PENSHURST REVISITED

     by Murray Hedgcock*

Chapter 1. Late 1937

      When in late 1937 my postal clerk father, Bert Hedgcock, told us he had been promoted to postmaster, the family (Mother, young brother Ronald and I) were delighted. But when he explained this meant a move to somewhere called Penshurst, from the comfortable provincial city of Mildura, where we had lived little over a year, we were less certain. Where on earth was Penshurst? At this stage in my life, the Western District was not nearly as significant nor as wellknown as it was to become. (Eventually my father was to be Postmaster not only at Penshurst but later at Colac and Mount Gambier, retiring in 1961 as the senior PM in Australia, based at Ballarat: I was to work at Warrnambool and Geelong). As I was not quite seven when we moved in February, 1938, and my brother just two, we probably didn't worry much about the change: for years we just enjoyed the excitement of any move because of Dad's job. But I should have felt sorry for my mother as she had to leave the home she had established, and head for this little town none of us had ever seen, to start all over again. My first memory of Penshurst is of the arrival of mains electricity and the grand ceremony in the Mechanics' Institute when power was switched on by a grand old lady of the district, the street lights blazing into life.   The Mechanics' Institute was the centre for the community: the highlight of course was the weekly picture show when the man with the van would turn up to bring us not just the delights of Hollywood, but also the newsreels. It is impossible for anyone brought up in the TV age to imagine how significant newsreels were, as they brought us information of the outside world, as well as of the rest of our own country. About all I can recall of those news reports with their flickering black and white images is one dealing with the ill-treatment of Jews in Germany - something that sounded unpleasant, but nothing much to do with us, surely. It wasn't long before we discovered that it had a great deal to do with us, even in distant Penshurst. I do remember one feature film, a film I watched again on satellite television in London only the other night. It was 'Robin Hood', that swashbuckling adventure starring matchless Errol Flynn, sinister Basil Rathbone as Guy of Gisborne (what a sword-fight the pair turned on in the gripping finale), and a newcomer in Olivia de Haviland as Maid Marian. I imagined myself Robin of Sherwood for days after first seeing this epic. 

The hall also was the setting for a range of entertainment, including concerts and church fetes (we were active Methodists). One fete I remember included vocal competitions, most of the sections attracting only a couple of entries, but at least providing some sort of entertainment for the gathering. I sang 'Lords of the Air', one of those intensely patriotic wartime epics, obviously based on the Battle of Britain (and therefore in late 1940 or 1941), and duly won my section. It sounds incongruous now in an age when patriotism is hardly a basis of everyday life; just imagine trying to persuade an ordinary Aussie to sing the prayer - "Lord, Keep Britannia's Sons, Lords of the Air". But in its day it was stirring stuff, expressing a national and British Commonwealth patriotism, solid and soundly based in Penshurst just as in a thousand little Australian country towns. 

Chapter 2. Life Not All High-flown

 But life was not all high-flown, deep emotion; that also was the fete when the rowdier local lads late in the evening managed to switch off the hall lights, and start pelting ice around, pinched from the icecream stall. The whiz and splat of ice against the stone walls, to the irritation of the fete organisers, stays with me, half a century on. Personal memories flit out of the past about the institute; I remember my father, discovering that its library had been left virtually untouched for years, volunteered to clean it up and catalogue it. As a booklover, I sat with him night after night, reading all sorts of odds and ends, and being fascinated by a pictorial magazine I had never met before, the Illustrated London News. Heaven knows who had ever ordered it, but there were piles of this excellent record of the day's events - a magazine that sadly closed down in the late 1980s, another victim of TV. Reading was much more important to me than anything else: not all of it good quality, certainly, as I used to rush to Cheswass's every week to see if my comic from distant England had arrived. This was The Champion, featuring a cast of super-heroes headed by Rockfist Rogan RAF (surely himself one of the Lords of the Air?), the boxing pilot just as likely to knock out a sneering Hun with his iron fists as with his aircraft machineguns.

 And at school, I read my way quickly through the class readers - I was in Grade Three in 1938 - to the point that on reaching the big room where Grades Five to Eight were taught, I devoured the readers for the three classes above me, which was regarded as pretty bright, if a bit smart-alecky. The paternal Mr Macdonald was headteacher at first, and then the distinctly tougher Mr Jenkins, much younger, tall, dark: was he the Macdonalds' son-in-law? I have an idea there was a family link - a dozen years later, I was to meet them again when I worked briefly at Colac. Teachers' names are vague at this distance: was there a no-nonsense woman teacher of the lower grades called Miss Green? And then Miss Batey, who took a special interest in me and suggested I really should read something better than comics.

 (For years afterwards I wanted to find, out of sheer nostalgia, a copy or two of The Champion of those days, but it was not until  the mid-Nineties that I acquired half a dozen, to plunge into a brief and amiable orgy of those distant days, by now understanding very much better the England of their setting which, around 1940, had seemed such a strange and remote land. (There again were those absorbing small advertisements - not least for cycles and airguns, which I desperately coveted; and for "the Ventrilo", an instrument to be secreted in the mouth allowing the user to throw his voice, complete with drawings of a cheeky boy baffling stuffy adults by producing a voice from a locked box.

Chapter 3. Stamps On Approval

  (And there were numerous advertisements by kindhearted stamp dealers - so kindly that they promised to send you packets of stamps simply on receipt of appropriate postage. These were "On Approval" - a phrase which baffled me for years: what on earth did it mean? It sounded as if you were being given these delights to keep, at no cost - but surely business was not done that way? In a more hardheaded, less trusting age, the idea of sending stamps to prospective purchasers, to pay up or return, has long since disappeared).

  But I did read more than comics: there was always the newspapers, of course. First, there was The Free Press, produced in a cave of mystery and delight just down Bell Street by the proprietor, who seemed to me a man of enormous power. It intrigued me vastly, not least the sight of the linotype clattering away, with the flatbed press churning out its few hundred copies; it would be too glib to suggest I was inspired to go into newspapers by watching from the footpath, but it may have planted the idea deep in a small boy's mind, so that it did happen before the end of the decade. We got The Argus (The Age was a bit heavy, and The Sun a bit lightweight, my parents believed). News in The Free Press every week wasn't very exciting (boring livestock market reports were instantly forgettable), but I used to scan the paper just the same, gradually recognising more and more names as we settled in, and got to know our fellow citizens both in the town and out on the properties around. The football reports were worth a look, although the Penshurst team must have increasingly made do with the aged and the infirm, as the young and fit went to war. We also got the Hamilton Spectator, which had more pages and was more impressive, but not very interesting: who on earth were those people they wrote about? And when they ran any Penshurst news, it was tucked away as if it didn't matter - we looked on Hamilton as a bit stuck-up, really, just because it was bigger. Mind you, Hamilton had its points: it was a delight to drive there in our little royal blue Austin Cambridge Ten, after the Post Office closed, for Friday night late shopping, to see all the shops lit up, with their vast range of goods - vast anyway by contrast with Penshurst. Hamilton also has one sad memory, of visits to the park, to stare at the caged wedge-tailed eagle, a forlorn figure kept in an enclosure far too small for him, so that he sat morosely on his perch, with no room to do more than flap his wings.

Chapter 4. Visiting Warrnambool

An occasional visit to an even bigger town, Warrnambool, was something extra special: here again, one memory stays - of a parade of the Light Horse just before war was declared. The dark-brown uniforms with leather belts and bandoliers, the distinctive hats with their plumes waving, and horses pulling artillery, made a deep impact on a wide-eyed kid from Penshurst. They were an echo of the past asked to take part in a global conflict marked out by the blitzkrieg of modern weaponry - and as their fathers had done a quarter-century earlier, they were not found wanting. Years later I was to research the Light Horse for a book: at least I knew what they looked like.

 There would too be the odd visit to some small town nearby, Dunkeld perhaps, or Caramut, or Byaduk, where we had a friend who was the local Methodist minister - the Reverend Eric Griffin. He and his wife Grace were to be good friends to our family for decades afterwards: Eric Griffin, a Staffordshire man who never lost his accent, was to officiate at Ballarat at both my wedding in 1957, and a year later, at my father's remarriage (my mother died in 1956). The Methodist Church was very important in our lives. Dad was a local preacher and circuit steward, as well as being an excellent organist. But Penshurst Methodist Church had a lovely lady named Etty Downes as organist - hardworking and dedicated in the style of the utterly loyal church worker who over the years kept so many congregations of all denominations alive in so many similar towns. My father would play the organ now and again, but he was always officially the deputy organist, so that Etty would not feel threatened. As I was only a youngster, the adults of Penshurst did not mean a lot to me, but I remember the Fry family as active church workers - did we go to Peter Fry's wedding? Or was it one of those inevitable church socials, to wish him and his bride good fortune? The church social was a highlight of Penshurst life when there would be genteel games, and songs, and of course a supper which we kids always enjoyed especially. It was disappointing on my recent return to Penshurst, for the first time since 1941, to see the church no longer in use, but encouraging to see it converted and cared for by Shirley and Geoff Bunker. We lived there in those unhappy days when Protestant and Catholic felt animosity rather than brotherly love, and Penshurst was split accordingly. We State school children would sing rude and pointless songs about the kids going to the Catholic school, and they would respond: at times of particular heat there would be stone-throwing duels, or sporadic brawls - and if you were on your own and saw a group of 'Pats' coming your way, you ducked down side streets or fled for home in hope of averting terrible retribution. Did the Catholics of Penshurst live in other parts of town, go to different shops, even use different footpaths, in ordinary life? We seemed to have no normal contact with the Micks - perhaps an immediate and stark reminder of the denominational divide of those days.  School itself was mostly happy, although if you were not much of a sportsman, then physical activites always lurked threateningly in the background. (It is odd that I was later to become deeply interested in various sports, and to make my living largely as a sportswriter).

5. Penshurst State School

There were 96 children at Penshurst State School as I recall - how depressing to learn on my 1992 visit that today's enrolment, in that nice new building, with all the playground space, has dropped to a quarter of that number, and threatened even the posting of a second teacher. Names from those classrooms drift through my mind, brought to the front when Chris Kineally kindly showed me historical society archives in the Courthouse - people like Mervyn 'Bullocky' Walker, and Ken 'Fishy' Eales, and Arthur 'Ogle' Cottrill. For years afterwards a family joke was levelled at my father, who knowing there were several Cottrills, asked one day: "Is Ogle younger than Arthur?" We laughed at that forever afterwards (sorry I missed you on my return, Arthur).  Dawn Lee used to deliver our milk at home each morning - and Jackie Hatherall (no nickname? I can't recall one) was a star sportsman: I recall an incident when we played cricket on that wasteland alongside the school, and Jackie, batting, edged a ball hard onto the ground, where it spun back towards his wicket, so that he hit it again - and I caught it. There was furious argument - out? Not out? Even Mr Jenkins didn't know when we rushed to appeal to him (it was shattering to discover in that age of certainty in authority that schoolteachers, headmasters at that, didn't know absolutely everything in life). It took me years before I learned that Jackie was not out.

Chapter 6. Sporting Links

 (A sporting link with Penshurst surfaced when I returned to London in 1992 - a cricket magazine recorded the death "on July 11 at Penshurst, Victoria, of Laurence Osmaston ('Larry') Cordner, aged 81", who played three times for Victoria from 1931 to 1933. He was a legbreak and googly bowler: was he at Penshurst in our time? A reference book listing all Victorian cricketers says he was born at Warrnambool, and in the mid-Eighties his address was given as 'off Tobermory lane, Penshurst'.  As a cricket buff with a  passion for the history and personalities of the game, I wish I had the chance to meet him and talk about his brief career. Another reference book records that Larry Cordner played one VFL game with Melbourne, where his cousins, the other Cordners, were stars for years). We played Aussie Rules at school, of course - or should I say, I stood around while others played. I was always skinny, and cursed with a vivid imagination, so that I could see a great pack of players dive for the ball, unscrambling themselves until just one broken, bloodied body would be left at the bottom of that heap. That would be Me, I knew. So my system was to hang around by the goals in hope I would have enough of a start to get clear - whether doing anything with the ball or not - before the mob reached me. One scornful colleague argued that I really should be called a goalpost because of my static role (our actual goalposts of course were just piles of stones: cricket wickets were good old kero tins). But I got enthused about football for some reason at one stage, and decided I needed a ball of my own, getting a Size 4 ball from the saddler and sportsgoods shop just past the church (the saddler's brother was the shoemaker opposite - the names have gone, but I remember the shops and their wonderful leathery smell so clearly. Plus the shoemaker's calendar with pictures each year of the latest Melbourne Cup winner - first Catalogue, then Rivette, and Old Rowley, that 100/1 shot of 1940). That shopkeeper must have been a good salesman: certainly, I could take the ball on trial, and if I didn't want it, then I could bring it back, he agreed. Bring back an Aussie Rules ball? After you've booted it round the backyard on the gravel? My father, thank goodness, was sporting about it. He agreed when I explained the deal to cough up the ten shillings involved (which was quite a sum: I know while we were at Penshurst, he was pleased to announce to my Mother one day that his annual salary had just reached one thousand pounds. So he got around twenty pounds a week - what a reminder of inflation and today's pay rates. (My Mother did not believe inflation was anything other than a brief if unpleasant hiccup in life: her idea of prices was for example the leg of lamb we would buy periodically from Uebergang the Butcher for two shillings and sixpence - and when in later years the cost of a leg crept up by shillings and then into the pounds, she firmly believed there would come a time when old, sensible, proper prices would be restored. What did Uebergangs charge when they last sold a leg of lamb, I wonder?) 

Chapter 7. Splendid New Footy

  My splendid new footy didn't do me much good, although I had a lot of fun, booting it round the linemen's yard (which was the official Post Office yard behind our own backyard at the Post Office residence). It was carefully polished with brown Nugget, taken to bed with me when suitably clean and non-smudging, even given a name - Jim Cleary, after my South Melbourne fullback hero; when brother Ron acquired his own footy later, it was named after his idol, Dick Reynolds).  I didn't actually ever watch any of the local club matches: did Penshurst play on through the war years? But I used to note the Penshurst results for years afterwards when I would turn to the country football section in Monday's Melbourne Argus. And I was intrigued in 1947 when one of my heroes turned up there as captain-coach. Born in South Melbourne, I barracked for the Swans all my life, and grieved when they lost both the Grand Final and the fight against Carlton in that notorious 1945 'Bloodbath' that saw no fewer than twelve players reported, and eight suspended. I had vague memories that the man who went to Penshurst was Ted Whitfield, a brilliant but fiery winger, who was suspended for 12 months for a string of offences in that turbulent Grand Final. But the splendid book, The Great Laurie Nash, by Ned Wallish, points out that it was Jack "Basher" Williams, one of the legendary hard men of the VFL, whose clashes with old teammate Nash, then at Casterton, proved a highlight of the 1947 season.  Still, I was glad to learn on my return that Penshurst Football Club was still going strong, as I was told on staying at the Penshurst Hotel: there was even a committee meeting in progress the night my son and I were there, with big decisions needed for the new season. Good luck, chaps.  My most awful sporting and indeed general memory of Penshurst was the school swimming lesson: if there was anything I hated, using all my imagination and cunning to counter, it was swimming (some dinkum Aussie, me).. The old pool with those barren, chilly changing rooms used to fill me with dread: we were supposed to go to swimming from school once a week, but I would invent any excuse, do anything at all, to get out of it. Mostly I could get a note from my mother than I had a cold, or ear trouble, or something: once, just once, I know, I could find no way out of it, and had to scramble miserably into the shallow end and pretend to be taking notice of the actual swimming instruction for a long, long afternoon. Never again: the sight of the smart new pool did nothing to erase those awful memories from my mind when I returned the other day.

8. Life Dominated By Books

 My life was dominated by books, and radio: the ABC was the centre of my world, while Radio 3HA at Hamilton had its moments. When the ABC Children's Session on 3AR introduced the Argonauts Club, based on the legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece, on January 7, 1941, I was hooked: I listened to it faithfully for many years. I was always indignant when told to go to bed in that comfortable, quiet residence behind the Post Office: there were always books that desperately needed to be read, or wireless that should be listened to - but no light was allowed on for late reading, and there was no such thing as a transistor radio or indeed any sort of portable to take to bed. We had one radio in the lounge, and I think during Penshurst days we acquired a second set for the kitchen. But the radio high spot was buying a new autogram, a splendid cabinet of polished wood combining both radio and gramophone ( previously we had a windup gramophone). This was bought from Cheswass's, the local agents (they seemed to be agents for many firms of all types - was this an AWA?): I vividly recall lanky Jack Cheswass, balding even then, standing in the lounge and trying to make his sale while my Mother, ever-watchful of the pennies, argued that we didn't really need it. But my Father wanted it, and so we got it: the 78s record collection sounded much more entertaining on the new machine, although it didn't stop both my parents from making good use of the piano we always owned. There was some idea that I should learn piano, but there was no teacher available in whom my parents had any faith, and it was one of those things that just faded away. My father treated himself to one other major luxury around this time: he had convinced himself he had always wanted to play the cello, and so one Friday night in Hamilton he took the plunge and bought a secondhand instrument from the local music shop. He tried: he practised for a while - but the noises were discouraging, gradually the practices became less and less frequent, and soon the cello was a forlorn addition to the odds and ends we kept stored away in the spare room. Dad was a kindly father, who fairly enough he believed he deserved the odd minor personal treat: on hot nights we would sit under the enormous walnut tree in the front garden, when my brother and I would have penny icecreams, or icy poles (mine was pineapple, thanks) - and he would have a threepenny icecream, (Mother mostly wouldn't bother: it saved money). These came of course from Dave McNichol's shop across the street, combining fruit and vegetables, confectionary, icecream, and hairdresser and tobacconist. His two children - Alison, and the splendidly named Nichol McNichol - were occasional visitors to our place, although Nichol was a baby and not very entertaining, as far as we were concerned.

 (Twenty years later I was to meet Dave in Adelaide, when by coincidence he was the clerk on duty when my wife and I visited the Executor Trustee and Agency Co. of South Australia to draw up our wills).

Chapter 9. Post Office Cat

 Dave McNichol had a small market garden alongside his shop which caused an extraordinary awakening one morning. Great clankings could be heard from outside, and we imagined that roadworkers who had been mending street potholes had started unusually early. But when we checked the time at something like 5 a.m., we knew the Mount Rouse Shire gangs would hardly have started that early - and we found the Post Office cat struggling to climb the side fence with a rabbit trap attached to his leg. Dad eased the trap off, and tough old Bulgy, after a bit of rest and treatment, was good as new: we decided he must have been lying in wait for rabbits raiding the McNichol lettuce patch, just as Dave had got sick of the same raiders, and had laid a trap which selected the wrong victim. Bulgy - christened by us kids for obvious reasons: he was a huge, philosophical tabby - came with the Post Office. He was there when we arrived: he was there when we left. I was almost surprised not to see him still there in 1992. Cats were a regular part of Penshurst life: they would migrate into our yard from Ira Gunn's grocery and general provisions shop behind the Post Office premises. Ira Gunn kept cats to fight the rats and mice intent on his grain stores:  they often decided our domestic lifestyle would be preferable to working for their living, and we had a constant supply of supplementary cats adding themselves to the strength (Bulgy seemed unruffled).

 There was a dog next door - a greyhound kept in the courthouse yard by First Constable 'Dinny' Ryan, whose service record I was intrigued to read in Senior Constable John Sutherland's entertaining study 'Policing Penshurst'. I see he came to Penshurst from Hamilton on September 1,1939: I don't remember his predecessor, Constable Bill Smith, but I did play now and then with Constable Ryan's son. We would occasionally risk a game in the courthouse itself, sneaking in through the side entrance: it offered the thrill of being discovered and ordered out by the voice of police authority. Once I was practising catching by bouncing a cricket ball against the courthouse wall from our yard: I put it straight through the window, which send a chill down my spine. I think I had to cough up two shillings and sixpence to pay for the window - a heavy sum in those days.

 On the other hand - Dinny's son and I found a ten shilling note outside in the street one day: three months later, when no-one claimed it, we we solemnly handed five bob each. What joy! I also found a pound note outside the Savings Bank of Victoria another day: what happened to that, I have no idea.

Chapter 10. Penshurst a Law-abiding Place

 Penshurst seemed a pretty law-abiding place, although now and then we would learn of a prisoner kept in the lockup, which seemed very exciting: what if he broke out and came our way? Then early in the war, a German was interned and kept briefly at the police station: I recall the thrill that went round the town, or around the kids, anyway, at this sudden approach of the war to our quiet streets. But when we saw the ferocious Nazi standing at the police station gate taking a breath of air and chatting amiably to his gaoler, it was a genuine disappointment that he was in shirt and trousers, not steel helmet and jackboots, and that he looked like anyone else. Who was he? And what happened to him? We kept in touch with the war largely through the newspapers: they arrived every afternoon by Ansett roadliner at 3.15 p.m. Dad, in his forties, was in a reserved occupation, and had been rejected on medical grounds for World War One, so we as a family were spared the common heartbreak of wartime separation.

 That Ansett timetable was the focus of the day: there would be the mail, the papers, bits and pieces of freight, and perhaps a passenger or two - it was so significant that my father would generally cross the road to supervise his staff collecting the mail as the coach stopped outside the Penshurst Hotel. Then there would be brisk activity at the Post Office as the mail was sorted and the private boxes filled up, ready for the farmers and station-owners to collect. The people who lived outside Penshurst were of course in a different world: I was intrigued by the hint of money and influence of the Ritchies of Blackwood or the Huttons of Cheviot Hills or the Twomeys of Langulac or the Faulkners of wherever. My special mate at school for a time was Con Goulding, son of the Blackwood estate manager: what happened to Con, I wonder? And I cherished hidden devotion for his sister, Dorothy, who seemed the ultimate in smooth sophistication. The Ritchies seemed to pop up in the news long after I left Penshurst: decades later I interviewed the new headmaster of Geelong Grammar, a master at Eton College, and discovered that he was succeeding the acting head - Robin Ritchie, the man from Blackwood Estate. 

Chapter 11. Sighting Of Aeroplanes

 Penshurst provided me with my first sighing of aeroplanes: one afternoon around 1939 I heard and then saw two buzzing biplanes, high in the sky over the Post Office. It was a moment to remember: what child of today has to wait till he is eight before he sees his first aeroplane? As I now live under the flight-path to London's hectic Heathrow Airport, at times I feel I wouldn't mind if I never saw nor heard another plane again - especially when Concorde powers over every night precisely at ten minutes past ten, thundering its way in from New York, and drowning out TV, radio and talk. Communications were primitive then, too: it was long before the days of two-way radios, or indeed telephones everywhere. So when my father took over for a while as secretary of Penshurst Bush Fire Brigade, his position in the Post Office with the telephone network at hand was invaluable. No more so than on Friday, January 13, 1939 - Black Friday, when Victoria blazed and a tragic 71 lives were lost. I still remember Dad, seated himself at the little telephone switchboard (his girl telephonists working in shifts with him) as he kept contact with the firemen, relaying messages of fresh outbreaks, co-ordinating transport for extra men, and generally providing the vital link to maintain the counter-attack on the fires. An account of that terrible week - a book by W.S.Noble called 'Ordeal by Fire', published in that later bad fire year of 1977 - includes this reference: "Among the heroes were the men and women who manned the country post offices".

 Dad was awarded the MBE in 1970 for his community work in various towns through his 51 years in the Public Service: I like to think his contribution on Black Friday was especially recognised. Penshurst shopping was fairly unexciting for a child, at any rate: there were four grocers for everyday needs - Madigan's, Ira Gunn's, the Melray Stores(our choice) at the bottom of Bell Street, and another general store in the main block past the Free Press.

Chapter 12. Important Business

 But I vividly remember the Afghan hawker - or hawkers: were there more than one? The clanking mix of all sorts of hardware and materials and bits and pieces in the crammed horse-drawn cart was a real reminder of country Australia of another age, outdated really by 1938, but still clinging on. Stock and station agents were significant - Dennys Lascelles and Dalgety's always seemed to have important business going on as managers and owners from properties outside the town would drive in to discuss the wool clip. For a long while I owned a precious sample card of Australian wools, obtained from (I think) Denny's for a school project: wool mattered, and brought big dividends to the grower and the nation, in those simpler days. I didn't see very much of Penshurt's surroundings except for those occasional car excursions: Sunday afternoons were sometimes the occasion for a drive when we boys had the job of scanning the roadside, to shout: "Stop the car, Dad - there's a mushroom". Funny, but I never liked mushrooms: it was just the fun of spotting them. But when I learned to ride - after a minor mishap when I crashed a too-large adult bike into the official rain-gauge in the backyard, smashing it, and greatly upsetting my father as he kept the rain statistics - there would be the odd ride out and about, sometimes with a mate to collect pine-cones on the Warrnambool road. We sold them at times to the Prince of Wales Hotel, I dimly remember - today another casualty of the years. And pine trees figured in work every now and then at the school plantation on the exposed face of Mount Rouse - a welcome break from lessons. Sooner than we expected, our time in Penshurst was up: 1941 saw Dad  promoted to Belgrave, in the Dandenong Ranges.

Chapter 13. Leaving Penshurst

 It was a big change - a town only 20 miles from Melbourne, set in wooded hills, with lots of other little towns dotted nearby. So we left Penshurst: there was the usual farewell in the Methodist hall with presentations to my parents, and I transferred to what seemed a huge school at Upwey. We lived in a quite different community, always aware of nearby Melbourne, without the feeling of common interest stemming from comparative isolation that Penshurst had offered. In 1947 we moved to Maffra: I joined the State Savings Bank there, eventually going into newspapers at Warrnambool and then Geelong before heading for London in 1953. Back in Australia in 1955 I worked on Sunraysia Daily at Mildura, got married, and in 1960 joined The News in Adelaide - the original paper of the Murdoch empire. There we lived at Colonel light Gardens, just around the corner from Cliff and Laurel Simpson; Cliff had been Dad's No.2 in the Post Office at Penshurst.  In 1966 I was posted to the London bureau of News Limited and stayed there until I took early retirement in 1991 at the age of 60 - and 1992 brought me back on a trek around southern Australia when I was able to see Penshurst for the first time in half a century.

Chapter 14. Penshurst Changed - And Revisited

 It was a fascinating reminder of another age: both Penshurst and I had changed greatly, but there was plenty that was familiar - not least Mount Rouse, up whose slippery front face our family had laboriously climbed on our first Sunday afternoon, not realising there was an access road on the far side. I had never seen the Western District look so green as it did this time from the top of the Mount: Penshurst seemed pleasantly neat and cosy from that vantage point. I came back with my son Alan, aged 27: born in Adelaide, it was his first sight of his homeland since he left at the age of one - and for someone brought up in London, Penshurst was definitely a strange and very different experience. It was a pleasure to chat with Jack Cheswass, and old classmate Foyster Farrell at his Rouse Restaurant, while Chris Kineally's kindness in opening up the Courthouse to share the historical society archives was a genuine bonus. And it was fun for a onetime wowser to spend a night at the Penshurst Hotel, definitely out of bounds to the family in our distant and rigid Methodist days. As a journalist, perhaps I was most delighted to see the old Free Press building still there, and the printing machinery intact - even if in the computer age this was very much yesterday's equipment. One thing startled me in its reminder of the passage of the years - the fact that the War Memorial, which in my Penshurst days recorded the contribution of those who fell in what was once called simply, The Great War, now had added the names of World War Two servicemen, many names so familiar from my time. Penshurst is a special little town I remember with great affection: I hope you can keep it special - and that I can see it again without waiting another 51 years for the next return journey. And I have a confession - I have never yet visited the original Penshurst in Kent. Perhaps in 2000?  

© Murray Hedgecock, December, 1999     

®Murray Hedgcock, 30th December, 1999

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Friday, 21 April 2000