Edited transcript of the interview with Dr. Sue Lopez Atkinson.
My father was born in Cooraminta Street in Brunswick in 1914 and he grew up in Brunswick. He met my mother in Brunswick, got married in Brunswick, and then after he got married they moved to Coburg. In the house that he grew up in, as a teenager I think he was about 13 when they moved there. And I grew up there and now my children are living there. Which is a fourth generation of the family to live in that house and the only family that’s lived in that house since it was built in 1929.
So mum was living in Coburg when her mother was very sick so she went back to the mission, to Cummeragunja mission, to die. About 1929 when mum was about five and her little sister was about two at the time. Then she went to live with an aunt I think after that, who also got tuberculosis.
Mum was a stay-at-home mum. She was a machinist before she got married and dad was a buyer or purchasing officer. He worked long hours and he worked in Springvale, which was a long way away then. I don’t think I had the freeways they had now so mum and I had a lot of time together just the two of us at home. Mum was a good cook we had a lot of lovely times in the kitchen making cakes and dessert. She let me sort of go wild in the kitchen. I got to be about ten so I used to go off and cook cakes and make a terrible mess but mum used say ‘well it’s this clean mess.’ So we had a lot of fun doing laundry together. We had a washing day and we had a ringer, you know like I had an electric ringer, which I was allowed to help her push the clothes through but it terrified me.
I remember my favourite meal was fish fingers and mashed potatoes. I hated tripe, we had tripe I think it was once a week, that was sort of a cycle of things. We used to have tripe with white sauce and parsley and it didn’t matter how much white sauce and parsley you put on and it still tasted terrible.
I think the best part of growing up was being part of a group of kids who played outside. We had a big vacant lot around the corner from the house that we called the paddock. I don’t know why, I don’t know whether it was about horses or anything in there, but there were still a few vacant lots around Coburg at that time. We played in the alleyways that we weren’t supposed to, we were told not to go down there but we always did. We had a local flasher who was often in the laneway but we just ignored him and laughed and sort of walked past. The local park, which is still there, we used to play there. The Progress Theatre was a treat they used to have double-feature, they showed two films back-to-back. I think it was about a shilling or something to go, so that was a big treat on Saturdays. I think we were one of the first families in our suburb to get a TV set so that was very exciting. I still remember the day this big box arrived, we didn’t have an aerial but I turned it on just watch fuzz and that was just exciting as well.
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.