Tony Andrews (Gulnare)
I lived in Gulnare from the time of my birth in 1942 until we moved to the city when I was eight. Gulnare was a small but prosperous farming town, and my father was the schoolteacher: we lived in the schoolhouse. The schoolhouse and the school stood in their own grounds with no other buildings on any side. The rectangular block contained the school, a tall stone and brick building separated by a few paces but no fence dividing it from the schoolhouse, which was a four-room cottage with a lean-to for the very basic kitchen and bathroom. Behind the school was a corrugated-iron shelter shed and the school workshop, and at the back of the block were the school dunnies (toilets).
On three sides of the school block there was a paddock which changed yearly as the crops were rotated by the farmer. The Gulnare oval was right alongside our front hedge. I could go through the front gate on to the oval and play in the little grandstand situated a few steps to the left, or if I were to walk straight across the oval, I would come upon the back of the Gulnare Institute building on Railway Terrace; this short trip took me all the way across the town. The Institute was the venue for meetings, concerts, Christmas parties for the children, Strawberry Fetes, and so on. It was the social centre of Gulnare. The main town buildings lay along the Western side of Railway Terrace – the Gulnare hotel, Belcher’s general store, the Institute, the Methodist church, a house or two, and Syms’s garage on the corner of the main road.
As well as performing the rest of his duties as a teacher my father also put on the yearly school concerts in the Institute. He had to choose the items, rehearse the pupils, print the programs, and make the props, while my mother would make the costumes. Some of the items from 1947 make interesting reading more than seventy years later. The Ten Little Nigger Boys (the boys) would not make it onto a modern stage and Maori Scene (the girls) or Hi-Ching-Ching-a-Ling (the juniors: that’s me) might raise an eyebrow or two. At least two of the carols made it on to the program in 1950, my last year. Mary Inglis sang The First Noel, and I sang Silent Night, despite my crushing shyness.
