The Town That Isn’t There

I grew up in an industrial company-town in Victoria, from the time I was nine until I left school at sixteen.

My father emigrated from Wales after World War II to find work in Australia as a Blacksmith. He wasn’t shoeing horses as may be imagined, but had experience in heavy engineering in the ship-building industry in our home town. That expertise took him into the manufacture and maintenance of heavy machinery at the Power Station in Gippsland where he found work.

My mother, sister and I followed him to Australia a year later when a new town of pre-fab wooden homes was ready for occupation by the families of workers at the Power Station. There was nothing new in that, many towns in Wales sprang up to accommodate the workers of one industry or another; coal, slate, weaving. (Even the pyramids in Egypt had workers’ settlements adjacent to the site.) On our arrival, my mother dubbed our new town Nylon City because she could no longer wear her hand-made pale blue leather shoes. Instead, we were all shod in Wellingtons (known as gum-boots locally) to navigate the copious mud around our homes.

We had to travel to an older town nearby, adjacent to the Power Station, for such things as doctors, movies, clothing, banks, schooling, chemists, eating out and attending church. This town had brick homes, paved streets, street trees and lighting, a town square with all the commercial buildings around it and a large bus depot servicing the outlying areas such as our new town, aptly named Newborough. My mother soon found work at the hospital as a nurse. In fact she nursed the injured workers from the explosion at the Briquette Factory in 1953.

Our sponsor, who helped us migrate to Australia, lived here and we often visited, being plied with cups of tea, scones (which we had never seen before) and ready-made chums in the family of six children. I took a fancy to her teenage son, Noel, who wore ties with cheeky women drawn on them, though I was too young for him to take any notice of me, except to show me his pigeon coop with dozens of birds. An older son, Barrie, worked in the town bakery and we often went there to sample his wares. A daughter about my age, Marlene, became my first Australian friend and her younger sister, Lynette made friends with my sister, Dolores. We would often gather in the parlour (known as lounge-rooms) and play records - I distinctly remember Nat King Cole singing Unforgettable - have dress-ups and sometimes there were parties in that room.

As well as the old Morris Minor, our family car, my dad also had a BSA Bantam motorbike. He would pillion me to the lake in that town that was used as the local swimming pool. It was just a dam really with a muddy bottom, complete with a large area of reeds. However, it did have a diving platform and a fenced-off area for non-swimmers. Alongside the pool the tennis courts were very busy teaching the locals, including me, the rudiments of the game. Not far from that was the football club where I saw one match and decided it was boring. I didn’t make a very good New Australian as they called us in those days. But I did join the athletics club on that site and learned to throw the javelin and discuss but was absolutely no good at running.

In my teen years I saw all the latest movies at the cinema and clearly remember wearing my first high-heel shoes to a show there. A golf club was situated between that town and my town and we often saw players there when passing on the local bus. At Gunn’s Gully, a service station between Moe and our town, my mother sometimes worked in the kitchen catering to the café attached and sometimes seconded me to work as a waitress there. One evening the owner held a dance and my father taught me to do the tango. Many years later I visited Argentina and was able to brush up on that skill at a tango bar in Buenos Aries.

My first job after completing High School was in this town – at the Power Station in fact, where my dad still worked. I never saw him there of course as I was office staff and he was somewhere in the acreage of buildings doing his hard work. I was sent to Melbourne to train as one of the State’s first Comptomotrists. This machine was basically an advanced adding machine which also multiplied and I, as well as several other girls, would compute the wages for the thousands of workers in the industry.

At the weekends I worked in a milk bar which had sprung up in our little town, the only shop in town. It was the typical corner store with cigarettes, boxed chocolates, milk shakes and spider drinks- the teenager’s choice, a mixed lolly cabinet very popular with the under 10s, biscuits in tins and the resulting broken biscuit assortment, fresh slab cakes sold by weight, groceries, and a rudimentary deli section including sliced cold meats and fruit and vegetables – and a juke box.

It was here that I met my first husband to the sound of Heartbreak Hotel by Elvis Presley and Rock around the Clock by Bill Haley and the Comets. The next few years were a flurry of shirtwaists, (shirt-style blouses) tucked into flared skirts, roped and hooped petticoats, tight belts, flatties (flat black shoes), Bodgies, Widgies and Rock’n’Roll.

Whenever I go back to my old hunting grounds, I take the Old Coach Road up the big hill that we sometimes walked over as children to get to our sponsor’s house. On reaching the summit, all the houses and streets that would cascade down the hill are gone. The town square and buildings are gone. The several churches are gone. The swimming pool is gone – no trace.

All one can see is a huge open pit where brown coal continues to be extracted from the open cut mine through the Haunted Hills, coal that is used to manufacture electricity, and sent by pylons to every corner of the State and beyond. But Yallourn, the town of my youth, isn’t there.

Charmaine Calaitzis (nee Housden)