A tale of two towns (2): Burnie

Time passes. Listen. Time passes. – Dylan Thomas, Under Milkwood

INTRODUCTION: the best of times: the worst of times

In the winter of 1954 I moved to Burnie from Strahan. I had a new home town at the age of six. Burnie was to be my home for the next eleven years of my life. I did all my schooling there and it was the town through which I went through puberty and my early teenage years.

I must confess pleasant memories of Burnie were re-invoked by an internet site I discovered called a Pictorial History of Burnie. It did this by posting photos of buildings long destroyed that has passed from my memory. Perhaps even more importantly the comments section brought to me a multitude of voices from the past, many of whom had long ceased to reside in Burnie, rejoicing in a shared Burnie experience especially from the 1950’s onwards.

I asked myself why I was feeling this wave of emotion for a place I hardly ever visited anymore. Only on rare occasions would I go to the town to visit my mother and father’s grave in the Burnie cemetery where, looking westwards for eternity, they overlook the beautiful Table Cape. Further conjecture on this brought the realization my views of Burnie have always been mixed: while I lived there, as Dickens said at the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times”

For many years despite an avid interest in the world and the universe I had no desire to leave Burnie, yet one week after my arrival I wanted to leave. I felt afraid and alone. I was to feel this again after I finished my schooling – the conservatism, the small town mentality and the progress at all costs attitude saw me desperate to leave. Wedged in between this from 1954 to 1964 were the best of times; from that time Burnie offered a cerebral treasure house of pleasant memories.

I arrived in at our home in Cherry Street Burnie from the tiny village of Strahan, where I had the freedom to roam at will and rarely saw other children. I discovered wall to wall kids, when I started out to explore my new street. Non baby boomers will find it hard to visualize just how many kids there were in society at large in the nineteen fifties. It was further exaggerated by the fact we had moved into broad acre government housing, known colloquially as bank or housing department homes. In my street alone one family had twelve kids in a three bedroom house with no sleep outs or extra rooms of any kind.

Bigger families were the norm.

A perfect Burnie day. This photo was taken recently from the top of the famous goat track; notice the absence of the huge paper mill.

They bashed me up – for no good reason

In the first week of my arrival in my new environs I began to explore by walking the length of my new street. Some boys beckoned to me from across the road and I thought I was about to make new friends.

No- they bashed me up, for no other reason, than I was a stranger. This incident is forever etched in my memory and shapes my views of Burnie to this day despite the fact two or so years later I was to defeat the ringleader in a fist fight in the shadow of our local bonfire site. As I grew up it seemed a violence of fists pervaded the town. I could not understand it and it made me slightly fearful of Burnie.

Other fearful things were also brought to the front of my mind; the DLP was showing us propaganda films of Chinese troops marching across Sydney Harbour Bridge and we lived with the fear of nuclear war and communism.

Fear was instilled into us – Cold War fear never leaves you.

I was terrified during the Cuban missile crisis; scared witless when Kennedy was shot. Panic that a tidal wave was to engulf the town at some point also served to frighten most of the youngsters in the town.

A phenomenon of the time, namely newsreels, contributed to this.

A newsreel is a short film prevalent between the 1930s and 1960s, shown at picture theatres prior to the main film and they consisted of news, current affairs, and general entertainment. There is no doubt that newsreels played a valuable role in keeping Australia pro-British and conservative. Movietone cinesound newsreels were the common ones shown in Australian theatres- newsreaders had exaggerated educated accents and the tenor of the newsreels was generally conservative. Nonetheless they give a valuable cultural insight into Australia at the time.

Newsreel one –The Rumble (Fight! Fight!)

One went around Burnie prepared to fight or more importantly and wisely to do your best to avoid a fight, or to avoid being picked on. As avoidance was not always possible one had to develop some residual fighting ability. The boys in the town did have an unofficial pecking order of who were the best fighters in the town. The mystique attached to this lessened the number of brawls as reputations counted heavily in this boy’s world of fighting. One of the most popular attractions at sideshows that visited Burnie for the Agricultural Show was Harry Paulsen’s boxing tent where locals would fight three rounds with a selected boxer from the travelling troupe.

‘Fight! Fight!’ – the spectre of a fight raced around the school grapevine and soon a ring of boys would surround the two combatants. The fight would last until one boy was beaten or a teacher broke it up. The boys themselves never combined to break the fights up. They wanted black eyes and bloody noses the outward signs of a loser and by implication the crowning a winner. Of course fights between boys and more occasionally men took place everywhere outside dances, in the streets, at the beach.

One fight I will always remember was between two real young men whom I will designate as the Baker Boy and the Butcher Boy. It will remain forever legendary in Burnie teenage folklore The Baker Boy was by repute the town’s best fighter. Few people had seen him fight as he lived on his reputation. The Baker Boy was actually a nice youngster; he always spoke to me and was polite to all around him, was always well groomed and good at most sports. His father worked at the giant pulp mill and his family, like most, lived in a housing department home. At first glance he was detached and could easily have been mistaken him for a pacifist. He had the distinctive ducktail hair style slicked back with hair oil – probably Californian poppy or Brylcreem, the two most popular hair oils of the day.

The Butcher Boy had left school early, having secured a special exemption to leave and become apprenticed in his uncle’s butcher shop. He was always initiating fights at school and wore tight fitting white tee shirts all year around to accentuate his huge arm muscles. It seems the school was only too willing to facilitate an early release as he was the source of many fights and was forever playing truant. If you looked sideways at him he would use it as an excuse to start a fight with you. One always avoided eye contact with him. His declared aim was to be the best fighter in the town. For many months at communal venues he openly challenged the Baker Boy to fight. He often would bump him or push him and call him weak and gutless. The Baker Boy just shrugged and continued to tell him he just did not have any real reason to fight him. This posturing continued for six months and eventually there was a sense that maybe the Baker Boy would not fight because he could not win.

It was one of those summer evenings in February where it seems darkness will never arrive and playtime lasts forever. It was at the Police Boys Club and the Baker Boy was playing basketball. He did not see the Butcher Boy swagger into the club and was reaching down to pick up the basketball when it was kicked from his outstretched fingers. Calmly he retrieved the ball and was about to dribble towards the basket, but Butcher Boy wanted more, this time he knocked the ball firmly from his hands. Again Baker Boy ignored the intervention and continued on dribbling toward the basket. Butcher Boy followed and after Baker Boy had completed his shot took the ball and kicked it to the furthest extremes of the hall.

This was the tipping point Butcher Boy had wanted and he turned to mock Baker Boy but he was hit with a rapid combination of punches. Fight, Fight! was the call as the combatants were circled by boys. The on-duty adult, who was of course was an off duty police officer, stayed at a respectful distance and let the fight unfold. After twenty minutes the skill of Baker Boy and the strength of Butcher Boy were producing lots of action but no decisive result. They were sweating profusely. After thirty minutes they had worked their way into the change rooms at the rear of the premises and were so exhausted they fought on their knees, blow for blow, for another fifteen minutes. The fight presaged the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire, the so called ‘rumble in the jungle’.

Butcher Boy was wasting punches, his massive arms were a lead weight and he was tiring markedly. Finally a massive right to the jaw rendered Butcher Boy out cold.

Baker Boy just sat on a bench for a few minutes recovered his composure, took out a comb and combed his hair and walked out into the evening.

I never saw him fight again – he didn’t need to. It seemed the gloating bullies and the swaggering king hit merchants always won the fights but for once, at least, justice was served. He is forever both Burnie’s best fighter and more importantly probably one of its most modest young men. Butcher Boy humiliated beyond compare left the town soon after and joined the nNavy.

Burnie: the pre-pulp, pulp and the post-pulp eras

Burnie is a port city of around 25,000 people on the north-west coast of Tasmania. White settlement dates from 1827, and it was named after William Burnie, an early director of the Van Diemen’s Land Company, colloquially known locally by its acronym the VDL. The influence of this still-extant company remained strong at the time I was growing up in Burnie. Burnie was not settled peacefully. In 1828 a Palawa woman Tarerenorerer led a war band of the Emu Bay tribe against white settlement. The Black War in Tasmanian from 1828-32 was marked by a disproportionate imbalance in weapons; however Tarerenorerer managed to secure muskets and conducted attacks on VDL employees until her eventual capture.

The key industries are still heavy manufacturing, forestry and farming. The Burnie port along with the forestry industry provides the main source of revenue for the city. Burnie has always been the main port for the west coast mines and one of the most successful private railways in Australia the now defunct Emu Bay Railway (EBR) was based in Burnie and serviced the West Coast of Tasmania. By many measures Burnie is Tasmania’s major seaport. The influence of forestry had a major role on Burnie’s development with the founding of the Burnie Paper Mill, often called APPM or the Pulp by Burnie people, in 1938 and later the woodchip terminal in the later part of the century. The Burnie Paper Mill closed in 2010 and I divide Burnie into the pre- pulp, the pulp and the post pulp era.

A Burnie postcard! Pre-pulp view taken from South Burnie.

Pre-pulp era Burnie was a flourishing town with a beautiful bay and some fine houses, prominent among them Oakleigh, another magnificent house demolished for no apparent reason. As I had outlined before, my father liked Burnie – he had moved from Waratah to begin his first job there on the cusp of the depression when a pre-paper mill Burnie was a pollution-free, smaller and gentler town. People promenaded along the foreshore at Oakleigh Beach under the sturdy Norfolk pines. Farmers prospered tilling the rich red basalt soil; how could they fail in what was some of the world’s richest agricultural regions with a climate that aided and abetted this. It is often by way of hyperbole that north-west coast residents brag that the soil is so good you pull up the vegetables and throw them away and just eat the soil!

Merchant and support services grew up in the town to support its rural base. Webster and woolgrowers, farmers and graziers, Nat Brown, the River Don Trading Company, Moran and Cato and the great VDL Company. Sport and religion flourished and I became immersed in both: the former freely and enthusiastically, but was dragooned into the latter by a mother heavily influenced by the strong temperance line projected by the Methodist Church. It is fair to say robust temperance and intemperance were both present in post-war Burnie like two competing football teams.

Then came two important overlays ushering in the pulp era: the first was the creation of the huge APPM mill directly employing upwards of 3000 workers at Burnie. The post-war baby boom, the second overlay, and the establishment of the Pulp complemented each other. Burnie had the giant mill and a future labour force and the first pulp workers came from all over the Tasmania and the mainland and even as far as the UK.

Where to house them? Tasmanian Labor governments created broad acre housing estates to cheaply house workers to support the big heavy industrial companies attracted by the policy of hydro-industrialisation using the principles of buying up large tracts of farm land or sometimes bush land on the outskirts of towns. Burnie was largely built along the coast in a narrow strip of land enclosed by sheer escarpments which rose to a plateau and that supported many farms and small settlements like Upper Burnie. Here was created Montello, Terrylands, Hillcrest and Acton Estate some of the houses directly on the sheer escarpments, like our house in Cherry Street, others more fortunate on the flat.

Beginning of the boom times for Burnie

This was the beginning of the boom times for Burnie – workers had money in their pockets, Burnie produced some great sportspeople, free universal education flourished and everybody had a job. Pulp pay day each fortnight and pulp bonus time each Christmas saw a buzz in the town that was hard to describe; it was more than just cash registers ringing out the fivers and tenners passed over to Burnie shopkeepers.

Perhaps it was liberal capitalism’s zenith – the money stayed in the town and the flow on effects was immediately apparent in the bars, the taxis, the electrical shops and the banks.

It was an era where each year the banks put on a new junior teller, the railway a new junior porter and shunter, the factories apprentices and the public services recruited clerks. The internationalisation of capitalism will be its death blow – you can see the thousand cuts of its death in every Australian small town and Burnie is no different. When I visited Burnie after the closure of APPM the town took on a sullen demeanour, as if the town had lost its mojo, the townspeople looked sad and jaded. Immediately there was a yearning for the Pulp a sense of loss, even from its fiercest opponents.

I said in my previous story on Strahan …most of us hated the ugliness of the mill, but now it’s gone, we seek out photos of the old Pulp with smoke billowing from its stacks. Driving west over the Wivenhoe Bridge will never be the same without the Pulp on one’s left hand side. The town of Burnie is at once both unique and typical of Australia in the 1950’s and 1960’s. I would like to explore how both these elements are exemplified by the Burnie that I grew up in from 1954 to 1966.

A perfect ripple of concentric semi- circles

The Burnie of my imagination is really a set of concentric semi circles like a perfect ripple from a pebble thrown into a pond. The first concentric semi circle is the sea which forms Burnie’s northern boundary. The sea has played an enormous role in Burnie’s psyche – the port and the beach in particular. One striking memory of my childhood was the magnificent view we had from our kitchen window of the sea and the waterfront. We could see ships entering and leaving the port and I could see the spray as large waves hit the rocks on the perimeter of the breakwater abutting ocean pier. The local Advocate newspaper had its own shipping section, so we would see a ship on the horizon and Dad would thoughtfully tell us what the likely ship was by consulting the Advocate. The beach consumed so much of our leisure time it was free and healthy and I spent hour after hour in the water. Later as puberty approached beach was where we went at night to smoke country life cigarettes, ‘pash’’ on with girls and drink cans of UDL.

Then the second: the relatively narrow and flat part of Burnie. This was the part first settled by Europeans on which stands the CBD and small sections of housing to the north, west and south. Today South Burnie is almost a giant marshalling yard full of semi-industrial development. In my childhood it resembled a quiet self-contained village with long established families, the odd small shop and sturdy private homes. There was a recreation ground where I played cricket and also a community hall where the postal institute put on a Christmas party for the children. I can still remember the huge tree in the hall and the unforgettable taste of tropical flavoured Cooee cordials that was provided to the kids in ample quantities. We would walk to South Burnie on Sunday afternoons down Wilf Campbell’s private road to watch the non – remote controlled model aeroplanes that were flown by several avid hobbyists on the South Burnie Recreation Oval.

Welcome to Burnie

The next concentric semi-circle consists of the settlements perched on the plateau that nestles on hills that rise sharply from the narrow plains below. Emu Bay is really bounded by the promontory that forms the wharves to the West and Round Hill to the East. It is at the bottom of Round Hill that the road traveller is greeted by the sign Welcome to Burnie and they can see for the first time can see Emu Bay unfold. In previous times the huge pulp mill virtually on the western banks of the Emu River would immediately take your eye. On this plateau are the largely broad acre housing estates that have sprung up since the 1950’s on what was formerly farmland. Like a huge spine Mount Road runs from the town up the hill arriving at the unimaginatively named Upper Burnie, hence onto Ridgeley and eventually if you keep driving, the west coast. Upper Burnie existed as a small settlement prior to the building of broad acre housing and a trip up Mount Road one is reminded of this by passing the once prestigious home of transport pioneers the Tatlow family on the corner of Mount and Southwell Streets.

Just before this at the junction of Alien Crescent and Mount Street you may catch a glimpse through the trees the magnificent old home that was the homestead of the original Hillcrest farm. The selling of large tracts of this farm was to provide blocks of land for public housing. A little further up the road was the site of the once impressive home and garage complex of Bill Singline and directly opposite this the huge timber yards of the Cummings family. Bill Singline, was the chairman of Tasminex, who claimed in 1970 the company had found evidence of massive mineral deposits in its drilling program with the price of shares soaring to $96 a share. He also was reputed to have said that the find could be bigger than that of Poseidon, whose rich nickel discoveries began the post Vietnam War minerals stock market boom in Australia. The discovery soon fizzled out and the shares lost considerable value. I well remember that the Tasminex affair certainly created a hum of excitement around Burnie at the time.

Strictly no jiving!

Another place of interest in Upper Burnie is the Upper Burnie Memorial hall, where I attended overflow Methodist Sunday School classes and perversely my older sister attended dances on the weekend evenings to the strains of Tassie Cowgill’s Orchestra. The venue was temporarily renamed Dreamland for this frivolity and curiously I can remember clearly signs on the hall walls saying “strictly no jiving”, perhaps as some small concession to the wowsers! Three miles up Mount Street a large road intersects it, called the Three Mile Line This is the end of another concentric semi circle now Burnie does become rural and as you travel south disappears into farms and plantation forests and small rural settlement like Ridgley, Elliot and Stowport. The hinterland of Burnie was a strange place for suburban kids – far away, or as we said in our version of beyond the Black Stump – ‘Way out the back of Bulgobac’. The kids from these farms travelled into Burnie for school each day so that Burnie schools has a great mix of rural as well as working and middle class kids. This was great melting pot and was later added to by the kids of migrants who started, albeit slowly to make their way to Burnie.

The King of the Bodgies & Queen of the Widgies

Here on this plateau overlooking the town of Burnie and the sea, in and around the older sparse settlements like Upper Burnie, amid what was once farm land broad acre government housing was built to accommodate the workforce needed for the giant Pulp mill and the spike in births that followed the war. The preposterous names of broad acre suburbs belied the social reality. Montello – could almost be out of eighteenth century English novel. Perhaps a grand house named for someone like Mr. Darcy. Terrylands recalls sense wide spaces, rolling fields Elysian almost, Hillcrest a sense of smugness, of safety of grand houses. Acton Estate aligns itself in the mind with the grand estates of England; again one thinks of grand houses.

No Mr. Darcy here just the King of the Bodgies and the Queen of the Widgies. No grand carriages just billycarts and bikes and the odd curious Morris Major or Mark One Zephyr vehicle. No Harrods but instead the Shop on Wheels, the Terrylands Fish Supply, Metcalfe’s News agency and Miss Overton’s corner shop. Miss Pearl Overton my local shopkeeper who wrote down in HB pencil every purchase in an exercise book and added up the total in her head. No caviar or pheasant here but gobstoppers, bubble gum and bullets, icy poles and at our tables rabbits and mutton bird, mullet caught gutted and scaled by me on the Burnie wharves and jelly with sliced bananas encased in the final mould. No expensive Italian shotguns but shanghais and air rifles and the occasional .303 stored up high away from the kids. No Eton or Harrow but the grassy expanses of Montello Primary School teeming with kids, or the asphalt playgrounds of Burnie State school again overflowing with kids made to take goitre tablets and drink, depending on the season, luke warm or freezing cold school milk . At the musset huts of Parklands High School, a revolution was happening in universal education and working class kids from humble backgrounds were reaping the benefits. A large part of today’s Tasmanian intelligentsia was sourced in the public schools and government housing estates of Launceston, Hobart, Burnie and Devonport and other smaller Tasmanian towns. Stella Maris Catholic School was flush with students too and I can remember the friendly banter as we passed by on the way to Burnie State School.

State school rats, with your hair in plaits,
Eating maggots out of cats.

And our refrain
Convent Dogs sitting on logs,
Eating maggots out of frogs

Whilst Mr. Darcy and company hunted grouse we trapped rabbits in primitive steel traps dodging swooping plovers. Despite the proliferation of suburbs a connecting network of vacant fields, hills too steep for any commercial or residential use, small farms, creek beds swamps and vacant Crown land ran within suburbs and connected suburbs. We roamed them all.

VIEW FROM OUR HOME IN CHERRY STREET HILLCREST.PROMINENT WAS OF COURSE THE ORIGINAL HILLCREST FARM HOUSE, THE WATERFRONT AND BASS STRAIT.
(AN ORIGINAL BOX BROWNIE SNAP TAKEN BY MY ELDEST SISTER.)

Newsreel two – one perfect day

One perfect day: we lived out a multiplicity of them in those carefree days in the Burnie of the late 1950’s. No real burdens and no forward planning needed but just doing something spontaneously every day we were not at school. In fact my mother would shoo us out of the house as soon as breakfast was completed and she had thrust a cold spoonful of cod liver oil into our mouths. We were exhorted to go out and play and our only riding instructions were to be home for lunch. We have a veritable smorgasbord of structured and unstructured play and recreational choices.

To the Coast

One is said to be returning to the Coast, when you return to Burnie traveling from the west, east or south. Here I need to pause and explain to mainland and international readers that Tasmanians call the North West Coast – the Coast. Perhaps the term implies some pre-eminence as the common naming of other stretches of coast in Tasmanian more clearly display their geography – the East Coast, the West Coast, the South Coast. The Coast refers to the coastal settlements stretching westwards from Latrobe, which paradoxically is not on the coast, to Wynyard and their hinterlands. The two large towns of Devonport and Burnie historically compete as the foremost towns in the region. The connection with the sea is important. I believe I have only truly arrived at the Coast until the vehicle I am travelling in descends the Don hill outside Devonport, and as one passes the 7AD radio mast on the right, there suddenly is the sea. Sparkling evocative like the euphoria felt by Xenophon’s ten thousand Greeks as they wailed “The sea, the sea” (thalatta, thalatta) when their long march finally brought them to within sight of their beloved sea. Bass Strait sparkles and beckons – one is home. The sight of the sea turns on a memory switch to perfect days from my youth in Burnie. I am immediately putting on my bathers on the beach, using my towel to shield my private parts, so I can swim out to the buoy that seems so far out to sea holding on to it for a time and then returning. Perfect summer beach days building sand dams, that for some precious minutes hold back the storm water flow, leaping from the promenade onto the hot sand or belly flopping into the crowded Hilder Parade pool where, under the watchful eye of our PE teacher, I learnt to swim on those ice cold high school mornings in February and March. Happy and naive we would wave at the Tasman Limited passengers as its carriages slowed to a walk at the level crossing near the approach to the Burnie wharves. Hundreds of kids not collected in four wheel drives instead walking up one of the numerous hills, flicking each other with wet towels and feasting on three pence worth of beautiful greasy chips from the best Brownells or Kennebecs wrapped in newspaper. A tiger moth flies into the setting sun on its way to Wynyard aerodrome. One more perfect day was ending.

Newsreel three – Beyond the Sea

We looked out into Bass Strait at the horizon and imagined Melbourne. Imagination made real when we turned on our radio at night to hear Melbourne stations –chiefly (the greater) 3UZ with Stan the Man Rofe, 3AW, 3KZ and 3DB. My brother built a radio aerial on our tank stand so he could hear the fights from Festival Hall and Night Beat, a live police rounds man’s segment, on Melbourne radio. We gazed at Melbourne TV programs boosted by summer atmospherics in a special TV room provided by, the then biggest electrical shop in Burnie, Lloyd Campbell. It was not until May 1962 that Burnie was to receive its first local TV broadcasts by TNT Channel 9 from its Mt Barrow transmitter and associated relay towers. Melbourne seemed to us closer, not just geographically but in every other sense, than the state’s capital Hobart.

The beckoning finger to cross to the mainland was surely for me the popular song Beyond the Sea. It often drifted carelessly from our wireless in the early 1960’s and somehow I knew I was destined to cross the sea. One evening in 1968 I was in my apartment in Melbourne, shared with at least one Burnie émigré, and started twiddling with the radio dial. Stations were coming in from everywhere, as they often do on a clear evening, and a multitude of AM stations was hissing and squawking into the room. I heard faintly through the hissing and buzzing someone send a cheerio to a ‘Gidget’ of South Burnie. Gidget was the preeminent movie of the syrupy Beach Party-Surfing genre popular in the period 1963 – 1967.Yes from beyond the sea I was listening to 7BU Burnie, as if by some bizarre reversal of my former longings. It reinforced for me two things the sea somehow is omnipresent in Burnie, even if it is remembered through a teen surfing movie that was popular at the time; and secondly would I ever leave the shadow of Burnie?

Somehow as the newsreels left our screens more of the USA and less of Britain crept into our lives. Most of this can be attributed to the advent of television. Suddenly Sandra Dee, James and Bobby Darin, Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello insinuated themselves into our young lives. Like many other twelve year old boys Annette Funicello was my first crush.

7BU was Burnie’s radio station and a hub for the community. Here, the later to be well known ABC radio personality the late Bob Cure, polished his craft on Buy and Sell corner. Chubby Brain a local music store proprietor ran a country and western show and the late Auntie Jan Northrop ran the Sun Polishers Club. Unfortunately this kids’ club had a habit of reading out your birthday cheerio each year until you were eighteen, it was great to hear it when you were turning eight; a trifle embarrassing when you were sixteen and trying ever so hard to be hip! Jim Trethewy and his counterpart on 7AD Devonport Elton Alexander called the Saturday football games over the radio in a soothing mellow amateur tone. Radio was a pivotal part of life in those times and radio was about the listeners; today it seems it’s all about the announcers.

Newsreel four – Telstar

At nine years of age I witnessed an event which forever is in my memory. I stood at the front gate one late spring evening in 1957 with my family looking skywards. All along the street other families were doing the same thing. People were watching in awe a moving star that was in fact Sputnik One. The science fiction of our comic and movie serials was now becoming science fact. It may have been that this single event imbued me with a sense that ideas could transform into reality. It was a defining moment for me and many of my generation that perhaps it was possible for us to break and rebel from the conformity of the nineteen fifties. For many it increased the cold war paranoia – the enemy had stolen a march on that bulwark of freedom, the USA. For others it opened the doors of reason – there must be two sides to the cold war story. Sputnik One was a portent, the bubble we grew up in had burst, slowly inexorably just like the change from black and white TV to colour, we were becoming part of an international community. Suddenly we were forced to look outwards rather than inwards.

More crucially for Burnie one year earlier the first shipping container was invented and patented by an American named Malcolm McLean. Burnie was able to embrace this change in a timely manner, such that it positioned itself to be Tasmania’s premier container port and helped it survive to shock of huge factory closures. It did however largely destroy the wharfie culture with quaint customs like the bull system with its number allocation system and wharfies hooks gradually disappearing into history.

The interconnectivity of the world was revealed by the burgeoning number of TV aerials appearing on rooves. Our local TV station was not quite local unlike our radio station. We had to vacate the street, our common playground, more often for the increasing number of passing cars. Change was afoot. My parents introduced themselves and the older members of the family to coffee. Mum would barista coffee and milk from a tube for supper. Unimaginable as it was the name Yuri Gagarin was as familiar to the kids in Burnie in 1961 as our sporting and comic book and picture theatre heroes.

It was around this time also that I first witnessed rock and roll danced expertly by a neighbour’s daughter. It was a first for me in two ways – first I had never made a connection between music and dance and secondly despite my tender years I could detect undertones of sensuality. It might well be that rock music was the force or catalyst that was to later drive me away from Burnie. The 1956 Olympics also tied Burnie and a thousand Australian communities to the world at large. Sport at a national level was commanding more attention at the expense of local sport. Hitherto sport often saw gifted sportspeople play multiple spots and excel in each of them, gradually this was receding as winter and summer sports crossovers became blurred.

Burnie could now see it had a place in the universe, what was less sure was its place locally. The 1962 credit squeeze was to rudely cement that new sense of place.

Newsreel five Ghost riders in the sky

This year my late father’s great grand daughter, Amy Cure, won the Burnie Women’s wheel race at the Burnie New Year’s sports. This event occurred some twenty three years after my sports mad father’s death. The sports have been a Burnie institution for over 100 years and like Anzac Day was one of the few days my father carved out solely for himself. Not only would he go for the day session decked out in his cardigan and tie, but he would come home for tea and return for the evening session, affording himself the luxury of an evening taxi. He would make notes in the official program. Reason tells me otherwise, but my heart intervenes, and I picture Dad up there a ghost rider in the sky hovering over West Park observing Amy’s ride, smiling contentedly but still with his usual fairness recording all the placings in his program. Another ghost rider is the champion cyclist Russell Mockridge a Victorian beloved of Burnie sports fans. I always saw great parallels between Mockridge and Buddy Holly – both taken too soon, both bespectacled, both modest and both masters of their art.

The late fifties and sixties was high water mark of the Burnie sports – we saw epic struggles on the bike track with cycle champions Ron Grenda, Mac Sloane, Sid Patterson and everyone’s favourite, another relative of mine, E J Teddy ‘Breakaway’ White. Although the halcyon years were gone by the mid seventies by sheer fluke I had returned to the Burnie New Year Carnival for the first time in perhaps two decades. Here I witnessed a vignette in Tasmanian sporting history when Danny Clarke won the 1977 Burnie Wheel. In my estimation Clark was one hundred metres behind the leaders with one lap of West Park to go. He came from nowhere to get up on the line urged all the way by colourful Burnie caller ‘Tiger’ Dowling.

Along with Cooee’s first grand final win over arch rivals Burnie and the 1977 Gillette Cricket Cup win, it was for me, one of the three greatest Tasmanian monuments in sport I have been lucky enough to be present at.

Of course the sports were equally divided between athletics, cycling and wood chopping. I shared workplaces briefly in Burnie with two great Burnie Gift winners Basil Burley and Bruce Dobson. Bruce ‘Duke’ Dobson I remember clearly as a modest champion and kind man. Wood chopping was the province of family dynasties : Youds, Sherriffs, Mundays. A highly spectacular form of chopping is tree felling where a prepared tree trunk around thirty feet high is climbed, axe in hand, by way of three planks inserted by the axeman cutting horizontally into the tree. This is designed to get the axeman close enough to the top to cut a designated section of the tree so it eventually severs from the tree. The axeman must repeat the process on the other side of the tree so that the designed section of the tree is completely cut from the tree. The first axeman to do this is the winner. The other interesting feature of tree felling contest is that it is a handicap. Crowds would watch spell bound as champion axeman Doug Youd would give rivals impossible starts from his scratch handicap and still steal victory.

Forever in my mind is the open air boozer at the western end of the ground where the smell of barley and hops punctuates the warm evening air amid the babels of drinkers all in a good holiday mood. For a youngster like me, that would wait, I was tracking down Dagwood dogs that treat reserved only for sports, shows and regattas. Time and tide may have caught up with the Burnie Sports; however the popular Burnie Ten may have been a baton change, but whatever the future the ghost riders, those past champions, their seconds, the Calcutta spruikers, trainers and spectators, will forever hover over West Park.

BASIL BURLEY (FAR LEFT) WINS THE 1965 BURNIE GIFT. NOTE THE HUGE CROWDS IN THE BACKGROUND.

Newsreel six Burnie – place without a postcard?

The celebrated Australian band Midnight Oil, long associated with social and political critiques did a stint at the Menai Hotel in Burnie in the very late 1970’s. Lead singer Peter Garrett was apparently bemused that Burnie did not have a postcard. He reputedly looked out his hotel room and saw, looking westwards, a pile of woodchips on the waterfront; and looking eastwards the drab smoke pouring out of the stacks at the pulp mill. He wrote a song called Burnie which many opine shines an unflattering light on the town. It did not sway many aficionados of the band within the town from the band, Oils fans are fiercely loyal, but in some quarters in the town it was naturally not well received. I can remember a friend of mine whose father worked at the Pulp mill recalling how quick his father was to defend the environmental record of the mill to an abrupt finality with the terse phrase; it puts food on the table, to would be family dissenters. My own father, who was generally socially progressive, but was possessed of a similar mindset on this issue. To these men the spectre of the great depression still loomed large and jobs at any cost were writ large in their handbooks of life. A company directly and indirectly employing thousands will always command many staunch defenders in that town.

The catalogue of nicknames:

Had Peter Garret made those comments twenty years earlier, perhaps the town’s youth would have raised an army or more colloquially for the times a gang. The gang would take on Mr. Garrett and it could be easily catalogued, just as in Homer’s famous catalogue of ships before the Mycenaean Greeks sailed for Troy. It could be almost entirely catalogued by nicknames.

This army would roll down the goat track, down Mount Street, dodging Mollison’s dog at Brooklyn to traverse Old Surrey Road, down Menai road, almost vertically down View Road passing Chinaman’s corner, down to the sea, like the ten thousand Greeks Xerxes describes, to gather for battle at West and Oakleigh Beaches.

Here on the march are snake, baz, bub, chook, bluey, donkey, banger, bodg, dasher, ferret, doc, whoopsy, boomer, boy, drongo, flea, stick, rocky, brick, cats, froggie, stringer, tex, budgie, bull, dutch, fub, soss, donna, sparrow, spider, crim, grunter, spud and jap.

To the west march nifty, nointer, spider, goose, grinner, chummy, horn, pee wee, hungry, lizard, midge, china, butch, duck, nong, chocker, cocky, lanie, prof, cracker, curly, grub, cushy, ginger, rags, horse, kite, rooster, knocker, ringer ,midge, zac, chicken and mullet.

Also marching are wocky, carrot, nugget, possum, skinny, toad, toey, pud, red, sandy, truck, tubby, whale, rabbit, stinger, rattler, tiger, shark, shorty, skeeta, quoit, rocker, smiley, snowy and snoz
A rolling army boosted by thirty or so Smiths and Joneses and their accompanying million freckles and twenty five Browns equally freckled, hardy and Machiavellian too, some in Davey crocket hats, mousketeer ears, petite sailors hats and knotted handkerchiefs. This army it should be noted is not entirely made of boys some very tough girls have joined in as well.

A band of Burnie youth armed with shanghais with gumnut ammo, phantom rings, knuckle dusters, some with acquired police boys club pugilistic skills, Hopalong Cassidy cap guns, homemade bows and arrows and wet towels to flick. A throng mostly on foot but some on bikes with many double dinked, on billycarts, scooters, even the odd BSA bantam smuggled out of parent’s garages for those kids still wearing the iron legs of polio.

The armies assemble on the two beaches: on West beach a well known figure addresses the gang- it’s Baker Boy. Ever the peacemaker, he says, Garrets a bodgie no need to fight him, that he’s going to come and live in Burnie, play footy in the ruck for Cooee, join HR’s surfie band and will be singing at the Surf Club next Saturday. Scabby a very small boy is sent on his bike to Oakleigh Beach to give this information the other army assembled there.

The boys demob slowly and make their way home or to the pictures, to West Park to watch the town premiership, to Sea Cadet HQ on the banks of the Emu River, to the breakwater and ocean pier to fish, hoping that the couta are running. Some will wind their way back up to the Montello Rec to play Jungle Jim, Custer’s Last Stand, British Bulldog, Queenie or fly their home made kites, sending newspaper sheets as messages up the string line to the reach the tail of the kites. Some will play hopscotch, marbles, French cricket or brandings. Some will traverse the neighborhood swapping comics or scavenging beer bottles to sell to BB the ‘Bottle O’. Like a deft yoyo trick this army has quickly retracted to civilian life.

Newsreel seven – Memories Are Made of This
Progress versus Change

It was with no regrets that in February 1967 I left Burnie for good. The last three years in Burnie had seen me at odds with the town’s ethos. Some of this was the natural process of generational difference, some was due to the cultural and intellectual explosions the 1960’s unleashed on the Western world. The leadership of Burnie saw its self as embracing progress. This meant embracing all the technical innovations from the outside world with alacrity. What Burnie did not embrace well however was social change. The electoral system the Burnie Council used, continued to reflect its rural past, and ensured more conservative and rural councillors dominated the council despite Burnie becoming increasingly urban. Burnie was a conservative town and perhaps nothing illustrated this more than attitudes to the Vietnam War. Burnie has been a town that largely supported the military and by implication all military adventures the country was engaged in. A disproportionate share of war heroes from Burnie and districts augmented this. My father was a returned soldier from the last world war who proudly marched on Anzac Day and attended the dawn service. To my surprise, despite being an avid supporter of the RSL, he did not support the war in Vietnam. His view was that diggers fought in New Guinea so as to prevent any more wars happening and despite being a conservative ALP voter he was not rabidly anti- communist. He was however rabidly anti-DLP. My late maternal uncle a wharfie with pro Moscow leanings was a fierce opponent of the war also. It was inevitable I would follow their views as most of my close friends were also leaning this way.

A small minority of young people started to exhibit signs of non conformity. We wore or hair long and mod clothes aping the Beatles and the other rock groups of the sixties. People of unorthodox views gathered together- gays, progressive young Christians, conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War and libertarians The Burnie populace at large, or so it seemed, began to attack us for growing our hair long or wearing unorthodox clothing. Homophobia seemed rife. A friend of mine a genuine pacifist refused to go to Vietnam becoming a conscientious objector. He was subjected to much venom and even physical abuse from large elements of the local community. A local family from West Burnie provided a refuge for young people of gay, anti war or unorthodox views. We could go there and discuss critical social and political issues, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. Without this family, mainstream conservative views would have strangled all of us. We began sorties out of Burnie camping on the beach at Coles Bay at Devonport during weekends to attend dances there, more importantly meeting like minded people from that town as well. We began to venture occasionally to Hobart again making friends with like minded young people. We began to be confronted by these people about the pollution engendered by the Burnie factories most notably the jibe about the Red Sea. This was a theme Midnight Oil picked up on in their 1981 song. A paint pigment factory at the Blyth River, known locally as the Titan, pushed red effluent out to sea, which coloured the sea red for several kilometres east and west of the factory. Burnie was dubbed by many as Tasmania’s dirtiest town a sobriquet made all the more puzzling as the town was only ninety minutes drive from the cleanest air in the world at Cape Grim.

Yet in exile from Burnie, most curiously I found, Burnie expats tended to defend Burnie against all the jibes from outsiders. It was acceptable for us to criticize Burnie but not so for non Burnie people.

BURNIE -TAKEN FROM PRINCES STREET POSSIBLY LATE 1950’S. MUCH OF THE AREA TO THE LEFT OF PICTURE WAS DESTROYED BY THE BURNIE BY PASS. ALSO FROM THIS PICTURE THE BURNIE STATE CHOOL, THE BURNIE HOSPITAL AND THE PULP MILL ITSELF ARE ALL NOW GONE.

A town divided

The Burnie powers that be reacted to criticism of the town by a process of modernization. This was principally after I left the town for good. What happened after my absence was the large scale destruction of the town I loved by a process of re-building. First to go was the cherished town hall with its distinctive clock and adjoining library in 1977. It was replaced with the modern Civic Centre in 1978. Many of Burnie’s distinctive art deco buildings were disappearing under the wrecker’s hammer. My old primary school was also to meet the same fate- on its site now is a so called super store.
In March 1977 the Burnie by pass opened. This project destroyed many beautiful old homes in the southern end of Wilson Street but more critically destroyed inner Western Burnie by dividing it and by destroying many beautiful homes. This project divides opinion in the town to this day. It will take generational change to heal the wounds. For me it was a bridge too far and it was a painful experience for me to even visit this new Burnie. The final straw was the ‘accidental’ destruction of my old high school adjoining West Park. The Burnie Council would proudly point to the high water mark of their progressive policies as being the declaration of Burnie as the winner of the 2000 Tasmania Tidiest Town Award.

THE FORMER JOYCE HOUSE IN WEST BURNIE. A MAGNIFICENT RESIDENCE FORTUNATELY SPARED FROM DESTRUCTION ENGENDERED BY THE BURNIE BYPASS

The best days of our lives

Redemption for me happened through the internet site- a Pictorial History of Burnie. I saw a photo of the Genders Building in Burnie long demolished. It’s a modest art deco building that was located in Mount Street. Instead of being angry nostalgia gripped me. I had forgotten in my anger at the destruction of Burnie’s buildings some important things, most notably that the community belongs to us all rich or poor, old or young, able bodied or non able bodied, religious or agnostic. Suddenly that community I had forgotten was leaping out of the face book pages at me. Family, work, school , sporting and hobby connections – those invisible strings that bind a community together and are hard to dissolve even with the passing of time. As one voice almost we viewed these days of old Burnie as having been the best days of our lives.

A photo of Brownell Place reminded me that this is where we sat external exams and vied for scholarship places – all Burnie schools in the one room all equal under the examination system. At dances here, I first felt the pleasure of an arm around a girl’s waist, as she whirled onto the next partner in a progressive barn dance. I had never experienced anything like this: so narrow this waist, so soft the brush against my reefer jacket. My first girlfriend Miss Annette Funicello was to soon disappear from my imaginings like the autumn leaves in Burnie Park scampering away under a northerly bluster from Bass Strait.

Gone now is the Rawleighs man, coincidentally an AIF mate of my father’s, with his beautiful wooden case that opened to reveal a treasure house of ointments and potions, gone is the Pulp and the Titan, gone is Friday night shopping and the meetings on Palfreyman’s Corner, gone are Saturday matinees and the lolly boys with trays of jersey toffees and licorice with politically incorrect names, now gone is the knick knocking and bonfires with tyres atop, the Darwin Hospital and the attendant school dental service in its austere caravans, gone are blue icy poles made on the premises, gone are the peddlar’s parades with toffee apples and homemade coconut ice, the billycarts and hula hoops have disappeared, gone are the forward and back pockets and utility players except in our imagination as we reprise the best days of our lives in Burnie.

Still existing is the beautiful Fern Glade much as it was when we are kids only a stone’s throw from where once dense smoke puffed out of the chimneys of the Pulp Mill. Still there icons of our past- the shacks and beaches of Boat Harbor and Port Sorell, still there the new Parkland high School on the three mile line where I was in the first intake, still there West Park oval beautifully located by the sea and still hosting footy matches. Still dominating the skyline the magnificent house that once belonged to the Joyce Family and the Sack Menzies sign, albeit it faint, on a Seaview Avenue retaining wall commanding that spectacular view of the sea and western Burnie. A Surf Club stands on the site of former surf clubs still and thrives much as it did in my day – all that is missing is Mr. Arch Hardy trim and fit and lifesaving until a very advanced age. To this day there is nothing more perfect than watching the moonlight twinkle and sparkle on the gently lapping waves at West Beach.

To consider a childhood in Burnie in the twenty years after World War Two is to consider it as having many of the same elements all over Tasmania and the Australian mainland. We never questioned singing God Save the Queen but the liberal education we were to be given gave many us the intellectual freedom to later question it. Burnie as I have pointed out was slightly unique, not just because we know the difference between old and new spuds; but at last I am free to say it, these were the unsurpassed days of a childhood rich in memories if not in money.

This story is dedicated to the memory of the late “Snowy” Walsh and to all former Parklands High School teachers, proud torchbearers for free, universal state education.

BEAUTIFUL FERN GLADE EMU RIVER BURNIE WAS JUST A STONE’S THROW FROM THE FORMER PAPERMAKERS, APPM MILL AND THE ACID FACTORY

Pictorial History of Burnie, Tasmania.

This wonderful community website is responsible for rekindling my interest in Burnie after decades of disdain. It is tirelessly maintained by knowledgeable volunteers and is an indispensible guide to the history of both a typical and atypical Tasmanian town. It’s even handed approach means the most seemingly trite moments of Burnie social history are made to combine with more serious elements in an unsurpassed tableau. It enables Burnie people, many of whom now live elsewhere, to interact, to relive and rediscover their shared Burnie past. I have used the site for some of the photos in this story, as they in the public domain, but acknowledge without the donors of these pictures such an astonishing site could not exist.

EARLY PICTURE OF PAPERMAKERS FINISHING ROOM. IT WAS A HUGE EMPLOYER OF FEMALE LABOUR IN BURNIE EMPLOYING HUNDREDS OF BURNIE WOMEN OVER THE YEARS

The songs
My newsreels are titled from songs and I include some further information on the songs that may interest readers.

The Rumble (M.Grant-L.Wray)

This almost threatening instrumental was released by Link Wray and his Ray Men in 1954. It was actually banned by some radio stations.

One perfect day (Roger Galtier Hart-Wells)

This single by Australian band The Little Heroes was released in 1982

Beyond the Sea (Jack Lawrence)

Beyond the Sea is a 1946 pop romantic love song by Jack Lawrence, with music taken from the song “La Mer” by Charles Trenet. It has been recorded by many artists, but Bobby Darin’s version released in 1959 is the best known.

Telstar (Joe Meek)

Telstar” is a 1962 instrumental written by and performed by The Tornados. The track reached No. 1 in the U.S. December 1962 (the second British recording to reach No. 1 on that chart in the year, after “Stranger on the Shore” by Aker Bilk in May),

Ghost riders in the sky (Stan Jones)

Ghost Riders in the Sky is a country and western song written in 1948 by American songwriter Stan Jones. The most successful version is by Vaughn Monroe.

Burnie (Moginie/Garrett)

A single from the Midnight Oil album Place without a Postcard released in 1981

Memories Are Made of This (Gilkyson, Dehr, Miller)

The most popular version of the song was recorded by Dean Martin in 1956 A German version , titled “Heimweh” (“Homesickness”) by Freddy Quinn ( lyrics by Ernst Bader and Dieter Rasch) the song sold more than eight million, thus exceeding sales of the Dean Martin version.

HOW I REMEMBER THE BEST OF BURNIE -KING STREET PROBABLY VERY EARLY 1960’S AND PRIOR TO A FOOTBALL FINAL.
THESE TYPES OF SCENES WOULD BE REPLICATED IN LARGE CENTRES ALL OVER TASMANIA

Brief CV of author: Greg Cure was educated in the Classics at the University of Tasmania. He was a senior strategic manager for many years in the Australian government. He was awarded an Australia Day Award (Australian Government division). He is an author, social critic, poet and freelance management consultant. He has spent a good portion of the past decade working as a teacher of both English and Business in China. He is the author of “Where did all the good times go” an examination of the 1960’s R&B musical revolution in the UK and this work has also been translated into Chinese. He has contributed articles to magazines in China. In his early years he worked in the mining industry on the West Coast of Tasmania as well as spending several years as a builder’s labourer. His hometown is Strahan and his maternal grandfather was a Huon Piner.

EARLIER on Tasmanian Times …

A tale of two towns