When Sawtell was still a village
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 road provided access from the south, and a sealed road provided the northern way back to the highway and into Coffs Harbour. In heavy rain, that dirt road was slippery and treacherous, as I found on another white-knuckle journey one day. I don’t know where dad was going to or why the need to travel at that time, but it was not a pleasant experience to find the car in places travelling sideways.
There is a half-sized railway station where trains from Sydney to Brisbane would stop. It meant the train had to do two stops, to accommodate passengers at both ends of the train. I was surprised on a recent visit to the town to see that the original size of the station remains. Perhaps the trains that do stop there now are smaller in length?
The modern Imperial Hotel has expanded to fill its boundaries on all sides, but the outline of the original hotel is still clearly discernible on the inside. For us, this was a wondrous place. Helen, Neil and myself shared a bedroom that had been created by infilling a southern verandah, next to our parent’s bedroom. Both these rooms opened onto an east facing verandah, with a view to the sandhills hiding the beach, about 100m away, and looking down the main street.
And we had a lounge room. Strictly speaking, this lounge room was available to any hotel guests, but in practice for the main part it was our domain. Not that we used it greatly, as television had not yet come to Australia, and if we listened to a radio, it was downstairs in the kitchen. Bathroom and toilet facilities were shared with hotel guests, and as we had grown up with that, it never seemed strange. But where did we keep our toothbrushes?
Looking back on our lives growing up in hotels, it seems strange these days to recollect that we rarely had meals with our parents. Sawtell is where my ‘meals memories’ begin, and our meals were prepared by the hotel cook and eaten in the kitchen. They were standard meals for the time – meat and vegetables as main course and jellies, junkets, rice puddings – all with tinned fruit - for dessert. A special treat was ice cream, home made of course – not only were there no supermarkets to buy such a treat, but the local Grocer’s Shop only sold individual ice creams. I doubt commercial ice cream tubs were yet invented. I can’t remember the name of the cook at Sawtell, but she would have been a local woman whose job was to prepare lunch and dinner for the family and any guests, Monday to Friday. The hotel cooks we encountered over our years were friendly, mothering women and I am sure that mum would have been very particular in these appointments. Mum looked after our breakfasts and also the weekend meals.
It would be wrong to assume these meal arrangements implied we were somehow ‘neglected’ children. Our parents were in business and the business hours and operating procedures of hotels meant that family meals were not possible unless there were other employees to take over the running of the hotel at dinner time. Dad ran the ‘public bar’ (which, despite its name, allowed men only), and mum ran the ‘saloon bar’, where men and women could sit at tables and single women could also come and drink – although by 1955 the requirement that another male present in the bar do the actual purchasing of drinks, was already in decline. At Sawtell, this saloon bar was also called the ‘garden bar’, as it opened onto the ‘beer garden’, a delightful grassed area with tables and umbrellas, ringed with flower gardens. Whereas the public bar opened around 10am, the garden bar opened mid-afternoon.
The law requiring hotels to close at 6pm had been repealed on 1 February 1955, several months before we arrived in Sawtell. With no records now available, it’s not possible to work out the actual hours of operation of the Imperial Hotel, but it certainly remained open until some time at night. The usual procedure was for the hotel to close around 6pm, the bar areas were then cleaned, glasses washed and re-stacked, shelves restocked with cigarettes and spirits, beer kegs replaced in the cellar if needed, money in the tills counted and placed in the hotel safe. After that mum and dad and any staff staying on to work the evening shift would have their own dinner, which had been prepared previously by the cook. So, this was a busy time, with jobs to be done which were not only important to the efficient running of a clean and well stocked hotel, but which required the owners to be present and actively involved. The hotel would then open again around 7pm and close some time between 10pm and midnight depending on the number of customers present and the licence conditions.
So it’s easy to understand why the cook looked after feeding and supervising the evening meal for us kids, with mum looking in briefly when she could get away. In 1955, I was 8 years old, Neil was 4 and Helen was 2 and mum employed a local girl to help look after Neil and Helen, especially in the afternoons when the garden bar opened. Somewhere in this routine there would be bath time, and after dinner she would put us to bed before returning to work in the garden bar. Looking back, I have no recollection of feeling ‘abandoned’ or of missing out on my parents’ time and attention, but inevitably there was more time without parental supervision. Fortunately this did not lead me into trouble but it did mean that I was already learning to be more self-sufficient than I otherwise might have been. And like everything in life, this brings with it a mixed bag as it feeds into a growing personality.
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Year 3, or 3rd class as it was then known, at Sawtell Public School was my third school for the year. I can’t imagine what impacts on my schooling these constant moves to new schools would have had on me if schools then had operated as schools now. Today, with a much more crowded curriculum, the varying approaches individual schools take to such things as reading instruction and development, and mathematics, there would be the risk of a massive dislocation to my education in each new school. I had experienced this, to some extent, in the very different education I had briefly endured at Christian Brothers, Manly. Back in the Public School system, I was to benefit from the sameness of a centralised education system, where the same approach to reading was implemented across the state, the same readers were used, the same lock-step approach to maths. It was a system carefully supervised by a regimen of “School Inspectors”, who ensured this uniformity was maintained. This all sounds quite foreign, even mildly repugnant, to modern ears, but I think it may well have been one of the key factors in my receiving a stable and effective early education.
The other thing about public schools of the time was the sameness of the buildings and playgrounds. There is a certain type of weatherboard building, its large windows and the pitch of its roof, that is immediately recognisable as a NSW government primary school of the early to mid 20th century. And probably earlier than that. Much like the School Inspectors checking that teachers state-wide were following exactly the prescribed policies and procedures of everything from attendance records to Social Studies topics, the standardised building format ensured buildings that were at once familiar and fit for purpose. And long lasting!! One of the rooms at the Canowindra Historical Museum is the former schoolhouse from Murga, a locality which long ago stopped educating its own children. And at West Wyalong, the local rugby union club transported to its ground a disused school building sitting on the property of one of the team members, to do good service as the beginning of a club house. As I say, the “look” of the building is instantly recognisable.
Inside those buildings, there were other things that were repeated in classroom after classroom. Desks would more likely be solid wooden contraptions, 2 students sitting on a wooden bench in front of a sloping desk top hinged over a box-type container for storing various work books – writing practice book, Social Studies book, Maths book, and more. And, ink wells!! In the 1950s, ballpoint pens ( or ‘biro pen’) were becoming more available to a mass market, but certainly not to us primary school kiddies. The big point of graduation from Infant School to Primary School, was the transition from writing with pencil to using…….an ink well and a pen with a nib. Careful instruction in the use of this fabulous tool taught us to get the right amount of ink on the nib. A bit like Goldilocks – not too much, not too little. Too much ink, and the page became a mess of splotches . Too little, and there was not enough ink on the nib to complete a full word. And with ink, came the use of blotters – absorbent paper to soak up any errant overuse of the precious substance. Did we have a “pen licence” in those days? I remember as my own children moved through primary school, the achievement of moving from writing with pencil to using a pen, and that occasion being marked, indeed celebrated, with a “pen licence”. I suspect that like most things in the 1950s, no great fuss was made on this transition, although surely the skill needed to successfully use pen and ink is a much higher level one!! And I am guessing that the favoured children who had the prize job of re-filling the ink wells on every desk at the start of the day, were chosen as much for their dexterity and care in not spilling a drop, as any other characteristic. Not a job for the clumsy, the unco-ordinated, or the impetuous. And certainly not for those with mischievous intent or otherwise being kept on a short lease by the teacher.
Christmas 1955 sticks in my mind. I can still see the pride on dad’s face as he wheeled into the room………..a brand new bicycle. And I remember vividly my short-lived delight. Written boldly on the diagonal bar, in beautiful sign writing, was “Cleary Special”. I was an absolute mixture of emotions. Excitement at this incredible present. Embarrassment at the personal aggrandisement of its naming. Shame at my ingratitude to my father. Fear of the laughing stock I would be when I rode this proudly-named bike in public. If it had just kept its “Malvern Star” naming, it would have been perfect. I’m sure I was well-mannered enough to hide the worst of my feelings as best I could, and I certainly didn’t verbalise any of this mish-mash of thoughts and emotions. I knew that gratitude was what was expected, but I can’t imagine that the cloud of confusion enveloping me was entirely missed by my parents. But nothing was said, and I was quickly riding it around. In fact, this was not only my first bike, it was my first time ON a bike. No trainer wheels in those days, and in any case this was a full sized bike – it was a matter of getting on it and learning on the go how to ride it. And I did. A few years later, at Nowra, I sand-papered off the offending naming, and painted the bar a nondescript yellow. This did nothing to improve the appearance of the bike, but at least I didn’t feel I was somehow ‘big noting’ myself when I was riding it. I don’t know if dad ever noticed, and if he did, nothing was said.
1956, our second year in Sawtell, was a memorable year. The Olympic Games came to Australia, and for a while Melbourne was the centre of world attention. Neil began Kindergarten at Sawtell Public School. And at some time that year I transferred school to St Augustine’s catholic school at Coffs Harbour, travelling on the school bus which took Sawtell kids to Coffs Harbour High School or to St. Augustine’s. Whether it was at the start of the year or at some time during the year, I do not know. What is certain is that I was there on 15th August of that year, as I have a “Remembrance of First Holy Communion” certificate confirming that fact. I was in 4th class, which was the year catholic kids made their first communion, so it was off to the catholic school for me. It was the beginning of my self awareness as a catholic.
Going to Sunday Mass had been a taken-for-granted part of our family life. In Murrumburrah, a short walk up the road and over the railway pedestrian bridge brought us straight to the picturesque stone church of St. Marys. It’s a strangely gothic church in appearance, with an imposingly tall tower, all somewhat out of place in the broad plains of the central west of NSW. It’s the sort of place you might expect to come across in an English village. My only particular memory of going there was to my cousin Lorraine McDermott’s wedding to John Bateman in January 1974, but undoubtedly there were many other occasions in my younger years. In Tallimba, the local hall was pressed into service for Mass, and this may have been every second week or some other such rotation. Bowning had a lovely small bluestone church, on the side of the then highway going through the town, and I remember going there. Clearly the experience neither scarred me nor uplifted me, as apart from being there and running around outside after the service, no memories remain. That church is still there, sitting forlornly in unkempt grounds and overgrown grass, apparently little used. I suspect it’s too small to find another life as a home for an intrepid renovator.
In Sawtell, a community hall was again pressed into service for Sunday Masses. The hall was much too big for the size of the usual weekly congregation attending, but came into its own at Christmas time when the population of the town soared with holiday campers. We would have undoubtedly spent time in the vastness of St Marys church at Manly, but it’s St Augustine’s church at Coffs Harbour that first left impressions on me. In the style of catholic parishes pretty much everywhere, the church was on the same block of ground as the parish primary school, so it was a regular place of visit. And indeed the concept of a “visit” to the church was one of the things early imprinted on the mind of any young catholic. It goes back to the catholic belief of the “real presence”, that in some way Christ himself is truly present in the bread consecrated by the priest at Mass. The presence of these consecrated hosts in the tabernacle above the main altar, was indicated by a glowing red sanctuary lamp. While some fervid teachers and priests went overboard in asking us kids, and the laity generally, to spend time with Jesus to ease his loneliness in the distant tabernacle, the more balanced managed to get the view across that a “visit” was good for the individual, a chance to say ‘hello’, get a re-set on the day, and a re-affirmation of faith. There’s a lot of theology tied up in that simple idea of making a “visit”. And also quite some pietistic rubbish.
So, by the time it came to my First Communion, I was well on the way to understanding some of the things that went with being catholic. Indoctrination? Of course, but I would say a ‘benign indoctrination’, in as much as it was a careful leading into a particular faith tradition, done without hate or rancour towards other faiths, or forcing a cult-like withdrawal from or revulsion of the outside world. Having said all that, I accept totally that for many catholics, a lifetime is spent in getting over ‘catholic guilt’ and the neuroses induced by force-fed teaching. The Catholic Church is hardly blameless in its accounting for its methods of instruction and teaching, and even moreso, the life-wrecking damage caused by its abusive paedophile officials and the cover-up of these activities. Elements of this are unforgivable. I am forever grateful that my own experience, and my extended family’s experience, has never been personally touched by this. For me, a catholic childhood and adolescence has been a harmonious and enriching time.
Part of the reason for this, I have long believed, is my good fortune in having the educators I did – although I may well have felt differently if my experience of the Christian Brothers had been longer!! At Coffs Harbour I first met the Sisters of the Good Samaritan. Non-catholics, and many catholics, don’t understand the differences between the many Religious Orders in the Catholic Church. Each Order has its own particular characteristics, or ‘spirit’. Thy call it their ‘charism’. The Ursuline nuns, for example, were regarded as more academic. The Sisters of Mercy, an Order founded in Ireland, were more ‘grass roots’ and were first brought to Australia by catholic Bishops to set up and run schools in city and country and in that way keep the faith alive in a catholic population all too influenced by the Irishness of its teachers. My kindergarten year at Murrumburrah was with the Sisters of Mercy, and no memories remain.
Mum, however, had very clear and positive memories of this time. Sister Peter “instructed’ mum in her journey to become a catholic. Mum’s nominal religion growing up had been “Church of England”, and she had attended “Sunday School”, a uniquely protestant arrangement where children would learn bible stories and Christian precepts for living a moral life while their parents attended a church service. As far as I know, she was not a regular attender at church services through her teenage and young adult years. The Protestant churches were nowhere as strict as the Catholic Church in mandating weekly attendance at worship. However, in marrying a Catholic, mum had agreed that any children of the marriage would be raised as Catholics. As she told the story, in fulfilling this obligation she would accompany dad to Sunday Mass when toddler me was taken along, and over time her interest was piqued.
It’s a common-enough story of a conversion journey and suggests that the priests and nuns that mum encountered, especially in Murrumburrah, brought a humanity to their religious duties that appealed to her own already developed Christian sensibilities. Sister Peter would meet with mum weekly, either in the parlour at the nearby convent or in our lounge room, and systematically explain to her the teachings of the Catholic Church. One of the big jumps of faith for a protestant in becoming a catholic, was coming to understand, and believe, in the “real presence”. Catholics believe that the host consecrated by the priest at the climax of the Mass, becomes the Body of Christ. Although looking like, tasting like, a wafer of flour and water, a sacred transformation has taken place and Christ himself is now present. Mum’s protestant upbringing accepted that Christ was symbolically present in the host – now she had to make the leap of faith to the “real presence”. This she did, and her instruction complete, was ‘accepted into the Catholic Church’.
In her funeral eulogy, many years later, I included these remarks :
“When she was about 30, mum converted to Catholicism. Like many who come to a faith system as an adult, her commitment to her Church became one of the pillars of her life. The strong but unobtrusive faith of our grandmother, her mother-in-law, was significant in her decision. For mum, we couldn’t not be here today, in this church, celebrating this Mass. This church was her weekly place of renewal and sustenance, and to not understand that would be to not understand our mother”.
My own remembered experiences with nuns, however, were not the Sisters of Mercy, but the Sisters of the Good Samaritan, who ran the schools I would attend for the remainder of my primary school years. Unlike the Irish origins of the Mercies, the ‘Good Sams’ had been founded in Australia and this Australian-ness was significant. Neil, Helen and myself all have benign memories of teaching by the Good Sams – with the exception of music teaching. But more on that later.
On 15th August 1956, together with my entire 4th class, I made my First Communion. An early rising on a cool late winter Sawtell morning, a satin white sash over my white shirt and tie, and new navy shorts. Probably the most dressed up I had been at that stage in my life. For girls, of course, the required outfit was a white dress and veil – somewhat of a mini-bride. It all speaks to this notion of Catholicism I am digging into here, as a way of explaining that ‘being Catholic’ brought with it a cultural identity that was expressed in ways of dressing and acting as well as ways of believing. And after the big moment – the big party in the school hall. Although much else has changed, that aspect, at least, of this particular day seems to have survived.
For some strange reason, we did marching practice at St. Augustine’s school. Martial music in good 4/4 time would blare from the loudspeakers into the playground, and around we would go. In my mind it was somehow connected with an upsurge in patriotism and a dim memory of flag saluting persists. Perhaps it was somehow linked to the Melbourne Olympics, an event that I was aware of. I recently heard Dawn Fraser explaining that prior to her marching in the Opening Ceremony of those Olympics, the whole team was subjected to a rigid regime of marching practice under the watchful eye and barking orders of an Army Regimental Sergeant Major. Perhaps across the country, we were all marching, in a fit of national pride and solidarity with our athletes.
In the beer garden bar at the hotel, a radio kept all the drinkers enthralled with vivid descriptions of the events. I was taken in with the excitement of it all, and particularly the swimming and the athletics. When I later read about the achievements of Dawn Fraser, Jon and Ilsa Konrads, Murray Rose in the swimming, and Betty Cuthbert, Marlene Matthews, Shirley Strickland on the athletics track, I was learning more about personalities already familiar to me. If the excitement of this far away Melbourne event had reached even quiet little Sawtell, it’s safe to assume that across the country there was a growing pride in this event Australia was presenting to the world. Even now I see a black and white newsreel of an event at the Melbourne Olympics, and feel myself back in that beer garden listening enthralled to the fervid commentary. Actually being at those events in person at the 2000 Sydney Olympics was the fulfilment of that fired childhood imagination.
Christmas1956 was as memorable as the previous one, but at least this time there was only one emotion. It was utter joy to see the tiny fluff ball which – looking at the dark hair on one side of his face and surrounding his left eye - I immediately named ‘Patch’. A fox terrier, he was the first dog we owned. Dad was always very good with animals and would have grown up with dogs on the family farm at Piney Range. This Christmas gift was very much a case of the giver of the present experiencing as much joy as the receiver, and although as the eldest I took most responsibility for the little hound, Neil and Helen were also very much his family.
Dad’s cousins Barbara (known as Bobbi) and Patricia (Patsy) Cleary brought hand-knitted jumpers for the three of us when they came during winter 1957. We had a closeness with our Cleary relatives who had lived at 14 Clarke St, Granville, and that included Bobbi and Patsy. Their mother, also Barbara, had died when Patsy was 4, Bobbi 2, and their youngest sister, Moira, not yet 1. Their father, Paddy Cleary, was my pop’s younger brother, and what happened now was that Paddy came to live at Granville with his parents and his sister, Margaret, who now looked after the children. Margaret would herself never marry but her motherly qualities made her a person who was very easy to like. She herself died on Anzac day 1988, and her funeral service in a gloomy, cavernous church on Parramatta Road, attended by mum and me and a handful of her surviving wider family, could not do justice to the life of such a warm-hearted person.
As 1957 drew to a close, the strangest thing happened. We were buying a house in Sawtell. To live in ourselves. As a family. Together with mum and dad, us three kids went through the intended purchase – a three bedroom brick house with rounded front corners, on a street corner opposite Sawtell Primary School. It had a lovely big back yard. After a remembered lifetime of living in hotels, this was wildly exciting. I picked out the bedroom that would be mine. And then …… and then …….. nothing. To this day, I don’t know where the idea came from and, more pointedly, why nothing came of it. Was the idea to keep running the hotel but live off-site? That doesn’t make a lot of sense and I don’t see how it could have worked, financially or in the care and management of us kids. So I can only assume that dad was going to leave the hotel and go into another type of work. Perhaps back to being a mechanic?
The next thing I knew, we were moving from the North Coast to the South Coast. Nothing had been said about the now non-moving into the lovely house with its rounded front corners, and here was dad explaining to me that we were moving to a place called Nowra. None of it made a lot of sense.
Earlier in December, there had been another burst of wild excitement when we went over to Coffs Harbour airport to see Dad get onto a real plane. We learnt that he was off to Sydney ‘on business’, whatever that meant. At a time in life when there were a number of ‘firsts’, it was a big thrill to see a plane actually take off. He was away for a few days and it was a lovely moment when he returned and sat down with us three kids and broke the news about a Nowra-bound move. And what a fabulous move it was going to be. A beautiful, safe river ran across the bottom boundary of this new hotel we were going to, and you could even swim in it!! A glorious lawned area with its own paddock led down to the river and there were glasshouses in the grounds full of exotic plants. Wow! Sounds exciting, dad!! We quickly forgot the lovely Sawtell house with its rounded corners and promise of family living. Nowra, here we come! Let’s get there as quickly as we can!
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