LEICHHARDT LIBRARY: TRANSFORMING THE LOCAL PROJECT
INTERVIEW WITH GEOFFREY LARGE AND NEIL BEVAN ON
29 OCTOBER 2008
MS PICKARD: This is Rose Pickard interviewing Geoffrey Large and Neil Bevan for
the Leichhardt Library Oral History Project, and today is 29 October 2008. Geoff, tell
me a bit about yourself. Where were you born and where were you brought up?
MR LARGE: Born in Mudgee, New South Wales and moved with my parents to
Balmain in 1941 as a two-year-old. I had one sister at the time older than me. Dad was
a shearer and because it was the war years he came to Balmain, and why he came to
Balmain is he had a sister in Trevor Street, Lilyfield, a sister in Moodie Street, Rozelle
and a brother in Bowman Street, Drummoyne. So he was sort of central to his family.
But another reason he came to Balmain was that the contractor for the shearing for the
whole of New South Wales lived in Johnson Street, Annandale. So it was primarily for
his work, that he could meet up with the contractor, go to the central railway and get a
train to wherever he had to go to do the shearing. He stayed in the shearing for a few
years, but eventually it got his back, he couldn’t keep it up. So he then started working
on the Balmain waterfront. My mother never worked. She was always at home.
So from ’41 till ’58 we lived in Davidson Street, Balmain, then my parents bought a
house in Cove Street, Birchgrove, Balmain, and that was in ’58. They stayed there until
about three years ago when mum passed away. So that started me off in Davidson
Street and the school was St Augustines alongside the church at whatever street it is up
there. So I went up there with my sister in kindergarten and then after the first three
years, I went down to Balmain Christian Brothers, Thames Street, and I was there till I
did my intermediate in 1953. My sister stayed at St Augustines but then she went to a
school in St Benedict’s in Chippendale which was a high school for the girls. So she
didn’t go to St Schol’s which was closer.
MS PICKARD: And there’s just the two of you, just you and your sister?
MR LARGE: No, then there was – after we moved to Sydney I had one brother – two
brothers and one sister were born, so we ended up with five children in the family.
They were all born in Balmain, the other three. My eldest sister, Pam, was born in
Mudgee at the same time, 18 months before me.
MS PICKARD: And what about you, Neil, where did you grow up?
MR BEVAN: Yeah, I was born in Balmain as well, but I lived in 150 Darling Street.
It was a big house. It was where my grandmother lived, actually, on my mum’s side. It
was sort of about 200 feet off the main – off Darling Street to get to the house, which is
on the waterfront. So we lived there for about six years before we moved then further
up to number 92 Darling Street. And I’ve got two elder sisters and one younger brother.
My dad came from Woolloomooloo originally, where he was born. He came to
Balmain and he lived with his auntie down in Adolphus Street. She looked after – there
was a coal yard and timber yard down there and a big old stone house. She had one son
and she also looked after a couple of other children who the parents sort of went
missing.
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And then they moved up into another little house right next to the Rob Roy Hotel where
they stayed there till about 1927 when she passed away. And then him and his – well,
not that it’s really his family, but his cousin and the other friends, they all then moved
up into his mother’s place which his up in Campbell Street, and there was a big old
stone place there. My mum, she was born in Balmain, but she lived in 150 Darling
Street. She was one of about 17. She was sort of in the middle of them all. The old
grandfather, we had boatsheds downs there, and he would go out and do some crabbing
and fishing and, you know, the - - MS PICKARD: Supplement the family diet, yeah.
MR BEVAN: Yeah, yeah, I can remember mum saying that he used to take fish
sandwiches to school, and she went up to St Augustines as well. I think everybody
went to St Augustines from that family because being Irish and having a name like
Carroll (ph) - - MS PICKARD: And 17 children, they kept the school going for quite a while.
(Laughs).
MR BEVAN: (Laughs). Yeah, sure did.
MS PICKARD: What did your dad as a - - MR BEVAN: My dad was a glassmaker. He worked over at Waterloo. He would –
he’d either go across by the ferry from Darling Street and get the tram up to – near
Hyde Park and then get a tram that ran past, you know, Waterloo there, or he would go
round the other way. He’d go round Glebe way and go to the railway and then get a
tram then from the railway to Waterloo. So he did it both ways, just whatever suited
him.
MS PICKARD: Yeah, yes. And what was it like as kids growing up in Balmain?
MR LARGE: Well, there were plenty of kids.
MR BEVAN: Yes.
MR LARGE: You didn’t have to worry about friends.
MR BEVAN: Yeah.
MR LARGE: Yeah. Well, next door to us – we were at number 3 Davidson Street.
Number 1 there was about nine in that family and then there was plenty of people
around, all with kids. And, of course, there was no cars, so all the play was in the front
of your house on the street. Davidson Street runs into Pashley Street and Pashley Street
was a cricket pitch as well as a football field, I think. But we used to go down to Punch
Park where the tennis courts were. They built the bomb shelters in the middle of our
football field down there, so we had to wait till they got cleared. That’d probably be
1947 or something before – so I’d only be eight years old then.
MS PICKARD: Did you ever have to use the bomb shelters? Did you have practise or
anything?
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MR LARGE: No, no, no. They were smelly old places, so, yeah, you kept away from
them, I think.
MR BEVAN: Yeah.
MR LARGE: Yeah. No, they were there but, you know, because the war had only just
finished and they hadn’t had time to remove them all. I suppose the council put them
and the council had to take them down, so they did it, you know, bit by bit. But there
was tennis courts there when I was a little bloke and Unilever, of course, was – or Lever
Brothers, the soap place, was on the other side of it. So it was a busy area down there.
There was always plenty of room in the park. But we spent most of our playtime on the
streets in front of the house, you know, in Pashley Street, Davidson Street, Stewart
Street. Mostly like you’d just sort of have running races or hide and seek sort of thing,
because the streets weren’t built out.
There were plenty of paddocks and, you know, grow a lot of grass and trees and
everything, there’s plenty of hiding places. And football was a big thing. Like, even
when we were very young, my father used to take me out to see the Tigers at Leichhardt
Oval or maybe out to the Sydney Cricket Ground, get the tram into the railway and then
walk to the cricket ground and then walk back to the railway, so we got plenty of
exercise. If you wanted to go Leichhardt Oval from Balmain, you walked there. It’s
not that far. It’s only about four kilometres, I suppose, now. You walk to the oval,
watch the game and then walk home again.
MS PICKARD: What about you, Neil, did you spend a lot of your time playing in the
street too?
MR BEVAN: Yes. Actually, that house where we lived in 150 Darling Street, we used
to – it came into a bay and we used to call it Jubilee Bay. Everybody called it Jubilee
Bay, but now it’s called Camerons Cove because of Cameron who owned – who got
that big old house built, Ewenton House. But it was always called Jubilee Bay because
the two floating docks were there, two big wooden docks, and there was a lot of
paddocks there and one of them we used to call Sherwood Forest. So this half of it was
Sherwood Forest, we would play Robin Hood, and the when we got sick of Robin
Hood, we would go over to the other side, more towards – going towards where the
police – the water police are now, which used to be the Harbour Trust, which used to be
the MSB.
And there was a hill there and we used to pick up sides, anything from about 10 to 15
on either side, and there was goodies and baddies, and Germans and the goodies
(laughs) and the Germans were always down below, and there’d be an incline, fairly
steep. And so the idea was the Germans would have to run up and try and get us and
pull us down and once you got everybody down, then it was their turn to get up top
there and pull them down. It wasn’t - - MS PICKARD: So you didn’t have toy rifles or sticks or anything like that? You
just - - MR BEVAN: Oh, gee. Oh, yeah, yeah, there was a few toy wooden – I had a machine
gun actually. (Laughs).
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MS PICKARD: (Laughs).
MR BEVAN: But it was more in the grabbing and pushing and shoving them down,
not so much shooting, you know, because everybody was within about 20 or 30 feet
away, another – so we did that a fair bit.
MS PICKARD: Did girls take part in that?
MR BEVAN: Oh, no, it was only all the boys. There was – like I says, there’d be
anything up to 30 of us, you know, just come from everywhere. You used to talk down
the street and say, “We’re going down to Sherwood Forest”, and that was it. Another
friend of ours, Mr Douglas, who was a seaman, he had two twins – or I should say a set
of twins, boys – and he built a swimming pool out of just ordinary rock .....(11.06) in
that bay and we used to do – high tide it was a nice pool, low tide there was nothing in
it. We used to swim in there. And just to the side of that there was – where the floating
dock used to be it was quite deep, so we used to have a swim in there.
But in mum’s early day, they would swim from our boatshed over to where the dock
was, which is from sort of Ewenton House side over towards where the police are now,
and they would swim out there and swim back to this – and actually, I’ve got photos of
them where they’d been swimming in that bay there. So we did that. And also in
St Marys Church there was a little – it had a little grassy spot there and we played touch
football in there, and then other nights we’d probably go down to Thornton Park, the
Darling Street Wharf and play – it was a bit bigger there, the football, and you’d get a
lot more – the boys who lived further down there, they would gather around and then
we’d pick sides up and probably have about 30 a side (laughs) trying to score a try. So
we’d play there.
MS PICKARD: Yeah. Did you play – was it mixed groups from the different schools
or did you - - MR BEVAN: Oh, God, everybody - - MS PICKARD: - - - only play with the kids that you went to school – to your - - MR BEVAN: No, they were everybody.
MS PICKARD: So there was none of this Catholics and publics?
MR BEVAN: Nicholly (ph) High, Pigeon Ground, St Augustines and the Brothers.
No matter where you came from, that was – no one worried about religion.
MS PICKARD: No.
MR BEVAN: You were just a human being.
MS PICKARD: How did Nicholson Street School come to be called Nicholly High?
MR BEVAN: Oh, Nicholly, just Nicholson Street, see. Nicholly - - MR LARGE: Abbreviation I suppose.
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MR BEVAN: Yeah, just Nicholly High. Everybody called it Nicholly High.
MR LARGE: The Pigeon Ground, I suppose, was – I don’t know - - MR BEVAN: Yeah, Pigeon Ground - - MR LARGE: Probably a lot of pigeons up there.
MR BEVAN: No, that was because they used to – the Pigeon Ground got its name
because of clubs taking their birds up there and releasing them.
MS PICKARD: Racing pigeons?
MR BEVAN: Yeah, racing pigeons, that’s correct, yeah.
MR LARGE: Yeah, Neil reminds me of our swimming. As we got a little bit older
and you could handle the water, the best swimming place was at the White Bay Power
House where the outlet for the hot water flowed back into the harbour. There was a
canal there about 40 or 50 metres long and the kids had put ropes across, because the
flow of the water was so fast you couldn’t swim against. So you’d jump in at one end
and then you’d wait till you come to a rope to grab and then pull yourself over the side
and run back up to the top and jump back in again.
MR BEVAN: Yeah.
MS PICKARD: Did your mother know about that? Sounds very dangerous.
MR BEVAN: Oh, no.
MR LARGE: Well, it wasn’t really dangerous because at the far end there was a grille
and you couldn’t actually get swept out into the harbour, but little fish could get in, only
little tiny things. You couldn’t – not worried about sharks or anything. But it was male
and female swimming. You could go down there and, you know, you might see anyone
down there. Like Fraser, I think she used to swim down there. But I think some
afternoons were a bit like the – because of the pace of the current, if you didn’t have
real good shorts on (laughs) - - MS PICKARD: (Laughs).
MR LARGE: - - - you’d end up down at the grille getting your gear back, you know.
So they used to sort of discriminate a little bit. If the boys were down there, they’d have
to make sure they had good clothes and the girls were the same, you know.
MR BEVAN: Yeah.
MR LARGE: Yeah. The canal swimming was very, very popular. Another big thing
was hiring a boat in Louisa Road off Hancocks and go out rowing and take out a fish
trap and then fish all around Snails Bay and Goat Island. Not so much Cockatoo
because there was always people there working and that, but Goat Island you could get
pretty close and drop the traps down for the leather jackets. That was a pretty big thing
to do as we were getting strong enough to row. And there was always a bob to be made
if the timber ships were in Snails Bay and the seamen wanted to get back to the wharf at
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Birchgrove and you had the rowing boat, you could pick a couple of blokes up and take
them in so they could go up for a drink and they’d sling you five bob or two bob or
something.
MS PICKARD: Yeah. So you’ve earned some extra pocket money.
MR LARGE: Yeah, yeah.
MS PICKARD: How old were you then when you did that?
MR LARGE: Well, about 13, I suppose. Yeah, about that age. So 1951 I started to get
involved in rugby league with the Balmain Sports Store D grade and a chap named Jack
Buckley had the sports store. And I started off as a ball boy for Balmain Sports Store D
grade in 1951 and that started a long association with junior league that’s still running at
the moment. But that’s – kids sports were chasings and releasings and, of course, in the
playground at school there was a marble contest on every lunch time. There was a few
– I suppose cricket was another thing, but I was about 17 before I started to play cricket.
And then another thing fell in about the same was men’s basketball. We used to play
basketball in a competition, the City of Sydney Basketball Competition. That was
another exercise.
MR BEVAN: And also at school there, I don’t know if you mentioned this, the
handball court.
MR LARGE: Oh, yeah, a big handball court at Balmain Christian Brothers, yeah,
which was - - MR BEVAN: Big handball court at school.
MR LARGE: We had state champions playing for the school. I suppose one of the big
things about school sport was the gymnastics and to hold the gymnastics in an area –
they used to do that at the Balmain Town Hall. So all the gear for the gymnastics at
Thames Street had to be carried up Darling Street to the Town Hall. The horse, you
know, and the springs and all that.
MS PICKARD: The horse as well?
MR LARGE: Yeah, all that was stored in the school and you had to take it up. You’d
have like six blokes carrying the horse and six blokes carrying the springboard, and then
they had the big mats that you could land on so you wouldn’t hurt yourself. You used
to have to carry them up and when you got the Town Hall you thought you were right,
then you had to go up all them stairs to get into the top floor. So that was a school
thing. Yeah, gymnastics, I suppose, I can remember that – oh, no, the other thing was
the boxing ring. You had to carry the boxing ring up when the boxing was on because
they held that at the Town Hall too. But that wasn’t competitive against other schools,
that was inner school competition, you know, the blues, greens, golds and reds. So,
yeah, used to, you know, just have everything competitive for the school.
Then there was underweight competitions for rugby league and cricket and that,
underweight rugby league, but cricket was open, and you used to play against Christian
Brothers schools then. You’d play Waverley, Newtown, St Marys Cathedral. So there
was plenty of sport going on. Everybody could be involved. Yeah, and when you think
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about it, the camaraderie, the friendship and all that, the Balmain boys stick together
sort of thing, because there was a lot of kids that did very well at sport and went on to
play for Australia or represent Australia at swimming or water polo or rowers.
Everywhere that you went you knew someone who was a good sportsperson, so there’s
plenty of local heroes.
If you wanted to meet kids, you’d probably go to BO Plenty’s (ph) Milk Bar or movies
on Saturday afternoon was another big meeting place, and the Town Hall had the milk
bar across the road from the Hoyts, and Dreamy Daniels (ph) had a milk bar across the
road behind the Balmain Town Hall Hotel. So you went up to the Hoyts, you met at the
milk bar afterwards, or you bought your intermission stuff over at Dreamy Daniels
across the road. If you went to the Kings Theatre, the Pacific Milk Bar was directly
opposite in Darling Street and behind the theatre there was another milk bar, I don’t
know if it had a name, but it was sort of on the premises. You could go out through the
exit door and take about four steps and you were in the milk bar.
And the other big milk bar was Harry Hardens Milk Bar at the Town Hall right opposite
the post office. That was another, you just walked out of the Hoyts, went round the
corner to the milk bar and had probably a pineapple juice served by Mrs Moran or her
daughter, Mrs McCarthy. Mrs Moran lived in Mort Street and Mrs McCarthy lived in
Phillip and, of course, you knew them because you went to school with their kids, you
know, or their grandkids.
MR BEVAN: (Laughs).
MS PICKARD: Yeah. And, Neil, going back to the swimming and things, was there
ever any problem – I mean, were there accidents? Did anyone ever get drowned or
nearly drowned or anything like that?
MR BEVAN: No, no, no.
MS PICKARD: What sort of lifesaving would there be?
MR BEVAN: I can remember – oh, down in sort of Jubilee Bay where we used to just
swim in that area?
MS PICKARD: Yeah.
MR BEVAN: Oh, no, no one was there. I can remember, I must have been about four
years of age, and I was down at the boatshed and it was high tide – that’s how vivid that
is – and I can remember next to us was Mr Swan, who had a timber yard, had Ewenton
House. He had a big slipway and there was his yacht was in there all the time.
Anyway, there’s a ball in the water, so Neil being four year old, I’m reaching over
trying to grab it and, whoosh, I fell in. I couldn’t swim at the time, I know that. I can
still see myself going down and coming up and I went down again and I don’t know
where he came from, but our next door neighbour, Jack Jones, he grabbed me by the
arm and pulled me out of the water. I don’t know if I went home and – I wasn’t that far
from home. I was just at the bottom of the house virtually. I don’t know if I told my
mother I fell in the water and I can’t remember if she went crook on me or anything.
Knowing me, I wouldn’t have told her that I fell in. (Laughs). So that’s what
happened. But there was nobody there, but you always had those stories that they used
to swim there their selves at that place.
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And also with the floating docks, the wooden floating docks, on the weekend when
there was no work, if the dock was down when she was full up with water and the
watchman was there, we’d sneak around – if he’d go in and have lunch or something or
he’d go out the way, we would sneak down and jump into the docks and have a swim in
the wooden docks. And that was at Brights Dock which is just around from Jubilee
Bay. It was just at the turn of the point. But opposite Jubilee Bay was Chapman Slip
and they had two floating docks there, a wooden one and a steel one, an open ender and
again we used to sneak down there if the docks were down and have a swim in them.
You know, no one was worried about drowning. Who drowned? No one. You know, it
wasn’t often heard of, never even thought about it.
MS PICKARD: Did you have swimming lessons or did you teach each other?
MR BEVAN: Well, I can remember my daddy, he taught me to swim, but he taught
me to swim at the beaches and it’s Balmoral and Bronte. They’re the two beaches that I
recall going to as a young kid and he was just teaching you how to do the freestyle and
once you knew how to do that, well, that was it. Next week you were out there trying to
catch a wave sort of thing. (Laughs).
MR LARGE: Yeah, well, it’s Geoff again, but my learning to swim was very simple. I
was down at Balmain Baths, Elkington Park, and a friend of my father was another
shearer, Ronnie Adams, and there was this diving board, springboard and a diving board
over in one corner, and he asked me if I could swim and I said, no, so he picked me up
and threw me in and then he jumped in behind me and I had to get all the way to the
ladder and when I got to the ladder he said, “You can swim.” (Laughs).
MR BEVAN: (Laughs).
MS PICKARD: How old were you then, Geoff?
MR LARGE: Oh, I was very young. I was probably about seven or eight, I suppose.
Yeah, but that was my learn to swim. I went about, I suppose, six metres. But when
you got to the ladder, you got up and he said, “Well, you can do that. You’re full of
confidence now, you can do it on your own”, you know, but he was there in case I
faltered. But, yeah, that’s I learnt to swim. I never took to the water. Yeah, it wasn’t a
big part of my life. My brothers all played water polo and refereed and everything, but I
stayed out of the water. I think he might have frightened me, yeah.
MS PICKARD: Yeah. A lot of the sports you mentioned was organised sport and it
sounds as if the boys were all pretty competitive. Was it similar to the way kids
compete these days in organised sport?
MR BEVAN: Oh, no.
MR LARGE: No, no, we didn’t really have organised sport - - MR BEVAN: No.
MR LARGE: - - - till we were 15 or 14, you know - - MR BEVAN: Yeah, yeah.
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MR LARGE: - - - like to play in a competition away from school or anything. The
kids today start playing at six.
MR BEVAN: Yeah.
MR LARGE: My grandson’s playing now, he’s only six. So they get a lot bigger start
for competitive games. They say it’s non-competitive, but, you know, like no one cares
who wins the comp at six years of age, but, of course, they do play against each other
and one team scores more points than the other, you know. No, we didn’t have – we
used to, like Neil said, someone would say we’re going down to Punch’s Park for a
game of football, well, then the blokes would all just turn up. Like some of them lived
in Wortley Street or Reynolds Street or close, and if they see the game start and
someone had a ball, well, they’d all just come along. You might start with five a side
and finish with 14 a side. But there were kids that went down there that went on and
played for Australia, but they didn’t start their competitive football till they were 16 or
so, you know. But they always had their grounding down at Punch’s Park.
MS PICKARD: Do you feel – do you have any particular feelings about the
comparison with what life was like for a kid then and what it is now, Neil?
MR BEVAN: Yes, I seem to think, well, we had a really good time with everybody
mingling in. Like I says, it – as we said, it wasn’t organised until we left school. Like,
we did the school sports, which was a little bit organised, but all the other sports, well,
you didn’t do anything until you left school. Then all the sports that we organised
ourselves, well, no one cared who lost, won or anything, you know. It was just a game
and everybody went home happy if you lost or you didn’t. no one worried about it. We
used to have, at night times too, running races. They’d say, oh, we’re not going to go
down the park, we’re just going to have some long distance races and so we’d just run
around the street and come around and come back. And you’d get a bit of a handicap at
different ages, you know. Like there was about four years difference between a lot of
us, you know, and some of us were only 10 and 12 year old and the other fellows are
15, you know, so they give you quite a bit of a start, and we’d have races. There was no
prizes, you just – you won it and they say, “You won”, and that was it.
MS PICKARD: Yeah. And what are your observations about life for kids in Balmain
now?
MR BEVAN: Oh, geez, I mean, I don’t know. In the sporting part of it, they’ve got all
the opportunities all right. I know four young kids who live next door to my cousin
who are in Five Dock, he’s got all sorts of sports, he swims, he does taekwondo, he
plays soccer, he plays rugby league (laughs) and – what else did she let him always –
there may be one other sport that he does too, but he’s under seven.
MS PICKARD: Does he go off on his own to these?
MR BEVAN: No, his mum takes him. But his dad’s a – he’s been a sporting – he’s
played first grade football as well. But the kids are just – they’ve just inherited from the
father, I think, they wanted to play the sports.
MS PICKARD: And do you think this is better for kids?
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MR BEVAN: It gives them a good opportunity to find out if they’re any good at
anything. I mean, us, we – I don’t think a lot of us sort of aspired to go to greatness in
our younger days. It was nice to know some – you know, like Dawn Fraser and Teddy
Pearson (ph) who represented Australia, you know. We all knew them when we were
about 16 and onwards, you know, and we thought, “Geez whiz, you know, somebody
had been to the Olympic Games. They were good, weren’t they, you know, but - you
know, maybe it inspired a few but there’s not too many to really reach that high mark,
you know. It’s only a very small minority number and they’re the lucky ones, I always
think.
MS PICKARD: Yeah. Let’s talk about the shops. You were talking about milk bars.
MR LARGE: Yeah, well, there was - - MS PICKARD: What other sorts of shops can you remember that aren’t here now?
MR LARGE: Well, there was all the grocery stores. You had Broadhead & Barchams,
Derham Brothers (ph), Moran & Cato, Mr Cohen (ph), and then you had all the corner
shops that were – like, Vic Ide, I-d-e I think his surname was. He was on the corner of
Stewart Street and Mullens Street and we lived at the bottom of Stewart Street. So if
you wanted a bottle of milk or, you know, a packet of biscuits or something, you went
to Mr Ide’s shop. But if you wanted a lot of groceries, well, I fell into the job of
delivering groceries after school. I used to work for Mr Cohen with a bike with a frame
on the front to put the cardboard box full of groceries and then delivering all around the
place. But that’s basically what your mother would do, would go up, and she couldn’t
carry it, and they’d put it on a pushbike or – there was only pushbikes I think – and then
someone would drop it home for you. So that was part of the service.
MS PICKARD: Did you have any adventures on your bike?
MR LARGE: Had a few falls.
MS PICKARD: What happened to the groceries?
MR LARGE: Mostly the biggest problem was that I used to do Cohen’s groceries and
I used to do Gooley’s (ph) hardware – he had a – what would you call him? He used to
sell kerosene and things like that. So I’d get a delivery to Bradford Street or Cove
Street and he’d have a four-gallon tin of kero for the fireside, and I’ll have the groceries.
And I wasn’t a very big bloke, but used to have to put all that on the front of the bike
and – I don’t think I ever spilt too much but I think I had a few – like, some of the
corners were a bit sharp at the bottom of hills, you know. But that was a pretty hard
job. You used to get little tips for doing things, but – yeah. But I think the grocery
stores – well, after I left school in ’53, I think the first job I got – I walked across the
road from Cohen’s and went into Broadhead & Barchams and worked behind the
counter.
So the grocery shopping was – oh, it was completely different. There was no prepackaged stuff or anything. If the lady wanted half a pound of Saos, you opened a tin
and took the Saos out and put them in a brown paper bag and handed them to her over
the counter. So I worked there for a little while. And the manager was a bloke named
Jack Clare (ph). Broadhead & Barchams had two shops, one in Gosford and one in
Balmain. And Derham Brothers, of course, their main office was in Beattie Street and
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they had, oh, probably about 11 shops. My eldest sister, the one that was in Balmain at
the start, she ended up working at Derham Brothers as a pay lady. She used to do the
pays for them. Moran & Catos had a shop. I don’t think they were – if it was graduated
by size, I think Broadhead & Barcham were the biggest, then Derham Brothers and then
Moran & Catos and then Cohen was across the road.
He was like a one-man outfit. He wasn’t a big show. He sold out to a bloke named
Kloster, K-l-o-s-t-e-r, a Dutchman, and he was the first person I ever met who played
ice hockey. He played ice hockey in the Glaciarium. He had a small family – I stayed
with him for a little while, but I must have been there – I left school when I was 14, so I
must have been just finishing when he started and I went across to work at Broadheads
for a while before I got an apprenticeship. I got an apprenticeship at Garden Island. So
shops, mostly there was a little corner shop everywhere, you know. Biggest one in this
area down where you are, of course, was Gooley’s in corner of what’s that – Grove and
Cove, is it? Yeah. Well, then Gooley’s brother was the bloke that had - - MS PICKARD: The kerosene.
MR LARGE: He used to have bags out of the front with dog biscuits in them, you
know, like it was a - - MS PICKARD: Was it called a hay and corn store? I remember something called a
hay and corn store when I was a child and they used to sell - - MR LARGE: Yeah, well, Harrie Hannaford’s up at Rozelle, Hannaford’s shop, was
the same thing. You go in and buy loose potatoes and loose corn and there was bags of
wheat I think they used to feed their chooks with or something. That was, I suppose –
it’s a produce store really.
MR BEVAN: Yeah, that’s what it was, produce.
MR LARGE: Yeah, produce stores.
MR BEVAN: That’s what it was called, yeah.
MR LARGE: And he had the kero and everything.
MR BEVAN: I think that building might still have that sign on it, you know .....(33.19)
MR LARGE: Could do, yeah. Yeah, Jack Gooley. Yeah, well, Jack had the produce
store. I think there’s Wally Gooley up here. Yeah. So the shopping, as far as I was
concerned, was I’d walk up to Vic Ide’s shop at the top of the hill, get the milk and walk
back. But one of my biggest jobs was to have – we had a four-wheel barrow with ball
bearing wheels and I used to have to go to CC Kent’s, the timber – they were box and
case manufacturers. There was a back lane in Ennis Street. Used to take the barrow
around and load it up to the hilt with off cuts of timber because the hot water for the
bath was a chip heater. So you used to have to cart all the wood so that everyone could
have a hot bath for a couple of days. Then the barrow would be empty and you’d go
round and get another load.
MS PICKARD: And you’d have to chop up the chips too?
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MR LARGE: Well, yeah, they were all fragments that would break up.
MS PICKARD: They were fairly small?
MR LARGE: Yeah, they’d break up pretty easy. Actually, if you got a lump of wood
that didn’t break real easy, it was like a bonus because it lasted a bit longer in the fire.
A very dangerous thing the chip heaters. You worry about people drowning.
MR BEVAN: (Laughs). Yes.
MR LARGE: Chip heaters used to work on – they’d build up a certain amount of heat
and then the wind would blow and the fire would go out, but the embers would all still
be there heating the water up and then it’d ignite again when the wind dropped and all
this flame would shoot out and boiling water would pour out the front. If you were
sitting in the bath, you got it all over you. I got scalded pretty bad one day. I couldn’t
go to a party. I was getting dressed to go to a party and out come the water and scalded
me. I had to go hospital instead of the party. So that was a big but, getting enough
wood for everyone to have a bath. Like, there’d be four kids by then, I suppose, and
mum and dad.
MS PICKARD: Did you pay for that wood or was it - - MR LARGE: No, no, that was - - MS PICKARD: No, they just gave it away?
MR LARGE: That was off cuts, yeah, yeah. They wanted to get rid of it.
MS PICKARD: Glad to get rid of it, yes.
MR LARGE: Yeah, yeah.
MR BEVAN: With the chip heaters also with our place, we used to go down to the –
just go down to the Jubilee Bay again and pick up any timber that washed in. There was
always timber washing in all the time. There was balls, there was – anything that would
float, it would come in.
MR LARGE: There’s a catch.
MR BEVAN: So we’d walk, you know – every afternoon I’d go down with dad or
he’d say, “I’m not going down this arvo”, so I’d go down and you’d just pick out a few
pieces, you know, enough to chop up and use on the chip heater. Also, we had a – it
was a factory also that used to be not too far from us, behind the – in Union Street
behind the Commercial Hotel. Used to go down there, a lot of people, and take a bag
and they’d have all the off cuts of, you know, pine timbers and oregon, you know,
something nice and soft. And so you’d go and see somebody there and they would give
you a bag of firewood as well. And with the chip heaters, if you (laughs) – oh, God, I
think I remember.
MR LARGE: They were dangerous things.
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MR BEVAN: If you ever lit one and if you just got the paper, the newspaper, and just
– don’t squeeze it up but just crunch it up a bit, and throw it in and throw it in and throw
it in and put the lid on, it’d go buh buh buh buh buh buh buh buh. (Laughs). I used to
just like to listen to the noise of it.
MS PICKARD: So you used to do that just for fun, did you?
MR BEVAN: Yeah, it was just a fun thing with it, you know, while you’re having a
shower or something. Just get some more paper and throw it in and buh buh buh, and it
used to go, you know, roar its little head off.
MR LARGE: That was another thing too, we crossed over the wheelbarrow incidents
there. We used to have four-wheel barrows, probably with two pram wheels on them to
get them off the ground, and they were the – they were used for carting stuff. And then
you had three-wheel barrows which were used for sport racing. So you had one wheel
on the front and you’d put a foot each side of the wheel and that’s how you were
steering. Some of the hills were a bit steep there too, so you lost a lot of skin when you
were doing your wheelbarrow tricks.
MS PICKARD: So that’s a - - MR LARGE: Nearly all the kids built their own wheelbarrows. You had to get the ball
bearings from Mort’s Dock or Cockatoo or someone where - - MR BEVAN: Yeah.
MR LARGE: There seemed to be plenty of them, you know. And you had one wheel
on the front and it was all built up on your own axle to get it up high enough and
everything. Of course, if there was a bump in the road, you’d skid over the bump and
bits would fall off and you’d have to rebuild everything, you know.
MS PICKARD: Did you have a billycart, Neil?
MR BEVAN: Yes, yes. Yeah, I had one with the small ball bearing wheels, but also I
got one that I put big wheels on the back, oh, they must have been about six inches or
so, and just had a small one in the front.
MS PICKARD: Yeah. Yeah, Balmain would be a good place for billycart races,
there’s so many hills.
MR LARGE: Yeah.
MR BEVAN: Oh, yeah.
MS PICKARD: But was there much traffic?
MR LARGE: No. We lived – there were, say, three streets, Stewart Street, Davidson
Street and Pashley Street, and Bourkes had a car, Dicksons had a car, Lester Jackson up
the other end had a motorbike. But, no, there would have been probably four cars in
three streets and they were off street parking too. They weren’t parked on the street. So
there was – all day, everyday, you’d nearly – there was no cars in the streets at all.
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MR BEVAN: Yeah.
MR LARGE: I’ve been down in recent times to go and have a look at the old house
and you can’t get through (laughs) because there’s too many cars, yeah. But two
telegraph poles in Pashley Street was a four. If you could hit the ball straight, two
telegraph poles was a four. That was down to John and Greg Tyrell’s (ph) place, or Mr
Davis lived down there. He was a gatekeeper at Leichhardt Oval. And the next thing,
of course, if it went off the roof, you had to catch it one hand. You couldn’t catch with
two hands if it come off the roof. So there were a lot of roofs.
MS PICKARD: Lots of rules. (Laughs).
MR LARGE: (Laughs). Yeah, yeah.
MR BEVAN: Like, down the East end, with the shopping, you just had corner stores
down there. Mr Mimas, (ph) who had a grocer store, he’d get the butter in bulk and
he’d cut it up into pound lots and wrap it up himself. There was a big paper shop across
from him.
MS PICKARD: Did you have a butcher’s down there?
MR BEVAN: There was a butcher’s down there, yes. He’d been there for quite a
while. Not too far there was other grocery shops. There was a Mr Brown’s that we
used to go to, and Tindal’s, but Mr Brown, like Geoff was saying with the – if you
wanted a pound of biscuits – but anything that was broken, he’d put it in another tin and
so you could go and buy a pound of broken biscuits. So you’d get some Nice and, you
know - - MR LARGE: Chocolate Montes. (Laughs).
MR BEVAN: Yeah, you know, anything that was broken, you know. They were just
as good, I thought. (Laughs).
MS PICKARD: Absolutely.
MR BEVAN: They were a little bit cheaper too.
MS PICKARD: Yes.
MR BEVAN: And Mrs Balran’s, (ph) that was down there. She had a little like a
delicatessen. Oh, she’d been there for ages, Mrs Balran. Oh, she was a nice lady. Had
a couple of greengrocers down there, down the East end. There was one little fish shop
but it lasted for a while but not all the time. Tony Russell, they had a little milk bar. He
used to sail the 18 footers, Tony, and also he played for the Tigers back in the 20s, the
same as his brother, Mick Russell. There was a barber shop down that end and - - MR LARGE: And his son, Barry Russell, was on the Gretel in the America’s Cup, due
to the sail.
MR BEVAN: Yeah, sail in 12 metres. Yeah. Had a little post office down there on
the corner of Union Street. And there was a couple of pubs down there too. (Laughs).
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MR LARGE: From my memory now, I’d say the only things that are still right where
they were when we were kids is the paper shops. There’s a paper shop down near
McDonald Street. Next door to where the Commonwealth Bank used to be was Bells.
Then there’s a paper shop opposite the Town Hall Hotel. That was a paper shop when I
was a kid. I don’t think the paper shop down in Elliott Street was in that shop, but it
was in that area. So they had, like, delivery areas and I think they’re still much the
same 50 years later to what they are today.
MR BEVAN: Yeah.
MR LARGE: There was a paper shop at the bottom of Rowntree Street. That was –
what was his name? Hendicott. (ph) Yeah, Hendicott had that. He had like the
Birchgrove area. I delivered the - - MS PICKARD: That’s still there.
MR LARGE: Yeah. I delivered papers for a while for Bell and Bernie Cameron, he
was another paper boy there, Harry Fyshwick. (ph) But there was a little perk in paper
things, as that all the fish shops – and they were the only take aways, and there was a
fish shop on nearly every corner – you could sell the papers, if they were clean, to the
fish shop. You’d take them in and he’d weigh them on the scales and give you a penny
a pound for newspapers that weren’t dirty, you know, or wet or anything like that. So
that was a little profit-making scheme if you were a paper boy. You always got a few
papers you could sell. And, of course, all the hotels were busy and they had afternoon
papers, so you had The Sun and The Mirror in the afternoon and you went selling papers
to the pubs, which was another good little job you could - - MS PICKARD: Were you allowed into the hotel?
MR LARGE: Oh, yeah. You walked around the bar, but it was sort of like in one door
and out the other. You weren’t in there for half an hour and no one gave you a drink or
anything. There was nothing like that. But, you know, some of those pubs have gone
now, but that was a little thing that – the afternoon paper was the paper – I don’t think
they bought the morning papers because they were off to work too early, you know,
unless they were on the tram or something.
MS PICKARD: Did you ever sell papers on the tram, on the old - - MR LARGE: Yeah, I used to come down here and jump - - MS PICKARD: The old “toastrack”.
MR LARGE: - - - on the tram at Grove Street and learn how to get on the other side so
the conductor wouldn’t (laughs) toss us off, you know. It was a bit of a – what did they
– scaling the tram I think it was called. That was the technical name for it. Yeah. I
used to come down here because that was in our area, jump on the tram, sell two papers
or something, jump off and - - MS PICKARD: Never fell off?
MR LARGE: No, no, no, no, too experienced for that.
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MS PICKARD: What about you, Neil? Did you have afterschool jobs?
MR BEVAN: No, I had a Saturday morning/afternoon job. I used to work on the ice
truck in the early 50s.
MR LARGE: With Mr Woodrow? (ph)
MR BEVAN: No, a Mr Rogerson.
MR LARGE: Oh, right.
MR BEVAN: The phantom.
MR LARGE: Oh, Bob. Oh, yeah.
MS PICKARD: Did people - - MR LARGE: David Rogerson.
MR BEVAN: And Mr Rogerson had a small truck and - - MS PICKARD: Did people still have ice chests?
MR BEVAN: Yes.
MR LARGE: Yeah.
MR BEVAN: And this is like nineteen fifty – probably be about 1951 when I first got
it. I must have been about 12, I’d reckon. And there was two other boys there; one
cousin and a Maxy Brian (ph) and the other cousin was Barry Anderson. And we all
used to help Mr Rogerson and deliver the ice and – oh, there was a few places that we
didn’t like to go into. (Laughs).
MS PICKARD: Why was that?
MR BEVAN: Oh, because some of the very old, old, old ladies, you know, they must
have been about 90, yeah, they never opened their house up. They had cluttered
furniture and they’d have a nice little small icebox and they’d have a big piece of, like,
pork or meat, it was just sitting on top of the ice, you know, or in the top of the – and
you’d have to pick it up (laughs) - - MR LARGE: (Laughs).
MR BEVAN: - - - and put the ice in and it was always greasy, you know. It wasn’t
wrapped up and it was - - MR LARGE: I’ve had that one too, Neil.
MR BEVAN: They were older than the – one lady, the same lady I was thinking about,
is - - MR LARGE: Don’t mention the names. (Laughs).
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MR BEVAN: I can’t think of her name, but she was a lot – she was old and she had a
stuffed cat in a glass cabinet as well and every time you walked in you looked at that
cat, you know. (Laughs). But, I mean, she - - MR LARGE: I had a few like that with the deliveries of the groceries, and one lady at
the bottom of Church Street, she was – she used to have at least one walking stick and
she hobbled a lot and things were never quite right, you know, like, “What’s going on?
Where have you been? I thought you’d be here at 3 o’clock”, you know. And then she
blow up. I mean, you’d have to cart everything right out to the back and put it on the
table and pull the things out for her because she was handicapped. We didn’t look at
her as being our best customer. (Laughs).
MR BEVAN: Yeah.
MR LARGE: She was always cranky, you know.
MR BEVAN: That’s right. And also on the ice run one day there was a lady had a
beautiful peach tree in the front and was always getting good fruit off it, you know - - MR LARGE: (Laughs).
MR BEVAN: And she only lived about six houses down from us, in any case, and one
Saturday I took the ice in there and, oh, God, the peach was just sitting there (laughs) so
I took it off, but she told Mr Rogerson during the week that, “Your boys have been
taking my fruit.” (Laughs). So he gave us a bit of a talking to, “Don’t touch the fruit”,
you know. “If you’re going to take any, take the green ones. Don’t take the nice ripe
ones.”
MS PICKARD: (Laughs). Or ask her first.
MR BEVAN: Yeah, or ask. Oh, yeah.
MR LARGE: So what’s really different, I suppose, is that the kids today, while they’re
well organised in sport, they get taught how to swim and they get taught how to do
everything else, none of them do the odd jobs that were there. Those jobs are all gone,
you know. I mean, the bloke on the truck does Woolworths, I suppose.
MR BEVAN: Yeah.
MR LARGE: And all the ice jobs and all the paper jobs and that are – I think you get a
very early morning delivery of the paper and that’s about all now. You don’t even see
the people any more. And we were a part of the landscape, the kids that sold the papers,
you know. Everyone sort of knew who you were.
MR BEVAN: Also in those 50s, you know, when we’d go down to the Grove for
football, they’d all sit on the hill there, a lot of – because they used to get quite a lot of
people down there on a Sunday, and all the young kids, if you were drinking a soft
drink, they’d hang around you waiting for the bottle because you used to get a deposit
on the bottle, and, of course, everybody being, you know – starting to work, you know,
and the young boys would come around and says, “You finished with that? You
finished with that?”, so they could take it back and get the penny.
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MS PICKARD: And get a refund.
MR BEVAN: Get the refund on it, yeah.
MR LARGE: Yeah.
MR BEVAN: Which is – it’s non-existent in this state. I think South Australia may
still do it – get a refund.
MS PICKARD: They’re talking about bringing it back in I think.
MR BEVAN: But that’s – oh, yes.
MR LARGE: But we used to go to the cricket ground to the football and you’d come
home with a lot more money that you went out with because you were cleaning up out
there, picking up bottles all the time, you know. Then they knocked them out and put
the plastic cups in, so it ruined – but the cricket was a good day out.
MR BEVAN: Yeah.
MR LARGE: There was a lot of people sitting in the sun drinking. You could always
get a few bottles there. Yeah, very enterprising sort of kids they were, you know.
MS PICKARD: Yeah.
MR LARGE: Everybody was the same, if there was a dollar to be made. But, of
course, everybody today, if you’re comparing the children today to what they were like,
my own grandkids, I don’t know, I think they haven’t got time. They’ve got to go to
swimming one afternoon, tennis one afternoon, rugby league, touch football, soccer and
I think they’re going to start rugby union next year as well for the young bloke. And
my granddaughter’s about the same, hey. She does the swimming and the tennis,
dancing. She does one day dancing. So hers is organised, you know. Mum and dad
have got to pay for all the lessons, but it’s great that they can learn to swim a four years
of age, you know, terrific.
MS PICKARD: And if they weren’t doing that, of course, they couldn’t go out and
play on the street the way you did.
MR LARGE: No, they couldn’t, no.
MR BEVAN: Oh, no.
MS PICKARD: And there’s not much in the way of back gardens any more.
MR LARGE: No, no. We like it. We’ve got a bit of room in our yard. They’ve got
enough to just, you know, hit a ball around and that in our backyard. But it’s pretty
popular after school. My granddaughter, who lives with us, turned up yesterday with
two girls because they wanted something to do. They can run around the backyard and
it was a good day yesterday. But as you say, there’s no – it’s not easy to go out and
play hopscotch or similar things. You know how you used to draw everything on the
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ground and run over the top of it? But in the discussion, the recollections come to me
about when we lived in Davidson Street, summertime.
There was an old chap, a Scots man, named Mr Brennan, (ph) lived halfway along
Pashley Street. He used to drink at the exchange hotel and he’d stagger down to
Davidson Street and he’d turn the corner to go down to his place and he’d line all the
kids up at the end of Pashley Street, and it was about 60 metres down to his house, and
he’d put pennies on the ground down there and then he’d stand down there and say,
“Go”, and we’re all off down to pick up the pennies. You didn’t know where they were
because you – he used to throw dummies. He used to put his thumb down and not leave
anything, and he’d walk across the road and that. So he was entertainment. Because he
was a drinker, he used to end up with a pocket full of pennies, you know. So we used to
run for the pennies of an afternoon, girls and boys all included, no start, push and shove
when you got down the end. Yeah, Mr Brennan. He lived on his own. I don’t think he
ever had any children or anything.
MR BEVAN: And then there was Sharpe Brothers who used to come around
delivering the - - MR LARGE: Oh, yeah, the drinks.
MR BEVAN: - - - soft drinks, especially – oh, what’s the - - MR LARGE: Yeah, ginger beer?
MR BEVAN: The ginger beer, yeah.
MR LARGE: Or .....(51.19) beer, or whatever it was called.
MR BEVAN: Yeah, that was until sort of the 50s and that shop started appearing and
people were buying all in like the - - MS PICKARD: When did you first start noticing the changes, Neil, to Balmain?
When are you – what are some of the first things you remember about sometime when
you might thought, “Oh, hello, this is different. Balmain’s changing.”?
MR BEVAN: Oh, gosh, yeah. Stan Edwards, who owned the Commercial Hotel, a
little bit further down from his hotel he developed a butcher’s shop and a cake shop,
which was nothing – no cake shop was down the East end. You could only get – one of
the grocery shops might have a couple of vanilla slices and an apple slice, and an apple
charlotte, and that was about it. I don’t know about – if they still make apple charlottes,
but they were a favourite in them days with a lot of us. Then, oh – because a lot of the
industries started dropping out of the place too, like the Adelaide Steamship Company
and Nichol Brothers was down there, and SG White’s was all down the East end and
they were all - - MS PICKARD: And they were waterfront industry?
MR BEVAN: The waterfront industry, yeah. We got a – there was a Chinese – it
wasn’t a restaurant, but it was – they came into the fish shop, Chinese, and they were
making spring rolls. We believed that they were the first people who sort of kicked the
spring roll off. That was down there. That was a big change. And then Tindal’s
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grocery shop, he opened it up and made it like a self-service type thing, it was, which
was a bit sort of unusual. And, of course, then Brown’s they closed down. Oh, gosh,
and when you – there was another place down there, Max Cooper. He was a builder
and he was just next to St Mary’s Church. He was there – by the end of the 50s or so,
he’d started, you know, moving out. Then the buses started coming down the (laughs)
main street. There was no trams. Geez, that was a big change.
MS PICKARD: That was during the 50s sometime, wasn’t it?
MR BEVAN: Yeah, early 50s, yeah. And they started digging up the tram lines then.
Gee, the tram lines, when you were riding your bike, especially when you crossed over,
I know I got caught in them once across into The Avenue and kept sliding, fell head
over heels, but – the Chapman slip, I said about that, they came and went. And then
later on Chapman’s turned into Sydney Slipway then after about a four delay or so. So
that was a big change. Dickson Primer moved in. Our old big house that we lived in
where my grandmother was, Dickson Primer bought that big old house and he knocked
it down and then he put in a number of timbers and doors and whatnots down there.
And they use old Ewenton House as a warehouse and an office warehouse, you know.
MS PICKARD: So it wasn’t occupied then? There was no one living there?
MR BEVAN: No, it was just Dickson Primer had it and they just used it for their, you
know, office, and when I say “office” it was only office virtually for the workers and the
big timers were further down in Darling Street in a big brick place that they built for
them. But now Ewenton House has been restored back to its place. And then started
filling in Jubilee Bay. Oh, gee, whiz, (laughs) it filled the bay in, you know, all the
memories and where the boatsheds were and - - MS PICKARD: How did you feel about that when you saw it happening?
MR BEVAN: Oh, God. I still go down and have a look at it and I think, oh, that’s
where the house and that’s where it was and this where it was. The Maritime Services
Board moved out and it just changed – kept changing, you know, from the 50s and the
60s and, of course, all the newer type houses come now.
MS PICKARD: How did it make you feel?
MR BEVAN: Oh, I was a bit – I mean, I wasn’t living there at the time, I’d moved out,
but I used to keep thinking, oh, gee, the changes, it’s changed, it’s changed. But even
the big old – big sandstone place – not the trades hall – School of Arts, it was there, but
it had been burnt out earlier in its life and it was just standing there.
MS PICKARD: Where was that?
MR BEVAN: It was right next to us where we lived down in 150, and now they’ve got
all units there in the bay – in Jubilee Bay, again, Cameron’s Cove, as it’s called.
There’s all units there now. And there’s all townhouses and units where we used to live
at 150. And then even over on the side with Chapman’s here, it’s all been developed
into housing and units and, yeah, everything’s gone. It’s just gone. You know, you
think, oh, well, it’s – think it’s for the better, but they don’t seem to spread them out
enough, you know. They just clamber everything in in one hit and that’s what I don’t
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like about it, especially when you drive up towards The Avenue in Darling Street and
you’ve got all those units just sitting there right up on the footpath.
MS PICKARD: And what about the people? Do you see changes in that?
MR BEVAN: Oh, geez, I’ve only got – I’ve a cousin that lives there still in Johnston
Street and I think he’s about the only one that I can recall that’s – oh, well, I know a few
people who I knew from the early days. The Rooneys, they still live down the East end,
and, yeah, the Rogersons. Well, they’ve moved out too just recently, but she’s still at
her parents’ house. But everybody, they’ve just gone now over the last – I just had a
friend who lived in Cove Street there, Kenny Lewis, he says, “Oh, yeah”, he says, “I’ve
moved.” He said, “Nobody wants to talk to you”, he says, “any more.” He said,
“They’re all new people”, he says. So he’s - - MS PICKARD: And the new people don’t - - MR BEVAN: They just don’t seem to want to mingle. Anyway, they’ve got cars, so
you just jump in your car and you drive. In our days, if we went to the city, we’d walk
down to the Darling Street Wharf with mum or dad and get the ferry across to Erskine
Street and then either walk up or get the tram up to the city to go shopping. And then
the other shopping was, you got the tram or the bus and go out to Parramatta Road and
Leichhardt and the Annandale section and walk up and down the shops there to do your
shopping. So, I mean, that’s - - MS PICKARD: But now?
MR BEVAN: Now, they just go to – I don’t know where they do their shopping now,
these days, down there. That big Coles is still – oh, I’ve got an auntie also that lives in
Church Street, that’s right. She’s still there. She says, she didn’t like the idea of them
putting the tables and chairs out on the footpath. (Laughs).
MR LARGE: Alfresco.
MR BEVAN: Yes. Yeah, and my other cousin neither, he didn’t like – they didn’t like
it too much.
MS PICKARD: Why didn’t they like that?
MR BEVAN: Oh, I think they just thought it was invasive. If you want to walk up the
street, you’ve got to walk past people sitting there eating, smoking and drinking sort of
thing, you know, coffees. I mean, inside the building is for all that. (Laughs).
MR LARGE: So in my case, I suppose I started to notice different use for the
buildings. Like the Rob Roy Hotel was open when I was a paper boy, but then it closed
and then it become a boarding house, I think. Then the Pacific Hotel become a TV
studio after it closed. They made a long running program there. The Warwick Castle
Hotel closed and the Commonwealth Bank moved from McDonald Street up to Mort
Street and took over that part of the – where the Warwick Castle was. Like the Institute,
I went to Dawn Fraser’s 21st at the Institute and I think the next time I went back there
was to buy a Larco tracksuit. Larco took over the building. Things started to close, you
know. The milk bars went. BO Plenty was my favourite because I came from Mudgee
and he came from Mudgee and his son, Barry, was a nice young bloke, but they moved
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out. I don’t know think it was competition. I think it was more of people stopped going
to milk bars. They just didn’t – the movies closed, the Hoyts went, the Kings went, the
Amuse You went first, so there was - - MS PICKARD: Why do you suppose all these places closed down?
MR LARGE: Well, ’56, wasn’t it, the TV started.
MR BEVAN: TV, yeah.
MR LARGE: So that eroded the movies. Well, I’d imagine that’s what started it.
MS PICKARD: What about the pubs?
MR LARGE: Well, I think, if you went to the Rob Roy, you probably had to work in
the area generally where Neil’s talking about. So they relied on the lunch time and after
work trade. The Warwick Castle was at the top of the hill from Mort’s Dock, so they’d
knock off work and come up to the Warwick and have two schooners to get on the tram
or the bus or to walk home. So it was attached – like there was two hotels opposite
Mort’s Dock and they both closed, Podmore’s and the Star. They closed real quick
when the Mort’s Dock slowed down and closed down. And the Warwick Castle was
the last one, but they’re spin offs of Mort’s Dock. So if you sort of look at it – take all
the ship repair places out and it leaves you with very little.
Some of the hotels have kept going, like the William Wallace, they would have got
business from Caltex at Ballast Point. I know they’ve got the Storey and Keers and the
Jubilee Engineering workers probably could have went to the Wallace. And the
Wallace has stayed on because there’s a fair few houses between where Caltex was and
where Storey and Keers was, so they have people like that. But the Dry Dock, of
course, Mort’s Dock closed and then the Housing Commission built across the road and
the private accommodation and houses down there, so they got some business back, but
you wouldn’t say it was a boom pub. It’s not the biggest pub in the place. You’ve got
the pub like the Exchange. I think in the last five years the Exchange has probably –
one mob went bankrupt and the last mob that are in there now are probably going to do
the same.
The Riverview closed for a little while just recently for the first time ever because the
lunch time drinkers, the afternoon - you know, the 6 o’clock swill or 10 o’clock closing
– they were all blokes that worked in the area and they went off for a drink in the
summer, or, you know, even in the winter time they went up and had a few schooners.
So there was always a passing trade or people around all the time, but these days they
rely on probably selling bistro food or different type of person altogether. None of them
have got accommodation, so they rely on selling beer. Well, you can’t drink and drive,
you know. The RBT got you there. So the pubs closed. The milk bars closed because
people just seemed to – milk bars got a spin off from the - - MS PICKARD: From the cinemas.
MR LARGE: From the cinemas, yeah. At intermission you had just enough time to
get a milk shake down and get back over for the next show, you know. Then, like, the
RSL even closed, you know. Like, they put in heaps and heaps of time and energy
selling raffle tickets and everything to get it open and, you know, bad management, lack
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of people going there, the RBT again, you know, and of course it went by the board, you
know. You had a tennis club in Rozelle, it went, not enough people going to it. The
Codocks Club, it closed. So there was – that’s three licensed clubs in the – well, from
Darling Street back down this way, that all closed for lack of people. They just, you
know – the people that were moving into the district weren’t the three schooners after
work type. Now they get home at 7 o’clock in time for dinner, whereas the other blokes
were knocking off at 4 o’clock and having a couple of beers and being home at 6
o’clock for dinner. So there’s a different type of person for the pubs and the clubs.
MS PICKARD: How do you feel about that?
MR LARGE: Well, it’s taken everything out of the what used to be. Like, Neil
mentioned the name a minute ago of Lewis. My father lived in Cove Street and Ray
Lewis, the father, lived across the road from him. Well, they’d sort of work together or
they’d go to the pub together. Jack Lewis was another brother. So if my father said,
“Oh, I’ve got to fix a gate or I’ve got to do something on the roof”, the Lewis brothers
would turn up and do the job with him. If Lewis had to do some painting, my father
would go and help him. There was all this camaraderie where, because they went to the
pub together or because they work at Mort’s Dock together or the Adelaide Company
together or something, they all – like, if you were doing a job and you needed a
plumber’s assistant, you know, you had to do something that you needed a plumber for,
someone would turn up and tell you how to do it, dig a big hole, do this, do that, a
licensed plumber, and it was all do it yourself, but there was all this work together thing,
you know. It was sort of like a friendly, everybody was happy and, yeah, everyone used
to help each other out because they worked together, the knew each other, they were
very close and that.
Today’s population, you know – I mean, I live in this house for a long time, I know the
next door neighbour on this side, next door neighbour on the other side rents, they come
and go. People across the road, I know who they are, but we’re not close by any stretch
of imagination. It’s no fault of theirs, no fault of mine, it’s just that they go to work and
get home, you know, by the time I’m inside the house, I’m not outside the house. And
another thing, of course, is that they’ve got no reason to be out the front because all the
car spaces are all taken, you know. I’m a back lane bloke, I’ve got a back lane entrance,
so I use everything out the back lane. People don’t even know I exist, you know. I just
sort of go out the back door and you never see them or talk to them, except for my next
door neighbour where we’ve got a common fence, you know. So, yeah, I’ve noticed the
changes coming for probably 30 years, here, a little bit here, a little bit there.
I’m not pro-big development. I’m not a greenie. But like the Balmain Power House,
when you’re driving across Iron Cove Bridge and you look up to where the Balmain
Power House was and Monsantos was, I get a picture in my mind of the Incas living in
the hills with all little holes, you know, (laughs) that you’ve seen in some movie.
Where you’re driving across and you think it’s just like a big wall with windows in it,
you know, and that’s accommodation for a lot of people. There’s 300 units or
something down there and half the people that live there don’t know each other. It’s
just changed so much over the years because of – everyone lived in the area, they
worked in the area, they socialised together, they played sport together and they walked
the streets together.
MR BEVAN: Yeah, that’s the big thing, the walking.
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MR LARGE: Yeah.
MR BEVAN: Not driving home in a car. You get on a bus, you get on the boat, you
get on the tram or you walk down to the bus stop, “Hello, hello, hello.”
MR LARGE: (Laughs). Yeah, I was just having a little laugh. I got on the bus to go
into town - - MR BEVAN: Can’t say anything to anybody. Even where I live now, I live at North
Ryde, I’ve lived there for 44 years, and, as Geoff said, we know – I know this fellow
next door and this one, I know another one up here, one there, but it’s starting to get
very thin. And I say to my wife, “Did you see that young fellow up there?” “Yeah,
that’s so-and-so’s kid.” Oh, God, I said, “How old is he?”, you know, “Like he’s about
18, 19.” “Yeah? Gee whiz, he’s grown, hasn’t he?” Don’t even know his name but.
MS PICKARD: Yeah. And so this is in North Ryde?
MR BEVAN: Yeah.
MS PICKARD: So it’s not just Balmain?
MR BEVAN: No. No, it’s - - MS PICKARD: It’s the times rather than the actual area?
MR BEVAN: Yeah, I think it is.
MR LARGE: Yeah.
MR BEVAN: It’s that motorcar. I mean, I put mine under the house, so I get in there
and shoosh, and it’s just, “Geez, there’s that white car going. I know that white car”,
and that’s all they know, there’s a white car just went down the street. (Laughs).
MR LARGE: Yeah.
MS PICKARD: Yeah. So that sense of community has gone everywhere in the 70s?
MR BEVAN: Yeah.
MR LARGE: Yeah. Well, I only ever lived in Balmain, so I can’t – well, I’m the only
one left in our family, even though I’ve got two brothers and two sisters alive, with
families, I’m the only one that’s still in Balmain. Of all the kids that went to school at
the same time as me, like Neil, in the same three years, in the last three years at school, I
don’t think there’s anyone left that live in Balmain, because their parents rented houses
or their parents lived in company owned houses and everything, and as time changed
and, you know, Caltex closed – I mean, my brother-in-law was a foreman at Caltex, so
he lived in a company house, so he ended up at Gladesville, you know, those things
happened.
A hell of a lot of people rented, so all of a sudden everyone realised that you didn’t have
to do anything at Balmain, just buy the house, knock a few walls down and build it up a
bit and you had a beautiful place with water views, you know. Well, the people that
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were living in them weren’t, of course, able to fork out the five and a half thousand
pound that they needed for the original house, you know, so they had to move. So you
go to the Central Coast now and you meet more people from Balmain at the Tuggerah
Gold Club than you’d ever meet in Balmain. And people will often say to me – I walk
down the street and I bump into someone and they say, “Geez, someone from Balmain.
You’re the first person I’ve seen. I’ve been here for two hours”, you know, walking up
and down the street.
MS PICKARD: And this is in Darling Street?
MR LARGE: In Darling Street, yeah. People have said it to me, I’m the only one they
ever saw there.
MR BEVAN: Yeah.
MR LARGE: But I’ve got a neighbour, when I lived in Davidson Street, in ’41, he was
a young bloke alongside me, you know, next door neighbour, and he’s still there and I
see him quite a bit, you know. The Back to Balmain day last Sunday was great because
he brought down some old photos and everything like that. But, I don’t know, I just
think it’s just changed – I even tend to live on my own, you know. Like, I think, oh,
well, I’m doing this and I’m doing that and it doesn’t – no one worries me, so I won’t
worry them. Although we’ve got good neighbours, we’ve got wonderful neighbours,
and they do at Christmas time make every effort to get in – we have a back lane party at
Christmas or a street party at Christmas, close the lane off a bit, you know, and that’s
good, but they’re people have actually – the fences touch each other, you know. You
sort of can’t help but know them and, of course, they’re very nice people, so that’s great.
MR BEVAN: Yeah, that’s right. There’s no talking over the back fence.
MR LARGE: No.
MR BEVAN: Or on the side fence. I mean, I lived next door to my auntie and then we
had good friends next door and you could talk to them. I mean, you always talked to
your auntie, but even the Caines (ph) next door, you know, they were quite good. You
walk down to the bus stop and, “Hello”, you know, “Mr Davidson.” “Hello, Mrs Cook,
hello.” (Laughs).
MR LARGE: I was going to tell you. I got on the bus the other day because I had to
go into town a bit early and it was only like 7.30 or something, and when I got on the
bus it was crowded and I was standing up and a girl offered me a seat, and I thought,
geez, I must be getting old, you know, like the grey hair’s starting to show, but I
knocked it back. But then a guy got off halfway down Mullens Street and left an empty
seat and a bloke moved out of the way, so I sat down, see, and I’m looking around and I
thought, geez, I’m the oldest person on this bus by 30 years, not just the oldest, you
know.
MR BEVAN: (Laughs). Yeah.
MR LARGE: I said to the bloke that moved out of the road, I said, “I’m the oldest
bloke on this bus.” He said, “Yeah”, he said, “you’re lucky.” He said, “I’ve got to go
to work.” (Laughs).
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MR BEVAN: (Laughs).
MR LARGE: Yeah. But that’s – it’s different now. They’re all gone to work and they
all get home late and - you know, my own son, you know, we babysit for him and his
wife, they know whether they’re going to be in the country, you know. Like, they get a
phone call and they go, “Oh, I’ve got to go New Zealand for two days”, you know, or –
he’s going to leave next Sunday, I think, for China. So, you know, things are so much
different, yeah. Like, when we were at school, an excursion for us was Parsley Bay.
These days they spend four days in the snow, you know, like it’s not unusual for kids to
do that. They fly all over the place and everything.
MR BEVAN: Yeah. I can remember the girl opposite me, like being about 12, and she
was in my sister’s class and she went to the Barrier Reef.
MR LARGE: Wow. (Laughs).
MR BEVAN: The Barrier Reef? She going to fly, is she? Yeah, see.
MS PICKARD: Something very special.
MR BEVAN: Was it ever.
MR LARGE: Yeah.
MS PICKARD: Yeah. Do you see any parts, any aspects of the change that you feel
are positive, that are good, in any ways - - MR LARGE: Oh, great – it’s been great for the suburb, yeah.
MS PICKARD:
- - - you know, how is it better?
MR LARGE: Well, it’s better because the old places that were damp, riddled and, you
know, falling down and old slate roofs with holes in them and everything, all been
renovated and made to look like beautiful homes. There’s a lot of benefit, no doubt in
the world about that. Forget the high rise – the Incas type thing. The actual homes that
are renovated, they do wonderful work with it, you know, and it really does good – and
it’s good for the schools. And the P&C these days, if they have a fund-raising thing,
like the Big Night Out for Birchgrove last Friday, they raise quite a lot of money and, of
course, the benefit to that is that they get coverage in the school yard so you’re not
getting sunburnt all the time and a lot of benefits in their library and things that – in the
old days, you know, it was – you could throw a few pence in.
These days they throw a few hundred dollars in and, of course, you get a lot of benefit
out of the type of people that are in the area, and they’re all very nice people. Like, they
don’t mix as well, but there’s no – you know, they’re all nice types, you know, really
well educated and nice people. So, yeah. I mean, I’ve heard a lot of stories about things
at Birchgrove, because my wife works there, that would amaze you at how generous
these people are. They are very, very nice people and they’re very generous to help the
education of their own children, you know, and, of course, all the other kids get the spin
off, so that’s great, yeah. I mean, they just did a $75,000 thing in the schoolyard now
that, you know – I think one or two, three people put most of that money in themselves.
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They raised it, but they didn’t have to do a lot of raising because it was coming in in big
lumps. So, yeah, there’s a lot of benefit from the changes.
Whilst I see the loyalty and the camaraderie of everyone working together and all that in
1950, they don’t work together and they don’t go to the football together and they don’t
do that, but they’re generous in a different way, I’m sure of that, you know, very nice
people.
MS PICKARD: They have coffee together on Sunday mornings in the - - MR LARGE: Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, you can’t walk up the footpath. (Laughs).
MR BEVAN: (Laughs).
MR LARGE: Yeah. Well, if they didn’t bring their dogs and their prams, it wouldn’t
be so bad, but (laughs) if you just had to sit there and put up with the smoke, yeah. It’s
great, yeah. I think the people are really nice and I’ve never met a bad one, I could say
that for sure. In the old days in Balmain there was – I think if you talk about Balmain
for long enough, you’ve got to get onto the shifty types that we had in SP bookmaking
and all those sort of things were alive, you know.
MS PICKARD: Can you remember any of them?
MR LARGE: Oh, yeah, yeah. There was a bookies in Birchgrove Road, across the
road from the Riverview, where you could go down the side of the house and they’d
converted the laundry into a betting shop on Saturdays and, you know, it didn’t matter
who you were, how old you were, there was no 18-year-old or anything like that. If you
went in and you had a dollar each way or 10 cents each way, it was a shilling each way,
they’d just take the bet, write it down, put your initials down. If you won, they’d come
and you’d go and collect, you know. There was plenty of bookies around.
MR BEVAN: Yep.
MR LARGE: Yeah. And there was, I suppose, you know, The Prince and the Premier
book, there was a few Balmain blokes got a jumper for that, when they were talking
about Bob Askin and those people. There was – I don’t think there was any house
robbers or any – like, I’ll tell you about a particular incident. My father’s place in Cove
Street, someone jumped over the back fence and broke into his work shed and took the
tools. And this is without a shadow of a doubt, the father of the kids brought the tools
back because he knew who they belonged to and then blew his kids up and said, “That
bloke’s a good bloke. Don’t go and pinch stuff off him.”
MS PICKARD: (Laughs).
MR BEVAN: That’s a - - MR LARGE: Yeah, that actually happened, yeah. Because the kids only lived about
two blocks away, yeah, and the old man knew my father, so he brought the stuff back,
yeah. But you didn’t pinch another kid’s pushbike or anything like that. A lot of the
things that happened in Balmain in those days fell off the back of a truck. You’re never
quite sure where it came from, you know. There was places that – like, I can’t mention
names, of course, but there was a place called the Hothouse where you could just walk
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in the door and they’d sort of measure you up and you could walk out with a new suit,
new shirt, new shoes, everything you needed to go to a wedding or something, it’d cost
you about a third of the price if you went up the road. (Laughs). Yeah.
So there was a shady part of Balmain, but they were all – you never got in their road
and they never got in your road, you know. I suppose you could have fallen in with
them, but once again, you know, at the time in those days, you just did what you did,
you know. I think I was more interested in sport than anything like that. And I didn’t
go to the pubs much either, so that made it a bit harder. I didn’t get in with those
groups. There’s a lot of nice blokes. Even today, I suppose, you still see – I see the
bloke on TV the other day, he didn’t mean to be, but he was filling his car up and he
was on TV and I thought, gee, I don’t think he’d like to know that all the crowd’s
watching him. He’s a sort of a bloke that wears a mask, I think, yeah.
MS PICKARD: Is there anything you’d like to add, Neil? That’s been a really good
talk.
MR BEVAN: Oh, no. There was an SP bookie down our way, down the East end
there, you know, in a certain little street, and they had a cockatoo standing outside the
hotel. And I used to place the bet on for my dad actually and I’m not even a – I don’t
even bet myself. Saturday before we go to the football he says, “Here, take this around,
put this 10 bob on so-and-so, all up, the next one in the race”, or whatever race it was.
Yeah, right, you know, so I used to go round there and, like Geoff said, they’d just write
it down and put your name down and what horse and how much you put on it. And
then we’d go to the football and they’re all saying, you know, “Who won that race?
Who won that race?” “Oh, yeah, I got that one”, sort of thing, you know. And then the
next one, all up, whether it’s probably, you know, run a place or may not even run a
place, so you’ve done your dough again. And that was there for quite a number of
years, that little place.
MR LARGE: My last betting story is, my dad asked me to put a bet on in the
Melbourne Cup because I was out at the time and he was home, I don’t know why, and
I went to where I was going to put on and I couldn’t get in, it was that crowded, and I
thought, oh, it won’t do any good anyway, so I didn’t put it on, and, of course, it won I
think at about 14 to one, so I had to pay him out of my pocket. (Laughs).
MR BEVAN: Oh, yeah. (Laughs).
MR LARGE: That was because the SP was that crowded that - - MR BEVAN: Yeah.
MS PICKARD: Yeah.
MR LARGE: And, like, I left it to the last minute - - MS PICKARD: Yes.
MR LARGE: - - - and I wasn’t going to get on, so I thought, oh, don’t worry about it,
yeah.
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MR BEVAN: Yeah. Another thing when we were young as well, because I lived next
door to my cousins, who were a couple of years older than me and that, and we had, you
know, 10 foot dinghies and 12 foot dinghy and we used to go spear fishing under all the
wharves, you know, spear fishing the leather jackets. Yeah, you’re not allowed to go
under the wharf – well, you can’t get under them now, the newer ones because they’re
just big casings – but you would go under and spear fish with a speak, you know, about
10 foot long with three prongs on it and - - MS PICKARD: Home made?
MR BEVAN: Yeah, yeah, home made. They were home made and you would just –
you’d stand up on the front of the boat and one of youse pushed himself along off the
piles underneath there. Sometimes the watchman might say, you know, get out from
under there, but most times they – if you kept quiet, you know, it was all right. And,
God, there was – the MSB as well being there, the Harbour Trust, in the bay there, sort
of every weekend all the timber from all the wharves that they’d collect and renew,
they’d make a big bonfire. It’d burn, you know, from Saturday afternoon although
Sunday.
MS PICKARD: Where would that be?
MR BEVAN: Right where the police – water police are now, where the Maritime
Services Board was.
MR LARGE: So when did they stop Guy Fawkes things? That was probably 20 years
ago or more. We used to always have our - - MR BEVAN: Yes, yeah.
MR LARGE: - - - big pile of rubbish to burn - - MR BEVAN: Yeah.
MR LARGE: - - - firecracker night, you know, till they started throwing the bungers at
you and busting you up instead of throwing them up in the air.
MR BEVAN: Gosh, yeah.
MR LARGE: I think one of the big things I wrote down before I came down is that
there was a lot of picnics. There was sports picnics at Birchgrove Oval. There were
church picnics and – so there was a lot of this congregational thing with - you know, I
used to go to all the ones for the Methodist Church even though I used to go to the
Catholic Church because that was a better picnic at Parsley Bay, and they took you over
on a bus and you could go for a swim and go in all the races and everything. And that
was a fairly common thing, picnics. You used to go to quite a few. And the rugby
league used to hold them down here, annual sports days, and, you know, there’d be like
five or 6,000 people down in Birchgrove Oval for a sports day.
Another thing, of course, is we had all cooked meals at home. These days, of course, the
pizzas and take aways and the McDonalds and everything. But in our days, I think,
your mother cooked every meal. I think you had – yeah, packed your lunch for school
and everything else, which is different to what it is today. Another thing that’s obvious
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is that you have early nights in those days. Everyone went to bed after dinner, you
know. Like, you’d probably sit up for an hour listening to the radio, but then you went
to bed early. So these days, you know, you struggle to get the kids into bed at half past
11 sometimes, even on school days, you know, yeah. I suppose that about sums it up, I
think, yeah. It was a bit like that in those days, otherwise – you’d visit a lot relatives
too. If you had relatives in the area, you spent Sunday lunch with them or Sunday
night’s dinner and that with them. Because as I said earlier in the day, my father had
two sisters and a brother in the area, so we used to visit them quite a lot. That was a big
thing out, get on a tram and go over to Lilyfield and see my auntie and that, yeah. So
now everybody’s moved away or passed on, all that part of it just went with time, yes.
Like, I’ve got no aunties, no uncles, no parents in the area now. Lucky for me, I
suppose, that I’m still alive, but a lot of good people have gone before me. I’ve got a
few - - MS PICKARD: Yeah. Well, my nieces and nephews never come to visit us.
MR LARGE: Yeah, yes.
MS PICKARD: Maybe at Christmas time.
MR LARGE: Yeah.
MS PICKARD: And family, you know, christenings and weddings and things.
MR LARGE: This is a modern day thing. We have Westies dinners. I’ve got two
brothers and two sisters that live away and if there’s a family birthday for a niece or a
nephew or an uncle or someone, we all meet either at a pub close to where they are or a
club close to where they are. So my wife and I go to about 10 or 12 Westies dinners a
year to fit in with my brothers and sisters, you know, yeah. So they don’t – they come
here because we’ve got one or two particular restaurants that they like that have been
well established long time restaurants, so they come here occasionally, but mostly we
just go up for Westies dinners. They’ve got all their daughters and sons and son-in-laws
and everything close to them, and the grandkids up there, so it’s easier for us – two of
us to go up then for 14 of them to come down or something, you know.
MS PICKARD: But it’s different from getting on the tram and going to your auntie’s
for a roast on Sunday.
MR LARGE: Yeah, different altogether.
MS PICKARD: Yeah.
MR BEVAN: Yeah, that’s right. My mum, because we lived down the East end there,
we – oh, gee, I mean, we had aunties, uncles, cousins all within sort of 200 yards.
MS PICKARD: Well, you had 17 - - MR BEVAN: They were everywhere they were.
MR LARGE: Yeah, yeah.
MS PICKARD: Seventeen or 16 aunties and uncles, didn’t you?
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MR BEVAN: And then, of course, some of them moved away a bit, one up near the
hospital, Balmain Hospital that is. (Laughs).
MR LARGE: But that’s a long way away, isn’t it? (Laughs).
MS PICKARD: (Laughs).
MR BEVAN: And then the other one here in College Street and then she also lived in
Mort Street as well. So we used to - - MS PICKARD: yeah, went to the country. (Laughs).
MR BEVAN: - - - used to go there. Oh, God, yeah. And so we would go and see
them fairly regular and they’d come down and see us. And then I had another one lived
up – or she’d moved too far away, to Yagoona.
MS PICKARD: So do you think - - MR LARGE: So we’re not going to jump around all the time, but going back to when
we were kids, the community of Balmain was divided. It wasn’t divided by –
“segregation” is a bad word, you think of, you know, indigenous people or something
there – it was just divided because if you lived in Birchgrove, you went to Birchgrove
School. If you lived down in East end, you went to Nicholson Brothers, you know,
Nicholson Street School. Just a sec. I’ll ring you back, Chris. Righto. If you lived
down in East end, Davidson Street way and that, you sort of went to the Pigeon Ground,
but if you lived over the other side of Mullens Street, you went to Rozelle School. So it
was sort of divided up and – like, Neil – I wouldn’t bump into Neil till I went to school
because he lived down the East, and it was a long way to go from Balmain East to
Balmain Town Hall, you know. You’d just get on a tram and go up, but you’d have to
have a reason. You just - - MS PICKARD: Yeah. Was there rivalry?
MR LARGE: Oh, I don’t think so. I think, you know, there was no sort of gang thing
like that, you know.
MS PICKARD: No.
MR BEVAN: No. it was just sort of like they lived that area, that - - MR LARGE: A little touch of snobbery. If you went too far over that way, you come
from Rozelle, you just weren’t Balmain, you know. There was that – if you went to the
Amuse You, you probably came from Rozelle, when that picture show was open, you
know.
MR BEVAN: Well, I can remember one time as kids, the majority of us from the East
end we came as far as, like – well, I had a couple of cousins live there, and a few other
blokes that went to school, and we went down there to Colgate Avenue and there was –
from Colgate Avenue up to sort of Campbell Street, and there was a lot more boys
there, and there was just a little bit of an argument, confrontation one day and a few of
them had some BB rifles, you know, and I can remember (laughs) standing - - Large & Bevan
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MR LARGE: Declare war.
MR BEVAN: We were firing – they were – I didn’t have one at the time, but they
were firing – we were firing at one another and kitting out the lay and I remember one
of them hit me (laughs) right between the teeth - - MS PICKARD: Oh, yuck.
MR BEVAN: - - - a slug. Oh, gee, I ducked out the way from then on I did.
MS PICKARD: (Laughs).
MR BEVAN: Yeah. So I thought – I often think about that. Geez, if I got hit in the
eye with that thing, you know, it wasn’t too far away.
MR LARGE: Yeah, I suppose the - - MR BEVAN: But that was only a little bit of rivalry that I ever came across,
otherwise - - MR LARGE: I think if you went down to Punch’s Park for a game of football, you sort
of just – they picked the teams – when you turned, you’d say, “Oh, you’re on that
team”, you know, like you get put on that team or you get put on that team, but that was,
you know – I think that was a balance of ability, quality - - MR BEVAN: Yeah, yeah, it was.
MR LARGE: - - - as well as everything else, you know. As soon as – like if Jacky
Sinclair turned up, they’d say, “Oh, we’ll have Sinky. We’ll keep him. He’s a good
player.”
MR BEVAN: Yeah. Or “We’ll want two players to make up for him.”
MR LARGE: Yeah, that’s right.
MS PICKARD: “You’re going to have him, we’ll have two instead”, yeah.
MR LARGE: Yeah, they’d have two, yeah.
MR BEVAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MR LARGE: So there wasn’t rivalry, I don’t think.
MS PICKARD: Well, that was a really great talk.
MR LARGE: Okay.
MS PICKARD: And unless you’ve got something else that you were keen to add,
we’ll say that’s the end of it.
MR LARGE: No, no, no worries.
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MS PICKARD: And thank you very, very much.
MR BEVAN: Oh, that’s good, yeah.
MS PICKARD: That was very, very enjoyable and informative.
MR BEVAN: I think if you walked, you know, started down the East end and you say,
well, that was there, this was there, Mrs So-and-so lived there, they lived there, he was a
brother of his and you keep walking up, I mean, you can go on forever and ever. I
mean, I’ve got another cousin who’s 10 years older than me, he’s 80, and he’s lived
down there all his life. I mean, he could tell more things.
MS PICKARD: I might get his name from you later.
MR LARGE: There was a couple of industries that kicked off in Balmain. I think
Golden Cob birdseed. I think that might have kicked off. And I think Birds Eye Frozen
Foods was the Arena family. I think they kicked off frozen foods in Balmain, yeah. so
there was a couple of things that happened that because you came from the area, you
know, you had sort of a little bit of pride in the fact that those few little bits of things
happened. Like Pearson’s sandsoap, that was a Balmain – they were in – near the
Bridge Hotel there, yeah. So there’s sort of like another thing about Balmain besides
their football team or their cricket team, or something else. There was always this
association with the industry. It was always a great thing to have Mort’s Dock. Mort’s
Dock was a big thing, you know. Everyone - - MS PICKARD: There was a feeling of pride about some - - MR LARGE: Yeah. Well, Mort, of course, invented refrigerated transport. So, yeah,
there’s a big thing about it. Everyone knew about it and there was a pride about being
part of Balmain, yeah, for sure. Turn it off. (Laughs).
MS PICKARD: Okay. (Laughs).
INTERVIEW CONCLUDED
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