You’re probably familiar with that old Aussie idiom, “The Big Smoke”. It’s used in reference to a big town or city, most usually of an Australian state capital, and has its origins in the early years of Australia when Indigenous people referred to any European settlement as a “big smoke”, as opposed to the “little smoke” of their own camp fires. As an expression it was soon adopted by European settlers, with Melbourne thus becoming a “Big Smoke”, but have you noticed something about the Big Smoke these days? There just ain’t so much of it about anymore.
Autumn colours in the garden at Yallambie, April, 2022. (McLachlan)
The autumn is a beautiful time of the year in Melbourne with mild temperatures and settled weather, perfect conditions you would think for a little garden burn off. I can remember a time in my childhood when the annual fall of autumn leaves would be raked into piles, a match applied and the leaves left to smoke for hours on end until all that remained was ash, but changing attitudes to city air quality saw an end to this sort of thing. These days the only smoke you will smell is probably drifting into town from up country where properly managed, Indigenous style, cool burning takes place with the change of seasons in order to reduce the potential of summer bushfire.
Winter Solstice at Montsalvat, Eltham, June, 2015. (Picture by Allison Hyland. Source from the Winter Solstice Festival, Facebook)
Preparations for a mid 20th Century, Guy Fawkes style bonfire complete with tractor tyre and a model “Guy” on top. (Picture: Argus file photo/Google search)
The option of having a damn good burn off once in a while was a luxury enjoyed by those earlier, pre-climate change generations and there are some today who will remember that time and the build-up to “Cracker Night” and the annual Guy Fawkes bonfire. Anything and everything that would burn would go onto that pyre and sometimes a few other things beside. Winty Calder in “Classing the Wool” described her father’s infant memory of a bonfire at the Wragge, Wakool River country property when Frank Wright pulled the cooling end of a fencing wire from the fire, only to be burned as he grasped at it further along its length, (Calder, p176). Although rarer these days, the appeal of a bonfire in winter has never really diminished, evidenced in part by the continued popularity of mid-winter Solstice Festivals across Melbourne, including those staged in recent years at Montsalvat and Edendale Farm in Eltham.
Shallow inversion layer of air trapping fog across proposed site of the Australian Radiation Laboratory, 1974. Note the barbecue/incinerator located on the back fence. (Source: PIT Environmental Impact Statement)
Advertising for besser block incinerator for sale from David Jones in Sydney, $25.95
Individually in the suburbs of Melbourne, there was a time when it seemed that every backyard kept an incinerator, usually a Besser block built box in which rubbish of a combustible nature would be stuffed to be lit once a week, usually it seemed when the washing was hanging fresh on the Hills Hoist. Such practices added considerably to air pollution in the city and by the last quarter of the 20th Century there were increasing calls to limit the practice, or outlaw it altogether. In Yallambie, the building of the original suburb in the 1970s and into the 1980s coincided with this decline in incinerator use and one of the points made in John O’Connor’s 1974 Environment Impact investigation into the ARL proposal was that many residents had already elected to dispose of rubbish in ways other than burning in a response to meteorological conditions across the valley, (Appendice 8).
A foggy morning at the site of the proposed Australian Radiation Laboratory. (Source: PIT Environmental Impact Statement, 1974)
The actress type Garbo, not the “beefy armed, blue-singletted” sort that used to collect our rubbish bins. (Picture: Wikipedia)
Backyard incinerators were eventually banned by local governments across Melbourne about 40 years ago, around about the time that the old galvanized rubbish bins collected by those beefy armed, blue-singletted garbos were replaced by plastic wheelie bins collected by extendable armed, transfer station trucks. This coincided with the big push to sort household rubbish into recyclables, green waste and hard rubbish and with Banyule Council this month delivering new bins to Yallambie residents, the system is apparently still open for refinement. The only burn offs permitted now are on suburban blocks over a ¼ hectare in size, but the amount of red tape involved in securing a permit for this and the cost of the permit fee of $157 means that at this house, we have never bothered.
Per capita Australia is one of the world’s largest producers of greenhouse gases and our past reliance on electricity generated by burning brown coal means that regulating a few suburban autumn burns is not going to make that much difference to the bigger picture. The planned closure of the Yallourn W power plant in the Latrobe Valley which supplies about 20% of Victoria’s electricity and replacing it in part by a grid-scale battery, storing power generated from renewable energy, is a sign perhaps of the direction the wind is blowing. We hear a lot about battery systems being the way of the future and the rapid advances in this technology have seen them become available in everything from your mobile phone, to cars and the national power network. The world need for lithium to build these batteries has as a result grown exponentially and wouldn’t you know it, Australia is by far the largest supplier to this date.
Reflections on Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt pan high up in the Andes of South America gives the impression of walking on water. (Picture: Gerald Mueller, March, 2022)
Unlike lithium sourced from South America where it is taken from evaporated pools of brine pumped from beneath dry salt pans, Australian lithium is refined from an ore called Spodumene mined in Western Australia. You would think replacing old energies with renewables incorporating lithium battery technology would be a clear win all round but recycling batteries at the end of their life has emerged as the next big issue with battery producers for commercial reasons refusing to identify the mix of metals used with nickel, toxic cobalt, manganese, rare earths and graphite mixed up with the lithium in a variety of combinations. The only way of extracting these at the end of the life of a battery is by burning it, which to my mind rather takes us back to where we started from.
In India, so called “Waste To Energy” plants operate which are designed to burn rubbish, fueling turbines to generate electricity which is then fed into the national power grid. The environmental problems associated with operating such plants are obvious but intriguingly the trouble in India has always been finding enough rubbish to burn in these furnaces as the average person on the the Sub Continent is just so darned good at recycling. It’s said we live in the West these days in a throw-away society and it’s true that we are far more likely now to throw something away than repair it. The days of my dad hammering new soles onto his shoes or mum darning socks are long gone. Likewise, the Besser block incinerators and Guy Fawkes bonfires are things of the past, relics of a pre-climate change era before the fundamentals of environment protection were properly understood.
I’ve heard it said that one man’s treasure can be another man’s trash. As I look around at our tumble down house built in another time and in answer to the needs of another era, I can say it comes as hardly any surprise. As an idea, it’s scarcely novel.
Photograph taken with the old Kodak during a fishing trip to the Mitta Mitta River in the 1950s.
I remember my father having an old folding Autographic Kodak with a lens that popped out on the end of a bellows and with a little silver pointed scribe which could be used to write directly onto the film. As a child I was fascinated by the mechanics of the object, especially the possibilities of that pencil, but it was only later when I was at art school and getting briefly interested in photography that I thought more about it. With access to a dark room I started wondering what sort of a picture such a camera might be capable of producing in the modern era.
When I asked my father his reply was to the point.
“Oh that. I couldn’t get the film for it anymore so I threw it into the rubbish.”
“What!”
“Oh, never mind that. It was old when I got it. I bought it from a man in a pub you know. By Jove, though,” he paused. He used to talk like that. “Do you think it was hot?”
“No, not really?”
Thus ended in the Pater’s belated realization of his role as a fence, any possibility of a foray into a world of experimental art photography.
My wife’s parents have always had a good appreciation of period style and my father in law in particular has a collection of interesting if now entirely obsolete cameras. At one time he even had his own dark room but, as a freelance commercial artist, that was probably a necessity of business. The reality is, the older they have grown the more modern their tastes have become, a trend in which they are not alone. Just go mid-week to any second hand auction house to see the low prices these sales generate, a by-product of the Marie Kondo led minimalism craze and the dictates of Instagram fashion. It’s a fad but one that overlooks the fact that the old product is generally better made, lasts longer and is sometimes more aesthetically pleasing than a modern day equivalent. Pauline Morrissey calls the trend “fast furniture” and puts it into the same realm as fast food and fast fashion.
Singer of an occasional lunatic tune.
The cuckoo clock that hangs over this table for instance and which offers the occasional lunatic tune on the half hour as I type is one example. It keeps pretty good time and makes more of a contribution to family life here than an equivalent digital device. It was rescued from a rubbish pile one day in need of new bellows and replacement weights. Dusted down and rejuvenated, our feathered friend continues to make a fitting and regular Laurel and Hardy commentary on the unstated, state of the union.
Skipper’s mandala
So it was no surprise after a recent visit to her parents that my wife returned with another discarded object tucked under her arm.
“It’s a mandala,” she said holding up a bent and rusted object for me to inspect. “Apparently my parents got it from Matcham Skipper at Montsalvat back in the day. Mum and Dad threw it away in the garden but it’s going to be bolted onto that wall over there.”
I looked at it with interest. I’d seen similar things before on suburban homes of a certain age. Many have a sort of Brutalist honesty in form and the rust this example had collected in the garden only seemed to add to the shadows cast by the afternoon light onto the indicated wall. It concealed a story of potentialities. Apparently my wife’s grandmother had taken her father out to Justus Jörgensen’s Montsalvat in Eltham when his family re-emigrated from England as £10 Poms after the War. He was only a kid but he already wanted to be an artist. For some reason or other and in spite of her strict Baptist upbringing, Nan took her son over to Montsalvat where Matcham’s sister, Helen gave them a tour of the buildings many of which were still in the construction phase.
“Nan took one look at all those “Bohemians” and their libertine lifestyle and couldn’t get Dad out of there quick enough. She eventually found him an apprenticeship at Colour Gravure but imagine if he had been allowed to stay.”
“Yes, he might have missed out on a spectacular career as a commercial artist where he reached the top of his profession and instead learned how to mix concrete and spit rocks for Justus Jörgensen.”
Building project at Montsalvat c1939-45. (Picture by Albert Tucker, from the Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria)
The Great Hall at Montsalvat under construction c1939-45. (Picture by Albert Tucker, from the Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria)
The story of Justus Jörgensen’s artists’ colony at Montsalvat is well known. It is Australia’s oldest artist colony and is famous for being constructed by the artists themselves from cast off materials scavenged from places all across Melbourne. It’s a principle that seems to have extended into the production of art as for most of his life Matcham Skipper, 1921-2011, as one of the principle artists in residence at Montsalvat, was a keen advocate of the concept of “art in the found object”.
A young Matcham Skipper photographed at Montsalvat, c1939-45. (Picture by Albert Tucker, from the Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria)
One of Justus’ sons, Sigmund Jörgensen who died earlier this year wrote of the Matcham method:
“He loved the stuff and, given the opportunity, would have filled the whole of Montsalvat under metres of his junk. To Matcham, it was inspirational… each piece containing an inspired thought of what he might do with it when he had the time.” (Sigmund Jörgensen, “Montsalvat”, 2014, Allen & Unwin)
Everyone remembers Matcham Skipper today for his exquisitely fine jewellery but that was only one side of what was in essence a multi-faceted career. Sculptor, jeweller, ironworker, photographer and builder of dreams, in his lifetime Matcham Skipper would turn his hand to many things. Mandalas could be described as an eastern sort of cosmic diagram of the infinite world which extends beyond our vision and Skipper borrowed from the concept, using off pressings sourced from the Sidchrome tool works in Heidelberg and incorporating welding skills learned from the Commonwealth Industrial Gas complex in Preston to create strong yet sometimes delicate structures. In the 70s, Skipper mandalas became a bit of a must have for the bare arsed exteriors of many newly minted brick veneers, like the shag pile carpets inside and the flared trousers of their owners outside. For a while they became a much copied static design motif all around town although often it can be said without the mastery of a Skipper original.
“Once, driving him (Matcham) through a Melbourne suburb, I pointed out an ill-formed mandala that had been fixed to a front wall of a cream brick veneer home. I said to Matcham, ‘Well, there is your legacy, the welded mandala.’ Matcham groaned, his great idea prostituted for the almighty dollar.” (Sigmund Jörgensen, ibid)
On location at Montsalvat. A scene from Episode 13 of Series 2 of the Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries, 2013. (Source: Every Cloud Productions).
The annual Montsalvat Arts Festival is happening this weekend but with admission fees and prices charged for individual events across the two days, perhaps the almighty dollar long ago subsumed the guiding principles of what Montsalvat originally stood for, indeed if those principles ever really existed.
The Royal Insurance Building at 414 Collins Street showing its renowned Domestic Tudor facade. “The most perfect Gothic stonework in Melbourne, excepting St Paul’s Cathedral”. It was demolished by Whelan the Wrecker in 1938 and the limestone carved windows became a feature of Montsalvat’s Great Hall.
Many of the architectural elements that were used to build Montsalvat were reputedly sourced from the yard of the demolition company “Whelan the Wrecker”. Whelan’s sign on building sites “Whelan Is Here” followed by “Whelan Was Here” on an empty block became synonymous with a Post War desire for urban renewal and social change in Victoria. Like the buildings it consigned to the scrap heap, the Whelan company in its original form is now long gone but it’s said that during its existence, the company always expressed an appreciation of the heritage of the old buildings it was their task to destroy as evidenced by the select parts of the buildings they salvaged from the wrecking ball. But it is also true that under their watch, much of Melbourne’s 19th century character was sacrificed with hardly a voice heard in protest.
Whelan the Wrecker sending Parer’s Crystal Cafe at 103 Bourke Street, Melbourne into oblivion in 1960.
As reported in Robyn Annear’s fascinating 2005 book, “A City Lost & Found” detailing the history of Whelan the Wrecker in Melbourne, in 1965 Whelan purchased a disused quarry in East Brunswick with a million-and-a-quarter cubic metres of ‘air space’ to fill. It was estimated that the old quarry hole would take Whelan’s 50 years to fill. In less than 10 it was half-full and many of the best buildings in the city had ended up in it. I’ve sometimes wondered what might be found if in years to come an archaeological dig was conducted on the site.
The Great Hall, Montsalvat, April, 1977. (Picture by John T Collins, from the La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria)
Matcham Skipper in 1964. (Source: picture by Sue Ford, from the collection of Nillumbik Shire Council, Museums Victoria)
It’s said that life imitates art and the idea of recycling has now become far more accepted today than it ever was in the days when Matcham Skipper was alive and punching out his mandalas. Recycling has become a catch cry in the 21st century but with China becoming more selective with the plastics it is willing to accept from Australia to be sent back to us as mass production stamped “Made in China”, we may have to start taking responsibility for our own actions. The collapse of SKM in August with debts of $100 million has sent the state’s recycling system into chaos with some councils reportedly forced to send thousands of tonnes of recycling to land fill.
No one wants to be “that hoarder” who ends up consumed by the detritus of a life out of control, but it’s also true that most of us could do more at patching and repairing than throwing away. For every piece of recycled timber used in a building project, a plantation tree or patch of old growth forest is saved. For every dumpster diver sourcing a culinary feast from a bin outside a supermarket, edible food that would otherwise end up as landfill, (up to 7.3 million tonnes in Australia every year according to a recent report) is a win in the war on waste. Recycling it seems has always been an art form, one that old Matcham was onto a long time before anyone else.
The Desert Continent can be a thirsty place. The Quixote sight of windmills standing high above dry watering holes in the Outback is evidence enough of that, but if extra evidence is needed, take a peek at the bending elbows inside any Aussie pub on a Saturday night and see just how thirsty this dry land can really be.
It’s true that many Australians like a drink. Then they like another. To paraphrase Slim Dusty, they love a beer in “moderation” hoping to “never ever ever get rollin’ drunk” and as watering holes go, the Lower Plenty Hotel across the River is the nearest place to moderately bend that elbow at Yallambie. Positioned on a ridge above the Plenty River opposite Yallambie, the “Local” was built in the 1960s when the surrounding sub divisions were just beginning to gather momentum. It might seem in a drinking haze today that the pub has been there for as long as anyone can remember but, as mentioned previously in these pages, the earlier Plenty Bridge Hotel preceded it by more than 100 years.
The old Plenty Bridge Hotel was a country pub in the classic traditions of Aussie drinking, the story of which stretches way back into the 18th century and to an infamous trade in “grog” by the 102nd Regiment of Foot, the aptly named Rum Corp of NSW. Aussie pubs themselves descended from the institution of the British public house and rural tavern, with the addition over time of a number of uniquely Australian features, such as the long bar and ice cold beer setting them apart from those of the Old Country.
The Lower Plenty Rd Bridge and the Plenty Bridge Hotel, photographed by Mark Daniel, 1900, SLV.
The weather board building at the Plenty River crossing place that formed the Plenty Bridge Hotel first opened for business in 1858 and it remained a well-known centre of community life in the district for at least a century.
Victorian Railways No.1 steam charabanc at the Plenty Bridge Hotel, (located opposite the south east corner of Yallambie Park), c1905
John Bakewell, 1807-1888
There has been speculation that it may have been preceded by an earlier pre-gold rush establishment on the same site which, to put this into some kind of perspective within the larger history of Yallambie, means that the first beers were being pulled at the Plenty Bridge during the Bakewells’ continuing involvement at “Yallambee Park” and while Thomas Wragge was yet a young man.
Thomas Wragge
Opening of the Heidelberg Golf Links at Bryn Teg, 1928
That may be, but at any rate, much of the later life of the Plenty Bridge became synonymous with its use by the Heidelberg Golf Course as a 19th Hole and indeed, over time, the hotel would even become known by an alias, the “Golf Club Hotel”.
In 1948 however, Robert (Bob) Irwin, a former Riverina Publican, took over the hotel licence with a vision of creating a country-club style venue within the environment of the old hotel. Among other renovations, the Plenty Bridge was given a lick of paint, sun blinds were installed and Irwin added what was commonly supposed to be Melbourne’s first formal beer garden.
Melbourne’s first formal beer garden. Source: John Irwin Family Collection
White coated “waiters” at the beer garden service counter. Source: John Irwin Family Collection
White coated “waiters” attended patrons within a vine clad and trellised enclosure and on a sunny day the atmosphere seemed quite fashionable.
This later life of the Plenty Bridge coincided with an Australian liquor licencing policy which, although seeming strange to the drinker of today, existed for a significant part of the 20th century. This was the era of “6 o’clock closing” when public bars were forced to close at 6pm, a mere hour after most working men knocked off for the day. The infamous “6 o’clock” swill” as it became known developed as a result of austerity measures introduced during the 1st World War but, under pressure from the local Temperance Movement in a sort Antipodean version of American Prohibition, it became permanent, remaining until long after the end of the 2nd War.
“The Bar”, John Brack’s apology to Manet and an ironic take on Australia’s “6 o’clock closing” laws, (John Brack, 1954, collection of the NGV).
The Plenty Bridge Hotel as a pub located “almost” in the country, appears to have escaped the most notorious aspects of the regular 6 o’clock, city worker, drinking binge. As a country pub, it was one of the first places where a drink could be legally purchased on Sundays, before the general easing of liquor licencing laws and the gradual repeal of all the various state Sunday Observance Acts.
Men crowded in the corner of the main bar of the Plenty Bridge Hotel in the late 1940s. The photograph half visible on the wall to the right was a team photograph of the Montmorency Football Club. Source: John Irwin Family Collection
A photograph from the John Irwin Family Collection taken inside the main bar of the Plenty Bridge Hotel in the late 1940s to my mind has an echo of one of Max Dupain’s iconic bar room images of a similar era.
Exhibition of Max Dupain photography at Mossgreen, a commercial gallery in High Street, Armadale, May 2016.
Dupain, perhaps better remembered for a single, quintessentially Australian image of a sunbaker he took on a NSW beach, was an incredibly prolific and gifted photographer whose subjects continue to resonate throughout the Australian consciousness. In the 1940s he was commissioned by the Australian Department of Information to document the Australian way of life and his photographs from this time remain an important record of the changing face of Australian society.
Similarly, the Plenty Bridge Hotel picture shows characters of that now largely bygone world. A time of laconic Australian men, their elbows resting lightly on the bar on a Saturday afternoon, yarning over cold glasses while their women sat across the hallway, segregated inside the so called “Ladies Lounge” in front of the fireplace with light shandies their only company.
In those days the barman acted as a sort of de facto hotel security and Mick Noonan, the head barman at the Plenty Bridge, was no exception. Robert Irwin had met Mick years earlier at the Bendigo Show where he watched him step into the ring in one of those old time, “Thorn Birds” style boxing tent displays to take on the champion. Mick took down the champion in a one sided contest after which Robert got talking to him, liked him immediately, and offered him a job as the barman in his pub. When Robert moved to the Plenty Bridge with his wife Daisy and young son John, Mick came with the family.
Mick Noonan (pictured right), the Plenty Bridge barman in front of the tools of his trade. Source: John Irwin Family Collection
Another view behind the PBH bar. Source: John Irwin Family Collection
Another Irwin picture from this time shows Mick behind the main bar with its top shelf liquors, valve radio and cash register. Mick’s reputation as a boxer was usually enough to keep law and order in the pub but on at least one occasion history records how this reputation was briefly put to the test by a stranger entering the bar hell bent on trouble. As the story goes, Mick remained silent to a variety of insults and challenges from this stranger before carefully folding his towel and emerging from behind the bar. In the yard outside between the pub and the stables, the hotel patrons assembled in expectation, forming a ring into which the two protagonists entered. While the stranger hurled verbal abuse Mick prepared himself without a word. Suddenly, with arms and knuckles flailing, the stranger charged into the attack.
The fight that followed was brief. Very brief. It’s said that Mick simply swayed aside from the onslaught and let go with a single punch. The stranger went down and didn’t get up. Without a word Mick went back inside the hotel to resume his duties as though nothing had happened.
Illustrated beer coaster presented to Mick Noonan by patrons of the Plenty Bridge Hotel to commemorate his boxing display. Source: John Irwin Family Collection
The story of the “Fight” at the Plenty Bridge Hotel grew in the telling and was remembered locally for years afterward.
The “Walk, Trot and Gallop”, a light hearted event at the Eltham Agricultural Show, c1950. Mick Noonan, the head barman at the Plenty Bridge, is pictured centre facing the camera and wearing a white shirt riding the retired race horse Tony. They came second. No one remembers whether this result was followed by an unscheduled boxing event… Source: John Irwin Family Collection
It cemented Mick’s reputation as the law man of the PBH: “He was unruffled and not easily angered – but it was a mistake to take his quietness lightly.” (John Irwin)
The beer garden at the Plenty Bridge, AKA the Golf Club Hotel.
Robert Irwin developed the Plenty Bridge into a thriving business that drew patrons from near and far. The Montmorency Football Club were regular drinkers. They won their first DVFL Premiership in 1951 and no doubt bent a few elbows back at the Plenty Bridge that evening.
The Plenty Bridge Hotel’s Robert Irwin was a Great War veteran who had become a father for the first and only time relatively late in life. He loved animals and any kind of sport and was still playing cricket for the RSL in his 50s. Irwin worked hard to achieve his vision for the Plenty Bridge Hotel but in the early 1950s he collapsed while on the nearby Heidelberg Golf Course. The family left the Lower Plenty Hotel in December 1951 and moved to Rosanna in 1953where in 1958, Robert Irwin died of a coronary occlusion aged 59. He left behind his wife Daisy and son John. Remembered as a loving father and husband, Irwin is buried at the Warringal Cemetery in Heidelberg with his wife.
The Plenty Bridge survived for a few more years under a succession of new licensees, Walter Stewart from 1951 to 1954, Noel Seletto from 1954 to 1957 and William Edwards from 1957 to 1958, but it was the end of an era. The hotel was demolished in 1958, the location being cleared away and standing empty for many years before the site was finally consumed last year by a newly constructed car park. With the onset of building work in the adjacent and interestingly named Edward Willis Court, the people and the times of the Plenty Bridge are long gone and all but forgotten, the legendary fight and the last orders of the ghosts of drinkers past lingering on in a few fast fading photographs and memories.
Young John Irwin with transport in front of the Plenty Bridge Hotel. Source: John Irwin Family Collection
Perhaps the final word in this story should therefore go to Robert Irwin’s only child, John, now a grandfather himself of Houston, Texas. John enjoyed an idyllic childhood at the Plenty Bridge. In the following wonderfully immediate and eloquent description, extracted from an unpublished family memoir and quoted here by permission, a window is offered into that Plenty River childhood from another time:
“My mind turns back to a child’s eye: clever, brilliant, uneducated Nan, my Tasmanian grandmother, and our walks together in the bush, her stories of fairies and the spiritual world, Nan milking the cows, separating the cream, making butter with a churn and butter pats, and curling the butter, Nan telling fortunes with cards, reading palms, her pansies and jonquils, her quick wit and ever positive nature, Nan listening to “Blue Hills” on the radio; riding my three wheel bike, on two wheels at the Eltham tennis courts while my mother played, meeting my first friends at tennis; eating ice cream opposite the Eltham tennis courts on Main Road near the street up the hill to the artists’ colony at Montsalvat, my father buying my Shetland pony Dressie (Dresden Lea) at the artists’ colony, meeting someone named Jorgensen at Montsalvat; sitting on a stool in the main bar surrounded by loud men drinking, being “shouted” lemon squashes and raspberry & lemonades; the lush beer garden brimming with guests; speaking to ladies enjoying a drink in their cars in front of the hotel; Christmas morning, 1949 when I was four and was given my first two wheel bike, Mick holding the seat as I rode with him to the dairy to get milk, learning to balance and the thrill of riding home to show my parents; Nan in the backyard asking me to get the men from the bar, and finally understanding there was a deadly snake between us; being mascot for Montmorency Football Club in 1949, the smell of eucalyptus in the rooms, the thrill of running onto the ground with the players and around the oval; my adults only fifth birthday in front of a blazing fire in the ladies’ lounge, table set with a feast, my father opening champagne and then pouring a small green drink after the meal (not for me, crème de menthe); riding Dressie in the yard with my father and later at the Royal Melbourne Show; collecting eggs in the old stables which housed a coop for chickens and ducks: playing with Billie Bush at Yallambie, his birthday party, finding peanuts in the bear’s mouth on the bear skin rug, riding his sled down the slope behind Yallambie, a special air about Yallambie Homestead and its stairs and polished banister; Laddie fighting a ferocious dog called a Queensland Blue Heeler; Nan teaching Laddie to sit up, Nan teaching Cockie, the galah, to speak, Phillip the magpie who resided on the Nan’s bed stead, Nan’s canaries, Nan keeping a fishing line in the river; my father’s fascination with animals and all that we had at the hotel—pony, retired racehorse (Tony), draught horse, two or three cows (one named Daisy after my mother), chickens (“chooks”), ducks — riding around Lower Plenty with Mick in his two wheeled jinker pulled by Tony and visiting the black smith.”
An idyllic childhood: young John Irwin inside the beer garden at the Plenty Bridge Hotel. Source: John Irwin Family Collection
Did you ever spend your time at school, when you should have been paying attention, drawing pictures of little stick men in the margins of your geography book designed to spring to life when you flicked back the edges of the pages? The equivalent today I suspect of surreptitiously watching episodes of Family Guy on an iPhone under the edges of a school table.
The art of the moving picture was widely practised in Australia from the earliest days of cinema. In the early 20th century, Australian film in some respects rivalled the embryonic industry on the West Coast of the United States, very apt for a newly Federated Australia. In the century before, Australians had thought of themselves as Englishmen living abroad and spoke of going “home” to Great Britain. By Federation we were thinking of ourselves as first and foremost true blue “Aussies” but with our own special place within an Empire on which the sun never set. Historical drama with a local content was popular in Australia from the outset and the world’s first narrative feature film is believed to have been the 1906 “The Story of the Kelly Gang” which, pertinent to this story, was filmed at locations around the Heidelberg district, many of which would have been familiar to the residents of Yallambie at that time.
Charterisville in Ivanhoe, built by David Charteris McArthur, c1845.
These included the property Charterisville, leased at that time as a dairy farm by the family of the producer’s wife and located today in Burke Rd North, Ivanhoe; the Rosanna Station railway siding, where scenes of Kelly’s “last stand” at Glenrowan were filmed; and at nearby locations in both Eltham and Greensborough, where additional scenes were made.
Kelly’s last stand from the 1906 film, “The Story of the Kelly Gang”.
The film was a great success and made a fortune for its backers, sparking the outlaw as a subject of film genre and popular culture with the iron clad bushranger being subsequently portrayed on screen by a diverse range of alleged actors from the Australian Rules footballer Bob Chitty to Mick Jagger of rock and roll fame. In the words of the real Kelly as he faced the scaffold in 1880, “Such is life.”
The precise story of early film making in Australia is probably lost to history like the cellulose nitrate film stock on which it was recorded. It is known that Kooringarama Films shot a silent short feature in and around Eltham in 1928 called “Borrowed Plumes”. Kooringarama Films was an amateur company and followed up the following year with four reel, one hour feature, also shot in Eltham, called “As Ye Sow” which was shown to audiences in local halls around Melbourne with an incidental musical accompaniment delivered on a hand cranked gramophone.
Still from the short feature, “Borrowed Plumes” filmed in Eltham in 1928.
Three decades later Tim Burstall, an Eltham resident whose wife taught French at Eltham High School, made his first short feature “The Prize”. It was shot using an old clockwork camera of the type used in battle in the first world war mounted on a 1930s tripod from an Antarctic expedition. It portrayed a boy wandering through the bush in search of a lost goat and most of the locations used were in the vicinity of Eltham. The film won a bronze medal at the Venice Film Festival of 1960 with Burstall later going on to play a principle and “Purple” part in the reinvention of the Australian film industry in the 1970s.
Screen still of Heidelberg Park restyled as Somerset County Fairgrounds, from 2006 film, Charlotte’s Web, (Nickelodeon Movies).
Locations in and around the Heidelberg district continue to be used today in both film and television. The 2006 Nickelodeon production “Charlotte’s Web”, used locations around Heidelberg Park which was transformed for the purpose of the screen to resemble a fair ground in the mid-west of the United States. Similarly, the final episode of Series II of the “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries” saw the artist colony “Montsalvat” in Eltham portrayed as a property in the so called “Australian Alps”. In the event and after the addition of a few dodgy special effects, that hang out looked oddly enough more like a castle hideaway in the Swiss Alps. A sort of Monsalvat on the Matterhorn.
Montsalvat in Eltham as seen in Episode 13 of Series 2 of the Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries, 2013, (Every Cloud Productions).
The process is not without the potential for problems all the same with the owners of a home featured in the 2013 movie “The Conjuring” reportedly suing Warner Bros for an unspecified amount over trespassers coming up to their home as a result of the film’s popularity.
Screen still of Banyule Homestead from Episode 3 of The Ex-PM, (CJZ, ABC TV).
Most recently in Heidelberg, Banyule Homestead has been seen in great detail on the small screen in Shaun Micallef’s amusing “The Ex-PM”, (which also features scenes shot in the surrounding area including one from the opening episode shot on Greensborough Rd, Watsonia), while Napier Waller’s Fairy Hills property continues to be portrayed as the Ballarat home and surgery of the titular character in the returning series, “The Doctor Blake Mysteries”. As ownership of Banyule Homestead changed hands a few months ago and the Waller home enjoys a peculiar rates agreement with local Council, perhaps the publicity isn’t seen as a problem at those properties.
Everyone with a camcorder or even an iPhone can be a film maker of sorts these days although, previously, home movies were limited to the lens sharpness and the sometime dubious technical skills of those fortunate enough to own 16mm or 8mm movie cameras. Yallambie itself was captured on film in a fascinating and previously discussed flick of this sort in the late 1950s, before the subdivision of the estate and while it was still operating as a farm. The 20 minutes of silent, 16mm colour moving picture was shot by Peter Basset-Smith, a professional film maker and friend of the of the last descendants of Thomas Wragge to live at Yallambie.
Bassett-Smith’s film stands alone today as a fascinating tribute to that now vanished era. A few years ago a former singing chum of my wife contacted us out of the blue with news that she had embarked on a career herself in film making. In fact, she was in the process of co-producing a low budget horror film with her son for which development was well underway. She too had been to Montsalvat to enquire about using that property as a location but was disappointed to learn that the fee asked by the trustees was almost more than her whole production budget.
“Hmmm, a horror story you say? I know just the place. It’s not quite Montsalvat or the Matterhorn but will suit your needs.”
So it was that the production crew came to Yallambie as our guests and spent a couple of days on location in the our garden shooting scenes for the movie “Killervision”, (21 Black Entertainment, 2014). It was great fun to be an observer of the process and I soon perceived the possibilities of the creative, almost addictive buzz that is a part of the film making business.
Character brandishing a piece of 4 by 2 in the garden at Yallambie, (Killervision film still).
Some of the action filmed at Yallambie required one of the actors to run through the garden screaming at the top of his lungs brandishing an ugly piece of 4 by 2, (in reality a lump of balsa wood). I wondered, probably too late, what the neighbours might think about this blood curdling racket and was rather perturbed at one point to hear police sirens in the distance. When those sirens came nearer and were obviously proceeding down Yallambie Rd I started to feel really concerned. I was standing next to a car at the time belonging to a member of the film crew and could see a set of (prosthetic) severed fingers oozing fake blood which had been left on the dash board. ‘How would I explain this to the cops?’ Thankfully it was a false alarm as the sirens proceeded further afield. Maybe the hamburgers from Maccas on Lower Plenty Rd were in danger of getting cold on their way back to the station.
On the soccer ground in Yallambie Park, (Killervision film still).
The movie, “Killervision” was eventually finished and sold to an international film distributor. The credit cards used were balanced and the actors were paid. We received a complimentary DVD copy of the movie and it was with amusement that I saw while viewing it later that the exterior of the Homestead appears very briefly and out of focus on screen where it is described as being a facility for the mentally disturbed.
Fictitious university prospectus featuring Homestead, (Killervision film still).
In a world being rapidly changed by the advent of new technologies, the art of the moving picture is no exception. Local cinemas were once to be found in many suburban venues around Melbourne but the multiplex venue has largely seen their demise. The Were Street, or Rotex Cinema in Montmorency with its purple curtains was one that I remember as a lad but there were earlier venues in both Burgundy St, Heidelberg and Upper Heidelberg Rd, Ivanhoe. A changing industry almost saw the death of the Australian film industry and certainly the closure of most independent suburban cinemas but a modern Renaissance, supported in large measure by Federal Government tax breaks, has seen the trend reversed. Hugo Weaving who has appeared in many Australian films of this later era as well as several international blockbusters was quoted from ABC television last week, saying that:
“This is a golden era of film-making in this country, we just don’t know that. I’ve been saying that for ages. I think our films are getting better and better, we [Australians] are just not going to see them.” (One Plus One, ABC TV)
Ol’ Elrond himself believes that the problem is basically selling the idea of Australia to a local market:
“We have an industry which is so slanted towards American films that it’s very, very hard for Australian films to get a look in.”
Ol’ Elrond himself.
It’s known as the “cultural cringe” and the problem is not a new one. The film makers involved in the “The Story of the Kelly Gang” in 1906 only realized the contribution to cinematic history they had made long after the fact, when it seems several of them jockeyed for credit of the initial concept.
On release of the 1959 Hollywood movie “On The Beach”, an American film that was shot in and around Melbourne about a world destroyed by nuclear holocaust, Ava Gardner is supposed to have said that Melbourne was “the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world.”
Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner filming the end of the world in Melbourne.
The story is almost certainly apocryphal. The quote appears to have been written by a Sydney journalist struggling to make deadline but it does illustrate all the same a very real and enduring inferiority complex that has always been a part of our way of looking at ourselves in this country. Meanwhile the Australian film industry continues to acquit itself on the global stage and not just with the export of Australian acting talent overseas. It has been said that to be born an Australian is to win the prize in the lottery of life. They call this the Lucky Country. It’s a pity we haven’t quite noticed it.
Yallambie 