GROWING UP DOWN UNDER

(a Summary of a talk given by Harry Locksley at the Falmouth Civic Society Cream Tea held on Monday 26 th April, 2010)

This illustrated talk was requested by the organisers of the Cream Teas of Civic Society. Although there was no specific connection with Falmouth, the organisers felt my early life in Australia was of sufficient general interest to pass onto members.

I was born in Port Pirie, South Australia,in 1930. Port Pirie was then a dreary smelting town where ores (silver, lead and zinc) were sent down from the mines at Broken Hill in New South Wales. The town was the industrial and shipping heartland for refining and shipping. Today, the Broken Hill company is a huge international conglomerate called BMP Billiton. At the time, my father worked as an engineer at the Shell Petroleum Company and I was born in a rented house owned by the company.

In 1932, my parents, my brother Peter (aged 5) and I (aged 2) moved to Sydney in NSW, which involved a sea journey of about 1000 miles. We moved again quite soon after this to a town in central NSW called Dubbo, where my father found work at the local electricity generating station.

We lived in Dubbo for 10 years, so the formative years of my childhood and my education - between the ages of four to 14 - were spent in this town. The climate was very hot and dry in summer, cold in winter, but with no snow.

I showed the audience pictures of the house where I was born, some of the main civic buildings in Port Pirie, then pictures of the house where I lived in Dubbo as well as others of the main civic buildings in the town - Court House, Base Hospital, and my former school. The house we lived in was eventually demolished to make way for a motel, but I was able to show pictures of the motel and highlight a palm tree in the grounds, the only surviving feature from our front garden.

At this point in the talk, I read the first of two extracts from an unpublished autobiography.

By way of introduction, I recounted how the autobiography came to be written - the result of attending a two-year part-time course in Creative Writing given by Anne Loukes (after marriage, Anne Morgellyn) in the Danielle Room of the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society in Falmouth. After the course ended, our group of twelve students decided to continue as a writer's group under the name The Danielle Room Writers. The group lasted for about twelve years and in the time, published an anthology of original short stories and poems.

I wrote my autobiography, which now runs to about 80,000 words, for the benefit of my two daughters. They were born in Manchester, so they knew little or nothing about my childhood in Australia.

The first extract, Noises in the Night, gave an account of the occasion when our normally docile cat, Fritzie, turned into an early morning marauder of bantams! We discovered to our horror that these bantams were coming from a nearby chicken farm - owned by a Mr. Pettigrew. With the help of Mum, the two half dead bantams Fritzie delivered to us, were resuscitated in our brooder. They recovered and joined our own flock of 50 Rhode Island Reds. News eventually filtered through to us via our butcher that Mr. Pettigrew had taken precautions to protect his bantams from a marauding fox. Fritzie was never the suspect criminal, so he survived Mr. Pettigrew's gun.

The second extract from the autobiography I called Or? the Move. It related the story of the family's move from Dubbo to a small village called Medlow Bath in the Blue Mountains - a journey of around 200 miles. Mum and I made the journey by overnight train. Apart from us, we were accompanied by a Shelley Tea Set, our dog Laddie, our cat Fritzie, and our parrot, called Cocky Locksley. These animals were not supposed to travel with passengers in the train compartment, so when to our acute consternation, Fritzie and Cocky Locksley made their presence felt in the middle of the night, they attracted the bemused attention of the rest of the compartment!

I showed pictures of Laddie, the house we moved to in Medlow Bath and several pictures of the luxurious Hydro Majestic Hotel, the main highlight of the village.

 

31/05/2010