Edited transcript of the interview with Heather Cox.
I was brought up with lots of animals. There were draft horses, a cow, geese, ducks, chickens, dogs, cats, and it was basically a farm. I was surrounded by aunts and uncles cousins and I had the best childhood ever.
I was brought up in West Street Pascoe Vale. It was really a free and wonderful time to be brought-up, I had no worries about anything at all and was just after the war and I believe we were very poor then, but everybody else was too. It was a sharing time everybody shared what they had, if you had an apple tree you’d trade for somebody with apricots.
School days when I went to Westbreen, it was two rooms and went up to grade six with only two teachers. There were no streets made or anything and if it rained or if it was stormy there was a little bus to go from Westbreen down to Bell Street and into Coburg. And that’s because nobody had cars, that’s how you got down to Coburg. You wore your gum boots down to the bus stop then you left your gum boots in the little shelter shed that was there and wore shoes, so you didn’t ruin your little shoes in the mud. But nobody ever took anybody else’s gum boots it was always very honest.
My dad won a contract down at Werribee because he had tip trucks and my mum decided rather than him go down there and live by himself we’d all go. So we actually lived in tents for six months on the foreshore in Werribee South. That was during the winter and I don’t know how my mum did that because it was very cold. And sometimes very scary because it was very foggy and you could hear the ships in the bay with their fog horns going warning one another. But us kids thought it was a wonderful life and I can remember mum buying us some gumboots and we walked out into the ocean just to see how far we could home until the gumboots filled up with water and then we got to strife.
Being brought up with all the horses and that, I used to go up to Middle Street in Glenroy and watch my uncle plough the ground up there. We’d sit there, and my aunt used to make the best rock cakes in the world, and so we used to love going with him and eating his lunch – which was a bit cheeky. Then we’d go back with the draft horses in the back of the car. We’d always sitting up in there going back through the paddocks taking short cuts back, and then we’d put the horses in the stables.
My dad had a canopy made on the tip truck and us kids would just take our beds out from the house put them in the back of the truck. We’d get in the back of the truck sit up on the beds and off we go camping. I don’t think it was so easy for mum.
My dad barracked for Carlton big time and my uncles were all Essendon, because Pascoe Vale being close to Essendon, and the noise used to be unreal especially if it was Carlton and Essendon. They didn’t argue but it was just an amazing time as they were all yelling and screaming and yelling at one another whose was the best team and everything, it was good. There were family times too, we’d all be sitting around the radio – no such thing as TV. I can’t remember, I probably was about six or seven before we got the electricity and I could remember having kerosene lanterns lamps on the table and I can remember my mum’s joy when we got the power put on and she got all those kerosene lamps and threw them all in the tip down the back of the stables. I wish I knew where they were now they’d be worth fortune.
I used to love it in the springtime because we had just a tiny kitchen but we had a wood stove, a black wood stove, that my mum always cooked on. She didn’t have anything else. Sometimes we’d come out of a morning and a baby lamb or two would be sitting by the fire keeping it warm. We were allowed to keep that baby lamb until it grew up but then we always had to promise they had to go back, which was pretty difficult. But as far as we know it never went to the market, they were always kept a special sheep.
Image credit: Jessica Ferrari/Memento Media
About the ReCollection project.
As part of the 2017 Melbourne Fringe Festival, Memento Media partnered with Moreland City Council to present ReCollection at the Coburg Carnivale. ReCollection is about celebrating, sharing and capturing the memories of Moreland’s places, history and faces. The ReCollection exhibit showcased short documentaries and printed historical material which helped attendees take a trip down memory lane. During the Carnivale, many locals generously shared their stories about life in Moreland in our specially built ReCollection Recorder.