PIECES: AUNTY KIT

Grandma Andrews was born a Laity.  There were six in the family (as far as I know), five sisters and a brother.  My grandma, Margaret, was the oldest, then came Kate, Gretta, Emily and Elizabeth, with Russell the youngest.  I don’t know whether Margaret had a nickname, or whether her family used a shortened form – as the eldest she may have been Cis; but Gretta was always known to us as Aunty Gret, Emily was always Aunty Em, and Elizabeth was Aunty Liz.  And Kate was always Aunty Kit - she said she hated the name Kate.  I refer to them all as aunt and uncle, but they were actually my great aunts and great uncle.

Aunty Gret’s married name was Abbott.  There were three sons, I think – one a garage proprietor (Ken), one a dairy farmer (Des), and one a bit of a con man (Norman) – who, among other things, defrauded his Aunty Kit by building a cottage for her at Ferntree Gully that proved to be so jerry-built that she couldn’t bear to live in it, and sold it in short time and moved to Bonbeach.  Aunty Gret had a strange mannerism:  from time to time, when not speaking, she made a grimace by pulling back her lips and exposing her teeth.  It wasn’t a glaring or hostile face, more a look of surprise; but the real surprise is that the habit passed to my aunt Kath Warren, an incessant smoker, who multiplied the effect by grimacing after every drawback.

Aunty Em married Frank Templeton, and had two daughters, Frieda and Joan.  Frank Templeton was also uncle to our friend Philip Templeton at Chinkapook, so in a way we are related to Philip!

Aunty Liz was a Mrs Edwards.  I don’t know her family details, except that there was a daughter or daughters who looked out for Aunty Kit in her later years at Bonbeach and beyond.  I do know that at some stage the Edwards were farmers, and held the square mile at Chinkapook next to the Andrews farm – the block where the famous “box tree” is located, still known as Edwards block.

Uncle Russell was fabled in the family as the man who painted the white lines on country roads.  Well not personally.  He worked for the Country Roads Board, and headed the team that travelled around the State touching up lines, and painting new ones after bitumen had been laid or replaced.  Part of the Russell Laity myth is that his team was able to cover the whole of Victoria, but that after he retired the task required several teams.  I remember only one of the Laity cousins, Arthur, who with his wife Edna ran a substantial chicken hatchery at Maiden Gully near Bendigo.  There is a horrific story about Edna.  One day she opened the wood stove – not the style of stove with a door that stretches across the whole front of the stove, but the style with a rectangular door and flange about 20 by 25 centimetres – and she tripped and fell with her face exactly in the opening.  I never saw her subsequently, but her face was said to have been “burnt off”.

Now to Aunty Kit.

Aunty Kit had been a redhead, but her hair was snow white when I knew her best in the 1950s.  She was trained as a nurse, and it was as a nurse that she served in the Middle East during the First World War.  (The only way for a female to be involved as a combatant in those days was as a nurse.)  The story goes that she had a lover, and that he died in the War.  Aunty Kit never married.  There was a framed photograph of a man in uniform on her sideboard.

I expect, but don’t know for sure, that Aunty Kit worked as a nurse after the War and in the 1920s, but I do recall that she later had the task of looking after her mother and was not then in the workforce.  There is a photograph of me as a baby being nursed by great grandma Laity who was in her late 90s at the time (1940), so if Aunty Kit “looked after” her mother until that time she could have been retired from nursing for a decade or more.  That is the sense of it that I have.  Was it simply the fate of a spinster daughter to cop the added responsibility for an aged parent, or was Aunty Kit happy enough to take on the responsibility?  The reward, if indeed Aunty Kit ever sought a reward, was that she was the sole beneficiary of her mother’s estate.  

I can’t be precise about where the Laitys hailed from, but I think it was at or near Quambatook (Pa Andrews and his family farmed at Quambatook), and I don’t know where grandma Laity spent her final years, but when I first knew Aunty Kit she had a one-room apartment at number 12 Wellington Parade, East Melbourne.  It was a crammed bolt-hole, and Aunty Kit had to journey down the hall to the lavatory and the bathroom.  This was a substantial two-storey building, purpose built, all fine – but the shared ablutions would never be tolerated today.  The building remains, but has long since been converted to offices.

Aunty Kit did not re-enter the workforce after her mother died, she lived off her share investments.  She talked a lot about her shares, proclaiming them all to be “blue chip” – Carlton & United Breweries, G.J. Coles, Myer Emporium, Herald & Weekly Times etc. – but she never actually discussed her financial situation, and I wonder whether she lived in quite modest circumstances.  She received some sort of veteran’s pension.

We saw a great deal of Aunty Kit after we moved to the shop at 294/296 Bridge Road Richmond in 1946.  She lived a short tram ride away, and – certainly in the early days - she used often to help out her niece and nephew (my aunt Kath and my father Gordon) preparing and cleaning behind the scenes.  She regarded Gordon as her “favourite nephew”, and was shattered when he died at 45 in 1960.

In 1951 I contracted rheumatic fever.  I had always been “throaty”, with numerous bouts of tonsillitis; and had had my tonsils removed during the time we lived in Prahran - just prior to the move to Richmond.  (The operation wasn’t entirely successful, by the way, and I had to have tonsil remnants removed in the 1970s, not so long after marrying Annie.)  The rheumatic fever developed from a case of pharyngitis – that throat again.  Rheumatic fever is so named because of the symptoms similar to rheumatism, but the principal concern with the disease is that it can lead to permanent damage to the heart……..sometimes quite permanent!

The pharyngitis was doubtless the result of a streptococcal infection.  I suppose that I was treated with antibiotics, although I can’t recall.  Today cortisone is central to the rheumatic fever treatment regime, but I fancy that in 1951 - having been discovered as recently as the late 1940s - it was not part of my treatment.  I expect that I was treated with aspirin, the then standard pain reliever for rheumatic pain.  My hands and other joints swelled up, and the pain was severe.  Aunty Kit to the rescue.  She visited every day, and applied an analgesic cream to my joints and wrapped them in bandages.  Despite the likelihood of her being out of practice by some 20 years, her ministrations were much appreciated by my parents, Gloria and Gordon, and by me.  She was a gruff and tough old thing, quite deaf and with a rasping voice, but I was part of her family.  Enough said.

The rheumatic swelling subsided, there was no heart damage, and I was out of bed in three weeks.  Not so when I had a second bout of rheumatic fever three years later.  A recurrence meant that the risk of heart damage was much greater, and I was sentenced to an extensive stretch of bed rest – I was absent from Melbourne High School for nearly six months of my Intermediate year (year 10) in 1954.  Treatment started with a couple of weeks in Epworth Hospital, for tests I suppose, then confinement to bed at home above the shop.  

At Epworth, I was in a four-bed balcony ward facing the east.  As a 14-year old (not feeling at all sick) I was subjected to a lot of friendly chiacking from the three men in the other beds.  Coincidentally, their surnames all started with “W”, so naturally they referred to me as Mr Wandrews.  I think they were all seriously unwell, and remember one of them being trolleyed off every morning to receive electric shock treatment. 

Through this experience I met George West, one of the most delightful of men.  Mr West had been an engineer with the Postmaster General’s Department (the forerunner of Australia Post and of Telstra), but had been forced to retire through ill health.  He had heart trouble, and it was that that put him into Epworth.  He was, I guess, in his early 60s.  He lived in Lennox Street Richmond with his partner Mrs Goldsmith.  This sort of domestic arrangement was not so common in 1954, and coupled with my then narrow Christian take on morality, it was somewhat scandalous.  But Mr West and Mrs Goldsmith were such a warm and welcoming couple that the prejudices of a priggish teenager were soon set aside.

 Mr West was a very keen amateur photographer, and when a few months later he heard that I had won the trip to the UK with the Sun Youth Travel contingent, he appointed himself my photographic adviser.  He was well-known at the York Camera Shop – long gone, but then located in a basement in Little Collins Street – and advised on the sort of camera I should buy (Voigtlander Vito II), the attachments I would need (rangefinder and light meter, which weren’t built into many cameras back then), and the type of film I should use.  I also learnt from him how to develop and print my own black and white photos, and it is no surprise that I still possess the developing tank and other equipment - although the chemicals have long since passed their use by date and (shock!) been thrown away. 

Mr West had built his own enlarger; and he had invented and made a machine not available anywhere.  If you wanted to have prints made from 35mm black and white negatives the processing companies would print the whole film - upwards of 36 photographs - at the one time.  This meant that if individual negatives were overexposed or underexposed, their relative darkness or lightness would be reproduced literally in the printed snaps.  Mr West had engineered an apparatus that enabled the film to be wound through a "black box”, so that each photo could be “read”, and the exposure time individually judged.  Then light was released through the negative and the print was made. It was a finely turned piece of equipment, and I wonder what happened to it.  If Mr West or Mrs Goldsmith had children from their respective marriages I never heard of it.

During my long months of bed rest Aunty Kit was continually on the scene.  Unlike the previous time, however, I had no rheumatic symptoms or pain at all, and there was no call for ointments and bandaging.  But, extraordinarily, some months after life returned to normal I developed swollen and “rheumatic” joints.  This was in the weeks before I was due to depart by steamer for the UK.  The doctor, who I think was as mystified as we were, thought that perhaps the swelling had been triggered by the typhoid and cholera shots and the smallpox vaccination, but he really didn’t know; still he prescribed some preparation – and Aunty Kit was back to her former bandaging routine.  This “recurrence” caused some consternation, and the thought that maybe I should be withdrawn from the Youth Travel tour.  But the swelling subsided, and the Tour was on.  In my suitcase I carried the ointment and some lengths of bandages just in case.  Three weeks later, as we were about to arrive in Marseilles, my feet swelled up.  By this time the contingent had about half-a-dozen lads with minor ailments, so instead of the bus tour of the region, the walking wounded just mooched around the heart of the city – the better end of the deal, I think.  After Marseilles, the swelling went down, and there has never been a recurrence.

And Aunty Kit never again had to call on her nursing skills.  But she remained a regular visitor to Bridge Road.  Over our years at the shop (1946 to 1961) she was a frequent guest for an evening meal, and very much part of our family.  She was an avid reader; and, even as a teenager, I was an unrepentant book buyer.  So each visit Aunty Kit would borrow a couple of my books, then return them next time, usually with a one-word critique written in pencil on a piece torn from the margin of the daily paper.  If you open a book that’s been on my shelf for more than 50 years you are likely to find a scrap of paper saying “interesting”, “not very realistic”, “didn’t like”, “good”, “boring”, “hard to believe”.

After East Melbourne, and the disastrous few months at Ferntree Gully, Aunty Kit bought a house in Bonbeach and lived there for many years.  Quite often I used to take Gloria for visits, with my younger sisters Kathy and Judy; and the three of them took the train on occasions too.  Kathy stayed for a week once, and had a miserable time – no television, the radio turned on only to hear news broadcasts, and Kathy’s cassette player not pleasing Aunty Kit at all.  Once I pruned her failing lemon tree, and thereafter never heard the end of how I’d butchered it.  The fact that it had been turned into the most prolific bearer in town was never mentioned. 

Aunty Kit was a guest at Annie and Gary’s wedding in 1969, but face to face communication more or less dried up after that.   Annie recalls visiting Bonbeach just once; and Gloria regretted that she had not remained in touch.  Aunty Kit  was allowed to drift out of our lives.  At the time of her death on 13 June, 1983, aged 96, she was in a nursing home. 

My recalling of the Aunty Kit story has brought home to me the error of allowing a busy life to interfere with important family obligations.

Gary Andrews

30 January, 2011

PIECES: MR GLAZIER AND THE SPONGES

One of the specialties of the cake shop at number 296 Bridge Road, Richmond was the cream sponge – at least, that’s what everyone called it, but more correctly it was the creamed sponge.  Personally, I was never a fan - I thought the sponges gave off a rather unpleasant “eggy” smell, and anyway I much preferred cakes of a denser texture.  The smell, I always assumed, was due to the frozen egg pulp that was a principal ingredient.

In those days (the late 1940s and the 1950s) the marketing of eggs was strictly controlled by and channelled through the Egg and Egg Pulp Marketing Board.  As the Board’s name indicates, egg pulp was a significant part of the egg industry, and the Board distributed its pre-shelled eggs in oblong-shaped four (or was it five?) gallon tins.  This saved bakers and pastry-cooks from having to shell large numbers of eggs and, incidentally, meant that large-quantity recipes listed eggs by volume rather than by number.  In the bakehouse the egg pulp was glugged out of the tin into a large measuring jug and then into the mixing machine.  The pulp arrived frozen, and couldn’t be decanted until it had thawed somewhat, so there was always a stock of egg pulp tins in the cool-room.  At any one time only one tin had been opened and was in use in the bakehouse, and it stayed out of the cool-room and wasn’t put away until the end of the day’s work. 

Why it was so I don’t know, but the egg pulp – even from a freshly-tapped tin - always smelt really bad, and the odour didn’t improve through being left unrefrigerated during the day.  Curiously, the pulp never seemed to deteriorate: today we would automatically assume that it was laced with preservative, but back then surely not!  It was my job, after school or at the weekend, to hose the pulp remnants from the empty tins. 

After each tin was finished the pastry-cooks cut out the top, and their oblong shape meant that the cleaned tins were easy to place on a shelf; and they were used extensively in the bakehouse to store various ingredients - the fruit mince, for instance.  Other than prior to the Christmas season, mince pies were not a popular item, and were made irregularly on a needs basis.  The fruit mince itself was prepared very occasionally, in bulk, and the supply languished in a corner of the bakehouse in a former egg pulp tin, covered with a hessian bag to keep the bakehouse flour from settling.  And even when the mince did accumulate a light crust of white, a quick stir with a stick was all it took to prepare the delicious mixture for ladling into the shortbread bases.

Given the years that the bakehouse had been operating, there was rarely need for a new storage tin, so my after-school chore was really to clean the tins for the man who came from time-to-time to take them away.  I don’t remember why the tins were collected, but it certainly wasn’t for scrap metal, otherwise we would simply have crushed them, and I wouldn’t have had to clean them first.  But I do remember that the stack of tins awaiting collection was sometimes huge, stretching along and up the high brick wall of the next-door factory.

All of this has been by way of digression from the issue of why to me the sponges smelt unpleasant.  Perhaps the smell wasn’t the latent whiff of egg pulp at all.  It’s possible that the smell was the smell of margarine – not so much the margarine that was in the sponge mixture, but the margarine that was used to grease the sponge tins.  Again “in those days” there were entrenched restrictive trade practices.  The dairy industry lobby had ensured that margarine had to be labelled as “cooking” margarine, and that it was not allowed to be coloured to look like butter.  It was white, like copha, and consequently was rarely used as a table substitute for butter.  However, it was widely used by bakers and pastry-cooks; and at the shop there was always a big block – 56 pounds, I think – in the cool-room or on the bench.  From time to time a hunk of margarine was melted in a metal jug, and was then used for greasing tins and trays.

The standard oven tray accommodated about eighteen sponge tins, and when cooked the sponges were simply tipped on to the bench or a rack to cool.  They never stuck to the cake tins, maybe because the tins had been so liberally coated with melted margarine, or maybe because the tins had never been washed.  They were black with usage.

It was not customary to sell single-layer sponges, and typically the sponges in the display cases and in the shop window comprised two sponge cakes with cream between, and with the top iced and lightly decorated – with a fringe of hundreds-and-thousands, for instance.  Sometimes there was simply a sprinkling of caster sugar instead of icing.

The sponges we sold to Lin Glazier were different though.  I call him Lin now, but then he was always Mr. Glazier.  He was our most faithful customer.  He and his wife operated the Wattle Park Chalet.  The Chalet was and is a Tudor-style oddity within the natural bushland of Wattle Park.  It is a tea rooms, with dining facilities of sufficient size to hold large functions, wedding receptions in particular. 

Wattle Park, of some 137 acres, was acquired in 1915 from a Mrs Welch, widow of one of the founders of the Melbourne department store, Ball & Welch. [Ball & Welch, long gone, used to be in Flinders Street, opposite what is now the Ian Potter Centre of the National Gallery of Victoria.  At selected counters – such as the glove department - there were tall bentwood chairs for ladies to sit while making their purchases.  One of those chairs is now in our bathroom, courtesy of uncle Alan Camm.  I don’t know how Alan obtained the chair, but I presume it was around the time of the store’s closure late in the 1970s.]

The Wattle Park site was sold by Mrs Welch to one of the early tramway companies on condition that it be used as a public park.  Ownership later passed to the Melbourne and Metropolitan Tramways Board, and subsequently to Parks Victoria.  The Chalet was built in 1928, from materials described as “recycled” – wooden beams and bricks from demolished cable tram engine-houses and depots, and roofing slate from the Yarra Bend Asylum!  The Glaziers operated the business of the Chalet for many years.  It still functions as a venue for wedding receptions, and is currently named Arlington – surely a strange choice of name given that the world’s best known Arlington is the American National Cemetery in Virginia.

Mr. Glazier used to buy several dozen sponges at a time, undecorated, and we provided flat wooden boxes for transportation.  He collected the sponges himself, and was thus a regular caller at the shop.  He was tall and lean, in his 40s through 50s I suppose, and very formal.  He and my dad eventually got on to Lin and Gordon terms, but it took some time.

When Mr Glazier learned of my impending trip to the UK with the Sun Youth Travel contingent he gave me an introduction to his brother-in-law, Dr. van den Brenk.  Dr. van den Brenk was at that time based at the Royal College of Surgeons in London.  He was later the Professor of Cancer Research at the University of London.  The US National Library of Medicine lists 84 cancer-related papers with H.A. van den Brenk as author or co-author. The man clearly had an illustrious career – but, on 27 June, 1955, he was happy to show a 15-year old schoolboy around the Royal College.  My strongest recollections are of the skeleton of a giant man in a foyer showcase, and Dr van den Brenk’s broad Australian accent.  Dr van den Brenk died in 1992, full of honours.  

As to Mr Glazier:  we lost track after leaving Richmond in 1960, and I know no more of him.

Gary Andrews

12 January, 2011

PIECES: WHY LPs?

They take up a huge amount of space, and it has cost me many dollars to house them – shelves specially built both at Durham Road and at Chinkapook.  There will be those, including family members, who seriously wonder why I bother to keep long-playing records (a.k.a. vinyl), indeed continue to add to their number.  Fortunately for me, Annie (as I have said elsewhere) is prepared to “cut me the slack”; and, indeed, she encourages me to prowl the opp shops in search of new treasures.  In a sense I’m a “collector”, looking out for some particular disc to complete a set or a series, but my typical inclination these days is just to look for things that are “different”, or simply discs that are “old” – more than 50 years old.  No doubt I’m a “completist”, and I can, and have, achieved complete works of some composers or performers through CDs, but I recognise that it’s too late to achieve complete LP sets. 

I recently bought three albums of LPs that were certainly different  They were pressed somewhere behind the Iron Curtain, and had no word of text that I could understand - or could ever have understood - because of the Cyrillic writing.  They were not only “different” but also “old”, pre-stereo.  It turned out that two of them were Soviet compilations of opera arias, and not just by Russian singers, but by world-famous singers of the 1930s and earlier.  I recognised the voices of some singers, but couldn’t confirm their names from the sleeve notes.  The other album – I subsequently figured – was a Latvian stage play.  Not enthralling, but certainly unique.  One thing that really attracted me to these three albums is that they are 10 inch LPs, not the 12 inch diameter typically used for albums in Australia.

Wearing my “collector” hat, I do have an eye for Decca recordings of the 1950s, not only for the music but for their stylish covers.  The first Decca LPs were plain, one background colour, simple geometric designs.  The full-coloured covers that next appeared had emotive painted illustrations and subtle tonings.  And since Decca was positioned at the quality end of the market, and had a contracted stable of major orchestras and other artists, the performances aren’t bad either!

My principal obsession, though, is to acquire every record released by the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra.  These were cut from around the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s by Capitol Records (and later reissued by World Record Club).  Capitol Records was founded in 1942 by the songwriters Johnny Mercer and Buddy DeSylva, and I get the sense that a dozen years on they wanted a light classical catalogue to complement their rapidly burgeoning popular artist line-up.

The music bowl in Hollywood dates from 1922.  First it was merely a natural amphitheatre, then from 1929 to 2003 there was the sound shell that illustrates the cover of so many of the HBSO recordings - still open-air for the audience (more than 17000 seats!), but cover for the artists.  A replacement sound shell was constructed in 2003.

In the mid-1940s there was indeed an orchestra  named after the Hollywood Bowl, but from 1947 to 1990 the summer symphonic concerts at the Hollywood Bowl were performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.  On the Capitol label, the HBSO is really the Los Angeles Philharmonic in disguise.  It’s the Capitol discs, dating from 1954,  that I collect……..and also those of the Roger Wagner Chorale, many of which have accompaniment by the HBSO, and those of the Capitol Symphony Orchestra – another ensemble invented for the record trade, and doubtless the same players as the HBSO.  I have more than 70 of these discs, but since I’ve never been able to find a definitive listing, I don’t know how incomplete my collection is.  Amazon.com lists a number of HBSO CDs that are unknown to me, but some are clearly compilations.  Note: I have not transformed my hunt for the missing LPs into a desire to acquire a duplicate set on CDs.

My interest in the HBSO dates from 1955, and from the fact that the HBSO’s Echoes of Spain album was the first recording I ever bought……although it wasn’t the first recording I ever owned. Read on.

The premises at 294/296 Bridge Road, Richmond were huge. At ground level there were the two shops – 294 was a delicatessen and 296 was a cake shop.  The delicatessen was run by my aunt, Kath Napier (nee Andrews, subsequently Warren), and the cake shop had my mum and dad - Gloria behind the counter, and Gordon in the bakehouse out back.  There were half-a-dozen other staff, plus family helpers. The two shops were large, and the wall between them had been pierced by two archways, hence two separate types of shop in one.  An inventive marketing idea for 1946, although invented before we took over the lease.  Running across the whole premises, directly behind the two shops, was a substantial work space.  On the delicatessen side there was the cool-room, and sink and washing facilities, plus a long workbench where food was prepared for the shop.  For instance, sides of bacon were de-boned prior to being placed on the industrial-sized bacon-slicing machine (which was in the shop for all to see).  The equivalent work space behind the cake shop was a bakehouse, with two work benches (one marble-topped) and the main cake oven.  Moving further to the rear, next were the two sets of stairs to the upstairs living quarters.  The stairs behind the delicatessen were the ones we habitually used.  The two upstairs premises, like the shops, had been opened into one, with a single connecting doorway.  An idea of the generous proportions of the building can be had by imagining the staircases – they had three rises and two landings.  A lightweight door had been installed at the bottom of the number 296 stairs, to keep the bakehouse flour from drifting up; and this was the main reason why these stairs were virtually unused…….but they were a great place to take school-friends, especially from the bottom through the mysterious door.  There were also unlit and strange cupboards under the bottom landing of each staircase, so there was plenty of opportunity to play tricks on the unwary.

And quite apart from the eight spacious rooms of residential quarters upstairs, downstairs there were four further rooms behind each shop.  On the cake shop side the next room was a second bakehouse with a second oven; then a room that when the premises were built (in the 1880s I think) was a kitchen but was now a storeroom for flour and other bakehouse supplies; then a scullery; and then the family laundry.  On the delicatessen side the next room beyond the staircase area was used as an office; then the former kitchen (which still had its wood stove) had been turned into a storeroom; and then there was a two-roomed kitchen and scullery.  In this space there was an industrial-sized gas oven whose main function was to cook large deep trays of rabbits. 

Baked rabbits were something of a house specialty, and this was the particular way in which Pa Andrews was useful.  The rabbits were delivered skinned beheaded and gutted, but there was often a bit of further cleaning to be done – bits of guts still adhering, feet to be cut off, necks to be trimmed.  Pa then filled the body cavities with bread stuffing, sewed the carcasses into a circular shape, and placed bacon rashers on top.  Although the mixture of water and dripping in which the rabbits were partially immersed for baking was not always pristine, and cholesterol-watching hadn’t yet been invented, and Pa Andrews always had a pipe in his mouth, let me tell you that the rabbits were delicious. 

This rear kitchen area was also the home of the dreadnought.  According to the dictionaries a dreadnought is a heavily-armed battleship, or a person who fears nothing, or an outer garment of heavy woollen cloth – none of these meanings coming close to our dreadnought.  How we came to call it the dreadnought I don’t know: it was a huge vat in which we boiled hams and corned beef.  At some stage during our fifteen years at Bridge Road the original dreadnought burned out, and was replaced by an even larger version – an insulated structure on legs, about a meter and a half across, with a heavy-gauge metal insert like a household copper but with a capacity of 20 gallons or more.  It was fired by a gas ring about half a metre in diameter.  Into the vat of water were loaded about a dozen legs of ham plus two or three hunks of corned beef.  They were boiled for about 20 minutes only, then the wooden lid was put in place, and the whole apparatus was covered with empty flour bags to keep in the heat overnight, with the removal of the fully-cooked meat next morning.

Gordon cooked the hams himself.  Undercooking was impossible to redress; and overcooking was a disaster.  (It happened once – resulting in a vat full of shredded meat!)  So not a task to be entrusted to Pa Andrews.  Pa was, shall we say, unreliable.  One time we were off to the Royal Show - Aunt Kath with cousin Graeme, Gloria with me and sister Margaret, and Pa.  Margaret was young enough to be in her pusher.  We took the tram along Bridge Road to Flinders Street in the city (thence by train to the Showgrounds), and all of us except Pa went into the closed compartment of the tram.  Pa stayed in the open-aired smokers’ compartment.  As we were alighting at Swanston Street Gloria noticed with alarm that the pusher was missing.  Where is Margaret’s pusher?  It had fallen out the open doorway several stops back, and Pa hadn’t thought to raise the alarm.  As I say, he wasn’t reliable.  In truth, the city was not his preferred environment, and when he returned with Kath and Bill Warren to his old farm in 1951 he was happily back in familiar territory.

Pa used to play cribbage several afternoons a week with a group of old people at a pavilion at the nearby Richmond Oval; and he went a lot to the Victoria Market.  He got some cheap bananas one day, I recall.  They were a bit brown and spotted, but quite sound inside, at least for a couple more days. But he arrived home with a full crate.  Even though we were many, there was no way we could eat such a supply in the days remaining.

Another day – and this is where I’ve been heading since I mentioned that the Echoes of Spain LP wasn't  the first record I possessed – Pa arrived home with a present for me, an HMV table-top wind-up gramophone, plus a pile of 78 r.p.m. records.  (There were furniture auction rooms down the road from our shop, and Pa was a dedicated onlooker at each week’s sale.)  We’re talking late 1940s, and the discs were already old by then, shellac and breakable.  Example:  Home in Pasadena, a Harry Warren song recorded by Al Jolson in 1923.  I guess that these discs were my first exposure to popular music of a generation or two prior to my own, an interest that has never left me.

I played that gramophone and those records literally to death.  Eventually I vandalised the gramophone, breaking it up, discarding the wood and the turntable and the pickup arm, but keeping the motor and handle…..for what reason I can’t imagine.  Years later I threw them away too.  And I remember throwing what remained of the records into the incinerator in the back yard – lovely black smoke before we had a consciousness of pollution.  On reflection, being a self-confessed hoarder, I cannot conceive of how I disposed of such a significant part of my childhood with such brutality and finality.

For years thereafter my experience of music was solely via the radio.  There was the weekly hit parade, Sunday evenings at 6.00 p.m., or was it 6.30?  – the top eight pop records, the list presumably compiled from the sales statistics of one of the major music shops; or maybe, given that there were relatively few labels at the time, “the industry” was trusted to compile the list.  The hit parade was essential listening; and there was hardly a hit song of the late ‘40s/early ‘50s that I didn’t know. 

And there were programmes of  classical music on most non-Government radio stations, but usually presenting "popular" classics only.  A half hour of “world famous tenors” was typical of what the commercial radio stations would stretch to; and the broadcasting of serious music was in effect left to the ABC (then named the Australian Broadcasting Commission). 

In those days there was no FM radio, only AM, and there were only the two ABC stations servicing Melbourne.  3LO (now 774, Local Radio) - named, in 1924, after 2LO in LO-ndon, although I prefer “hello”, get it? - was the generalist broadcaster while 3AR (now 621, Radio National) was the serious music station.  One function of 3AR was to broadcast symphony concerts, which it readily did, given that all the capital-city-based symphony orchestras were owned and run by the ABC (and still are – thank you ABC).  I absorbed all the classical music I could hear.  Ironically, I took piano lessons, but was not inspired, and did not practise; and I was somewhat relieved when Kath and Bill moved to the Mallee and took the piano with them.  That was the end of my career in music, something about which (once I came to my senses) I have had a lifetime of regret.

While through the hit parade programme I knew all the popular tunes of the day, I knew just as much of the ‘30s and the early ’40s too.  This was because Bill Warren had entered my life, and when he became part of the Bridge Road family he brought with him his radiogram (radio and record player combined) and hundreds of 78s.  Before he was called up for war service Bill had been an avid fan of 1930s popular music, jazz in particular, and had built up quite a collection of 78s – Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, Artie Shaw and all the leading swing bands of the day.  These he played incessantly at Bridge Road, and I sat at the feet of the master and his musical heroes.  (Years later, Bill gave his 78 r.p.m. records to me, and I have them still.)

Then came the quantum leap in 1955.  Although the first 33 1/3^rd r.p.m. records (vinyl LPs) were released in the USA as early as 1949, they didn’t really “arrive” in Australia for some years after.  I have a 120 page publication - 1952-3 Recorded Music – of all the records available in Australia under the EMI labels, and there is no mention at all of long-playing records at that time. But the flood of long-playing records, once uncorked, was relentless; and when in August 1955 I returned from the Sun Youth Travel tour of the UK I was amazed and delighted to find that the family now had an HMV radiogram, and a bunch of LPs.  The proprietor of the radio shop was a friend of a friend, and Gordon had been persuaded to buy the top of the range model.  It was a fine instrument.  The LPs, however, were a motley lot, and I never figured whether Gordon had been conned into buying discs that weren’t selling well, or whether they were thrown in to sweeten the deal.  Nevertheless, those records took a substantial pounding over the years.  They were nearly all 10 inch, by the way.  In the early 1950s the record companies had determined that the 10 inch format was “standard”, and that the 12 inch format would be reserved for classical music and for cast recordings of musical comedies.

There had been no record player at Bridge Road since Bill took his radiogram to the Mallee in 1951, so the new radiogram meant that not only was there a collection of new LPs, but that I was able to borrow and play classical records from the Melbourne High School music department. 

It also meant that I could buy records of my own, although it didn’t quite work out that way.  Sure I bought Echoes of Spain, but Gordon reprimanded me for wasting my pocket money, and the next disc I bought I kept hidden in my bedroom and played it only when the rest of the family was out for the day.  Even a couple of years later, when I was at university, I was still reluctant to buy records. 

As I said, although slow to kick-off, the rise of the LP in Australia had been rapid and comprehensive.  At first the classical LPs were simply re-releases of performances already in the 78 r.p.m. catalogues.  Then pre-existing performances were re-recorded; and then came new versions by different performers.  Competition was fierce, and soon there were tens of versions of the more popular classics, and the older versions were being deleted.  But while there was obvious product competition the industry remained a very effective cartel, and there was no price competition – for years 12” discs were 52/6 ($5.25) and 10” LPs were 31/6 ($3.15), regardless of the label.  But by 1957, my first year at Melbourne University, there was already a remaindering system in Melbourne.  The slow-moving and discontinued classical records were not discounted in record stores, but were available from one outlet, John Clements, through his premises upstairs in Collins Street. Clements had literally been allowed to corner the market, and his shop had bin after bin of less-than-full-price classical LPs.  I frequently dropped in on my way home from lectures.  I thumbed through the racks, lusting after juicy works and performances, always looking, never buying.  I remembered many of the record covers for decades, and then managed to buy them from opp shops.

There was a great time for me, late in the 1950s, when the ABC mounted a series of stereo broadcasts.  Stereo LPs, and stereo playing equipment, had hit the market; but the radio stations could broadcast in mono only.  So, as an experiment, the ABC commenced “stereo broadcasting”, by transmitting one channel over 3AR and the other channel over 3LO.  In order to achieve stereo listening it was necessary to have two radios, one tuned to each station.  The stereo programme was for half an hour a week, at 10.30 on Monday nights.  A big slice of the programming was of stereo demonstration discs – steam trains, jet planes, ping-pong and the like; but there was enough music to convince any listener that stereo was a remarkable advance in technology.  We had the big console radio (sister Kate has it now), and I “matched” it with our little kitchen (“mantle”) radio – quite unmatched, in fact, but we got the idea.  I was totally overwhelmed by stereo, but Gloria and Gordon, despite being forced to listen each week, really couldn’t have cared less.  Doubtless I was hoping that the new medium might find its way into our household, but to no avail.  The radiogram was too recent an acquisition, and the folks had no interest in upgrading.  The ABC's experimental stereo broadcasting went on for a few months only, and we didn’t have true stereo radio until the frequency modulation band was licensed by the Government nearly 20 years later, and ABCFM commenced in 1976.

Marriage in 1969 transformed my relationship with LPs and with listening to music, because not only did Annie have a modest collection of records, but she had a portable record player, and it was equipped to play stereo recordings.  Moreover, when we settled into our first home in Bonnyview Street, Burwood, we were close to the then headquarters – and shop – of the World Record Club.  Remember that I was 30 years old, had had a passion for classical music for damned near 20 years, and possessed a mere handful of recordings.  I remember attending my cousin Howard Carter’s 21^st birthday, and being envious of all the LPs he received as gifts; at my party a few months earlier I had received not one.  So the early years at Bonnyview Street were special listening years, with their steady flow of World Record Club pressings of performances that a few years earlier had been in the mainstream HMV, Columbia, etc. catalogues.

Having the stereo player broadened the options, no doubt, but just because the recordings I was buying were stereo and hi-fi it didn’t mean that I was listening to high fidelity reproduction.  And earlier, although I said that the HMV radiogram was a fine instrument, and it was, it couldn’t compete in fidelity with a system made up of individually-selected high-quality component units.  Since my late teens I had been carrying in my head the extraordinary sound of music being reproduced in high fidelity. 

After they returned from the Mallee in 1954, Kath and Bill Warren bought a Victorian-era mansion on the corner of Hanby and Dendy Streets, Brighton.  The building had, some years before, been converted into five separate living areas, so Kath and Bill became “godparents” to a procession of tenants.  Well, not really a procession, I suppose, because it was a lovely place – almost a community – and people tended to stay for years.  (One such was Judy Wines.)  One of the apartments was rented by CRA, the mining company; and four or five of the staff geologists made the upstairs front their home.  They were all in their late 20s or early 30s, I guess, and continually coming and going as assignments took them away from company headquarters in Melbourne for exploratory stints in remote parts.  One of their number was a hi-fi enthusiast, with state-of-the-art equipment.  I shall never forget the (mono) sound filling the large living room - in particular the Procession of the Sardar from Ippolitoff-Ivanoff’s Caucasian Sketches…….this great sound emanating from the Collaro turntable, the Quad amplifier, and the Leak speaker - not set in a speaker column but mounted in a five-feet square slab of wood, standing in the corner.  I determined that one day I would possess equipment of equivalent brilliance, and reasoned that it would be pointless ever to buy inferior stuff that would just disappoint me.

That moment took more than 15 years to arrive.  The final step in the consummation of my listening pleasure came at Christmas 1974 when I received a $750 bonus from my employers………and on 16^th January 1975 (with Annie’s blessing and encouragement) I bought a Thorens TD160 turntable with Ortofon stylus, and a Marantz 2015 receiver/amplifier.  That just about took all the $750, so I completed the set with a pair of second-hand Wharfedale speakers for $95.  I have them still – well, sort of.  The Ortofon stylus was misplaced at a shop where I was having it seen to, and there have been a couple of upgrades since then culminating in the Garrot K1 in 2003; and the Wharfedales died a little, and I was never able to get the spare parts necessary to repair them.  Sadly, the Thorens runs backwards and cannot be fixed – but it does it only sometimes.  I am prepared to put up with the foibles of an old friend.

As I write I am home alone, and I have succumbed to nostalgia and played the HBSO version of the Procession of the Sardar, in mono, and at considerable volume.  The performance was recorded in 1957, so it’s more or less the vintage of the recording I heard all those years ago at Brighton, when the Leak speaker and its baffle board seemed to lift off the floor in time with the music.  Nostalgia has won – the music today doesn't sound as exciting as the music in my memory.

So I think we can say that part of the reason for the vastness of my LP collection is a reaction to the early frustrations I suffered and the postponements I endured; and if the psychologists say that I have spent a lifetime in compensating and in catching up, they would also have to say that, with more than 5000 LPs, I’ve been quite successful at it.

Gary Andrews

2 June, 2011

SATURDAY BREAKFAST #3: SYDNEY ROAD, BRUNSWICK (BETWEEN ALBION STREET and MORELAND ROAD)

Visited 4 June, 2011

If you Google "Sydney Road Brunswick" you quickly find the sydneyroad.com.au web site.  This site is sponsored jointly by an authority of the Victorian Government and the Sydney Road Business Association, and is clearly orientated towards business and tourism.  It is a vibrant site, full of colour and movement, and gives the impression that Sydney Road could well be more exciting than Rio de Janeiro and Las Vegas combined.  It is not.  But like the curate’s egg it is good in parts – or, of more relevance to today’s visit, it is not so good in parts.

 Sydney Road, as its name signifies, is the road out of Melbourne to Sydney.  It doesn’t bear that name for the whole 950 kilometres or so; and, even if it did, at very least it would have to become Melbourne Road at the half-way point.  In fact the name Sydney Road persists only through the few northern suburbs of the metropolis, and then it becomes the Hume Highway. 

Moreover, Sydney Road doesn't even begin at the edge of Melbourne’s central business district.  The road that originates at the edge of the city is the appropriately named Royal Parade – fringed by the elegant Parkville on the west, and by the parklands of Carlton on the east.  This grand boulevard (complemented by St. Kilda Road to the south of the city) is Jekyll to the Hyde of Sydney Road, which it becomes upon reaching the suburb of Brunswick.  Not that Sydney Road Brunswick hasn't had plenty of affluence in its time, but at half the width of Royal Parade, it was foredestined to be “trade” rather than “profession”.  And trade it was and is. 

The shopping strip of Sydney Road stretches for some four kilometres, through all of Brunswick and a fair bit of Coburg, undeniably the longest such nineteenth century retail and commercial stretch in Melbourne.  And like an old stretched out and abused coronary artery it has its weak spots, and it has not been able to maintain vigour over its whole length. 

We had already, on previous occasions, walked sections of Sydney Road, and today we were covering the 600 metres between Albion Street and Moreland Road……..and seeing Sydney Road at its saddest.  To the north and the south there are energetic and interesting shopping sections, and ethnic shopping to delight, but the Albion Street to Moreland Road section has all but been abandoned.

Sydney Road runs parallel and close to the Upfield railway line.  There are a number of railway stations complementing Sydney Road, including Anstey near Albion Street and Moreland near Moreland Road. 

Moreland station opened on 9 September 1884, and took its name from the already-named location.  In 1839, a mere four years after the first white settlement at Bearbrass in 1835 (Bearbrass had its name changed to Melbourne in March 1837), the Scottish surgeon, Farquhar McCrae took up 600 acres of land, and named it Moreland after his grandfather’s estate in Jamaica.  True!  And 45 years later the McCrae farm was a Melbourne suburb, with its own railway station.

The Anstey station – although closer down the line to the city – dates from 15 December, 1926, much later than Moreland.  The original name, North Brunswick, was changed to Anstey on 1 December 1942.  It is named after Frank Anstey, tramway union representative, Labor member of the Victorian Parliament, later a member of the Federal Parliament, Australian nationalist, anti-Semite, and likely as corrupt as they come.  He was a mate of the power-monger and general all-round crook, John Wren, and features as a major character in Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory.  Hardy’s book was a cause celebre when it appeared in 1950 – published privately by Hardy, who assembled and bound the pages in his garage with the help of Communist Party friends.  Nearly all the characters were “real”, but had thinly-disguised names – John Wren was John West in the book, and Frank Anstey was Frank Ashton.  I doubt that any Government today would have the gall to re-name a railway station after one of its stalwarts, shady or otherwise.  [Incidentally, my copy of  Power Without Glory, although the second edition, was clearly one of those printed and put together by Hardy and his cohorts, because they mucked it up – pages 353 to 384 are missing, and pages 321 to 352 are duplicated.] 

So, what of our Saturday excursion?  In truth, the extent of my foregoing digression is directly related to the lack of interesting features in the shopping strip.  Many premises were closed, maybe 40%.  The effect was to give a general air of neglect.  Those businesses that remain are not feeling comfortable.  Having said this, our breakfast place (one of the two that presented) was first-rate.  We had figured that despite the closed businesses in Sydney Road there must be loads of people living in the streets behind, and surely there is café and restaurant trade for the taking.  And so it was.  Minimo Cafe was busy and alive - six staff, a thoughtful breakfast menu, and food preparation in the public space rather than in some back kitchen.  The porridge was served with a drizzle of honey, and shaved almonds on top.  There was no call to add sugar, but the porridge was thick, and the jug of milk was helpful. 

The morning was cold, and the bleak wind added a significant chill factor; but inside Minimo Cafe we, and the numerous other patrons, received a very warm welcome

Gary Andrews

 

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION.................

I spent my working life as a professional accountant, but words have always been more important to me than figures.  Perhaps this is why I was attracted to the taxation field, where the focus is on advice – written and oral – and where I could foster verbal skills more so than numerical ones.

The professional advice I gave over the years is buried and lost in old files (and remains confidential), but I’ve saved copies of speeches and other bits and pieces that may be of interest.  And in recent years I have written occasionally for pleasure………and my daughter, Laura, and son-in-law, Martin - having expressed interest and been given copies - have encouraged me to create a blog site and to post some of my stuff.

Some of the postings will describe places in Melbourne and surrounds where my son, Dan, and I have had breakfast on Saturday mornings.  This all started around seven years ago.  Although a 60-years-plus resident of Melbourne, I realised that there were many areas of the city with which I had no familiarity, and I thought the way to become better acquainted would be to visit with a specific purpose.  Dan agreed to be my companion, and since January 2005 we have been journeying to a different suburb each week for exploration and breakfast.  Of course, other pursuits are allowed to have precedence, but on average we manage our excursions on about 30 weeks each year. 

The idea is that we walk both sides of the street, noting in the process all the places serving breakfast; then we make the choice, and return for our meal.  Over the years our emphasis has changed – we used to favour those places that were able to provide sausages with a cooked breakfast.  But these days we seek out porridge and Bircher muesli.

The breakfast, while a necessary part of the ritual, is not the key part – we don’t sit down until we have scoped the whole area, checked-out the shops and other premises, noted the degree of affluence or otherwise, and formed a view about the locale. There are numerous suburbs in a city the size of Melbourne (about 3 million souls), and frequently there are several shopping strips and centres in the one suburb.  Which explains why, as of writing, we have been to over 200 precincts (and had over 200 breakfasts!) – with a couple more years in prospect before we have to re-visit old favourites. 

It is self-evident, indeed fatuous, to say that I shall add additional posts as time permits.  My life is full, and busy, and this blog site is a byway not the main thoroughfare.  Nevertheless, I expect that it will give me much pleasure, and I trust that readers will share in that pleasure.

Gary Andrews

7 June, 2011

SATURDAY BREAKFAST #2: GRANARY LANE, MENTONE

Visited 16 September, 2006

Mentone Station is right on Balcombe Road, and the railway line crosses the Road at an angle that is not right – it’s acute or obtuse, depending which way you look.  The streets near the Station are cock-eyed as a result.  Quite a tangle on the western side, but beyond the smaller shops room has been made for both Coles and Safeway and their attendant lots for cars and trolleys.  There are several streets of shops; and all – excuse the pun – towered over by the tower of Kilbreda College, smack in the heart of the shopping precinct.

Kilbreda College was founded by the Brigidene Sisters in 1904, and in establishing their Melbourne community they had the foresight (and the good fortune and the funds) to acquire an already-established premises.  The building had been The Mentone Coffee Palace, built in 1887 when Melbourne was becoming home to a number of similar temperance hotels where “no wine, ale or spirituous or intoxicating liquors” was sold. 

The suburban rail network had reached "Mentone by the sea" in 1881 (the station was originally named Balcombe), where the pretension of the times had already named Venice Street, Como Parade, Florence Street and Naples Road.  The shareholders of the Coffee Palace Company expected great things, but the bust that followed the land boom thought otherwise.  And they hadn’t expected that a big hotel – one that did purvey spirituous liquors etc. – would be built on the Mentone beachfront, and would take their custom.  So the Coffee Palace closed, the Company was liquidated in 1895, and the building had a number of owners and uses until rescued from dereliction by the nuns nine years later.

The hundred years-plus of change overseen by the Kilbreda College tower has included the disappearance of many types of business and trade.  Lingering mementos remain in the names Old Bakery Lane and Granary Lane; and it was in the latter, running off Balcombe Road, that we found our breakfast spot. 

Truly Scrumptious is an immodest name, providing a daily challenge to the proprietors; and from our viewpoint the challenge was met.  Each bowl of toasted muesli and soft fruits was served on a platter accompanied with a jug of milk and a dish of delicious vanilla yoghurt with syrup.  At the next table six elderly locals, obviously regulars, were having their usual – one couple into the big cooked breakfast, with the others ostensibly content with their coffee and muffins but giving envious glances. 

The Truly Scrumptious people were most pleasant and efficient.  The business has been there since 1990, so has already existed longer than The Mentone Coffee Palace.  I fancy that, by some sort of osmosis, Truly Scrumptious has taken on the Kilbreda motto “Strength and Kindliness”.

Gary Andrews

 

SATURDAY BREAKFAST #1 - BURWOOD ROAD, HAWTHORN

Visited 9 September, 2006

The corner of Burwood Road and Power Street, Hawthorn is something of a landmark corner - but only for those with long memories!  There is now a huge hole and the beginnings of a major office development, but located on this corner used to be the headquarters and the factory of the Fowlers Vacola Manufacturing Company.   Fowlers Vacola were food processors, and were at the Hawthorn location, from 1920, for more than 50 years.  While Fowlers Vacola’s food products were no doubt worthy, the fame of the name Fowlers Vacola comes from the company’s home-bottling kits, introduced by Joseph Fowler as early as 1915.  The ability to preserve one’s own fruit and vegetables, courtesy of the Fowlers Vacola preserving system and bottling jars, was a godsend to poorer (and not so poor) families right through to the affluent 1970s.  Around the country, agricultural shows still give prizes for the best presented home preserves.

So thoughts of home-preserved food were on our minds as we traversed Burwood Road. 

The shopping strip near the Power Street corner is brief, barely a shopping strip at all, and not our typical type of Saturday destination; but we had other things to attend to nearby later, and it suited us to be brief ourselves.  There is a good (non-chain) supermarket near the corner and, across the road from it, a fascinating shop selling old household items – not able to be called antiques, and not shabby chic;  but plain and honest stuff from earlier times, from lamps to gazunders, albeit at prices that their original owners would not believe.

Breakfast places were scarce, but we found one, Osso.  The word “osso” is Italian for bone, so the café’s name is a bit faux – but nothing else about the café is.  Indeed, I am diffident about calling it a café.  It is one of these modern eateries that serves a range of snacks of highest quality.  And it is a retailer of cakes as well.  Again I prefer not to call it a cake shop; maybe patisserie is more apt.  The combination of in-house dining (with some seating in the street) and delicious pastries for sale, works very well - certainly if the steady flow of Saturday morning customers is any indication.  The premises are very pleasant and modern, and have clearly been fitted out at considerable expense.  

We tried the muesli with yoghurt.  We remarked to each other on the smallness of the serves, but then had to eat our words - the portions were more than filling.  The lattes were so good we had seconds.  Make no bones about it, Osso is highly recommended.

Gary Andrews