

 

 

I think I’m fairly typical in the way my childhood memories paint objects and places as bigger than they are. I’m not sure that also applies to our memories of people – I find I have much less distinct recollections of the people in my early life, and perhaps that may have something to do with the benign nature of those recollections. 

2023 photo of the house

The first home I remember was in Murrumburrah, in the main street and quite close to the garage.  In my memory it was a beautiful house with large rooms and a wide shady verandah edging a garden of colourful flowers and shrubs, and a green lawn that itself met a lovely red gravel drive. It was a surprise in later years to stand on the street looking at the house and note its considerably smaller proportions, jammed in on a block between two commercial buildings and abutting one. Even so, it retains what a real estate agent would call “street appeal” in its pleasing proportions and setting. It remains the only free-standing house I remember living in with my family – the closest we would come again to this sort of living would be in another 14 years, in an apartment at Maroubra Beach. But I will come to that later!

 

Neil was born in Harden hospital on 10 January 1951, and named, it is claimed, after Dr Neil Joseph, the delivering doctor. One can only assume that the management of the birth was sufficiently difficult and heroic to result in the conferring of such an honour! His second name, John, picked up dad’s unused first name – John Francis was always known as Frank - as well as dad’s grandfather’s name , John James. “John” has continued as a name in our family in my son Ben’s second name, and his third son Reuben’s middle name. There’s a lovely photo of dad holding Neil as a young toddler, and another also including grandma, taken probably in 1952. I was told years ago that these photos were taken at the Murrumburrah show, which, if true, says something about the social importance of that event, as our protagonists are each in their “Sunday best”, including suit and tie for dad.

 

Around this time, we had a visit from our Sandford cousins. It’s the first event that registers in my childhood memory. I wrote about it in 2000, while doing a writing course in an adult education program at Sydney University :

“Why on earth did I do it?

 Poor teddy, horsey, fire truck bobbing around at the bottom of the big drain. I’m sure it was my big cousin Barry’s idea – Newcastle kids probably did that sort of stuff.

Sunday afternoons in a country town were quiet times. Mum and dad resting, probably snoozing after the roast chicken lunch. An easy time for bored children to follow unsupervised fancies.

 So teddy, horsey and fire truck snuck out the front, and just………….floated away in the rain-filled gutter, to tumble helplessly into the drain hole.

 We told dad. Guilt, I think  -  teddy and horsey’s little black eyes looking up accusingly.

 A bucket on a rope rescued the hapless friends, but poor firetruck sank to the murky depths.”

 

Yes, I’m sure Barry was to blame!! And it’s certainly a memory worth carrying a permanent stain of guilt!!

 

The other thing I remember about Murrumburrah is that it is where I started school, kindergarten in 1952 at St. Mary’s catholic school. Just up the road and over the railway bridge, a short walk. My cousin Gwen McDermott was at the same primary school, a few years ahead of me. She is also in the photo below - 4th in from the right in 3rd row up. My curly hair clearly identifies me in the 2nd row. I was a kid who took easily to school and enjoyed learning things, which was probably just as well, as there were to be quite a few schools in the following years – 6 primary schools, in all. Not a good recipe for making and keeping friends, but my education somehow hung together.

Kindergarten 1952. St Mary's Catholic School, Murrumburrah
Ross, 2nd row, 2nd from left
Gwen McDermott, 3rd row, 4th from right

My only bad memory about that year in Kindergarten was in the spring of 1952, when I was attacked by a magpie on the way to school. I still remember the terror of taking cover by lying down in the roadside gutter as the maggie relentlessly dive bombed me. It probably didn’t help much that the bigger kids at school would pelt stones at a magpie nest in a gum tree in the school grounds. For the magpie, this day certainly helped even up the score.

 

A major event for mum at this time was being received into the Catholic Church. Dad would take me to Mass on Sunday, and I know at some stage mum was coming along as well. Perhaps this was something they has discussed back at the time of their wedding. A common practice at the time was for the non-catholic party of a marriage to agree, in writing, that children of the marriage would be brought up as Catholics. This was still a time in Australia when sectarian divisions ran deeply, and your religious “tribe” mattered. And because the Catholic Church ran a widely spread network of diocesan catholic schools, it was relatively easy for a child to be brought up in an all-encompassing Catholic environment.

 

My grandmother, in particular, was a very religious person, deeply committed to her Catholic faith. In her case, it was a significant part of what made her the lovely, kind, wise and balanced person she was. Bigotry and religious intolerance were not part of her nature, and that certainly rubbed off on me. She would not have put overt pressure on my mother to “convert”, but would have led by example.

 

Mum’s religious instruction was carried out by Sister Peter, one of the Sisters of Mercy in Murrumburrah parish. Mum would speak fondly of Sister Peter in later years, as someone who taught her about the Catholic faith in a way that explained what was essential, without sectarian bitterness. She clearly understood the centrality of the Mass in Catholic life and worship, and for the rest of her life attended Mass every Sunday if at all possible. Her’s was not a doctrinaire Catholicism, however, neither rigid and uncompromising, nor narrow and constricting. It seems to me that she simply accepted that being a Catholic brought with it certain obligations, and I do believe this Catholic identity became a core part of her as a person.

 

I have long believed that my cousin Shirley McDermott, nearly 7 years older than me, suffered an accident that would change her life, on my 5^th birthday. At my birthday party, Shirley was walking along the top of the fence, or “tightrope” across the clothes line – accounts vary – and fell off. The jarring from the fall set off an inflammation in her hips, which in time developed into a serious infection. Her older sister, Lorraine, reminded me a few years ago, of the family becoming aware of Shirley’s growing difficulties, after a school march from Murrumburrah to Harden (quite possibly a religious event, between the two Catholic churches in the “twin towns”). Shirley arrived at the Harden church very red-faced and in considerable pain from the exertions of the walk, and the long processes of medical investigations and surgeries began.

 

I remember as a teenager, staying with my grandparents for the school holidays, being on Harden railway station to see Shirley lifted through the window of the train from Sydney onto the back of a ute. She was enclosed in a solid plaster cast from her ankles to her armpits. Her treatment at that time was total immobilisation, following one of her many surgeries to treat the infection which had by now destroyed her hip joints. It was at Mount Wilga Rehabilitation Hospital, at Hornsby in Sydney, that Shirley met Ron White. Ron was a Wagga Wagga boy, who had become paraplegic as a result of a gun accident. Her mother Vera worried enormously how they would manage the independence of  married life. If ever a couple deserved to win first prize in the lottery……….and they did!!  The win bought them a new home in Frenchs Forrest, in Sydney. Shirley and Ron went on to become the first physically handicapped couple to be allowed to adopt a child, and broke all records when they subsequently adopted another child. Jason and Kelly had great reasons to be proud of both parents, Ron through his significant involvement in advocacy for disabled, and Shirley established an international profile in her role as CEO of the “House with No Steps” organisation. Ron died in October 1988, and Shirley in June 2017.

 

Back in Murrumburrah in 1952, our lives were about to take a whole new direction. On 8 October, dad took out a lease on the “Tallimba Inn Hotel”, and from now on the children of Madge and Frank Cleary would be “pub kids”.  In what was to become a recurring, perhaps restless theme, I don’t think Dad stayed long in any one place. 1 year was not uncommon and, until I reached Secondary School, 3 years was a long time in any one place.

 

I stayed the rest of that year in Murrumburrah, and lived with my grandparents so that I could finish off the year in the Kindergarten where I had started. This may also have had something to do with mum being pregnant with Helen, who would be born 3 months later, on 24 January the following year – also mum’s birthday.

 

2023 photo of Grandma and Pop's house, Ward St, Murrumburrah.
little changed from the 1950s

Grandma and Pop’s place was about 1.5km walk from the school. No school buses in those days, and there was no car available. My grandparents’ only mode of transport was a horse and sulky, and in any case Pop took that off to work every day. Grandma used to walk everywhere – to the shops, to the Church, and we always did the same when we stayed with her. The exception was on Sundays when Ernie McDermott, my Uncle Ernie, would come down to pick them up in his car and drive them to Mass.  So, I walked to school. An older boy by the name of Peter Price used to walk up from his place, and then walk me to school in the morning and home in the afternoon. He was a friendly kid and I enjoyed his care and company.  I met Peter many years later, just once, after he had been ordained as a Priest, and enjoyed his company again. As the winds of change blew through the Church, like many men he subsequently left the Priesthood.