I am reflecting on the last 60 years, and writing 60 blog posts in 60 days. 30 about people and 30 about events, places, experiences and entities.
I was fortunate as a kid to have wonderful grandparents. Mum’s parents, Nan and Pa,(Alec and Elsie Burmeister) known as Nanny and Pa Northcote, and Dad’s parents, who were divorced, Nanny Falia and Big Pa.
We spent many weekends at Nan and Pa’s place on Clarke St Northcote. It’s a house filled with memories and I still like to drive past it and reminisce even though it is over 30 years since they lived there. Dennis train station was just around the corner, the shops at Vicki Rd where we were sent to buy things for Nan, the newsagent opposite the railway station where we would go and buy the Saturday night Herald for Pa and Westgarth State School was up the street, another place to play and ride the bikes.
The house was cosy and warm and constantly filled with family and fun. There was always lots of yummy food: trays of Cornish pasties, Lamingtons, yoyo biscuits, home baked bread and roast dinners. The crowning glory was Nan’s Christmas pudding, complete with threepences and sixpences. There was a sleepout in the backyard (which had been built for Uncle Clarrie and Auntie Emmy to live in before they could get a house of their own) and it was more than a place to sleep, it was a playroom, a cubby house, a games room and a place to read on a cold winter afternoon. The park at the end of the street was a great place to play or ride the bikes that Pa had fixed up for the grandkids to ride.
One of my outstanding memories is the day that someone said, “If you swapped the main bedroom for the (rarely used) formal lounge, and knocked down this wall you’d have twice as much living space”. Less than an hour later, armed with hammer and saw, Pa was cutting a hole in the wall and shortly after a wide doorway had been created and voila, the house was indeed transformed. Many Saturday nights were spent in the lounge room, watching the footy replay and eating soup and toasted sandwiches in front of the heater. Pa had a “clicker machine”, with a lever that turned over numbers on some sort of odometer. We loved playing with it and seeing how high we could get the number.
Nan and Pa Northcote on their golden wedding anniversary
Local newspaper story
Nan was quite deaf so you had to speak loudly for her to hear you. When I visited with a couple of mates one day, one forewarned the other, “Don’t be surprised if Marcus starts yelling at his grandmother”. She was mischievous and funny and if you said something cheeky she would raise both her fists as if to give you a hiding. If she wasn’t cooking she was always knitting something. Pa had been a bricklayer and was handy with the tools. He would do whatever he could to help and support his family. Unfortunately, Pa was a terrible driver and a trip in the car with him was a perilous adventure, although it was always the other drivers who were at fault apparently!
When we moved to Moolap Pa helped build our new house. He loved Nan dearly and Carolyn and I were able to go to Melbourne for their Golden Wedding anniversary in 1985. Sadly Pa died just a few months later and Nan couldn’t bear to live in the house without him so she moved to a retirement village in Wantirna, far removed from the life we all knew in inner suburban Melbourne. We were fortunate to have a few visits with Nan in her final years, our kids knew her as ‘Old Nan’ and I had the great privilege of conducting her funeral service when she died at the age of 91.
We called Dad’s mum (Elizabeth Holt) Nanny Falia because she lived in a small town in northern Victoria called Nathalia and when we were little we pronounced it Falia. The name stuck but it was a misnomer homonym, Nanny was anything but a failure. Nan’s first husband Jack died as a result of the first world war- I have his medals- and they had a son Jack who also died, of tuberculosis when he was a teenager. Nan and Pa had two children, my Dad Peter and his big sister, my Auntie Merle but they had divorced before I was born. In fact it wasn’t until I was a fair bit older that I realised Nany Falia and Big Pa had been married. And, many many years later I discovered that they hadn’t actually been married but Pa had taken on Nan’s surname, Holt, in favour of his own surname, Flint.
Nearly every school holidays we took the long trip to Nathalia, playing Spotto and trying to be the first to spot the water tower in the main street, the sign that we were almost there. Our cousins the Gallaghers lived next door to Nan which made our holidays there all the more memorable and fun. John, Geoff, Julie and Kathy were all around the same age as us and we all got along wonderfully, playing from dawn til dusk.
Cousins, the Holts and the Gallaghers with Nanny Falia. John is missing.
A Holt Gallagher reunion in Geelong, the first time in nearly 40 years!!!
One summer we got into digging holes as forts for our games of cowboys and Indians which then graduated to digging a tunnel between the forts. We succeeded in joining the two and crawling back and forth between them but I shudder when I think about it now and the risk of it collapsing and trapping one of us. The clay soil probably was our saving grace.
Nan cooked on a wood stove and had an outside dunny up past the woodshed. It was a great break through when she got an inside toilet, the bathroom was decorated in mauve, her favourite colour. Alan and Bruce slept in the sleepout off the kitchen, Vicki slept in the spare bedroom with Mum and I slept in Nan’s room on a bed by the window. Nan’s pantry always had jars and jars of preserved fruit on the shelves and no sooner had we finished lunch than she would start preparing dinner.
The radio on the mantel piece played the local Shepparton radio station and each morning they announced the deaths of people around the Goulbourn Valley. Years later when Nan died I immediately thought of her name being announced in the same way. Nan loved cricket and when a test match was on she would spend the day in the darkened lounge room watching every ball.
Nan had a beautiful garden and a shaded veranda and we spent hours playing chasey, hide and seek and releaso around the house. One afternoon Mum and Nan were lying on a rug in the garden and we delighted in leaping over them as we ran around the house chasing one another.
During my time in Queensland Nan came to stay with us twice and she and I spent hours lying on her bed and talking. I loved her very much and I treasure those memories because only a few months later Nan died. She was 76.
With my beloved Nanny Falia, late 60s.
The Gallaghers at their Mum, Aunty Merle's funeral, 2013
Pop’s Dad (Mervyn Holt) was known to us as Big Pa and he lived in Queensland with his second wife, Auntie Ada. We didn’t see him very often but whenever he did come down to Victoria for a visit we knew what to expect: a Jelly Bean scramble! The four of us kids would gather in the lounge room as Pa opened a bag of jelly beans then he would suddenly upend them and they would scatter all over the floor as we would launch ourselves in a frenzy to try and grab as many as we could. Next came the tallying and comparing our hauls before the inevitable “demand” from Dad to hand over any of the green ones which were his favourite.
Pa loved Australian bush poetry and could recite many Of Banjo Patterson and Henry Lawson’s poems from memory as well as some of his own. I have recordings of Pa reciting The Bush Christening, Mulga Bill’s Bicycle and one of his own, Tin Lizzie. Pa had been a bus conductor and a used car salesman among other things but whatever he did he had a knack for making money and he became a very wealthy man.
When he retired he took up training racehorses at their property in Amberley, “Mervada” and many of his horses were named “Mervada _____” He won many races at the country race tracks around southern Queensland and I remember going to the races with him at Ipswich one day when Mervada Sam won a race.
Pa wasn’t flashy with his money but he did like to drive quality cars and I remember him having a Landau, a special edition Statesman and then a succession of Mercedes, one of which he gave to Dad and Julie on the condition that they drive him home to Queensland (from Maryborough in Victoria) in it first.
In the time I lived in Queensland I saw more of Pa but it took me a long time to learn the lesson about how to shake hands. He would squeeze my hand tightly which I thought was a game. It was only when a kid at school shook my hand and told me to use a firm grasp not a limp grip that I twigged. The next time I saw Pa I gave a decent handshake and he was so impressed that he shook my hand three times while I was there. I don’t know why he didn’t tell me what to do, I guess he thought I’d work it out eventually.
Pa was a very good pool player and taught me that it wasn’t about hitting the balls hard, it was about touch and finesse.
Pa was a mate of Ambrose Palmer who trained boxer Johnny Famechon who won the World Featherweight championship. Pa got this signed photo for me when I was 8.
Many years later when we were married and just had Zachariah we went to visit Pa and Auntie Ada in Rosewood but the trip was a disaster. We drove up to Toowoomba for lunch only to find the restaurant we were supposed to go to had just closed and with nothing else open we ended up at McDonalds! They had never been to McDonalds before. Suffice to say, when they ordered a hamburger they were underwhelmed with what they received! It got worse. On the return journey Pa got booked for speeding and declared it was the only ticket he had ever received. We then stopped to buy a hot BBQ chicken for dinner, hoping that would make up for the disappointment of lunch. Unfortunately the juice in the bottom of the bag caused it to become soggy and the chicken dropped out onto the floor. To finish off the calamities, Auntie Ada slipped on the grease and fell heavily on the hard kitchen floor hurting herself in the process. We didn’t stay around long, fearing things could only get worse.
In late 2001 Pa got sick and we knew the end was coming soon. Alan Vicki and Bruce flew up to Queensland to see him before he died. I couldn’t go due to prior commitments but once they were finished I flew to Queensland and Dad picked me up at the airport. We went straight to the hospital and I arrived in time to see him. Although he was close to the end he looked up and recognised me and said “hello there”. Those were the last words he spoke because about an hour later he passed away with us at his bedside, Dad gently mopping his brow and stroking his head. I again had the honour of conducting one of my grandparent’s funerals and apparently I did a good job because after the service one of his old friends congratulated me and said “You did a great job, I wouldn’t mind you doing my funeral”. He wasn’t quite so keen when I joked “I’ve got my diary if you want to book in a date!”.
Auntie Ada died less than a year after Pa.
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