I am the daughter of a policeman, and my early life was spent in country towns. In 1948 when I was two, we moved from Farina in the far north to Wirrabara in the mid-north. My parents loved life in Farina and were reluctant to make the move, but they soon settled into life in Wirrabara. Five years later they were similarly reluctant to move to Tumby Bay, in 1953.
We lived in the local police station. It had an office for official business and cells out the back that occasionally housed anyone who had too much to drink. My mother had to feed these ‘lodgers’ and I usually hid in the house when the cell door was opened as there was often a lot of noise, which frightened me.
Heather at 5.
My older brother went to the local two-teacher school. In February 1951, when I was 10 days short of my fifth birthday, my father persuaded the school to accept me as a student at the start of the school year. I was allowed to attend provided the Inspector did not visit and discover my early attendance. Apparently, I came home each of those school days and reported, ‘The Inspector didn’t come today.’
Life was different in those days. I was allowed to wander around the small town without any supervision. About the time I started school my parents gave me a beautiful gold bangle that had my initials engraved on it. I have no idea how they could afford this, as money was very tight. I was thrilled and insisted on wearing the bangle all the time. It was, at that time, too big for me so I would have been told not to lose it. One day I was wandering the Wirrabara streets with friends, and we decided to try to do cartwheels. As the bangle was too big, I took it off and put it on one of the spikes that protected the Institute windows. Naturally, when we had finished playing, I ran off, completely forgetting my bracelet. My father who regularly walked around the town, discovered it hanging. Later that evening I was called into the police office and confronted by my father holding my bangle. I have no idea what my punishment was, but it was sufficient for me to remember the incident to this day. I never again lost my bangle and I still wear it.
The photo shows my bike decorated, probably, for Empire Day. The bangle can be seen on my left wrist.
Lectures were popular in South Australia’s early Institutes and included topics such as Fruit growing, Federation and Night life in London. One of the speakers who was in demand was my great-great-grandfather, Walter Paterson. He arrived in Adelaide at the age of 28 in 1839 and lived most of his life (to 1894) near Mount Barker.
In the 1860s he was in demand to speak at Institutes, as well as at other public meetings. His topic was Phrenology, the measurement of bumps on the skull to predict mental and personality traits. Each bump and hollow of the skull indicated a strength or a weakness, which could be increased or overcome with exercise. Audience members volunteered to have ‘their heads read’.
His talks, which were interrupted by ‘hearty bursts of applause and merriment’ were reported as ‘both instructive and amusing’. Through TROVE I have found that his lectures were held at Charleston, Kanmantoo, Lake Plains, Meadows, Morphett Vale, Mount Barker, Mount Lofty, Nairne, Noarlunga, North Gumeracha, Stockport, Strathalbyn, and even at Wallaroo and Mount Gambier. His most enthusiastic audience appears to have been at the Oakbank Institute. After his second lecture in February 1863 the meeting hoped for a return visit for the Young Men’s Philosophical Association.
I can’t work out how seriously Walter and his listeners took his interpretations.
A family affair at the Institute
Peter Brinkworth (Colonel Light Gardens)
When my twin brother and I were in primary school at Colonel Light Gardens, we had regular contact with the Institute Hall in West Parkway, as we passed it on foot every day on the way to school. In those days, the Garden Suburb Commissioner had an office at the front of the hall.
Between 1952 and 1954, we were members of the Crescent Boys Club, a gymnastics club, which met weekly in the main hall. We wore white shorts, sandshoes, and a white T-shirt with a green and gold felt badge on the front. The equipment included tumbling mats, vault with springboard, parallel bars, and rings. At our age and physical development, we never progressed past the basic tumbling and vaulting, but we had fun.
Peter (let), twin brother Malcolm and younger brother Alan in 1953
Meanwhile, we also joined the St John Ambulance Brigade cadets, a part of the Brigade Division which met there. Parades (with drills), classes and training were held weekly in the smaller hall at the rear of the main hall. The superintendent in charge was ‘Drew’ Harper, while one of our fellow cadets was Graham Hamdorf, now a leading Adelaide gynaecologist, and notable senior members were the Heard brothers, Malcolm and John, who were members of the Australian Olympic basketball team in 1960. We used our training in first aid mainly in competition with teams from other divisions around Adelaide, but the highlight of each year was the St John cadet camp held at the Angaston showground. We travelled there from Adelaide by train. We were probably encouraged to join by our father who was a member of the Unley City Ambulance during the 1930s. We might have joined the Boy Scouts, but we were not aware of any local troop. The Brigade division regularly held dances and socials in the main hall – I recall that it was where I first learned to do the ‘hokey-pokey’ which was a popular dance in those post-war days. Dad also had regular contact with the Institute (apart from paying council rates there) because he regularly attended meetings of The Returned Sailors and Soldiers Imperial League of Australia (RSSILA) in the rear hall. (He had served in the army as a rifle and machine gun instructor during WW2.) I was always puzzled by his attendance at the ‘smoke socials’ which the branch held, because my father never smoked.
Laying the foundation
Peter Brinkworth (Caltowie)
The original 1879 Caltowie Trustees and Committee
While researching the life of my great-grandfather, Ernst Siekmann, a mid-north store owner and corn factor, and an original settler in Caltowie, I consulted the Caltowie town historian, Doug Henderson. I wanted to find out more about my great-grandfather’s life there. Doug showed me a copy of the Golden Jubilee Booklet which was produced in 1929 as part of the town’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Caltowie Institute. In it there was a picture of the Original Trustees and Committee of the Institute. Top left was Ernst (a Trustee), in the centre, Oscar Laurenti (President) and on the centre right Thomas Williams (Chairman of the Institute Committee).
At Doug’s suggestion, I visited the Northern Areas Council in Jamestown to find out from the Rates Book where Ernst had lived during his time in Caltowie. I discovered that his house was still there (Lot 7), but more surprising, I found that the actual silver trowel used by Ernst’s wife Mary Siekmann (née Brinkworth) to lay the foundation stone of the Caltowie Institute was on display in a glass case at the entrance to the Council building. I was delighted to know that this historical item continued to be preserved for posterity. The reason for the choice of Mary as the layer of the foundation stone was probably that Ernst was the foundation Chairman of the Caltowie Council and thus the leading citizen of the town at the time.
We’re excited to let you know that our first four personal stories about Institutes are available to read right now! Gulnare was where the young son of the local teacher could walk across the small town to the local Institute. The yearly
In the Xmas holidays of 1950-51, when I was eight years old, we travelled the 150 miles to Adelaide from Gulnare in the Mid-North to take up residence in our brand-new house at Warradale Park. Living at Warradale Park at the time was in many ways just like still being in the country. Our house was one of three Trust homes in a row and opposite an older red brick house, but there were very few other houses in the rectangle bounded by Morphett Road, Sturt Road, Brighton Road, and the train line until you got near to Brighton Road itself. There were Trust homes going up around us, but they were scattered about and only gradually filled the streets.
In 1952 the Warradale Picture Theatre opened in the Warradale Institute, a fifteen-minute walk from home. The Bughouse was furnished with wooden chairs for the neighbourhood kids attending the Saturday matinees, and for which I paid my eleven pence to the proprietor, projectionist, and purveyor of interval-time lollies. I asked why the tickets weren’t a shilling, and I was told that if they were a shilling they would then have to be taxed.
I sat jammed in one of the middle seats, far from the rowdy older boys up the back, who provided their own soundtrack to the action up on the screen. When things got too loud the proprietor would stop the film and make an appeal from the front of the hall; this had at best a temporary effect. Love scenes interrupting the action in Roy Rogers or Tarzan were invariably met with a hail of lolly papers at the screen. Dean Martin’s singing during a Martin and Lewis film was inaudible. At the interval, the proprietor would open the door to the room behind the screen where a table was set up with lollies. Here I bought musk lolly sticks, hard and chewy White Knights, Fantales with the potted biographies of film stars on the lolly paper – too good to throw at the screen – liquorice straps to be dissected thin strip by thin strip, anything guaranteed to attack the enamel of the teeth. The children crowded round the table, and it was necessary to jump and shout to get the attention of the proprietor.
Over time I saw the early Marx Brothers films at the Bughouse, and I grew to delight in the anarchy of Harpo, his horn blowing and his overcoat with its bottomless pockets; but his harp solos always produced the inevitable hail of lolly papers. The Bughouse showed a main feature, never very current, sometimes twenty years old, and a B-movie which was shown before the interval, formulaic, only about an hour long, and often more entertaining to my undeveloped taste than the main flick. Many of these were war films, made with the planes, ships, jeeps and other paraphernalia left over from the war, which was still very recent, and interspersed, not very convincingly, but thrillingly, with live footage from the war. I particularly liked the aerial shots, great convoys of aeroplanes, and nothing was more exciting than the shots of planes spiralling down with smoke pouring from their engines, hitting the ground with an explosion or the sea with a great splash, though nothing like the CGI effects of today, and none the worse for that; and the thrill was not lessened by the appearance of the same shots over and over again in many different films. A perennial topic for discussion for us children, born during the war, was ‘who did we hate most, the Germans or the Japs?’, and various points of view would be earnestly put forward, influenced no doubt by whatever had been the latest low-budget war movie.
There was always a serial: The Scarlet Horseman, although his cloak could have been any colour as most films were in black-and-white; Roy Rogers – guitar playing and singing (lolly papers – Dale, love interest, lolly papers – and the very odd fact that he not only rode a horse like any other cowboy such as Hopalong Cassidy, but he also drove a pick-up, further confusing my meagre grasp of history; Rocketman with his rocket pack strapped to his back, who conveniently always took off at an angle from behind a car or any other object able to hide the mechanism that propelled him the few yards off-screen on his wire, and who was next seen flying horizontally past the back-projection of clouds, only to land later with a half stumble as if he had jumped into the frame, as indeed he had; The Cisco Kid, and so on.
The serial finished each week with the hero falling from a train to his likely death, or otherwise being seriously imperilled, but next week he would be seen not to have fallen after all, but to be clinging to the side of the train/wagon/plane in direct contradiction to what we had seen with our own eyes only the week before, and which we remembered. And yet I loved them, and I loved the cartoons, Woody Woodpecker, Tom and Jerry, Bugs Bunny, Mighty Mouse. Two or three times a year they showed Twenty Cartoons, an irresistible delight eagerly looked forward to. I soon became aware that they all had, more or less, the same plot, and those twenty cartoons were like twenty servings of cake, and not as satisfying as the normal three-course Saturday show, but by the time the next Twenty Cartoon promise came along I was just as keen for another helping of the indigestible fare.
An Eye-Opener!
Clare Murphy (Mt Gambier)
I was eleven when we moved to Mount Gambier in the late 1950s, and a keen reader. I can’t remember how and when I became aware of the library in the Institute building near the corner of Commercial Street East and Bay Road but once I did, I became a regular borrower from their children’s section. We lived in Mount Gambier East, so I had to ride my bike to the library, carrying my books in the basket attached to the handlebars of my bike.
The librarian at the time was an elderly, grey-haired, unmarried woman who I don’t recall ever smiling. She sat or stood behind a high, long, wide, wooden counter from which she dispensed loans on books to library members. The library was always very quiet and, as I recall it, not particularly well patronised during the years I used it. The children’s section was in a long, shallow alcove near to the librarian’s counter, and I usually had the area to myself, perusing the titles on the shelves for as long as I liked. Over a couple of years, I worked my way through the children’s collection, particularly enjoying the Mary Grant Bruce Billabong series.
One day I discovered Rumer Godden’s book The Greengage Summer on the children’s bookshelves and happily took it home to read. Well! I still recall my astonishment at its contents. I am sure the librarian had not read it before she put it on the shelves! Dramatic and romantic, I felt it was very risqué – especially for a naive twelve or thirteen-year-old child such as myself. It was certainly an eye-opening read for me! I must have outgrown the children’s collection soon after that, as that was the last book I can recall borrowing from the Institute library.
The Teacher’s Son
Tony Andrews (Gulnare)
First Day of School, 1948
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.
This Victory Flag, which was created to raise money for the Fighting Forces Comfort Fund, hangs in the Gulnare Institute. Parents embroidered their children’s names on it.
