Val has shared how her Scottish family of six – the Alexanders – found their way from Edinburgh to Castlemaine.
Val, who now lives in Maryborough, said her family made the trip from Liverpool in England to Australia in April 1949, on the renovated warship The Georgic.
“I was ten, my siblings 11, nine and four,” she said.
“As the days of our four-week journey drew to a close, excitement was mounting that we were actually arriving in Australia at last. We had visions of wild animals and jungles, gained from our frequent viewing of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies. These ideas were quickly replaced by the reality of docking in Port Melbourne.
“It seemed half of Scotland was there to meet us. Friends and relations, all Scottish, jabbered, laughed and hugged us. We boarded a suburban train for Preston, where a great celebration was being prepared for the new generation of Scots immigrants. We then proceeded to eat, drink, sing and make merry, until the wee small hours of the following morning,” Val recalls.
“On the last leg of our journey, our landlady, we six Alexanders and the driver, who was enveloped in a haze of Scotch whisky, all squeezed into a Morris Minor, to travel to nearby Coburg!
“We piled out of the car and in to the landlady’s house and ran through all the rooms looking, touching and calling out to each other, ‘Hurray, a piano!’ ‘Look at all the cats!’, ‘It has more than one room!’ It had six rooms, also grass growing in the front yard and a back yard. From a two-roomed tenement building, two storeys up, in Edinburgh, this seemed heaven on earth. Our landlady was flattered at our admiration of her humble abode, for by Australian standards it was quite modest. Finally, beds were allotted, piano farewelled, each cat petted, and six new citizens of Australia settled down to sleep in their new home at 721 Sydney Road, Coburg.”
Val said they were two doors away from the Fire Station, which was on the corner of Gaffney Street, with a hairdressing salon in between.
“We were immediately befriended by the children from the Fire Station and the children from the hair salon.
“We loved Coburg and Mum, and Dad got jobs immediately, Mum at a clothing factory and Dad at ‘Ultrays’, which made hospital X-ray equipment. We lived just a few doors from St Paul’s Catholic School and were the only non-Australian children there and were made very welcome,” she said.
“One of my first friends was Maureen Ryan, age nine. We were in Grade Five (we stayed friends all our lives). Maureen said later, that at an assembly before we arrived the head nun had announced, ‘These children are arriving from war torn Europe and have never seen a banana.’ On our first day we were inundated with bananas. Very soon afterwards, the Greek and Italian children began to arrive; despite being unable to speak English, they were welcomed and integrated.
“We children had the run of Melbourne unsupervised. One day, having 10 shillings, an 11th birthday present, I caught a tram by myself from Gaffney Street Coburg, to the city centre at Flinders Street Station and visited the slot machine alley close by. To dress up for the day, I heavily rouged my cheeks with Mum’s lipstick. I got there and back without incident, and my family never knew about my birthday treat to myself.
“Poor little Ivor, aged four, who had not attended school in Scotland, was thrown in at the deep end. He wore a kilt to school, and the kids queried, ‘Are you a boy? Are you a girl?’
“He sometimes ran off home as the ‘Bubs’ teacher was a crabby old thing.
“When Catholics get together, we always have negative stories of the nuns and rarely talk about the kind, gifted ones, but Sister Mary Berchmans, our Grade Seven and Eight teacher, was a saint. I managed to track her down and visited her in 2005.
“Most Catholic girls went through a stage of wanting to become a nun and my best friend Maureen and I did too. Maureen went into a convent aged 12, but only lasted a week and got her Dad to come and collect her. Her sister-in-law Julie aged 13, went in and stayed for a year. I escaped their fate by saying to my Dad that I wanted to become a nun, and he said, ‘We’ll have none of that.’ I thought, ‘They won’t let me,’ so I dropped the subject.
“It took me a long time to figure out that Dad was joking as in ‘none/nun of that,’ so he inadvertently saved me, for if I’d said it to one of my teacher nuns, they would have probably snapped me up.”
“We attended St Paul’s Church, which rubs shoulders with Pentridge Gaol. The old Irish priest was a tyrant. His claim to fame was his yelling out at the top of his voice from the altar to any late comers, ‘Come up the front you!’
Val recently heard the ‘famous’ Phil Cleary speak at the Highland Society in Maryborough where he spoke of his youth and the “crabby old Father Norris” and was delighted to discover that Val also remembered the old tyrant.
“Growing up in Coburg, we loved the Brunswick Baths, Luna Park, ice skating at ‘The Glacarium’ in the city and swimming in the Coburg lake.
“My Aunt lived in Bell Street Preston and attended The Sacred Heart Church there, where my future husband Brendan was an altar boy. As we sometimes went to Mass there, Brendan and I probably scraped hulls, but we were not to meet for another 30 years.”
‘We’re going to live in the country,’ Val’s mother announced in 1951.
