It was an ample lady with shiny cuffs and collar who provided the opening gambit: she brought a baby sister for me! She was a crying sister, with a shock of dark curls, who was likely to pose a problem in the otherwise happy home of my parents and me. Our visitor was Nurse Rosser, who stayed with us all day, cooked our meals, washed the baby, then rode her bicycle home without falling off! That was the commencement of our friendship, for over the coming years she was a periodic visitor, whom I unconsciously regarded as a prime example of domesticity and fecundity. Each time she brought another baby sister, cooked hot scones douched in melted butter and dark treacle, then rode her bicycle home.
Such important facts started a long train of memories, all revolving around the place where I lived for almost twenty-one years. Without fear or favor, I intend to recount a sample of these memories, not because they are compounded of precious wisdom, but because they are unique to me alone, a capsule of my years of childhood and youth.
Sometime in the early months of 1903, I was christened in the Anglican Church in Maritana Street, Coolgardie. My given name was Frances Louisa, honoring my paternal grandmother and my mother, in that order. Looking back from the viewpoint of an imaginative school girl, I arrived at the notion that each girl in our family had been given a typically national name of one or the other of the British Isles. Frances stood for England, followed by Marjorie for Wales, Katherine for Ireland and Jean for Bonnie Scotland. That idea was confirmed beautifully, when, years later, a fifth baby girl came to bless our home. It was at this point I detected the influence of my very English father, who again contributed his weight to the naming ritual, and “Mona” was added to our family album, a name well preserved in the ancient folklore of the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea, the historic Isle where my paternal grandmother and her remaining family then lived.
Time has gathered to itself inconsequential memories, even the petty jealousies I experienced because Marjorie had such beautifully dark curls! My hair was strangely straight! Mother had the answer to that oversight – she twined and twirled my hair in rag curls for my first remembered social occasion, the wedding of Aunt Ida, who was very short, to Uncle John Bremner, who was very tall. She told me how she could stand upright in his armpit when he held his arm out sideways!
Trifling or not, one’s memories need prodding occasionally, such as when I recovered an old time family photograph of a genuine Australian bush picnic, of which I know no satisfying comparison.
Squatting on a rug on the red earth, against a backdrop of spindly gimlet trunks and low desert bush land, the family party assembled, with baskets of picnic food and drink spread enticingly before them. That it was summertime as evident by the display of the lady’s stylish millinery and men’s chapeaux. Striking a matriarchal pose mid-center of the photograph is mother, wearing a gorgeous wide-brimmed hat weighted with a white, stiffened-muslin daisies. Never so unpretentious a mother ever wore so ostentatious a hat! To this day I remember it, lying on the top shelf of her bedroom wardrobe. With the aid of a stool I could reach it, perch it coquettishly on my head, then draped my shoulders with her ticklish feather boa. Gazing now at that simple rustic scene, memories return of those I have loved long since and lost a while. Thank God for the inestimable gift of memory! Thank God for the foresight of the man with the black cloth over his head, who urged everyone to watch for the canary! I’m sure it was Uncle Wilfred, for his face is the only missing one on that treasured memento of days beyond recall. Without doubt my unstructured education was gained from the vantage point of our front picket fence and its swinging gate, with a rail on which to stand. I counted every paling on that fence, the dry wood soaking up memories at greedily as it did the buff-colored paint forever flaking in the blistering sun.
From such a place I watched the tradesman come and go, each one a microcosm of my limited world. I seldom saw our news boy, but I knew he was on time, because father read the “Kalgoorlie Miner” each morning while he ate his breakfast. It was then I heard the strange talk of things which went up and down – like the Noble Duke of York
“Who had ten thousand men
He marched them up to the top of the hill,
Then marched them down again.
And when they were up they were up,
And when they were down they were down,
And when they were only halfway up
They were neither up nor down!”
It was much later before I could cope with the problem of father’s stocks and shares, and to understand how they went up and down!
Few tradesmen were as welcome as our baker-man, who brought loaves of crusty, new-baked bread each day. Good Friday morning was something special, for then he carried in his large wicker baskets Hot Crossed buns, with a doughy cross on top, and shot through with currants. We ate them for breakfast with steamed dry ling or English cod. Sometimes we had kippered hearing, which reminded father of the Isle of Man, the land of his mother and her family not far from the hearing kilns of Port St. Mary. How well remembered are those smokey, salty hearing! I smothered them with melted butter and swallowed fast! Father said it was an old English custom to eat fish and Hot Crossed buns on Good Friday morning, and he should know, for he was born in England!
My biological clock ran full bore as in memory I recovered that procession of tradesman arriving in their turn at our Kalgoorlie home. Few made more vivid impact than our butcher, driving a tall wagon drawn by a horse with a hairy fetlock. The two rear doors of the wagon opened wide on their hinges to reveal a small chopping block standing mid center on the floor. Around the walls suspended on strong hooks, were animal carcasses in sundry stages of dismemberment. One side of the wagon was festooned with men’s fleshy inventions, sausages, black pudding, balony, keeping company with pig’s trotters, tripe, furred rabbits and sheep’s tongues. The bloody vision was relieved by the butcher’s perpetual cheeriness, as if making amends for his gory offerings! His first manipulation with the meat chopper and long knife received a rapt attention. He slashed into sides of mutton; deftly dislodged sheep’s kidneys from their suet sachets, skinned a rabbit or rolled a sirloin of beef for Sunday’s roast dinner. From today’s hygienic age I questioned how our cheerful butcher managed to keep his wagon cool enough to withstand the sizzling heat of a Kalgoorlie summer.
In a different class was our Ointment Man, – at no time did we know his given name. He hawked home-brew imbrications, lotions, salve and high-powered laundry soap, and by the measure of his enthusiasm, was doing a thriving trade. He gained our family confidence when he prescribed ointment for curing ringworms, which Marjorie and I contracted from a bleary‑eyed kitten I had invited indoors, and fed from our Coolgardie safe. First, the Ointment man ordered a close head shave for the two cat-lovers, which caused a near-riot, with father the barber, and mother the designer of the two hail-spot-muslin mob caps, trimmed with valenciennes lace and ribbon. That healed the hurt of our vanity, and gave me opportunity to pray for a special miracle. Marjorie’s hair grew fast and curlier than ever. My hair grew fast too but was as straight as before!
It is possible our Ointment man was an originator of our Sunday morning medicine parade, carried out with praiseworthy regularity for years. After our breakfast of digestive meat, oatmeal or bread-and-milk, each reluctant member of our household was treated with a dose of one of several purgatives; senna tea, licorice powder, Epson salts, castor oil or a mixture of sulfa and treacle, which father called brimstone. Sometimes we swallowed a small chocolate-covered tablet, but the drenching which followed was always the same. “It will purify the blood” was the raison d’etre for a program which in later years I substituted for one of King Solomon’s wise maxims, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.”
So they came in their turn, the tinker, the night man, the dust man, the grocer. Mr. Ottrey the woodman, brought mother a dray of wood, chopped long for the fireplace in the front room, which mother lit on cold Sunday afternoons; short for the back kitchen stove where she cooked our meals and heated Mrs. Potts’ irons.
Strange it is that so ordinary a procession of tradesman should have a special niche in memory, providing a kaleidoscope of movement and color to fill my day – until I went to school. I enrolled in the North Kalgoorlie State Primary School in 1908, and for seven years from infants to the Qualifying Class, was instructed in the best traditions of the British system submitting to the influences of a succession of teachers, whose worth was not then fully recognized, but is now freely admitted. The time was not measured by the calendar, but by happenings great or small, according to the measure of interest they stimulated at home, at school, or my own growing sense of values.
Morning by morning we lined up in front of the school dias in the Assembly Hall, and listened to a brief homily by our headmaster, Mr. Potts, which climaxed in a combined recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. That seemed to set a seal of on all of Mr. Potts said or did, even the long, thin cane, which he frequently wielded, with praise-worthy impartiality on boys and girls alike, with a distinction of “Hands Out!” for girls, and “Bend Over!” for boys. I know – for talking in class!
Mr. Potts was an Englishman, born on the Isle of Man. He wore a tawny mustache, which worked overtime, and when he smiled, as sometimes he did, that mustache seems to cut his face in half.
It was long, thin, twirled and waxed to a sharp point at the ends. I remember it in particular the day I heard him in tone, in the best traditions of Royalty: “The King is dead! Long live the King!” King Edward the Seventh, the Peacemaker, had died, and King George the Fifth was king in his place. Soon every school-child throughout Australia received a shining Coronation Medal with the Royal face stamped thereon, and the date of his succession to throne. It was 1910.
What a startling year that was! One night Marjorie and I were awakened from sleep, and taken outside to gaze at a wide arc of unearthly light, spanning our pre-dawn heavens. It was Halley’s comet, from which we hid our faces in fear. We were assured it would soon disappear, but would return again someday – in over 70 years, father told us. That was too long a time for us to wait perhaps! Who knows?
School years ticked off by something worthy of recalling, like the time Englishmen Robert Falcon Scott tried to race Norwegian explorer, Amundsen, to the South Pole, a place marked on the world maps hanging on most school room walls… tragic it was that Scott missed by just one month – and perished with his friends on those frozen wastes.
Fast on that came the sinking of the British luxury White Star Liner, “Titanic.” I believe I can still hear father say, “She sank into the frozen depths in one long shuddering moan! Speared to the heart with an iceberg!” he said!
Ice! Frozen water, why, most of us in North Kalgoorlie school had not seen a slab of ice larger than that which the iceman dropped into the ice chest – if the household had one. We did not. We were well content with our Coolgardie safe, which stood at a drafty end of our back veranda. That safe was a wooden frame covered with hessian (burlap) set in position on a low wooden platform, its four short legs standing in a deep galvanized iron tray. Another such tray rested on top of the frame and was filled with water. Flannel drip cloths slowly siphoned the water down over the hessian, and into the lower tray. When overflowing, the water was released into an iron bucket by way of a small tap, and returned once more to the tray on top, in an apparent perpetual cycle. Strangely efficient, those Coolgardie safes served the needs of thousands of prospectors, explorers and miners in the hectic gold-rush days of the nineties and onwards, the only way of storing food. I cannot recall the time our family dispensed with that useful safe, but I know we moved into the indulgent days of the ice chest, and ultimately, the refrigerator. Before that time came, I had left my Kalgoorlie home forever.
Before the days of remembering, a pigeon house had been built adjoining our outdoor wash house. It was constructed mostly of strong wire mesh with a slight loft, and was a place of constant interest to us. There several clutches of fantail and pouter pigeons laid their eggs on elevated racks, and produced offspring. They were beautiful birds, with iridescent feathers, fanning out as they preened themselves in a proud display of vanity. Sadly, also part of my memories are the times mother served pigeon pie for dinner! Perish the thought!
Again, there were a few occasions father joined like-minded friends in a lorry or dray ride into the Outback, where were wild duck, wallabies, bush turkeys and rabbits for the shooting-although I at no time recall seeing a gun. Despite that, I distinctly remember the time mother cooked wallaby-tail soup for dinner! “Eat it up – it’s good for you,” I was enjoined. If it were, I was never convinced of it. Long years later I was told father and grandfather Eastwood had trudged the Yorkshire mores in search of English grouse and pheasants, and that they were skillful in that sport. There is evidence of grandfather’s prowess in rifle-shooting: A handsome gold medal now in our hands attests to that fact. Moreover, mother’s front-room sideboard, amongst a packed array of wedding presents and other memorabilia, stood a wooden fruit bowl on which was a silver shield engraved with the words: “Presented to James Wilkinson Eastwood by the Yorkshire West Riding…. ” though the rest of the legend is now forgotten, it is reasonable to surmise the award was made to my father for skill in some field of sport.
Never to be forgotten were the annual Christmas Holidays, when our parents took us to the seaside. Indeed, for several weeks during the peak of the summer weather, goldfielders in the thousands made for the cooling sands and sea breezes of the Indian Ocean beaches, or the Southern Ocean sand dunes of Albany and Esperance. Without doubt, those holidays were the highlights of the yearly cycle. Children of poor parents were given seaside vacations in the Bunbury hostels of the Fresh Air League, financed by the various Goldfields municipalities.
Some of mother’s relations had settled in one or another of many holiday towns – Fremantle, Cottesloe, Bunbury, and we stayed with each one in turn, or in a lodging house of our special choice. Every holiday became to us an experiment in living; an opportunity to sample untested ideas, to make new friends. From the first hour of stuffing mother’s tin trunk, packing our dress baskets and boarding the “Kalgoorlie Express,” until the time the “Puffing Billy” pulled to a slow halt in Perth Railway Station the journey of seventeen hours was high adventure. The train stopped at each one of the eight water-pumping stations on route; at the main rural towns. I counted it a lost opportunity should I be asleep at any of those many train stops – I knew the name of every one in perfect rotation.
Those yearly vacations became less frequent with the slowly-declining gold recovery figures, and father’s work program dwindled, but as children we were unaware of any financial crisis.
It was a free and easy life, even if an accepted fact that we would contract the normal run of childish complaints. Marjorie had diphtheria, and was confined to the Infectious Diseases Ward of the Kalgoorlie Hospital. Jean had germs in her nasal passage, and I was the carrier. Our home was in quarantine and I recall feeling a heavy sense of guilt over the whole affair, responsible for the evil smelling disinfectant and sulfur fumes rising from the live charcoal burning on a tin tray standing on bricks in our hallway. Those fumes penetrated every part of the house, a fumigation process ordered by a Dr. McMillen, the City Medical Officer. Apart from the normal run of chicken-pox, measles, mumps and whooping cough, which each member of our family of girls contracted sooner or later, we were a healthy brood, with no obvious need for such adjuncts to living as vitamins or balanced diet. Of course, minor accidents came our way such as slipping from the bough of our front pepper trees while swinging from our calves. It was a more serious matter when a near neighbor, Maisie Jeffery, was struck in the eye by a well directed stone while playing in the street a game of cowboys and Indians. Her eye was badly hurt, the doctor ordered slimy black leaches to be applied to the swollen tissues and bloody eye socket. The treatment was successful. I watched Mrs. Jeffery remove with tweezers some of those blood-bloated creatures, shaking with nausea the meanwhile.
However, not all street games were suspect. There was the welcome thunderstorm, mingling a deluge of rain to our dusty streets, which were soon awash with churning waters, rushing on their reckless way to the lower reaches of our City. That was our day of opportunity. With dresses tucked inside our elastic-topped bloomers, or trousers rolled up beyond the knee, we paddled those muddy waters, seeking the first glint of gold – a mere flick, or a miniscule nugget to be dropped into the matchboxes or small jars held tightly in our hands. After many such escapades, we would change our hoard of golden grains for the coin of the realm. At the rising price of perhaps four pounds sixteen shillings per troy ounce, we calculated we were on our way to fortune!
Well remembered is the holiday we spent in Cottesloe with Auntie Ida, mother’s sister, when we were taken to visit grandmother’s sister great-Aunt Alexina and her family, who at some unrecorded time had come to Western Australia. Uncle Donnelly was proprietor of a basketry store in the heart of the business area of Perth, and to my sisters and me, his shop was a wonderland of delight, with baskets of all kinds and sizes dangling from the rafters. Lining the walls were wicker perambulators, cradles and bassinettes, sometimes holding French China dolls with eyes which opened and shut.
I soon decided it was a pre‑arranged family meeting, for we were banished to a rear room, while oldsters gathered together in a serious discussion about a proposed journey Uncle Donnelly was to make to Scotland in search of a likely inheritance for grandmother and her sister, Alexina. He finally made that visit, and was successful in locating members of the Campbell Clan to which we were connected. The claim of the two sisters was acknowledged. And in due time came two large envelopes with official papers for signature etc. Alas and alack, the inheritance was far short of expectations. Uncle Donnelly was a disappointed man, talking of Chancery, where undistributed estates were stashed away, etc.! There his hopes eventually rested. However, I remembered the day our maternal grandmother, Archina Everett, received her bank draft, and we threw her a celebration party in our Kalgoorlie home, with Jubilee cake and such fare. Grandfather Everett had died in 1908, and she spent most of her remaining days moving amongst her children, sharing in their lives.
At the time of writing these memories, we were fortunate to have a paternal grandmother, living in the far-off Isle of Man in the Irish Sea, widowed in 1896. She kept in touch with her colonial grandchildren, whom she had not seen, sending us parcels every Christmas, for which we waited with keen anticipation, knowing that they would hold the most surprising gifts. Each one of our family of girls in turn received a real silver thimble, and a sewing basket. Then would come colored enamel broaches, lockets, rings and beads. The sum total of those Christmas parcels was a treasure trove of sheer delight – of musical boxes with dancing ballerinas; of chains, and fandangles, well kept, calculated to bring a whoop of joy from everyone present. Mother was not forgotten, of course. For her came hand crocheted supper cloths, lace insertion for her camisoles, her petticoats, and pillowcases, while father – poor father! All I remember he received were Havana cigars, or another pipe for his pipe rack!
As well, our English grandmother’s two sisters great-aunts Sarah Crowther and Jane Duff, who lived in the cotton capitol of Manchester, England, regularly sent large boxes of cotton remnants, which mother stashed away in her tins-covered box ottoman, ready to be sewn into Sunday-go-meeting dresses, petticoats, aprons, floppy hats for all of us. Mother’s turn-the-handle sewing machine was never idle during all the years of my childhood and youth. Eventually she purchased a Red Seal Singer treadle machine, but I learned to sew on that turn-the-handle Singer – first of all I sewed a white cotton blouse, peppered with tiny red spots!
It was an unexpected event in Campbell Street one day to see several miners digging into a large pile of rubble and rusty sheet-iron covering a filled-in mineshaft, one street block away from our front gate. When that shaft had been sunk no one seemed to know; it was probably during the gold-crazy rush to Kalgoorlie and Boulder in the nineties of the last century, and was finally abandoned. As children, we had been warned not to play too vigorously on top of that pile of rubble less the iron sheets cave in beneath our feet. The thought was shuddering! I watched the men at work, questioned mother. Has someone fallen down the mine? What’s Dr. Laver doing?
With theodilite and tapes he was striding out along our street a short distance. Was he looking for gold near our home? The question was answered within a week or more the miner shoveled back the disturbed earth, the rubble, the rusty sheets of iron. Our neighborhood returned to its quiet routine, holding fast its disappointed hopes.
The story of Dr. Laver was part of the history of Kalgoorlie and its distant areas. Gaining a medical degree in Adelaide University, he turned his steps and thoughts to the newly discovered inland Goldfields of the capital west, practicing medicine to make a living, while watching the craft of old time fossickers. With a proverbial luck of a beginner, and doubtless with a sketchy knowledge of gold-bearing land, he struck it rich in a far northern area. He remained there long enough to see its development into a booming town, appropriately named Laverton. Other prospectors followed where he had led and the towns of Waluna and Lancefield, though of short duration, rose from the once-bare, virgin land. His fame and fortune was made: However, by kindly interest in the world about him, he had preserved his professional competence. As time and opportunity offered he practiced his medical craft, a wealthy Goldfield identity. What profit he made was reinvested in down-and-out old prospectors and miners. It’s possible that when I met him face to face in Campbell Street, Kalgoorlie, he was “giving grub-steaks” to another group of luckless, broken men, while he followed the gleam wherever it led him still ensnared by what the poet John Milton called the “Precious Bane.”
My sisters and I had moved along with the years, keeping abreast of our education, within the limitations of a community in which we lived. In many areas of learning there seems to have been a particular emphasis on various class subjects, but the sorry lack of what I now regard as of high importance. That fact has been confirmed by another Kalgoorlie writer, whose book, “The Glittering Years,” came off the press in 1981. The author, Arthur Bennett, attended Kalgoorlie Central School several years earlier than I, but doubtless followed the same pattern of teaching. He writes:
“In our English-teaching lessons, we learned about the Battle of Hastings, 1066, the Crusaders, and the like, but did not get as far as the Australian Colonial days or the great gold discoveries in Victoria and Western Australia. Nor did our lessons attend to the Golden Miles discovery, notwithstanding we lived in the community of about twenty-five thousand, whose livelihood depended on its prosperity. The richest mines in Australia were then operating, but we were never taken to see one, surface plant or underground.”
How accurate that was!
With a sixth class Primary just ahead of me, then the new High School midway between Kalgoorlie and Boulder, I sensed a new awareness of the world about me, and a need for variety, which came with the arrival of father’s younger brother, Uncle Douglas, direct from his birthplace in the Isle of Man. We soon learnt he had spent his early maturity in the British Mercantile Navy, traveling to places mere names on my atlas. Tall and handsome with a shock of tawny-blonde hair, his inherited English complexion was weather beaten by the attrition of the salt seas. After a period of surprise and adjustment to the hot, arid inland climate, the low-slung timber homes with galvanized-iron roofs, and the earthy novelty of life, he settled down to face his new world.
Regretfully, he had come to the Goldfields at a time of diminishing returns. Change for better or worse comes faster in such a community, but Kalgoorlie, the throbbing heart of our district, was still active to a degree, drawing to itself a noisy goodwill, and aura of the prosperity it had once enjoyed. The change from the exciting gold-rush days, which my parents had experienced, was unknown to me, but I still recall the effort put forth by our City Fathers, and all people of goodwill, to provide gala functions, import famous entertainers whose voices and music we heard on “His Master’s Voice” phonograph, a long trumpet model in the home of my grandparents. In their turn came Galla Curci, Dame Clara Butt and her husband Kennedy Rumford, and our Melbourne prima donna, Madame Nelly Melba. Thrilling were the demonstrations of Houdini, Dante, magicians both; Worth’s Circus, and once in a while, a dancing troupe. The hard-working Goldfields notwithstanding, we were part of the high life of a progressive world.
Several Goldfields bands contributed to the social highlights of my early years, the Caledonian Bagpipes Band, and the prize winning Brass Bands of the two talented McMahon brothers, Harry and Hughie McMahon. We had a surfeit of Harry McMahon’s virtuosity for he and his sons practiced nightly near their open window not far from our home.
No vehicular traffic was permitted in the main streets on such gala occasions. Town lights shone brightly with shops open to entice the unwary. The most patronized places of visitation were the “pubs,” where men met to discuss business, display a rich specimen of ore, or slake the inordinate thirst. In front were hitching posts and horse troughs. As I recall, the love affair with the motor car had not spread to the Goldfields. However, soon would come the crush of cars to fill Kalgoorlie’s wide streets, wide enough to outspan a team of twenty bullocks!
I do not know how Uncle Douglas settled into the Kalgoorlie scene, but this I remembered, his presence heralded a time of delight to the members of the household. We watched his nimble fingers plait four or eight strands of cord or twine as easily as I could braid my two three-strand pigtails. Within a few weeks of his arrival, apart from any other interests he may have found, uncle had made two hammocks, and set them swinging on the lower branches of our front pepper trees. On stifling summer nights we took it in turn to sleep in those hammocks, turning and twisting to get comfortable, well-fortified by liberal applications of citronella in an effort to ward off the attacks of mosquitoes seeking their nightly prey.
Entranced, we watched Uncle plying his long, curved needle, converting a length of white canvas into blinds for our rear sleep-out, to which Marjorie and I had been banished, in an effort to accommodate our expanded family circle. With his cheery presence, and salty sea songs he was a unique, one-of-a-kind addition to our home.
Despite the collapse of mining companies, the paucity of new mining ventures, the slow drift of population to more promising places; the dismantling of many homes, to be reassembled in the burgeoning wheat belt, Kalgoorlie was putting a brave face to the world. I was scarcely aware of the problems at home, and of my family’s dwindling cash flow. Mother, though conscious of our situation appeared to rise above it, or if she were troubled, seldom mentioned it to anyone. Many of her sisters and their families had already left the area and that was cause for disappointment to her, but father was struggling along with a limited income, and few prospects of work in a deflated community.
Came Christmas of 1913, and mother did her best to entertain our English guest, serving the traditional Roast Beef and Yorkshire pudding, followed by rich plum pudding and brandy sauce. Despite the blistering mid-summer heat father and his brother were in spirit back in the land of their birth, paying homage to the Yuletide season of snow and mistletoe.
With the dawning of the year 1914 I was ready for the sixth and final Primary school year. New options were ahead of me, new studies to pursue. Under advice, I commenced classes in office procedure, arithmetic, shorthand, and normal English syntax and composition. As a diversion I joined the optional scripture class under the tutelage of Canon Collick of the Anglican Diocese, and for a half hour each Friday morning was indoctrinated in Church catechism and superficial Church history.
In due time I and others were confirmed according to the rights of the Church in the fine building where earlier I had been christened.
Uncle Douglas remained with us, probably occupied in work of which I now know nothing. As for gold production, its downward slide continued, with people leaving their Goldfields home for more rewarding areas of work. Though Australia was far removed from the world centers of population, we were nevertheless influenced by international trends, and they were mildly ominous. Shrewder than most, Uncle Douglas interpreted the omens, and made plans to return to his homeland, and if needed rejoin his command in the British Mercantile Navy. We watched him go realizing a sense of loss, but retaining a memory of his busy hands and salty good humor.
Then it came! In August of 1914 World War I exploded with shattering suddenness. Australia and every country in the British Empire joined with the Motherland in declaring war on the common enemy, seeming to change from day to day with the breaking of treaties and the crossing of national borders.
The Goldfields of the West felt the impact immediately, with prospectors and miners in particular volunteering for active service, casting aside their dungarees and overalls in exchange for the hastily manufactured khaki uniforms and turned-up slouch hats of the Australian Infantry Forces, or the navy-blue uniform of the small Royal Australian Navy. So grim was the effect on the already harassed mining industry that many waning mines ceased operation immediately, reckoning wars were won with weapons and munitions, not the hard-won gold of the Golden Mile and its extending areas in the gold-bearing land.
The call to enlist in one or another of the fast-arming forces was heady, personal, reaching even the minds of school children as I well remember. Production of peace time goods was switched almost overnight to the requirements of a young country at war, with food, minerals such as lead, copper, zinc, tungsten and other base metals deemed more important than gold.
Our school program was beamed to local concerns – that meant the interests of our volunteer army. I closed the school year with a qualifying certificate and two prizes under my arm – “The Children of the New Forest,” and “The Last of the Mohicans,” one awarded for General Proficiency, of the other, I think, for Art.
Then like a bolt from the blue, father volunteered for active service! Almost before we were aware of the implications of this decision he placed his many business connections in the hands of a colleague, and was ready to commence training in the military camp in Blackboy Hill in the Darling Ranges. I was pushing fourteen years of age, the eldest of four girls, too inexperienced and young to understand mother’s feeling, or to offer her any material help. However, I recall how unsettled out household was for some time, though father had assured us he would return sooner than we expected; that his military allotment would cover our financial needs during the period of the war, long or short; that he may be able to see his mother and sisters again after a long separation. Well remembered is the time mother packed our dress baskets and we traveled to the railway junction at Midland, not far from Blackboy Hill, where we stayed in a lodging house. The area was bristling with tents and men in new khaki. Father was granted leave of absence from duty for several days, then, all too soon, we boarded the train for home, more contented; more able to understand and accept that he was marching to the aid of his country in its need. We did not know when his troop ship sailed from home shores, nor what warzone he would ultimately reach, for a strict censorship was enjoined on all movement of ships transporting men, food and munitions over the oceans of the globe. A World War demands the ultimate effort of all.
My memories of those war years seem trifling, unworthy of serious times, but they were typical of the mind of a schoolgirl, and of the “Home Front,” which helped to defeat the common foe. As far as our family was concerned, we faced the future with the unspoken philosophy, “God’s in His Heaven; All’s well with the World!”
