Living History

My earliest home(s) in Rosewood and Coolangatta

Of my birth and early years in the little township of Rosewood in south-eastern Queensland, I have no memory.

I was born at home, in a house in Albert Street which, the last time I saw it, was tumbledown, with its garden overgrown and uncared for. For my delivery, Nurse Farrell came from Ipswich a day or two before to care for my Mother. Doctor Wallace, also from Ipswich, is said to have arrived nearer the time of delivery by horse and buggy. According to my elder sister, listening terrified in an adjacent room and comforted by my Father, the birth was difficult and my Mother suffered a good deal of pain. My Mother herself never told me anything in any way untoward about my arrival. I was born with a caul.

On the rare occasions I have been back there since, I can understand my sister's comment that Rosewood was a place in which 'there was not much to do'. My father was 29 when I was born. My sister said that he was so bored out of his mind that, not uncharacteristically and understandably, he sought some relief in drink - socialising with his mates if any were around and miserably alone if they were not. He was not an alcoholic or a good enough drinker to become one. His resort to alcohol over the years was rather a reflection of the depths of his boredom and frustrations than a measure of his addiction to booze.

We moved from Rosewood to Coolangatta - Kirra - when I was about two. Whatever our later destiny in terms of comfortable living, my family had in Kirra, between 1924 and 1927, one of the most beautifully located homes it is possible to imagine. Later, I was to live in some of the finest places on this planet but few could compare with the little house on the hill that was my home in early childhood. Since it was the first home I remembered, its exquisite location must have had some effect in creating a generally optimistic spirit and a subconscious conviction that life was good and my prospects even better. As I grew older, that conviction probably helped to see me safely through some of the more troubled periods that life inevitably brings.

When I wrote 'Uncle Rupert: The Man who Threw Money over Back Fences', I said that our house at Kirra was -

"...on a hill right above the Pacific which could, as its name implied, be peaceful enough but which could also roar and crash on the beaches below us. The area was then pretty much as nature had made it, with much open ground covered with thick grass, lantana and eucalypts. A rough, quite steep path ran from our place down to the rocks separating Kirra from Greenmount beach below.

My pre-school life was easy, gentle, and carefree. I forget the precise flow of the days. Once, I do remember, I waved a shiny new Australian flag and a Union Jack - the decencies required them to go together - at a visiting Royal personage who flashed through Coolangatta and uncounted points north and south. I can't recall ever having actually sighted him - or his princess - though my parents and others imagined the Royal Couple to have uplifted our lives for a few brief moments. That princely visit was followed, coincidentally, by a few days in hospital but even that was exciting - almost joyful in some ways. Such was the halcyon nature of those times."

The Royal Couple at whom I waved flags must have been the Duke and Duchess of York who were sent out to Australia in 1927 to open the new Commonwealth Parliament House in Canberra. Afterwards, they travelled around the country and returned to England to become King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, when Edward VIII abdicated nine years later.

In the southern winter of 1927, we moved to Brisbane. I still have a vivid recollection of getting off the train at Eagle Junction Station and walking down the long Rose Street with my Father. It was a gusty day and I can still hear the wind sighing through the power lines as we battled our way down the street against the gusts. We went to a house we'd rented in Kent Road. It was about as ordinary a house as I'd ever seen and, after the glorious vista from our home on the hill at Kirra, the view across Kent Road to other, equally depressing weatherboard houses was a shock I can still feel even now. We had, as Charles Dickens might have said, fallen on hard times...

James, Vienna, Austria

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