bus stop on time, organise my money or tickets for fares, and pick up canteen lunches from the hostel.
I loved the trip to school. Apart from the bus winding its way through bush settings of red gums and paperbark trees, the activities inside the bus were just as enjoyable. As with most British kids of that era, singing ridiculous songs about your surroundings was very common and life on East Hills Hostel provided wonderful ammunition for the aspiring writers in our midst.
Every morning and afternoon, the crunching of the school bus gearbox was drowned out by a few choruses of Come to East Hills. Words pieced together by the local kids and sung to the old tune, Oh My Darling Clementine. Within minutes of taking your seat, all you could hear was:
Come to East Hills, come to East Hills.
It’s a place of misery.
When you get there, there’s a sign post
Saying Welcome unto thee.
Don’t believe it, don’t believe it.
It is all a pack of lies.
If it wasn’t for the manager
It would be a paradise.
Hostel life and music were so intertwined that no-one seemed overly impressed by the stars and future stars that lived among us. Teenagers who would go on to form one of the great Aussie/British groups of the sixties, the Easybeats, and their younger siblings who later established AC/DC, lived at nearby Villawood Hostel. East Hills claimed Snowy Fleet (the Easybeats drummer) and future pop sensation John Paul Young. Dozens more, like Jimmy Barnes and John Swan climbed from the creative chowder of the Commonwealth Hostel Scheme forming the foundations of rock and pop music for generations to come.
Initially, the accommodation arrangement was designed to provide temporary lodgings for migrants and give them time to find work, save a little money then hopefully move on to more spacious, comfortable and permanent housing. I'm sure East Hills Hostel felt like purgatory for some and heaven for others. My parents seemed to enjoy hostel life so, as a consequence, we remained at East Hills for close to three years. While Dad moved in and out of the factories along the East Hills railway line, working a few months until he found out the factory next door was paying its workers more money, eventually Mum was lucky enough to land a job at the preschool located within East Hills Hostel. This meant she could stop travelling great distances for work and be closer to her own children if needed. This may have been one reason why we stayed there for so long – it was convenient. That, and the fact that two years into our stay, my mother’s family emigrated from Scotland and, as luck would have it, moved into the rooms adjacent to ours. The timing was perfect as our dear friends the Langley’s had purchased a small parcel of land in the farming area of Bringelly and vacated the adjoining flat weeks earlier. On my seventh birthday, May 1964, my Uncle Grant, Aunty Sheena and their two young boys, David and Ewan, arrived with my grandmother on my mother’s side (Mary Gray). Not only did Mum now have her entire family with her, I had cousins to play with. Hostel fun just got better and better.
I'm sure those early years were unsettling times for my parents but having family around would have helped to ease the burden. The Bruce, Binnie and Spark families could rely on each other when times were tough and I'm certain this helped to lighten the load and ease the feelings of isolation and loneliness that beset some newcomers.
Mid year, 1965, my family bid farewell to East Hills Hostel. I’m still not sure whether my parents finally decided to leave willingly or they were given a little nudge by the hostel scheme administrators. Either way, it was the start of a rental cycle that would last for years.
CHAPTER FOUR
Finding Our Feet
After leaving the hostel, our first stop was a brief stay in a relatively modern house in Junction Road, Moorebank. It was a small fibro house situated on a large parcel of undeveloped land. Although the house was quite new, it still had the old, outside dunny. I used to pity the poor workers who did the rounds loading our can into their truck before moving on to the next house. I’m sure those workers were always given their own private spot at the bar when they went for a drink after work.
Our new address allowed my sister and me to continue at the same school, although our bus trip was now replaced by a twenty-minute walk through the local golf course. We trekked this path every morning and afternoon by ourselves, something parents of today would never think of allowing. I’m not sure which was the more dangerous, the walk itself, dodging the odd stray golf ball, or the swooping magpies that seemed to target us for weeks on end. Perhaps the black-and-white bombers were testing us; a secret initiation, a rite of passage for immigrants. I'm sure every Aussie kid can relate to the wind gush and clicking beaks of an angry, overprotective swooping magpie.
By this age, Jenny and I were experienced latchkey kids and would remain relatively independent our entire school life. My parents were always off to work well before we left for school and generally arrived home some time after us. There was an expectation that certain chores would be done before they got home, but I was usually too busy climbing trees or watching Mighty Mouse on the TV to do housework. This often resulted in a swift and very Scottish ‘skelp in the lug’, which loosely translates to a ‘smack in the ear’. If Dad executed it correctly, with cupped hand and precise timing, he would hit me on the side of the head and sometimes force a small amount of air to enter my ear. The pain could be excruciating. I’m not sure if he meant this to happen but happen it did – way too often. It would certainly be frowned upon these days but luckily no permanent damage was done. It probably wasn’t the best deterrent because I was still getting belted years later for similar misdemeanours.
Our six-month stay in Moorebank was initially quite unremarkable, but my family’s perception of our locality changed later in life. The reason for this … our next-door neighbours were the infamous Milat family. My sister and I went to school with George and Richard. The notorious Ivan, (the ‘Backpacker Murderer’) was quite a few years older and had possibly moved on by the time we arrived. No-one could imagine the horrors to come and, although we were neighbours and classmates, Jenny and I had very little to do with them as they tended to keep to themselves and our stay there was relatively brief. I do remember they were a very large family and, although we were all considered quite poor, they seemed a little worse off than most.
Late 1965, once our lease expired we left Moorebank for the Sydney suburb of Greenacre. Our new rental was a small HardiePlank house situated in a quiet cul-de-sac. It was a wonderful environment for children as there was no through traffic and all the neighbours seemed more close-knit than those in other suburban streets.
Jenny and I both attended Banksia Road Public School and, although I didn’t realise it at the time, this was also the start of my lifelong involvement with music. I joined the school recorder band and, along with Jenny, played descant and tenor recorder. We were taught by a wonderful music teacher, Mr Freidman, who would come to our school twice a week for band tuition. In the wrong hands, the recorder rivals an out of tune violin as the most annoying instrument known to mankind, but my sister and I mastered the intricate techniques quite quickly and we both learned to read music at a very young age. We even performed at Sydney Town Hall as part of a combined Primary School Concert. I know Mum and Dad were bursting with pride as they watched from the lush stalls of the concert hall. Music was in their blood and they seemed overjoyed that their children might carry on their legacy.
Once
