\title{The Railway and Timber Industry During World War Two, and Healesville
Then}
\author{an interview with Cliff Enderby and Bert\\
conducted by Chris}
\date{recorded in 1984}
\maketitle

\begin{play}

Bert:  ... the bush y'know.

Cliff:  Yeah.

Chris:  Sorry about that.

Cliff:  That's all right, oh no, that's all right.

Bert:  Don't worry.

Chris:  You get to ignore it after a while.

Cliff:  Oh no, that won't worry us.

Cliff:  What I've got mainly of course is photos.  Y'know.  That was 1949.
That's the, eh ...

Chris:  Right.  So this is ... yeah gotcha!  So that was in the goods shed?

Cliff:  Ah, that's in the parcels office.  That's the cab of the engine,
y'know.  That's the railway gang where the, eh ...  he was the shunter, he
drove the gantry crane, that's the points, that was the S.M., checking timber,
y'know.  All he knew about timber 'd be bloody harmless!

[laughter]

Cliff:  'v prithee <??>

Bert:  Out to take Freddy's work ... Freddy Hunter.

Cliff:  Yeah.  Oh Fred was ...  But like you say, there's still years <?> of
them.  Of course Bigolow, he's gone isn't he?

Bert:  Yeah.

Chris:  So how many people worked there at the station?

Cliff:  At one stage the was about nine of us.

Chris:  Right.

Cliff:  Mm.  That's not counting all the gang and everyone of course.  There
was always about five in the gang.  Ah ...

Chris:  Doing the line?

Cliff:  Yeah, like these fellows.  And there was, ah, there was three in the
loco.  Two, ah ...  The driver in charge, and two driver firemen.  Ah ... On the
station itself there was about nine, y'know.

Bert:  Gee, they had that many at that time, did they?

Cliff:  Yeah, well see, there was ...

Bert:  The S.M. and the S.M. ...

Cliff:  Yeah, the S.M. and Bill Groves.  There was young Cupkee <?> in the
parcels.  There was meself.  There was Charlie Anderson.  Harry Booth.  Jimmy
Bennett.

Bert:  Yeah, over the shed.

Cliff:  Young O'Brien.  And a bloke in the shed.  I forget who was in the shed.
Who was in the shed in those days?

Bert:  Jimmy was there for a while, wasn't he?

Cliff:  Yeah.  You know, there was a few of us.

Bert:  Yeah amazing wasn't it.  'course, it was a busy line.

[sound of photographs sliding]

Cliff:  Now I don't know what you want out of some of these ...

Chris:  Just hang on, just before we get onto the pictures, so how many trains
a day would you say?

Cliff:  Ah, three.

Bert:  Oh, it was more than ...

Cliff:  No, three down and three back.

Bert:  Was that all?

Cliff:  Passenger trains, yeah.  It was ten minutes past seven, ten past eleven
...

Bert:  Oh, mixed trains in those days ...

Cliff:  ... and seven thirty at night.  Yeah, but we used to run a switch.
Remember, the yard used to get that much timber, and if you can imagine down
there ...  The ruling grade over any line is the highest part of the line.  Of
course, we call the ruling grade.  The ruling grade here was Daroworaket <?>
tunnel, which was two-ninety ton for a K-class.  Ah, ah, that'd be a K there,
they're on there, but I might have another one there.  Well, that's your ruling
grade.  Well we always had somewhere around about four- to five- hundred ton of
timber in the yard.  See?  Or more.

Bert:  Just dumped there off the trucks because there was nowhere to put it,
they couldn't handle it all, you see.

Cliff:  Your train would go out of a morning, say the two-minutes past seven,
see, with probably seven or eight trucks of timber and two or three carriages
and the guard's van, see.  See, so, the carriages weigh about thirty-five,
they're seventy, and the guards van, there'd be nearly a hundred ton of
carriages and everything, see.  So, there you can only put another hundred and
ninety on it.  So each train you, during the day, you were more or less falling
behind.  So what you do in that case, is when the afternoon train came in, at
three o'clock in the afternoon, you would grab the engine before he was put
away over the pit<?> ... that was the last of the local driver's trains, the
three o'clock coming in.  You'd say to him, run a switch - what we call a
switch - down to Yarra Glen.  You'd put two-ninety tons on him, of timber, or
logs or whatever, and go straight to Yarra Glen and leave it in Yarra Glen
yard, because from Yarra Glen yard into Melbourne, was a straight, well more or
less flat, so a K-class could take a thousand tons.

Chris:  Gotcha.

Cliff:  Eh?  So all you had to do was beat the ruling grade.  And that's the
way we cleared the timber, otherwise we would never have cleared the yard.
See?  Not every day, but every second day.

Bert:  There was a tunnel through the hill, of course you know about the tunnel
<?>

Cliff:  Tarawarra? <?>

Chris:  Yeah.

Bert:  That was to take the grade off see, they had to go through the hill-side
to get a bit of a grade.

Cliff:  But that was the highest part in the line, even with the tunnel.
That's the ruling grade.

Chris:  Yeah, because when they put the line in originally, it just went to the
other side there, didn't it, before they put the tunnel in?

Bert:  No.

Cliff:  It probably would, yeah, I think it went to a different property they
call it down there, some ...  Yeah, they take it in stages, they went to Yarra
Glen first ...

Bert:  It went to Tarawarra first I suppose until they put the tunnel through.

Cliff:  Yeah.

Chris:  I think they used to take horse and cart back from ...

Bert:  They were going to take the line on from here to Marysville, weren't
they, at one time?  And then they put the dam in, Maroondah dam was put in, and
that stopped the rail of course.  You couldn't put the rail in then because
that's where the rail was going to go, up that, eh, Watt's Creek bed.

[sound of photographs sliding]

Cliff:  There's seven there on the staff, that's only on the station, y'know.
See, that's one of the timber trucks, that's the staff as I say<?>, there's a
few views of Healesville.

Chris:  Gotcha.

Cliff:  But the ones you would be after, would be ...  They're not very good
photos, the camera weren't very good.  If you can look there, you can see
that's the railway yard - there's some of the timber trucks - that's the
railway yard, just full of trucks of logs, the whole lines were full of it.
That's the gantry crane ... road, you, ah, that was on the far, near the street
near the pub.

Chris:  Yep.

Cliff:  Big road.  Now, that was always ...  Does it show you there?  That was
always ...  No, it's pretty clear there, but, that timber sometimes was as high
as the crane from one end of it to the other, it'd be like that for months and
months.

Bert:  Of course you only had the little crane that couldn't move along, it
just swung around and dumped it wherever it could dump it.

Cliff:  Yeah, that's the gantry road, Bert, the one that ran along, like
y'know.

Bert:  That's the big gantry.

Cliff:  Yeah, yeah.

Bert:  But you didn't have that in the first place.

Cliff:  Oh no, oh no, we only had all those little cranes.

Bert:  The crane that could run, just, swing around and dump it wherever it
could.

Cliff:  Yeah.

Chris:  So, most of the stuff that went through there was sawn?

[photos sliding]

Cliff:  A lot of it was logs in the first instance, mainly sawn timber at the
finish.  Now, that's the gantry road with all the timber laying there.

Chris:  Oh, wow!

Cliff:  There's the gantry crane.

Chris:  Yeah.

Cliff:  Now often, that timber was up to, where the crane would just fit across
it underneath it.  They'd get that much.

Chris:  So ... how many ton?  Five hundred you said?

Bert:  The line would take?

Chris:  No, in the yard.  I mean, how much?

Cliff:  Oh!  Here in the yard, there was millions of super-feet!  We worked out
on super-feet, Bert, didn't we?

Bert:  Yeah.

Cliff:  See each one of those packs there would be five thousand super-feet.
Y'know, and sometimes there were nearly up to that level of the thing.  That's
what did all the ...  Well, there's an idea of one road, that's the road
opposite the station, which we weren't supposed to use, but we had to use it
because all down here was chock-a-block full of timber.  And that's the little
thing that used to move it all around, not the engine, all the shunting was
done with this thing.

Chris:  Oh!

Bert:  Little rail<?>

Cliff:  Which, no ...   There was only ever one of them or two, there was one a
little bit earlier and that, in the whole history of the railways.  That's the,
more or less the, second original.  The original was ...  something the same,
only a little bit, ah, a little bit different.  This was built especially for -
it runs on the tracks, not on the ground, it's chain driven, had a Detroit
kerosene motor in it, y'know.  Could pull, if you could, ah, there was a knack
in doing it, could pull a couple of hundred ton.  But you had to know how to
pull a couple of hundred ton, like y'know.  In this way, that ah, between all
automatic couplings there's three of four inches play <?>, so if you had a big
rake of trucks, you would push it all up together first, and then as soon as
you'd got it all pushed, you'd go like hell this way, and you, they'd all ...

Bert:  Bump one another.

Cliff:  Yeah, they'd all come out of the holes.  In this way, you couldn't see
it with your eye, but if you could see a truck on a rail ... it wasn't flat on
the rail, like, the rail would have a slight bend in it where the wheels sat.
Well, you could feel it with this thing.  You'd push 'em up onto the top of
that bend, and as you come forward, see, you'd have this moment of <?> probably
of from here to the door in twenty trucks, and by that time you had 'em, like
y'know, the one start to pull the other, like y'know.

Chris:  Right, right.

Cliff:  And, we used to pull consistently two- to three- hundred ton with it,
ah, if you knew how to do it.  But this is what I thought more or less would be
interesting, showing you all the timber, and how busy the yard was at the time.
There's one of those logs.  Now all these lines at times were absolutely full
of timber like that.  There's a timber truck being unloaded.  That's the gantry
and how they unloaded it, and there's the gantry again, but that's all the
timber.  And often that timber was another two stacks high.  I've seen it where
that ...

Bert:  Yeah, it'd be one on top of the other!

Cliff:  Yeah, could just get underneath it!

Chris:  Wow!

Cliff:  And there was millions and millions of super-feet of timber there.
Y'know, at this stage there would be a shortage of rail-trucks, see this was
what used to often hit us, that was the ...

Bert:  They used to let us through.  Every now and then the trucks'd go through
to Melbourne with their load, because they couldn't handle it, could they,
didn't know where to dump it here.  There was a limit to it.

Chris:  Sure.  So this was, now what, this is - forties?

Cliff:  This is ... I came here in November 'forty-one, it'd been going about
twelve months before I came here.  We all got ...  What happened was this.  They
decided to get all the fire killed ash out of Mt. St. Leonard's for the war
effort.

Chris:  Right.  Oh, this is the 'thirty-nine fires?

Bert:  That's the 'thirty-nine fires, killed all the Mountain Ash trees, see.

Cliff:  Well, all I know, before, there was one or two staff here, and they got
suddenly got inundated with all these bloody timber and logs, like, y'know.
You've got recording have you?  I [mumble mumble] stop swearing!!

[laughter]

Cliff:  So, ah, they got inundated, and, I was in the signal box in Riversdale
in Melbourne.  And the phone went this afternoon - I was single - and it was
our head office, said "You're temporarily transferred to Healesville, they're
in a terrible mess up there, they haven't got enough staff."  And I was shot up
here on, eh, cup day.  Eh?

Bert:  A good day to come here, wasn't it!

Cliff:  That temporary transfer lasted for ten years.  I was temporary
transferred here for ten years!  Temporarily transferred for such a stage that
I got married and had a child before I got left!

[laughter]

Cliff:  Now that's the yard - remember I told you about the snow?

Chris:  Oh right!

Cliff:  Eh?  Now that's a lot of the staff.  Ah ...  Oh no, King Willie, Frank
Johnson, no you could hardly call ...  Oh no, this was a fire brigade, eh ...

Bert:  Heh heh!

Cliff:  A fire brigade picnic <?>!

Bert:  When we used to belong to the fire brigade!

Cliff:  Yeah!  Fire brigade!

Chris:  Oh, you were in that, as well?  So, when did you join?  When you were
at the station?  Were you at the station, or?

Bert:  No, I was a truck dri ... I was a carters' contractor.

Cliff:  Yeah.  Bert carted, eh, he had three trucks or so, carting logs out of
the bush and timber and that, timber to Melbourne.

Chris:  So, from which side, Toolangi, and ... ?

Bert:  Toolangi, yes, Sylvia Creek, they called it.

Cliff:  Did you ever cart off St. Leonard's, Bert?

Bert:  Yes, yes.

Cliff:  But you finished up up at Snobb's, didn't you?  Further up than Snobb's
even, Snobb's Creek?

Bert:  Snobb's Creek, Dry Creek, eh ... everywhere, really, Big River, Woods
Point.

Chris:  What's Snobb's?  Where?

Cliff:  See what happened is, they cut out St. Leonard.  They cut all the
timber out, y'know.  Then they went further and further back.

Chris:  How did Snobb's Creek get that name?  D'you know?

Bert:  Snobb's Creek.  That's where the hatchery is up there, too, there's a
fish hatchery up there.  Where they breed all the new fish ...

Chris:  Like fingerlings and stuff.  Right.

Bert:  ... and then cart 'em round and dump 'em into rivers and lakes, and
such-forth.

Chris:  I just ...

Bert:  I don't know how Snobb's got it's name, why they called it that.

Chris:  It's a great name, but.

Bert:  Sounds like somebody, some stuck-up people lived there at one time.

Cliff:  Yeah, yeah.  Only one thing about it, they spelled it with a double B,
didn't they.  You see "snob" is S N O B, but they spelled it S N O double B,
you see.

Bert:  Unless it was some people that lived up there, like, the name "Snobb"
and they named it after them.  I don't know.  I never ever thought of that!

Cliff:  No, no.  When you're in a district, you don't think about funny names.
I went over to Western Australia, and was absolutely, said "Gee Whizz, look at
your names you got over here, of the places, like y'know!"  And all of a sudden
I remembered I was at Myrtleford, like y'know, and there's Tangambalanga, and
all these funny names.

Bert:  Native names, yeah.

Cliff:  That you didn't take any notice of here, but when you got over there
and heard some of theirs, like y'know!

Chris:  And you said Sylvia Creek, Toolangi used to be ... ?

Bert:  Sylvia Creek was the main road the forestry put in, to log that area.

Chris:  Oh was that, that was the name, was that an old tram track?

Bert:  They called it Sylvia Creek, I don't know why they called it Sylvia
Creek.  Perhaps the bloke who put the road in might have been named Sylvia, I
dunno.

Chris:  And I was told a number of the tram tracks were built by Italians.

Bert:  Yeah, the tram ...  Mmm, just a moment ...  The tram track used to come
down Myers' Creek, yes, to the Granton Mill.  There was a big mill at the East
End of Healesville there, where the old people's homes are now, in behind the
garage here.

Chris:  Yeah.

Bert:  That's where the tram track used to run to.  From a big mill called the
Granton up at the top of Sylvia Creek.  And when they started to ... when they
put the roads in, the tram tracks just went out of existence, then they carted
it with motor trucks then, see.  They did away with the line.

Cliff:  Manton's<?>, oh yeah.  When you're talking about tram tracks, Bert's
talking about the, eh, the Granton Mills down here, now they ... off St.
Leonard's ... how far past Bethany would it be, Bert?  Towards Toolangi wasn't
it?  It was the other side of Bethany.

Bert:  It was ten miles to the top of the hill, wasn't it?

Cliff:  Yeah, where the tram track come in alongside the road there.  Where we
used to go up Sunday and drop 'em onto the bus, the bus ...

Bert:  It about seven miles from the top of the mountain to the Granton here I
think, and another three miles ...

Cliff:  Was it?  It's be two or three miles past Bethany, wouldn't it?

Bert:  Oh yes, it'd be a couple of miles.

Cliff:  Yeah.  See, Sunday afternoon, at the stage that this is too, I used to
drive the tourist cars after I finished work for Charlie McConnell.  See?  And,
Sunday afternoon, we used to pick up all the blokes from the Dindy Mill ...  Now
the Dindy, how far would the Dindy be in off the road, Bert?

Bert:  The Dindy Mill, that was the name of it.  Dindy ...

Cliff:  How far would be it in?

Bert:  Oah, that'd be, from the top of the hill there?  Oh it'd be five miles,
I suppose.  Five or six miles.

Cliff:  Now, this tram track came alongside the Myers Creek road, right
alongside it, and there was this little tractor, it was a little <?> tractor,
with <?> flanged wheels, wasn't it?

Bert:  I don't know what they used to call it, I can't say that I've ever seen
it.

Cliff:  Yeah, well that's what it was.  It was a tractor with <?> ... But all
the timber, all the rails were timber.  And that's it, that's it disappearing
into the bush.  See the timber?

Chris:  Ah, yeah, gotcha.

Cliff:  Now, we would, we would pull up there Sunday afternoon with these six,
seven, eight, ten, blokes, that were going into work, see, they'd come out
Friday, see, usually they'd get a lift out with the timber truck Friday.  They
had to go back Sunday afternoon because they had to be there in the morning to
start <?>, they'd go back Sunday afternoon with all this, eh, food, they'd be
carting all their food in, see?  We'd take 'em up.  They were only open just
kinda fat trucks with bit of stick in the side to hold 'em.  And they'd all
clamber onto these, with all their tucker for the week, see, and away this
little tractor would pull 'em right away through there, right away out to the
Dindy Mill.

Cliff:  This is Chris, Nance, this is Nance, Bert's husband!

Chris:  Hi!

Nance:  How do you do?

Cliff:  Ah.  Yeah, and this is Chris, this is, yeah, Bert's wife!  Yeah, yeah.

Nance:  I'm heading off again.  I've put tea on.  I'll leave it in your good
hands.

Cliff:  Good, Yeah, see, that particular photo, Ken Cone's<?> family owned the
Granton Mills, and the Dindy.  The Dindy ... was the mill that supplied the
Granton here with all the timber.  And the Granton would break it down further,
Bert, wouldn't they?

Bert:  Ah, yes, they used to re-cut there, yes, and <?> as well.

Cliff:  See, they would cut it fairly big in the bush, and they'd break it down
in here.  The Dindy and Granton, now that was owned by the Cone family, C O N
E.  Now Mrs. Cone, just after I left here, I came back one day and saw her, and
she said, written on the back, she's got, you can see how it's been torn out of
an album?  This is for you, like y'know, and this is the ...

Chris:  Mt. St. Leonard.  Dindy.

Cliff:  Yeah.  The Dindy Mill.

Chris:  So, um, apart from food, they were obviously taking like grog in and
stuff as well?

Cliff:  Oh no, no!  They didn't ...

Chris:  There was no drinking during the week?

Cliff:  No, no, see it's too dangerous!  It was all axes, no chainsaws.  They
were axes, like y'know?  But they, I've watched them down here, like, you know
this Bigolow that commentates on the football now?

Chris:  Yeah.

Cliff:  Well, his father Jack worked here all his life and he, eventually he
and the chap McCloud took on the loading of the timber at the station, it was
done under contract, and he would sit during the winter, when there was not
much, with a stone and his axe, like that, and shave the hairs off his
whatsname.  Because one day, we came in and we wanted ...  often the timber was
just sitting on top, and we'd say to the loader "Is it safe to move?"
sometimes it'd just all fall out the side, no one ever picked it up, but ...  I
wanted a side-stick for one of the trucks, I used to put three sticks and then
throw the lashing over it, and I could see this old axe, right up the top of
the gantry road<?>, and I picked it up and I got it up in the air like that,
and there was an anguished howl from down the goods shed from old Jack Bigolow
and it was too late to stop me clipping<?> the piece of timber like that,
y'know.  And Jack came running down, "Ah, me axe, me axe!"  "Jack," I said,
"it's only an old axe that's been laying down here in amongst the timber!"  He
said, "Yeah, but have a look at it!"  Y'know the ...  He could tell by the way I
was swinging the axe what was going to happen.  The blade turned up like that.

Chris:  Oh!!

Cliff:  You could ...  If you had've been <?> the axe it'd bent like that <?>,
see.  He'd had to spend hours.  But they were, uh ...  I saw this block cut
through ...  One day we had a ...  There was a lot of shenanigans went on.
Cooks Mill from Preston used to bring down these great big red gum logs, their
butt would be that big.  And they'd say ...  They'd want to take it through to
their mill, but they weren't allowed on the road, see, so ...  They'd come down
and they'd say ...  If it was too long for our railway trucks, they could get a
permit.  And they'd bring a log down and they'd say, oah the railway truck was
twenty two foot nine, this was thirty foot, this was too big for the truck!
And old Freddy would say, "Naw, we've got a QR here!"  "A QR?"  A long low one.
"How long are they?"  "Thirty-five foot."  So he could put it in there, see.
So the next week they'd bring down one thirty-six foot.  And Freddy would say,
"Oh no, we've got an E truck."  A E truck was forty-four, a great big thing,
see.  So the battle of wits went on all the time.

Cliff:  So, This particular day, this log, oh, and it laid up the end of the
gantry crane for, oh I suppose a couple of months.  Oh, it'd be, I'd go it'd be
six foot, the butt, the butt end of it.  And when they went to get it in the
QR, it was that much too long, and you couldn't lay it on the top a QR, because
their sides and their ends were wooden, not steel.  See, so, they put it in the
QR, and Jack Bigolow waited till we shunted it out on the train.  Now we didn't
have time, the train used to get in at twenty past ten and leave at ten past
eleven.

Chris:  Right.

Cliff:  So, eh, at the most you would have had half an hour.  And, um, when we
put in on the train, Jack came over ... and a little bugger, blue singlet on,
like y'know, I've never seen a bloke ...  his back and all his shoulders just
rippled with muscles, and he walked over, and it was a big crowd on the
platform see, with his axe, and you know it, the girth would be that big, the
butt ... and he into it.  He did it in about just over twenty minutes, cut
right through this with an axe!  It'd take you an hour with an chain saw!  You
know, he was hitting it, and there was, there was billets of wood that big,
flying up in the air.  And, eh, he judged it so that so that when he hit the
last bit, the log just settled gracefully into the truck, but she was about
that much short!  I've never seen anything like it in my life.  They were good
axemen, Bert, weren't they?  There was no <?>.

Bert:  Oh yeah, they could chop!

Cliff:  Oh, they could chop wood!

Bert:  Old Jack could go all day.  That's what killed him at the finish I
think, he went too bloody hard.

Cliff:  But I've never seen a chap ...  Y'know ...  When he took that singlet
off, his back was just a ripple of muscles, like when he ...  Of course, they
used to walk like that, didn't they?

Bert:  Walk like an ape!  Yeah.  Heh, heh.

Cliff:  Yeah.  But you've never seen ...  Oh, and could he cut timber!  But
their axe was absolutely like a razor.

Bert:  Oh, you could shave with it.  Shave with an axe ...

Cliff:  Yeah.  And if you watch, you watch these good axemen, when they cut a
vee in a log, you'd swear it was sawn by a saw, there's none of this steps like
that, like you and I do.  When they hit, they hit with ...

Bert:  Very neat.

Cliff:  Oh yes, like y'know each blow counts.  I was absolutely amazed this
day, to see him cut this great big, red gum it was.  Every hit he hit when he
got going, there was great big <?> jumped up in the air.  He'd hit this side
and hit that side, a couple of times, y'know.  This great big chunk of wood ...
<?> He did it in just over twenty minutes.  Geez they could cut!

Chris:  So ...

Cliff:  This is what, see the, that I thought you'd be interested in.  If you
look at the derelict station now and realise that it was absolutely a hive of
industry.  We could never, we could never get above it, as fast as ...  and we
worked hard.

Chris:  So what happened to it?  Why did it die out?

Cliff:  Well, as soon as the war was over and petrol become available.  See if
you were carting it for seventy mile that way, it was silly to stop here and
put it on for the last forty mile, wasn't it?  They just took it straight
through.  Soon as pet ...  see, it was done during the war to stop ...  'cause
there was no petrol!

Bert:  Conserve petrol.

Cliff:  Yeah, yeah.

Bert:  They saved a million gallons a week, they reckon.  Didn't they?

Cliff:  Oh, I don't know!

Bert:  Wasn't it a million gallons a week, or something, they saved in Victoria
with this ration ... with the whole of the rationing I mean, not just here.

Cliff:  If you look at it this way, Bert, like, it got that way in the finish
with petrol with the timber trucks, that they didn't even issue them - y'know
we had little coupons, the ordinary motorists, got three gallons for two
months, y'know - the petrol, eh, the timber trucks didn't need ...  they gave
coupons right away, all they did was come along, and Bert would deal will Billy
Law, and he used four hundred gallons this month, the bloke'd give him a
credit, wouldn't he ...

Bert:  Yeah.

Cliff:  ... for four hundred gallons.  They just did without tickets, because
it was, it was just hopeless trying to ...

Chris:  What was it used for, the timber, during the war?

Cliff:  It was all to build those - Tocumwal the big airport was built with
it - all to build the big army stores and airport, uh, uh, airway, uh ...

Bert:  Was all case stuff ...

Chris:  Like ammo cases and stuff like that.

Bert:  Cases for ammunition.

Cliff:  Yeah, yeah.  And all the timber part of it was to, uh, the big Tocumwal
<?> air-force runways were all built with it, and it went right up to Darwin.  As
Bert said, and I didn't know, they were cutting logs up there to send over the
Middle East for uh ...

Bert:  They were going to Egypt.

Chris:  Really?

Cliff:  To build jetties with.

Bert:  To build jetties and wharves and all that with.

Chris:  Really?

Bert:  I dunno where it was in Egypt, but that's where they said it was going.

Cliff:  Yeah.  See, there was such a cry out for timber, at this stage, like
y'know.  And they had all this fire-killed stuff up there, and let's face it,
it was ... the mountain ash was the finest timber in Victoria, and probably in
Australia, wasn't it, recognised?  You know the stands at Marysville that
they've still got with these enormous two hundred foot trees?

Bert:  Actually the war fell in nicely with the ...

Cliff:  fire

Bert:  with the fire-killed timber, because it wouldn't have been suitable for
much else.

Cliff:  Well, they'd've left it, wouldn't they, they'd've never 've got it out.
See, we were talking a while ago, I remember when I came here, I was rushed
here, and I think there was about, somewhere about a dozen to sixteen timber
trucks.  Within eighteen months ...  how many were there Bert?  A hundred 'n
...

Bert:  A hundred and thirty registered here, I think, that's without trucks
that were registered elsewhere.  There was that many ...

Cliff:  This is how it expanded.  See?  This is how it ...

Bert:  All of a sudden.  Boom!  Y'know.  It exploded.

Chris:  So what happened to the town?  What happened to social life with all of
that?  I mean, that's a lot of ...

Bert:  What's happened now?

Chris:  No then.

Bert:  Oh!!

Cliff:  There was a dance or a ball on every second week!

Bert:  It was alive<?> with people.

Cliff:  If you were a man here, at that stage of the game, you had a ball.
There was no men around, only ones in protected occupations.  See?  And you
couldn't leave.  You didn't get any holidays!  You couldn't leave either, as
Bert tried once, couple of times, didn't you ...

Bert:  Yeah.

Cliff:  ... to leave Vouches<?> and they'd haul you back, see.  See you
couldn't do anything.

Bert:  No, you were tied down by the manpower.

Cliff:  Manpower board.  Mmmm.

Chris:  You wanted to get away?

Cliff:  Bert wanted to go out, he was working at Vouches<?> timber mills,
y'know.

Bert:  I wanted to change jobs.

Cliff:  He wanted to change into, into carting.

Bert:  Get up the bush.

Cliff:  How many times did you try?

Bert:  Oh, a couple of times, I suppose.

Cliff:  Yeah, and each time, Vouches<?> told the manpower, and the manpower
hauled him back, and eventually, Bert said, "Look, they're short of carters
more than they are of timber hands!" and he got a clearance, didn't you?

Bert:  Yeah, they could've put anybody in the mills to work, some of the older
chaps, and let us young blokes go and do something worthwhile.

Cliff:  Yeah, so eventually you got a clear ... y'know.  As you pointed out he
wasn't leaving the industry, he was still in the same industry.

Chris:  So, so, one of the Healesville women got you, huh?

Bert:  Hehehe!

Cliff:  No, actually she's on holidays, but I mean yes, eventually, yes.  But,
ah, oh no, it was, ah, well it was pathetic and it was whatsname in a way,
because I was driving ... see Charlie McConnell ... now you must see Nell
McConnell, Nell's got ... she's the one that told me to come down and see you,
y'know from round, she used to have the garage that's on the corner of Don road
there?

Chris:  Yeah.

Bert:  At the East End.

Cliff:  That was Charlie's <?> ...

Chris:  Oh!!

Cliff:  And we drove - what were they? - Hudsons, weren't they, eight-cylinder
Hudsons, with dickie-seats in them.  And we drove them up that Myers Creek
road, when it was a gravel road, tore through the war <?> with blackout lights
that you couldn't see from here to there, how we never hit any ...  'course
there was no one else on the road.  But I've been up to Bethany, Bethany was a
big place in those days, and there'd be about fifty or sixty screaming females
rush out and say, "A man! A man!."  Wouldn't let you off the bus!  Yeah!  This
is what is was like.

Cliff:  What we used to do, we used to say to Mrs. ...  what we had to do, the
train came in at six forty at night.  By the time you got the people off - if
it was on time - it was ten to seven or five to seven.  You had to go from the
station all the way up, and every hundred yards up the Myers Creek, there was
Combley<?> Bank, Olive Bank, Chantoney<?>, the Ferns, Woodstock, Bethany,
Strathvee<?>, and you had to go into these guest houses, drop a couple, come
out, and there were your <?> seeing the Ferns the same ... going up the Ferns,
turning off the road was a hairy proposition at any time, and you'd get to
Bethany and you'd have to pick up all the way down to the end to meet the train
at half past seven.  Of course you'd get to Bethany and - like, I've seen this
dozens of times - all the old ladies would be out the gate saying "good-bye,
good-bye, good-bye, yes," and you'd be saying "Oh for heavens sake, look I
gotta call into Bethany, I gotta go to the Ferns, can't we get a move on,
quarter past seven!"  Like, you're five mile down the road, with no lights.

Bert:  Hold up the train for you!  You used to ring up and say, "Hold up the
train!"

Cliff:  Yeah, we used to ring up!!  They'd get in the bus and they'd say, "Now,
don't miss the train driver, but don't go fast!"  [laughs]  Like, now they take
an hour to come down, like we'd come down in ten minutes, a quarter of an hour.
It was that dark, they wouldn't even know what you were doing, like y'know.  We
didn't even know, all we knew, where the curb was, and swung when we reckoned
we were on the curb, y'know.  And, no accidents, there was only one bloke hit a
cow there on the flat.  Never had an accident, like y'know, all the time, but
oh, talk about driving, like y'know, and that's all the time we had, but ...

Cliff:  I originally had been working at the station of a night, and Mrs. Mac
would ring up, "Can you hold the train five minutes or so, Cliff, y'know?"
"What's wrong?"  "Frank's just left Bethany!"  And you'd look, cor, twenty past
seven, he's just left Bethany!  "Where's he picking up?"  "Oh, he's gotta go in
the Ferns and Chantoney <?>."  Chantoney <?> was the one way up the hill, like.
Oh blimey teddy, I reckon you'll be "you gotta be so much <?>"  "Oh, wait a
minute, I've got a hold up."

Cliff:  Eventually, if you couldn't hold it, if it looked like being quarter of
an hour, the bus or whatever you're driving would roar into the, eh, garage,
Charlie <?> had a Pontiac, a thirty-eight Pontiac, wasn't it, a pretty good
Ponty.  They'd roar 'em into the Ponty.  And y'know, the Pontiac doing a
hundred mile an hour along the whatsname, could just catch the train at
Coldstream.  Even in that short time, y'know.  And they'd roar into Coldstream
station and get 'em on there, see.

Cliff:  And Mrs. McConnell 'll tell you, she said to me the other day, she
said, "You know what Cliff," she said, "I've got a lot of the registrations
still of those old Hudsons."  This is what we drove, we drove these Hudsons.
Charlie used to buy them for twelve pound ten in Melbourne, because they used a
lot of petrol, but when you're carting passengers, and get eight or nine on at
five bob a time, like, it was a working proposition, like y'know.

Cliff:  And she said, "I was looking at one the other day, and they'd bought it
off Ansett."  Off Reg<?> Ansett!  It's got Reg Ansett signatures in one of
these old cars!  But, eh, this is what they used to ...  these, Hudsons,
y'know, Hudson eights, y'know.  And of course, you'd, eh, normally you'd have
three in the back, two dickie-seats, and a couple in the front, with you, but I
can assure you we used to finish up getting eight or nine in 'em, like y'know!
It was the only way you had of getting up there, like y'know.

Chris:  That's the same thing they used to use for, like, the tourist buses?

Cliff:  That was all we had, pretty well.  Later on Charlie got one that
carried fourteen passengers.  It's a funny thing how you can remember numbers.
Three-four-one-eight-nine was the number.

Bert:  There wasn't any tourist buses in those days.

Cliff:  There was not many tourist, like y'know.

Bert:  Very few.  

Cliff:  Even, eh, Pioneers ...

Bert:  Of course the war was on then.

Chris:  Oh, of course.

Cliff:  All they had were those Packards, about ... what were their Packards
those days about?  Eight or nine seater Packards, weren't they?  See, Pioneers
were going broke during the war, and Ansett bought 'em just after for a song ...
and, eh, never looked back.

Chris:  That's the way to do it.  That's the way to do it.

Cliff:  But yes, that's the, eh ...  But as far as the station was concerned,
like y'know, we were working on - that gantry crane could load twenty trucks in
an hour, an hour and a half, old Freddy, when he got going.

Bert:  It was good, used to run along the rails and drop in ...

Cliff:  Oh yeah, see because, a lot of it, as you can see was already there.
See what they did, they brought in their first load, from one of the mills up
the bush, and they'd have to wait till they brought their second load in.  Now
sometimes they'd say "Oh well, look, we won't get the second load for a week."
So the first load went on the ground.  Then when they knew the second load was
coming in, ah ...

Bert:  They'd load the first load.

Cliff:  Yeah, they'd whack the first load in, and when the bloke come in,
they'd just wrap the slings around him and bang, in.  Oh, it didn't take them
long to load 'em, it took them a while to break them down because, they were
square, they had to break the ...  See the truck's that wide, and the load's
was that wide, so they'd break all the timber from the top down the sides till
they made it round, and take the lashings over the top, to stop it moving,
y'know.  And they'd put in three side sticks each side, lash it over round the
side sticks, y'know.

Cliff:  That took a bit of time, but the actual loading of putting it in the
truck, they could do twenty in just over an hour.  And, eh, consequently, we
would, um, doing nothing else, we would go like the Dickens after the three
o'clock train came in.  Because everywhere, there was ... this railway line down
here into the stockyard, there was a crane there, there was a crane at the
ganger's hut, there was a crane at the end of the goods sheds - these are all
fixed cranes.  And then the gantry.  But each one would load his eight or ten
trucks.  See?  But that's about all they could load because they ran out of
room down at the other end, so they ...  Round about three o'clock we'd go
round and what we call "clean them out".  Like, what were loaded, under the
fixed cranes, we'd kick them all out, and put the ones with one load back in
under, the gantry didn't matter, because it could run up and down, see?

Chris:  Yeah.

Cliff:  So we would go like the Dickens.  Eh, the idea was to try and get a pot
before, at five o'clock, and we never, ever made it ...

Bert:  The pubs were shutting at six<?>, hehe!

Cliff:  ... for about six or seven years, 'cause it never ever lasted long
enough.  And we'd go like a ...  And we'd clean out all these little roads, and
we'd give Fred Hunter - who was a part aboriginal, wasn't he, Fred? - we'd give
him the gantry, give him a clean-out the last, so we'd put like all fresh
trucks under him for the morning, see, and, ah, we'd do the gantry, we'd say
"ooh," and one of the other blokes'd say "aah, look I've got all <?>, give us
another pull-out!"  And away we'd go, and by the time we did that, Fred'd want
another pull-out in the gantry, like, we never ever got anywhere.  The harder
we worked, the more they loaded, like y'know.

Cliff:  But I've seen that yard there, and all the time, absolutely full of
trucks of timber and logs.  Some of them there you can see, like y'know.  And
it was like that nearly all of the time.  Yes.  When we gave a clean-out, see,
we had three trains a day plus the switch, taking away trucks, like y'know.
Ah, actually, if I could work it out, a truck of timber would be roughly
twenty-two to twenty-three ton, so, ah, say ten trucks would be two-hundred and
twenty, so another seventy, so you're working on probably thirteen or fourteen
trucks in a load, see, to go back over the hill.  That's for a full train-load
of timber.  Well, when you've got the carriages on and everything, you're only
working on six or seven trucks, see?

Cliff:  And, ah, they were consistently loading, eh, forty or fifty a day,
y'know, and of course it was gaining on you, you were sticking them everywhere,
y'know.  We were sticking them in running roads <?> which we weren't supposed
to, but you had to, that was all the place left to put them, like y'know.

Chris:  So, knock off was five?  And so five to six?

Bert:  No you used to work, you used to work right through.

Cliff:  We'd try and finish ... Five o'clock you were supposed to knock off.

Bert:  As long as the trucks were running, you'd be unloading!

Cliff:  Yeah!  But of course no one ever worked to hours, see, so, the harder
we worked to get, so we could knock off at five, the earlier we say pulled your
crane out, and by the time we did the gantry you'd be chasing us again for
another pull out, see, so ...  What happened was, I used to have to run the
night train, like working on the platform, I drove this shunting jigger.  So, I
had to step straight off it and rush over the station and start to run the
train, never got home, never had any tea or anything, see.  See, so, ah, every
day we did it, every day we got caught.  We were all eternal optimists, we
always reckoned one day we'd beat it, and the thing was, see, there was no ...
The beer used to last ten minutes.  See Healesville unfortunately had a quota
in <?> January 1939, and because they bought up very big in November and
December 'cause it was a holiday resort, what they bought in November and
December often carried them right through January.  So their orders in January
were very light, so they never had a quota.  There was not a bottle of beer
came in - I know that - all through the war here, to the station, no bottle of
beer at all.  Because, say your quota's two hundred gallons, well you took it
all in barrels!  You weren't going to worry about selling anyone bottles.  See?
And the Grand used to put on about two or three, didn't they?

Bert:  Niners.  Mm.

Cliff:  The Grand Hotel always had, eh, niners on the wood, as they called it,
straight off the wood, no pipes or anything, just a tap screwed into it, a
double tap.  And that used to last ten minutes.  Sometimes, if we made it, we
hit the door, and there'd be a solid wall of blokes from you to the bar.  So
you'd eventually elbow your way through, but everyone was saying, "give us six
glasses."  See, because they knew they'd never ever get back again, so the time
you hit the bar the beer was heavenly gone or they never had any glasses!

[laughter]

See!?  You'd just stand there and look at everyone like, and say to yourself -
this is in the summer, you'd been working flat out, like y'know, absolutely
parched - "Oh, blimey, like," you'd walk dejectedly out of the place like
y'know.

Bert:  Then the quota's 'd run out sometimes, wouldn't they, wouldn't have any
beer at all!  You be back onto wine then.

Cliff:  Yeah.  We drank like, go to a dance or anything.  It got down to to
last, eh, getting near the finish, the A.B.<?> tonic wine, but that nearly
killed a couple of blokes, so they decided they'd better not drink that any
more!  Without mentioning names, two or three of these blokes used to go down
at the weekend, to Fitzroy, and stagger back on, eh, on Monday with a big
suitcase full of that thruppenny dark<?>.  The whatsname!  That was the
saviour, like y'know.

Cliff:  Ah, I could tell you a story about this, they used to live in, there
was little huts in the yard, and two or three of this gang <?> - they were
single - and there was a little boiler room there with a copper and everything
like y'know, so this weekend they decided they'd make home-brew.  Now
home-brew, they boiled all the ingredients up in the copper.  Now the thing
was, you strained it and whatsname and you left it for two or three weeks, like
y'know, and then you got all the sediment out.  They made it in the morning, in
the afternoon they're all sitting around saying, "I wonder what it tastes
like?"

[laughter]

Cliff:  Hey?  And it's still warm of course!  By the evening came, they'd drank
it all!  And, one of these blokes, was sitting at the end of the goods shed for
a week, he's only young - I'll never forget him, old Freddy - just sitting
there going to sleep, like we're working up and down past him, and all of
sudden he'd let out an anguished howl, like "Wreeeeagh!" like, he's in the
D.T.s y'know?  See?  We used to say, "Shut up, woman!"  Y'know.  A week or two
and you'd get over it, that was, that was funny though, they're going to make
home-brew, and they didn't even let it cool down!

[laughter]

Cliff:  Yes!  Now these, a lot of these photos, would you like to take copies
of them all?  Can you take copies of them, or ... ?

Chris:  What I'd do, is I'd take them down to the historical society, because I
know that they're organising to do copies and stuff like that.  And, if it
would be possible, try to get them to take copies.  They're trying to, sort of,
document and copy stuff pretty systematically.  Um, so I'd do that, if that was
possible.

Cliff:  You'd like to take them with you.  Now that's the Dindy Mill, you've
got a little bit about that.

Chris:  Beauty.

Cliff:  I'd get 'em back eventually, I suppose?

Chris:  Oh yeah!  Oh come on!  Come on.

Bert:  Eventually!

Cliff:  All right.  Yeah!

Chris:  You'd get 'em back, and they'll look better than what you gave 'em to
us.  Fantastic.

Cliff:  There's the, uh, she never gave me that one.  That shows you that same
train track again.

Chris:  Oh right.

Chris:  So on the tram tracks, do you know how much they used to get on each
load?

Cliff:  Ah ...  On the load?  They put, ah, half a ...  A truck load was five
thousand super feet.  [sneeze]  On one of those, on one of their things, they
would have half the load, somewhere about three thousand super.  Yeah.

Chris:  Right.  That's a fair whack, isn't it?

Cliff:  Oh yes.  Oh yes.

Chris:  So this is ... yeah.  So what happened at the end of the war?

Cliff:  Ah, the end of the war, the gantry, as the, eh, as the timber ... ah,
that's just Healesville station, like y'know ...

Chris:  Beauty.  I haven't seen it in its heyday.

Cliff:  At the end of the war, when the ...  took 'em about, took 'em about
1949, like it went for three or four years after, there was still a shortage of
petrol, and then they let them go through by road.  Now the, that gantry crane,
the emphasis on the timber shifted down to, eh, Gippsland, Heyfield, see?  Now
at the time there was a big discussion of whether they'd go to Mansfield, and
work from Mansfield this side, or to Heyfield and work upwards.

Chris:  All right, gotcha.

Cliff:  Now, ah, there was two or three people here that owned timber mills
that went to Mansfield and set up mills, 'cause they were sure it was going to
be Mansfield.  And it went to Heyfield, and that gantry crane from Healesville,
went to Heyfield and was still there for years and years, I don't know whether
it's still there.  But that's where it went to, y'know, went from here to
Heyfield.

Chris:  So, what happened to Healesville after the war?

Cliff:  Well, as far as the timber went, like a lot of these guest houses were,
ah ... that's the same one, so you don't need two of them <?> ... see a lot of
these guest houses that opened up, they closed for years and years and years,
and they opened up, just for the war, and as soon as it went, see people ...
you weren't allowed to travel, see, there was Healesville, Warburton and Cribb
Point, I think, were as far as you were allowed to go to Melbourne.  If you
wanted to go to Wangaratta, you had to prove that you had relatives or your
family lived there.  You had to get a permit, because all travel was for
defence purposes, y'know.  So, 'course that's why this place boomed.

Chris:  Ah!

Cliff:  Guest houses that had been closed for twenty years suddenly opened up
here in Healesville, see.

Bert:  'bout as far as you could go on your petrol ration.

Chris:  Ah!  Well, it was the only one you could get on the train without a
permit.

Bert:  Couple gallons a week, you used to get, or a gallon a week for the
little cars, two gallons for big cars - didn't you? - was the petrol rationing.

Cliff:  Yeah.

Bert:  That's about as far as you could go, here and home and that was it,
that's all you had for the week.

Chris:  So, it would have been a boom time?

Bert:  Oh yeah, yeah, it was.  Terrific here, during the war years.

Chris:  And after the war?

Bert:  After the war, it gradually went back, y'know, back to what it was
before.  And people were able to go further then, see.

Cliff:  Oh, everyone wanted to go interstate and everywhere, see, which they
hadn't been allowed to do for years.

Bert:  Motor cars got better and transports got better and buses were running
everywhere, and the Healesville sort of, y'know,died away.  And most of the
guest houses ...

Chris:  I heard, in the forties, straight after the war, Healesville was
supposed to be a real, like a pretty tough town.

Bert:  Well, I don't know whether it was tough, it was like every other place
where things 're booming I suppose, y'know there's plenty of life here, the
pubs 're always full.

Cliff:  Oh, let's face it, they 're a pretty hard breed, weren't they?

[end of side A]

Ah, a lot of 'em 'd come from the timber district see, of Noojee, that's were
it all - Powelltown, Yarra Junction?

Chris:  Oh.

Cliff:  That's where.  And when this place boomed as a timber town, like, they
could see the opportunity, see, they came this way.  All the cutters, and ...

Bert:  All the rougher elements I suppose you'd call them, y'know, hard boiled.

Cliff:  Hearts of gold, but I mean, y'know, very tough blokes, like y'know.
Yeah.

Bert:  They'd just as soon a fight as to have a feed!

Cliff:  Feed!  Yeah.  A lot of them would.

Bert:  Get a few beers in, and they'd fight the world.

Cliff:  But there was never any, you could go to a dance here, there was never
any strife or anything at dances.  A girl was quite safe, there was never any
of that, like y'know.

Bert:  Not like there is now days.

Cliff:  No.  Oh no.  Like, men treated women as women, like y'know.  I suppose,
when you want funny stories, like I reckon then funniest, Bert, would be ...
every now and again there'd be a dance out at the Badger Hall, out the Badger
Creek there, d'you know it?  I don't know whether it's still the same, but in
my day, it was just a little hall, set in amongst a, a jungle nearly!  So, if
you had anything to drink, which was usually a bottle of wine or something like
that, you went out and carefully had a look at the sky and anything else, and
planted it in the grass, 'cause you weren't allowed to have it within two
hundred yards I think of a hall, wasn't it?

Bert:  Of a dance hall, or an amusement place ...

Cliff:  A hundred yard, or two hundred yard or something, see.  So, eh, you'd
plant it.  Well of course there was about a hundred other blokes doing the same
thing!  And, eh, it was all right for the first couple of times they'd come
out, they'd remember, see, but as the night [chortle], they'd forget where
they'd put their hoard, like y'know, so, eh, they tell me the old bloke that
used to come and clean up the hall on the next morning, like on the Sunday
morning, made a fortune, because, in the daylight he'd see bottles of beer and
wine all over the joint that the blokes couldn't find a night, 'cause it was
absolutely black as whatsname, y'know.  I think that was the story, like
y'know, that always amazed me.

Bert:  They'd always take more than they could drink!

Cliff:  I've done the same thing, carefully marked the spot, y'know, and
everything, come out, and couldn't find it in the dark!  Y'know.

Bert:  Everybody had more, take more than you wanted, too, wouldn't they?

Cliff:  Oh yes!  Yeah, oh yes!

Bert:  They wouldn't know how many bottle they took, they might take a couple
of dozen.

Cliff:  See, you could ... There were people that would go away, that would go,
probably to a little country pub that had a pretty fair quota, and you could
...  there were any amount of places if you knew them where you could buy a
dozen bottles of beer.  See, well they would - particularly fellers that were
driving trucks around - they would, eh, always have a few bottles, like, you
could get them if you knew someone, but not in this town!  I knew because I was
on the railways, and I watched the beer labels for years and years and years,
and we never had a bottle of beer come into this place, and we carted it all.
For all through the war.  It was all bulk beer, like, they took their quota ...
because it was so small the quota.

Bert:  It all came by rail then too, didn't it?

Cliff:  Yeah, the whole lot, Bert, everything, see there was a bloke in the
shed doing nothing else but unload.

Bert:  Nothing came by rail - eh, road in those days.

Cliff:  No, oh no, no, see it wasn't only the timber that was busy, the shed,
there was, what, there was one, <?>, Becker<?>, old Chandler, there was about
three carriers here, like working all the time, just from the station, y'know.

Bert:  Yeah, she was a busy little spot.

Cliff:  Oh yeah, she's a - 'course there was a big population, too, like, as
you said it was swelled by all these, y'know, ah, all the men that had to get
the timber out of the bush, like y'know.  See?

Chris:  Sure.

Bert:  You get a few gamblers in, a few rough elements, wherever there's a bit
of a boom, they turn up, don't they?

Cliff:  Yeah.  Oh yes, there's always, eh, y'know there were some funny, eh,
eh, real funny, I'm thinking of Murphy, that day when he had the kid out <?>
and pissed his paddock, the kid that joined the fire brigade.  Do you remember
Bert, at all?

Bert:  No, no.

Cliff:  Do you want me to tell it?

Chris:  Yeah, go on.

Cliff:  Well anyway, Murdoch and Murphy had a - they're both dead now, aren't
they?  yeah -

Bert:  Yeah.

Cliff:  They had a timber mill just out here near [VR]ouches<?> wasn't it,
somewhere, up that little side lane, weren't it?

Bert:  Eh, what's the name of the street?  Oh gee, I've carted up there
hundreds of loads.  Just above the little shop, on the Maroondah Highway there.
On top of the hill.

Cliff:  Yeah.  That's right.  This Murphy was a bit tall red-headed bloke, and
his mate Murdoch was a short, very broad-shouldered, but they were well-known
fighters, like y'know, rough and tumble blokes, y'know.  And, eh, Murphy being
of course Irish and red-headed, you can imagine what that combination was!
Anyway, this kid, he was about seventeen or eighteen, he came up to join the
fire brigade, and, eh, he was at Minagules <?> Pub this day, had a few beer in,
and was swearing a bit, and of course the place was full, like y'know, and
Murphy set him, "Hey!" he said, like, Murphy'd set anyone for, eh, make a big
feller, see, so he walks up to the kid, "Hey!" he said, "Can't you see there's
women here?" like y'know, 'cause in the parlour, see, "You're swearing!" and
the kid more or less said "What about it?" like y'know, anyway Murphy
offices<?> him outside, and in these days, at the Christie's paddock, just
behind the town there, there was what we called Christie's paddock, and all the
fights were settled there, see.

Cliff:  So, it was nine a.m. Sunday morning, this kid, like y'know.  Well of
course, they roped the ring, they had a ring rope there, y'know, word spreads
very quickly, all the town was there.  So, eh, all rush over, like y'know, no
kid!  Murphy's there, like y'know, eh, hard as nails he was too y'know.  No
kid!  "Where is he?"  "Oh," his mate said, "I dunno!  He's boarded at St.
Claire," - Mrs Roy's boarding house, just behind the main street.  And, eh, so
someone said, "Oh, you'd better go and get him!" so they rush over, and he's,
eh, he's got a bungalow there on the side, see there were a lot of bungalows
and they used those, so, he's sound asleep in the bed, and they woke him up and
he's "What's wrong?  What's wrong?" 'course not feeling too happy with himself!
"You're supposed to fight Murphy this morning."  "Why?  Why?  Why 've I gotta
do this?"  He didn't even remember anything about it, see!  So they got him up
and he dressed and brought him over.

Cliff:  Well, y'know, the betting of course was on Murphy.  This kid absolutely
cut Murphy to pieces.  He, eh, he seemed to have a smattering of boxing and he
cut Murphy to ribbons!  So much so that Murphy never - he used to always go
down this bottom pub most of the time of a night, never appeared in the town
for a week, from just up the road, he never come down to the - for a week.
When he did come down, oh Geez was he a mess!  The kid absolutely slaughtered
him.  He cut him to pieces.  Y'know.  And, eh, I thought to myself, "blimey," I
said, "he was such a quiet, mild, <?> looking lad," like y'know, he's only
young, he'd only be about a quarter the age, or a third of the age of Murphy,
but, oh, did he make a mess of Murphy.  Yeah, yeah.

Cliff:  See, this was how you settle a lot of the things in those days, y'know.
Murphy's "pissed his paddock" like they used to say, like y'know, Sunday
morning, pissed his paddock, y'know.  That's the ones that weren't on and off
quick and lively, like y'know, if it was going to be a real ding-dong, that's
when it happened like y'know.

Chris:  Well, Christies had a name for it too, didn't they?

Bert:  Christies did, yeah, they were <?> fighters and they were always causing
upsets somewhere, weren't they?

Cliff:  Oh, Rob?  Alec ... see, there was two brothers, Alec and Rob, Alec had
the butcher's shop on this side ...

Bert:  Not so much Christies as the Mapoleys<?>, they were the ...

Cliff:  Oh yeah, Mapoleys<?> and the ...  What was that great big bloke that
was their backstop?  Diver, wasn't it?

Bert:  Diver, yeah.  Les Diver, yeah.  They were the rough element, they were
always looking for fights.

Cliff:  These Mapoleys like y'know, they were, but they had this bloke Diver,
oh ...

Bert:  He used to take fits, though, he was a great bit strong feller.

Cliff:  He was their backstop.

Bert:  But he used to take fits now and again.

Cliff:  Yeah.  He always had eh, always threw a few fits now and again, didn't
he?

Bert:  Might have been convenient<?> once.

Cliff:  Yeah.  How tough they were, I suppose ...  This bloke here on the front
of the thing, Bill Groves, he lives in whatsname, too.  See?  Bill was a bit of
a keen rabbiter, and, eh, this Mapoley, their grandfather, he's walking down
through the yard, tall old bloke, walking down y'know.  "Where you going pop?"
Bill yells out, like y'know.  "Down to have a look, some barstard's been
pinching me rabbits!" out of his trap, he was ninety-two.  Large as life
walking right away down the railway line, down to the eh, where she climbed the
hill to get out all his rabbit traps down there.  He's swearing like, some
barstard's been taking rabbits out of his traps.  And I used to say to Bill,
"Gee, its a wonder he can walk down there, much less scrabble around the bush
looking for rabbit traps."

[Bert laughs]

Cliff:  But that was their grandfather, y'know, tough old bloke he was, like
y'know.  And the boys took after him in a way, but they made sure they had a
pretty good back stop.  Yeah.

Chris:  What was the difference between the pubs?

Cliff:  Well, there was the Grand, who served beer off the wood.

Chris:  Right.

Cliff:  And, let's face it, I know blokes who come up from Melbourne, just to
have a beer off the wood, like that was the ultimate, like y'know.  Then the
middle one was Minna Goul's<?>, you remember John Goul who played with Carlton
football?  Oh, he was one of the best centre-half-backs in the league.  Minna
Goul had that, and ah, who was the crowd that had this bottom one, Bert?

Bert:  Oh yeah, eh ...

Cliff:  Dennis's!!

Bert:  Dennis.  Dennis.  Yeah.

Cliff:  You know Dennis's, the big catering firm that used to be in Melbourne?
Well, one of the sons ran the bottom pub, the Terminus.

Chris:  Gotcha.  So what was the difference, what were the different crowds
that used to go to each pub?

Cliff:  Each pub had its own clientele, more or less, like y'know, but oh, it
split up, like y'know, you wouldn't say that ...

Bert:  They used to go from one to the other.

Cliff:  You wouldn't say that one, say, had all the timber blokes in it, they
didn't.  They all had their own like y'know ...

Bert:  Just convenient, wherever was the nearest they used to go.

Cliff:  Whichever one had any beer was the main time, wasn't it?!  Whichever
one had the beer usually, like y'know.

Bert:  That's right, yeah, they were more or less rationed, they had a certain
amount, it used to cut out and that was it.

Cliff:  Oh yes, the Grand, see, used to last ten minutes, didn't it?  Put it on
at five, and at ten past, it was gone.

Bert:  Yeah, that's right.  It got that way at the finish, didn't it, yeah, but
it gradually worked up to that, as beer got scarcer and scarcer.  They used to
send such a big quantity of beer to the troops, I think, y'know, a lot of it
used to go away overseas, and to the camps here, of course.  Made it short.

Cliff:  And there was probably hotels ... And there were hotels in Victoria
that couldn't get rid of it, because they had a big quota, say, and their
population had gone, more or less.  Y'know.  I know there were pubs in the bush
that had any amount of bottle of beer, but you couldn't get to them, of course.
One thing, you weren't allowed to travel by train, and the other one, you never
had any petrol for a car!

Chris:  But you would have got around, I mean, carting and stuff?

Bert:  Yeah, carting logs, oh yes, we used to get around a bit.  Although you
were limited then, in those days, too, because of your petrol.  We were
rationed.

Chris:  So, you didn't do any beer trading or anything?

Bert:  No, no, no sly grog stuff, no.  I never thought of that!

Cliff:  Well, see, if your truck got off its beaten track, they'd want to know
why, wouldn't they?

Bert:  Yeah, I suppose, yeah.

Cliff:  Say you'd 've suddenly shot from Snobb's over to Mansfield or
somewhere, the local cop 'd want to know what the dickens you were doing there!
Y'know.  I tell you what, there's a prominent member of this town, and he's
still here, so I'm not mentioning names, who, the police looked at his speedo
one day up the main street here, and eh, say it read thirty thousand miles,
yeah, in about two months time it read sixty-five thousand - they wanted to
know how he did thirty-five thousand miles on, eh, three gallons of petrol!

Bert:  On the ration!

Cliff:  Yeah.  But he also had timber trucks!

[Bert laughs]

Chris:  Ah!

Cliff:  Yeah.  See for a while, sometimes like bobtail, y'know, like you take
your, drop your jinker off and just run bobtail, like y'know.  Early in the
piece, when the football was still going, the trucks would be over at the
footy, bobtail, as the things got tough, see, when the Japs, and the police
said, "No more of that.  Your trucks to work to and that's all."  And all that
stopped then, like there was no, no shenanigans going on at all, like y'know,
nothing at all, like y'know.  Things were too tough.  Of course, you could go
from here to Melbourne, go from here to Box Hill without seeing a car on the
road.

Chris:  Right.

Bert:  Very quiet.

Cliff:  Very quiet, like y'know.

Bert:  'cept for trucks!

Cliff:  I know that's so, because I had a motor bike, y'know, and I used to go
down to the odd weekend, down home, and, eh, I wouldn't strike a car on all the
way through till I got to Box Hill.  Which when you look at the roads today, is
nearly unbelievable.

Chris:  I was going to say.  You still live, you live here of course, so you'd
notice the change a lot.

Bert:  Yes.

Chris:  In terms of traffic and stuff.

Bert:  Yes, well, Cliff lived here ... how many years were you here?

Cliff:  Ten.

Bert:  Ten years, yeah.

Cliff:  Pretty well to the day, too, wasn't it?  I come in November cup-day,
and I left in November thirtieth.

Bert:  You had ten here, ten at Morewell, and ten at Bright, was it?

Cliff:  Fifteen at Bright.

Bert:  Fifteen at Bright, yeah.

Chris:  So how ... well, at Morewell and Bright and stuff, how would you ...
describe Healesville?  I mean as a town.  Like each town is slightly different,
and you've spent ten years here, and ten year there and stuff.

Cliff:  Ah well, 'course, Healesville in those days, was more, ah, what we'll
say, a town that where everyone knew everyone, and a community minded town.

Bert:  A countrified<?> town.

Cliff:  A country community town, like y'know.  Where when you went to
Morewell, it was growing very big, like Yallourn, it had been too close to
Yallourn, a different type of town altogether, but Bright, when I went to
Bright, was the same, say, as Healesville, like Bright was ...  ah, everyone
helped one another, like y'know, even churches.  Made no difference to a church
at Bright, whether you were a Roman Catholic or a whatsname.  Roman Catholics
had their, eh, stalls and everything like that, they were helped by the other
churches, y'know, and the same thing went on, y'know.  There was a big
community spirit in those places.  Eh, there was here, too.  That, of course,
as the modern times come all disappeared.

Cliff:  If you switch that thing off, like to, eh, and I'll tell you a place
like Myrtleford.  Now I don't think this, unless you want to tape it.

Chris:  I'll tape it.

Cliff:  All right, now I went to ...

Chris:  Unless you don't want ...

Cliff:  No, oh no, oh no, no, no, no!  I just didn't think it was relevant.  I
went to Myrtleford in, ah, thirty-seven, ah, and I was there for about nearly
four years.  Now this is how a country town operated.  There was six o'clock
closing, they were very strict.  Myrtleford's two hundred miles, one hundred
and ninety six from Melbourne, like y'know.  Consequently, eh, I was on the
railways, just the same, and three o'clock in the afternoon the train came in,
and we shunted the, the "per truck" as we called it, the perishable truck, is
the truck that's got all the fruit, cheese, eh, beer and all that stuff in it,
must be unloaded quickly, like y'know, so - a louvre<?> iron truck, like y'know
- so the three carriage used to back in each side, and there used to, there'd
be a gap of about that far up the top, so they'd push me there.

Cliff:  Now this truck had been coming up from Melbourne <?> all day, in the
middle of summer, so I suppose up there it'd be a hundred and thirty or forty
degrees!  Hey?  And, eh, you just work your way through down to the bottom,
like you just, keep one for the co-op, one for J.B. Robinson, didn't matter
which side you give it, they worked it out between you, and you'd unload, say,
six, seven ton within an hour and a half or so, y'know.  So by that time, when
you got to the bottom, and the truck was just about empty, you were dehydrated,
so you'd rush over, I used to rush straight across, run down the station, be
pretty close to five, sign off, ah, and then rush up the pub.

Cliff:  Now this is Myrtleford, has a very hot climate, and you could shoot a
candle<?cannonball?> along the bar at five o'clock in the afternoon, there's no
one there.  You'd say, rush in, say, "Give us a pot quick!" like y'know, you
could hardly talk, see.  Then you would go home, get changed, have a shower,
get changed, have your tea, and at eight o'clock at night, you'd go up to that
pub - they were like clubs, see - the pub was all shut up, but you'd walk
around the back, and the back parlour was better than the front bar!  The
panel'd come off the wall, and there was a beautiful bar.  Well, now I'm going
to mention these things, because I'd just left home, and I thought everything
was goody-goody.

Cliff:  Eh, over in the corner would be the local policeman, the Church of
England, eh, padre or minister, and the Roman Catholic priest, all drinking
together, see, and this kind of rocked me, like y'know.  I used to look at 'em
and think, "Blimey, I was always taught that, y'know, they didn't do anything
wrong!"  And at odd times during the night - they both had Ford coupes, the
Roman Catholic, who's a young bloke, Father LeHaine<?>, oh-oh ...

[Bert laughs]

Cliff:  ... and Father Brown was the Church of England, high Church of England,
he had an excuse, because he was gassed in the first world war, and when got
the gas <?> bad, he used to get on the grog, so.  And, eh, halfway though the
night, see they'd get a few in, they'd be arguing the point about whose Ford
coupe was the best, they'd be roaring up and down the main street, like y'know.

Cliff:  Old Bill Miller the policemen, he's dead now, so it doesn't matter, he
was always, "No noise, boys, no noise," like y'know.  I've ... He has had the
superintendent of the district up in the front parlour at night, and he's
tiptoed down the passage, and the hubbub going in the back bar, "Sssh boys I've
got the super up the front, see."  And, eh, "Right Bill, right, no noise for a
while."  "I'll come down and tell you when I'm right," like y'know.  Now, it
was more like a club, see you might be there, and you didn't have to drink, I
mean, you'd buy a pot and it'd just sit there in front of you all night.
Someone'd say, "Hey, there's a dance at Beechworth, anyone want to go?"  This
was how you got around, like y'know.

Cliff:  Anyway, the part I was going to come to was this.  Now the - old Bill
Miller who was the policeman, he said - there was all the young blokes - he
said, eh, "Oh, this is no good," he said, "kids swimming in the Avons River and
the Myrtle Creek, like y'know, there should be a swimming pool<?> in the town."
So he used to come in the pub of a night, say about ten o'clock he'd walk in,
that's if he wasn't in before us earlier, which he was mainly, and he'd look
around to all the blokes, the farmers that had a few bob.  And there and then
he'd fine them all a bag of cement.  See?  And some of them'd laugh.  He'd say,
"Look, there's court day on Thursday, you drop a bag of cement in tomorrow, or
else!"  See, and they had stables, so he had two bloody stables nearly full of
cement!

Cliff:  Then - he came down to all us single blokes.  He said, "Righto boys,"
he said, "there's a working bee for the next few weekends, down just at the
back of the town, we're going to build a swimming pool," he said, "I borrowed
the, eh, the scoop, of that," - the shire was at Bright - "off that bloody mob
up there ..." - Myrtleford didn't like Bright, because they, Myrtleford was a
riding<?> y'know, all right, down comes the scoop on a horse, and away we go.
Jesus, we mixed concrete for hours and hours, we built the swimming pool.  Now
that swimming pool, I went back to Bright in 1961, and in '62 they were talking
about this swimming pool which we built somewhere about 1938, it'd kind of
out-lived it's usefulness, they wanted a better one - now that's how long it
lasted!  So, we built us a swimming pool, a proper big one, like, shallow end
for the kids, and deep end.

Cliff:  Old Bill said, one day - there're a lot of tennis players in the
country towns, like all the farmers had courts alongside their houses, terrible
lot of tennis.  In Myrtleford alone, it's only a small country town, I think
there's about, say ten tennis teams.  All the churches had their own courts.
Remember?  The methodists had a concrete, the pressies, like y'know, they
weren't too financial and everything, they had asphalt.  I think the Catholics
had asphalt, all the main public courts, over on the, eh, road, were all
asphalt.  And, eh, old Bill said, he said, "I think we need better tennis
courts than this."

Cliff:  I dunno where the, eh, equipment come from, but, this great big cyclone
wire all turned up and the thing.  We built eight grass tennis courts, at the
end of the football gro - eh, at the end of the, eh, eh, baths.  All on crown
land, we built eight grass tennis courts, and you could move the, eh, posts so
that you didn't wear any one end out first, y'know.  The chap that, eh, the
curator of Melb - of Carlton football ground, he was a Myrtleford resident, and
he used to come up there, real old chap at the time.  But he knew all about
grass and everything, and, eh, someone laid the levels and he told us what to
sow and all the rest of it, y'know.  Anyway, we built these.

Cliff:  So old Bill said, "All right," - the fire brigade trained up and down
the main street, which was rather hairy, even in those days, like y'know if a
car's coming in while they're <?>.  The, eh, fire brigade really needed a fire
brigade track.  So, baths, whatsname, this way, fire brigade track, laid down a
big asphalt fire brigade track.  So the next thing, Bill said - people started
to build up on the top of the, eh, we called it "Nobbs' Hill" in Myrtleford.

Bert:  Oh, this is Snobb's Hill!

Cliff:  Yeah, a few houses, and the water supply of course came out of, eh,
Buffalo Creek.  Now all you did was a little wall of stones - it was a
beautiful mountain creek - up far enough to get a bit of pressure, and just a
pipe running off.  And old Bill come along, and he said, eh, "They're
complaining up top on Nobbs' Hill, they can't get any water, we'd better take
the water intake a mile up the, whatsname," see?  So, he said, "I borrowed a
couple of trucks, all you young blokes will have to turn up," like y'know.  And
I remember, Jack McGeean, Jack worked in the power station, no SEC, see, you
had your own little power station.  Jack said, "I don't think I can make it,
Bill."  Bill said, "Look Jack, if you don't," he said, "oh, you're going to
have a bugger of a Christmas!"  Eh?  He'd be down on him.  See, every time he
went into a pub after hours, he'd be down on him.  See, so, up went the water
take.

Cliff:  We were just going to lay down the bowling green, when the war really
got hairy, see, so they planted it in flax.  But I tell you what type of chap
this was, this Bill, eh, Miller, the copper.  We used to get up of a morning at
seven o'clock at the - 'cause we were all single - at the guest house, or
boarding house, where I was, all for initerant<sic:itinerant> workers, like
school teachers, bankers, we'd all rush up and we'd play tennis.  The beauty of
it was, a pair of tennis balls lasted all day, oah lasted for weeks, because
the grass didn't wear 'em out!  On asphalt, we'd have a couple of sets, and
there was no nap left on the ball!  We used to think it was beaut.  Well, at
twelve o'clock, we'd rush straight across, to the Buffalo Hotel.

Cliff:  Look, you would get probably one or two glasses, you'd feel a tap on
your shoulder, and there was Bill Miller.  "All-right boys, you've had a drink,
home you go, don't keep the ladies waiting for Sunday dinner."  And this is why
the wowsers couldn't ever get anything on him.  Eh?  "Oh, Bill, wait a minute!"
"No, you go home now!"  And home you went.

[Bert laughs]

Cliff:  See?  They could never ever, eh, find anything wrong in the town,
y'know, never ever find anything wrong, because, he ran the town like that, and
that was the, eh, the role of the local policeman in the country.  Oh, I
wouldn't say they all did it, but this chap, this was the way he ran the town.
See?

Bert:  Bloody wizard, wasn't he.

Cliff:  Oh yeah, oh yeah.

Bert:  Good man.

Cliff:  'cause, there was no money, see the shire never had any money, if you
had to wait for these things, you'd've been still waiting.  So, the easiest way
was to, eh, do it all by working bee.  See?  And those facilities, and a lot a
...  well, the swimming pool was still there when I come back to Bright in
1961.  And the locals were just going crook about, reckoned it was a bit
out-dated!  I thought to myself, eh, what, eh ...

Bert:  Better than nothing!

Cliff:  ... eh, yeah, what about twenty-three years or more, I'll say it was
... it was only built with pretty rough concrete, there's no tiles or anything,
y'know, at least it was a swimming pool, y'know.  But, that's the way the
country was run, like y'know, totally different to Melbourne, like y'know.  I
came straight from Melbourne, I wondered what had hit me, like y'know, when ya,
the cooperation that went on.

Chris:  So Healesville was like that?

Cliff:  Bit like that way, the same type of way, see, but not quite as
community minded as Myrtleford or Bright is, because they were so far away,
see, here you're only still about thirty-eight mile from Melbourne.  But when
you get away into those other places - but the spirit was here, because we all,
ah, we all went to dances together, we all knew one another, y'know, we all
helped one another, sorta thing, like y'know.  Ah, and, totally different life,
actually, than living in Melbourne.  I, I spent thirty-five years in the bush,
I must have liked it, and I was bred and born in Melbourne, y'know.  Bert's
still here!  Heheheh!  Yeah.

Chris:  Are you originally from here, or?

Bert:  No, I came from Woodend to here.  But we've been here since 1939, 1940.

Chris:  That's ...

Cliff:  Fair little spell.  Yeah.

Bert:  That's a long while, isn't it!  Forty, what's, eighty-four, now.
Forty-four years.

Chris:  So, what have you noticed about how it's changed, and stuff?

Bert:  Well, it was a real live town during the war, as we said, and, eh, it's
gradually quietened off now, it's just a, more or less a tourist town, you'd
call it, wouldn't ya, a retired people's town, or a tourist town?  Which
they're trying to make it.  They were trying to keep industry out, they were
knocking back, eh, several industries that wanted to come here, but they
wouldn't allow them to build here, they wanted it more or less reserved as a
tourist town.

Chris:  Right, that was what, in the fifties and sixties, or ... ?

Bert:  No, that's just in the recent times really, that they've got so funny
about their town.

Chris:  <?> peculiar.

Bert:  The sanctuary of course has altered things a bit here, hasn't it?  It's
made it more tourist than anything, the sanctuary.  Everybody who comes here,
the first thing they go to is the sanctuary!

Chris:  Yeah.  But um, yeah, there's that, and the dam, and ...

Bert:  The dam's another tourist place, yes, and there's the, of course the
hills.  The spur, and ... quite a lot of the Mount Riddle and all these
mountains they like to go up to, don't they?

Cliff:  'course what happens is, they grow a little bit, don't they, definitely
Healesville's grown, and when you do that, y'know, the same thing happened to
Bright.  All the locals when I go back to Bright told me that, where we walked
down the street when I first went there, we knew everyone.  Now there's been
such an influx of retired people, particularly up there, that no longer, the
locals have kind of been swamped.  And I think that's happened here, see where
everyone knew everyone, you get to the stage in the finish where the faces
become strangers, you don't know who they are, like y'know.  See, and that's
just happened to Bright just recently, the same thing happened to Healesville,
like y'know.  You just, the local population kind of gets swamped, like y'know.
And that's, they say, they say, when you walked down the street one time and
you knew everyone, now you walk down, you know one out of every five or six.
Y'know.  That's progress, like y'know, it's the price you pay.

Bert:  It's a different set up now, see, you've got your, instead of guest
houses, you've got, eh, motels and camping grounds, like, where you leave your
caravan, caravan parks, y'see, it's gone to that, hasn't it?  There's no such
things as hotels now, people don't stop at hotels, do they?

Chris:  No, not anymore.

Bert:  They don't want 'em!

Cliff:  Oh, let's face it, too, during the war, like, remember, during the war,
Doonside<?> and a few of those out the Badger Creek, would be condemned as
unfit for human habitation now.  But in those days, well, we never drove away
from Doonside till we gave the people a chance to get inside!  Because, nine
out of even ten, they'd come rushing out to the bus and say, "Look, I can't
stay here."  Like y'know, oh, there was bed bugs, there was everything, like
y'know, some of them were, eh, just been opened up to cash in, like y'know,
and, eh, oh, they were absolutely decrepit, like, a lot of them, y'know, eh,
the big places like Bethany were always clean, and the Ferns, and Woodstock,
and those, y'know, but a lot of them, oh, y'know.

Chris:  And then, was it new-years-eve, was guest house fire burning night or
something like that?

Cliff:  Oh that was when they, that was something like, something like
Valhalla!  Heheh!  When it goes down, like y'know, oh yes, they all go up then,
like y'know.  Yeah, yes, the grandfather, he was bred and born in Valhalla,
when it started to die, like y'know.  They were going up like wildfire, like
y'know.  Eh, the famous story, I think, up that way was eh, eh, it was at a
dance one night, like y'know, and, eh, the woman had been dancing there for
hours, like y'know, and they said "Oh, there's a fire!" she said, "Oh, that'll
be my place!"  Haha!  Yeah!  Yeah.  How did she know?  Yeah.

[much laughter and merriment]

Bert:  Might have been the only house too, mightn't it?  <?>

Cliff:  Straight like, give it away straight away, like y'know!

Bert:  'bout time it went up!

Cliff:  Yeah, probably left a candle burning, under a, eh, piece of paper or
something like y'know, yeah.

Bert:  Under the curtains.

Cliff:  Yeah.  Oh, it got to the stage in Valhalla where the insurance
companies wouldn't pay out <?>.

Chris:  I thought they wanted, what was it, a candle underneath a balloon full
of petrol.

Bert:  Yeah, that's an idea.  A balloon full of petrol?  It'd gradually get
hotter and burst.

Cliff:  Yeah.  Oh yeah, they'd come up with all the - in the old days they
didn't have too many things to work with, but they'd still, they'd still, eh,
get some ingenious way of doing it, I'd bet, like y'know.

Chris:  So, did you just keep on carting?  Or, what'd you do then?

Bert:  What'd I do then?

Chris:  When the timber cut out?

Bert:  When the timber more or less quietened down, well, a lot of people
shifted away to different areas that were newly opened up areas, further away.
And, eh, I went in for tip-trucks then.  I had a couple of tip-trucks going,
but, eh, there's no money in them I don't think, I couldn't make any money out
of 'em.

Cliff:  But a lot of the timber trucks followed the, down to Heyfield, Bert,
didn't they?

Bert:  Yeah, they, mostly they went away to other areas that were opened, newly
opened areas, like, further over towards East Gippsland, and, y'know, Orbost,
and places like Cann River, and all around there, and further North, up
towards, eh, Aubrey, out from Aubrey, what's those ranges there?

Cliff:  Ah, the Woomboomgambers<?> or something, weren't they?

Bert:  Eh?  Or right up in the North-East there, y'know, along the Murray,
there's a lot of new mills gone in there, the new areas opened up, the
mountains, and, eh, Mount Buffalo, and, those, along the slopes of Buffalo,
those mountains.

Chris:  So, you ran a, you had a couple of tippers?  And that didn't work.

Bert:  No, no.  There was nothing in it.  I don't think there was much in
timber trucks, anyway, as far as that goes.  It was only good wages.  And then
you had to work for it, like you worked long hours.  There was no, eh, starting
at eight and knocking off at five!  You were starting at five and knocking off
at ten, y'know!  That's the only way you could make anything out of them, you
had to work.

Chris:  So then, d'you work in the mill as well?

Bert:  I have worked in mills, yeah, before I took on the trucks, yes.

Chris:  So, you got any truck stories?

Bert:  I haven't got any trucks now.

Chris:  No, have you got any truck stories?

Bert:  Truck stories?  Oh, not really no, just hard work.  Never had time to
have stories, you were too busy.  Going all the time.  'cause we used to
travel, eh, a thousand ...

Cliff:  There was only one story, Bert, when they used to ask whether Hoot<?>
Gibson was going up the mountain or coming down!

Bert:  Yeah.

Cliff:  There was one trucky here was, eh, when he was up the mountain, like
everyone'd be asking is Hoot coming down, they didn't want to meet Hoot on the
road, he was a terrible driver!  But of a night when he got half-full, he was a
good driver, wasn't he?  Yeah.

Bert:  Yeah.

Cliff:  Yeah, they'd all ask, "Where's Hoot?" like y'know, "Oh, he'd be coming
down now ..."  "Ooooh!"  Eh, the trucks weren't as good as they are now, there
was - the old brakes would give out now and again, they're air brakes, and they
were all the time shooting off the road and down the gullies, y'know.  Yeah.

Bert:  Yeah, the trucks were only small trucks in those days ...

Cliff:  Big loads.

Bert:  We were limited to loads.

Cliff:  For the size of the truck they were big loads, Bert, weren't they?

Bert:  Oh yes.  Yeah.  They were too big.

Cliff:  For the size of the truck, y'know.

Bert:  Of course, they cart three times the load, four times the load we used
to, now, with these big trucks they've got.  Massive things.

Chris:  Sure.

Cliff:  But see, coming down from St. Leonard, see, was a hairy ride, wasn't
it.

Bert:  Oh yeah.

Cliff:  Like y'know, like they were dirt roads put in, let's face it <?>
logging truck ...

Bert:  You were on your brakes all the way, and ...

Chris:  So, you ever lose a truck down there?

Bert:  Mm?

Chris:  Did you ever lose a truck down there?

Bert:  Oh, not really, no, no.  No, we had some close shaves perhaps at times,
y'know, the brakes 'd give out, and you'd manage to stop somehow.  Drag your
foot out the side!!

[laughter]

Cliff:  Yeah, yeah!

Bert:  Oh yes, there was quite a lot of narrow escapes, I suppose, as far as
that goes, with our loads, 'cause the roads were pretty steep for those small
trucks.  'course now days, they just go up and down hills like a car, now,
don't they?!

Cliff:  Yeah.  They've got the power now, haven't they?

Bert:  Oh, gawd!

Cliff:  See in the old days, with the air brakes, like y'know, you weren't in
the right gear coming down the hill, like, using your gears, you start to use
your brakes a bit, they used to get hot and give out!  Very smartly!  Y'know.

Chris:  And angels give.<?>

Bert:  Yeah.  Throw 'er out and go!

Cliff:  Heheh!  Start praying, y'know!  Yeah.  Tell 'em about Rubbley<?> Bert,
like that was a fearsome deal, wasn't it?

Bert:  My word, yeah, that was steep.  You attempt<?> to come down there low
gear all the way.  And your brakes flat out on, more or less.

Cliff:  Out over Lake Mountain way, y'know, they got over there.

Bert:  And we got the idea of putting, eh, water on the brakes, on the trailer
brakes.  We used to put tanks in between the trailer and fill them up with
water, and then run a pipe down into the wheels to keep them cool.  That
improved things quite a lot.  We were able to, eh, y'know, increase our loads a
little, and we didn't have that risk of running out of brake all the time.

Chris:  Mm.  That must 've been, yeah, pretty tough stuff.

Bert:  By Geez it was!  'specially in the hot weather, you'd get a day it was a
hundred degrees or something.  It was hot enough sitting in the cabin without
trying to drive the damn thing.

Chris:  Yeah, not all the air-conditioned stuff you've got now.

Bert:  Oh, no, no, no air-conditioning!  The only air-conditioning you had was
you wind your windows down.

Bert:  But now days of course, they've got hydraulic cabins, and hydraulic
seats, and air-conditioning, everything.  Automatic gears.  Oh, Christ, they
don't drive 'em now, the truck drives itself.  They just steer it!

Bert:  I noticed 'em going past here, with big loads, this last big fire they
had around here, they've opened up a lot of timber, logs, areas, over this way,
over Powelltown way, and they've been carting past here.  And they gotta go
past here, and up this hill, and they don't seem to change gear.  And we'd be
hitting low gear by the time we got to here, before we started to climb the
hill, in our trucks.  Not with their load on, either, 'bout a third of what
they put on.  But oh, Geez, they coast along these days.

Cliff:  They're not drivers, they're only chauffeurs now, aren't they!

Bert:  Yeah, that's right.

Cliff:  Yeah.  Yes, they really earned it in the old days.

Bert:  Look at the mountain highways, you can't catch 'em, can you, those big
trucks?  They go faster that you do.

Chris:  Oh yeah.

Bert:  If you're doing a hundred, they'll pass you.  Fully loaded.

Chris:  Wind those things up, and ...

Bert:  They keep 'em wound up.  They don't need to wind 'em up, though, they've
got the power, haven't they?

Chris:  Mm.  So, you're just about opposite the racecourse here?

Bert:  Yeah, right above the racecourse.

Chris:  So, were you involved in that ever, or ... ?

Bert:  No, just used to watch the races now and then when they were on.  No,
I'm not a race-goer.  Oh, it was quite nice to go down there on a nice day, and
sit down there near the fence and watch 'em.

Cliff:  Yeah, you've certainly got a good view of 'em.

Chris:  Yeah, 'cause I was, I thought you might have actually built up here
because you were ... like an ardent race-goer or something, so you didn't have
to ...

Bert:  Oh, I've been two or three times, but I'm not a race-goer, no.  It's
getting up towards the Melbourne Cup now, isn't it.  Not long.

Chris:  Hang on, hang on ...

Bert:  Another week.

Chris:  I was going to say, yeah, that's just next week, isn't it?

Bert:  Tuesday week.

Chris:  Is it Tuesday week?

Bert:  Tuesday week, yeah.

Cliff:  Oh, usually, first Tuesday in November, isn't it?

Chris:  Yeah, right.

Cliff:  Be about the fifth or something.

Bert:  It's a fortnight after the, eh, Caulfield Cup.

Chris:  After Caulfield, right.

Bert:  This is one week, almost, isn't it?

Chris:  Yeah, we just about knocked this week off, so ...

Bert:  Tuesday week it'll be, Melbourne Cup.

[sound of photos sliding, counting]

Chris:  They're a great bunch of photos.

Cliff:  Twenty-one.  They weren't, the, eh, the cameras weren't very good in
those days, there's no such thing as light meters or anything, I had an old
camera, like y'know, you used just to point it and hope for the best!  Had to
be a good day or nothing came out, wannit?

Bert:  ... wait till the sunshine, or something ... <?>

Cliff:  Yeah, yeah.

Bert:  Hang on a bit.

Cliff:  Yeah, you just hoped the ... unless the sun was shining, you didn't
have much chance of getting a good photo.  But it - do you want that thing too?

Chris:  Ahm, well, if, if you can spare it for a week or two.

Cliff:  Yeah, oh yeah.  That would be the only thing about Healesville, I
think, in it.  They're better photos than mine, of course, y'know.

Bert:  Oh ...

Cliff:  Ah, they'd be easier to reproduce, like y'know, yeah.

Bert:  Yeah, they'd reproduce bigger. <?>

Chris:  I'll take these down to, in fact, there's a meeting on this evening, I
just remembered, of the, a couple of people, the writers<?> from the, um,
historical society, they're just meeting down at Mark Schnell's<?> place.  I
might in fact drop these in on 'em now, and ask them if they can ...

Cliff:  Well, it was funny 'round about this time, y'know, they decided to, eh,
they came up and they decided they'd try to match all the jobs in our railways
here, against jobs in America, railways, American railways, like get the
identical job, like y'know.  That particular photo rocked the Yanks.  I think
it was, eh, it was this whatsname, they couldn't for the life of them think of
what job ...  you know the one they matched it with?  They had a bloke winding
a great big air compressor up!  Hey?  They had nothing on rails like that, see?
See, so the nearest thing they could get was this dirty great ... they sent it
back ...  they matched all the photos like of the different jobs, like y'know,
with staff working and all that, y'know, and when it come to that one, they
must've scratched their heads and said, "Oh, what the hell's this thing?" like
y'know.  And so they sent back this photo of this great big air compressor and
the bloke on rubber tires<?> winding it up, like y'know, ehe!  'course that was
the tractor that's in there, like y'know.

Chris:  Right, so, what was the upshot of that comparison of things with the
American stuff?

Cliff:  Oh, a lot of our jobs are the same, y'know, because I think we all,
mostly we all stem from the Yanks, like y'know, eh, from the English, like
y'know.  Nearly all our safety systems were built on that book "Red for Danger"
- did you ever read it? - like where they ... if you ever see "Red for Danger,"
it's the history of railways in England, from the word go, like y'know.  Where
they, they ran one train along a line, like y'know, and then it got a bit busy
and they ran two, y'know, and then one bloke, this signal-man, would've had no,
eh, absolute contact with this signal-man, decided to run this train this way
while this blokes running this way, like y'know.  And, eh, I think it was
Brunell<?>, like that big railway engineer, they, a lot of the, eh, prominent
people in a town had their own engines, in England, see, stabled in the engine
shed, see they owned them, like y'know, and they used to buzz off up and down
the line, like y'know, as much ...

Bert:  Did they?

Cliff:  Oh yeah, oh yes, this was quite, quite common in those ... of course
this was when it first started off ... Robbie Louis Stevenson, that's what they
were like!  And this Brunell, like the engineer, he's going along one day, and
he sees an engine coming from the opposite direction on the same track, so, he
just opened his up!  Haha!  And rammed the bloke!  Like, he reckoned he had a
better engine than the other bloke did, and he was quite disgusted to find
someone using his bit of railway line, like y'know, and [cough] this was ...
and you can see how our safety systems gradually evolved, after every one of
these accidents, in would come another rule, like y'know, and, eh, till they
had ironed it pretty well - well, if you look at the, what happened in England
the other day, you wonder why, like y'know.  But, eh, in theory, nothing should
go wrong, like, as you can see in Victoria at least, we don't run trains into
one another, like as I say, only been a couple in their lives, like y'know.

Cliff:  As a matter of fact, the Aurora, you remember the Aurora ploughed into
the goods train, well see I was on holidays at Echuca at that time, was in a
motel, my wife and I.  The bloke next door said, "Oh, I see where the Southern
Aurora just had an accident, on the main line."  I said, "No, impossible.
Impossible." I said, "With our systems they can't <?>," I said, "You must've got
it wrong."  He said, "You better go and have a listen to your wireless!"  There
was a wireless in there, so I went and turned it on, and sure enough the
Aurora's ploughed into this goods train, y'know.

Cliff:  But of course, eh, I don't know whether you - we know the story now, we
didn't for a long, long while, took years for it to properly come out, like
y'know.  The driver'd definitely taken a heart-attack and died, like y'know.
And the fireman definitely wasn't where he was supposed to be, he was down
having a cup of coffee in the -

Chris:  Oh.

Bert:  Huh.

Cliff:  See, and here's this train roaring along at seventy or eighty mile an
hour, going through red light after red light.  Eh?  See what they were trying
to do was, Bert, they were trying to ...  Now, I would personally be a bit
crook on the, eh, train controller, but of course they try to work trains ...
on this standard gauge they've only got crossing loops every now and again,
it's not, it's only single line, see.  So what they - they've got goods trains
and passenger trains coming along - what they try to do is keep working them up
as close as they can, so that they don't have the goods train down here twenty
mile away when there's a chance they could get him up ten mile.  But when
you're dealing with passenger trains roaring along at seventy or eighty mile an
hour which they do on that particular line ...

Bert:  They don't take long to do ten miles, do they?

Cliff:  ... I don't think they should take the risk, I'd've gone crook, but of
course he was doing his job, like y'know.  'course what he's doing, he's
bringing this goods train into the crossing loop, and the Southern Aurora,
miles back, got a caution signal.  Yeller.  Caution.  Now that - the driver
then is supposed to bring his train under control, like y'know, start to rip
her down, but of course, he's dead!

[the tape finishes at this point]

\end{play}