7. Ballarat

When filling in the required forms before starting high school in 1945, looking through the list of possible career paths, I said to Lorna
“What is an architect?”.
She said that an architect designs buildings, draws the plans and writes specifications necessary for the builder to build from.
“That’s what I want to do” I said.
Until then I thought I would probably be a carpenter.

I completed high school with enough points to get entry to a diploma course but not enough to do a university course.  This was not a problem because dad could not afford to send me to a university.

While Harry and I were on our travels dad must have done some research and found that I could do the first three years of architecture at the School of Mines Ballarat ( SMB ) where I could live with his brother, my uncle Allen.
To complete the course I would have to go to the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT).
The examinations for the course I would do at the SMB would be set by the RMIT examiners so I would actually be doing the RMIT course in architecture but in Ballarat.

Being away from family and friends for over three months and seeing the awful life some people lived made me realize how important my family and friends were to me and how much I loved them.
Since Harry and I had arrived home friends had been giving welcome home parties and I never wanted to leave Mildura again.
Before we left on our trip Harry’s younger sister, Valerie and I had become sweethearts and she was a lovely looking, sweet natured and very affectionate little girl and she could sing.  Had I not left Mildura we may have eventually married.  I used to have a photo of Valerie and I in a loving embrace but Heather, my wife, tore it up.

Because the academic year had already started I expected that I would not be going to the SMB (School of Mines Ballarat) until next year.
After being home for only five days enjoying my new found pleasure of ‘belonging’, on Friday dad said “what do you want to do now?”.
I said “get on with my education when I can”.
He replied “ I have been in touch with the principal of the SMB and if you are there by Monday you can get into this years course”!!!.

Saturday evening, exactly one week after looking at the flight time table in Ansett Airways window in Griffith all of my friends and family were at the Mildura railway station seeing me off to Ballarat.


I spent a miserable night on the train with the sounds of Valerie singing to me running through my head:

Evening shadows make me blue
When each weary day is through
How I long to be with you
My happ-i-ness
A million years it seems
Have gone by
Since we shared our dreams
But I’ll hold you agen
There’ll be no blue memories then
  Etc.

When I had been in Ballarat for a few months I caught a bad case of flu and my cousin Ken said  “geez. you look sick, you look as bad as you did when you first arrived here.”  I was very home sick.

 Aunt Pearlie was a very motherly person and she treated me as one of her own but she decided I needed fattening.  At first I suffered some bad stomach pains from being virtually force fed especially on Sundays when we always had a roast.
I enjoyed the family of cousins Ken, Heather and Noel.  Ken, the eldest was one or two years younger than me and we shared a room.

The government paid fifty pounds ($100.00) a year as a ‘living away from home allowance’ to my father who gave it to Uncle Allen.  This was a substantial amount relative to Uncle Allen’s income of five pounds ten shillings ($11.00) a week as a boiler maker.

Uncle Allen’s house was on Melbourne road which ran parallel to the railway line.  When you drive from Ballarat to Melbourne, after travelling about four kilometres, the road takes a sharp bend to the left, goes under the rail way line, takes a sharp bend to the right and continues parallel to the rail way line on the other side.  At the right hand bend there is a service station, next to that was aunt Pearlie’s mother’s house and next to that Aunt Pearly and Uncle Allen’s House where I stayed.  It was possible to drive under the train line because it had begun to climb at maximum grade to get over the Ballarat hills.
Sitting on the front verandah after dinner I would watch a train with two great steam engines straining to haul a long line of goods trucks up the slope.
The black steam engines were silhouetted against the grey clouds and you could see the fireman shovelling coal into the boiler fire box with his face, arms and belly illuminated from the red fire.
White steam would be hissing from the pistons that turned the great steel wheels.
If the track was wet, which was nearly always in Ballarat, the wheels would lose traction and spin madly, the piston stroke change from a slow straining huuff - - huuff - - to a rapid ch-ch-ch-ch and the engine driver quickly shut off the steam and  when the wheels stopped spinning, slowly turn it up.
 When the train came down the slope at night it was all black, fast and furious with white steam hissing from here and there and sparks flying from the brakes and screeching steel wheels on steel rails.  

For school holidays I would catch the train to Mildura when it would be packed, students sleeping on the floor of the compartments and along the floor of the corridor.  Sometimes it was so packed that there was standing room only with no space to even lay on the floor and you would have to stand all night.

The School of Mines Ballarat suited me perfectly.  Most kids there, if not from Ballarat, were from not too well off farming families so we had a lot in common.  Families with sufficient money sent their kids to school in Melbourne.
The school was very old being originally built during the rich days of gold mining around 1860 to teach mining engineering.  It was well equipped and spacious.  Mining companies all over the world sought graduates from the SMB.

There were only three architectural students, each doing a different year, so we did maths, physics, and other engineering subjects with the engineering students, commercial subjects with the commercial students and art subjects in the Ballarat Art School which was next door.
I believe that studying with the engineering students equipped me better for dealing with engineers as specialist consultants in building design.

The art school was very progressive and I enjoyed the art subjects so much that I took additional subjects that were not required for the course but gave me a better art education.
I discovered that art was an entirely new world and I loved it.
Mr Neville Bunning was the main creative art teacher who thought I was particularly talented, especially in three dimensional art like sculpture and architecture and he helped build my self confidence. Next to my father Neville Bunning had the greatest influence on my development.
The first thing they taught was to forget all that we had previously heard about art and adopt an open mind.  This attitude they encouraged us to apply to our whole life.  Our parents’ generation must have grown up during the most puritanical period in the history of Australia and some of this Puritanism had influenced my generation.  However the Ballarat Art School had the knack of freeing us from those unhealthy bonds and having larger than life copies of many famous statues like Michael Angelo’s David and the Venus Demilo, without their fig leaves, scattered around the school helped us to lose our shyness of the naked body.
 Yes, whenever copies of these famous naked statues were displayed in Australia, even in some art galleries, the city fathers had had fig leaves placed over their genitalia.
I was working in clay on a design for a war memorial in the sculpture class and next to me a young catholic nun, learning to be an art teacher, was making a clay copy of the statue of David and she had put a blob of clay where his genitals should be.  Mr. Bunning came up and with his booming voice, the whole class could hear, said “don’t you think you should model the penis properly.  It draws more attention to it if you just make it a blob of clay”.  She said “yes, alright, I agree” and proceeded accordingly.  

The hours of study we had to do was a big shock.  I had classes Monday to Friday from 9.00 AM to 5.00 PM and four nights from 7.00 to 9.00 and Saturday mornings from 9.00 to 12.00 noon, with additional out of hours assignments.  Fortunately the art school stayed open from 8.30 AM until 9.00 at night and all day Saturdays and was very under populated so most of us did our projects in the art school.
There was a big jump in the standard of maths from high school to the standard at first year SMB, I had missed the first month of lectures and was not coping well so the principal, Mr Richards, who used to be a maths teacher, gave me an hours special tuition after 5.00 PM two nights a week until I caught up.  You don’t get principals doing that these days.

With all that work and the fact that most of the students in the art school were girls, I had a very full and enjoyable life.  For the first term the girls in the art school didn’t pay me much attention.  Then came the end of term social.  I liked dancing and dressed in my best clothes I danced every dance with a different girl and had a ball.  During the next day at art school while working alone in a big class room as I often did, every girl  in the school, one at a time, came and sat on my desk for a friendly chat.      
 
 I developed a close friendship with two girls, Lois Pedrazzi and Pat Fitzsimmons, who were a year ahead and older and they were close friends with each other.  We did go on dates but it was not a romantic relationship although I sometimes thought it could have been with Pat if I had pushed it in that direction.  We worked together a lot and sometimes went out on painting trips in the Ballarat hills.
I also developed a close friendship with an engineering student called Athol Day and he was my best man at my wedding.

At the end of first year I won a scholarship for being the ‘most improved student’ which paid for the rest of my tuition fees.
At the start of the second year the architects’ registration board decided that there was getting to be a lot of sole practitioners who could not afford a typist so architectural students should do a basic course in typing.  Then they could type their own letters when they went into practice.  One other male architectural student and I therefore had to go to a typing class once a week with 25 girls.  I don’t know why I ever wanted to leave Ballarat but it was bloody cold there and I preferred to live in a hot climate.

Cousin Ken and I liked to explore the Ballarat hills on a Sunday afternoon if the weather was fine.  We found, well up into the hills, what must have been a tent village.  There were the remains of a roughly made street with low stone walls in rectangular patterns, probably base walls for tents, each side of the street.  There were the remains of stone pylons each side of a creek that looked like the remains of a foot bridge.
Aunt Pearlie would say “don’t you dare go near any old mine shafts, if you fell down one no one would ever find you”.

On one of our trips we found a quite large shaft, about three metres square but only about six metres deep, and there was a tunnel running off it.  What got our serious interest was a tunnel on the opposite side that had been sealed up with a dry rock wall and plastered over with mud to conceal the fact that there was ever a tunnel.  It was detectable for us because rain over the years had washed some of the mud plaster off the rock wall.  We resolved to come back next Sunday with a rope to get down the shaft. This was a tricky operation because we could not let Aunt Pearlie know that we had a rope or let her see us heading off with one.
The rock wall was well built and it took us hours to pull some of it down so we could look into the tunnel.  Thinking that the miners might have hidden a stash of gold in there and got murdered by bush rangers on their way to Melbourne.
It was full of excavated rock and earth obviously from the new tunnel, who knows why they disguised the entrance.

Some Sunday afternoons we would go to a local park where local teenagers used to hang out  sometimes kicking a football around or just socializing.  I met a beautiful tall blond Latvian girl and we gravitated together gradually more often.  I resolved after one Sunday afternoon to ask her out when we met on the next Sunday.  That Sunday evening my uncle Allen took me aside for a father to son type of talk.
He said “these BOLTS are different to us, they don’t understand our way of life and we don’t understand them.  It is not a good idea to get too friendly with them, you will find yourself in trouble with them and not know why.”
Apparently one of my cousins must have told him that I was getting very friendly with this BOLT girl.
I politely listened to my uncle but was thinking “he is wrong, I have grown up with all kinds of ‘BOLTS’ as they called immigrants from the Baltic states of Europe and have always found them to be friendly and affectionate people.”  So I was not deterred from my intention to ask her out.
However I never saw her again.
I kept going back to the park but she never came back.  I walked the streets where I thought she probably lived but never found her.  I asked the other kids but they either said they didn’t know or they did not know who I was talking about.  It seemed to me like a conspiracy was taking place.
I decided that her father must have been of the same opinion as my uncle and forbid her to mix with us locals.

I had my home made bike on which I had to ride to the SMB six days a week.  The chain was stretched and the sprocket buckled.   Sometimes in drizzling cold rain with ice on the road the chain would come off and I would have to take off my gloves, get the oily chain back on, clean my hands, which were now nearly frozen, the best way I could, put the gloves back on and continue to pedal on the slippery road only to have the chain come off again after travelling only 100 metres or so.
All I had to protect me from the rain was an ex army ground sheet that doubled as a rain coat but not a good one.  My trousers and socks would get soaked from the thighs down.
I was sitting on the hot water radiator in the Art school to dry off and thaw out when another student came in and laughed, “what’s wrong” I said? “You should see yourself, sitting there in a great cloud of steam.  You look like a creature being created”.

The Ballarat Boys College was having a new wing added and they wanted a model of the whole building including the new wing.  Mr. Bunning volunteered that I would do it for five pounds, ( $10 ).
I made the model in clay, then cast it in plaster, painted it and got my five pounds.
With my old bike as a trade in and the five pounds, I bought a second hand semi racer bicycle in good condition which I kept and still rode in Adelaide until after I was married.
At the same time as I was buying this bicycle my friends from high school in Mildura were buying their first car.

At an SMB social, I homed in on a lovely girl called Audrey Dunn who was in the typing class and we got on so well that we danced together all night.  While walking her home it snowed.  She was wearing a white fur coat and white fur hat, her long dark hair and the white snow flakes dotted over her made a most romantic picture which I will always remember.  She seemed to like me a lot but was too shy to kiss me goodnight.  I asked her out three more times but she said “no” so I decided that was that.  However when the next end of term social came around and I didn’t ask her to be my partner, her friends told me, she was devastated and didn’t go to the social.  “She only said ‘no’ to your invitations because her parents will not let her go out during the school term”, they said.  She was from a wealthy family so I blew that one.

I enjoyed the fogs in Ballarat.  When walking along people materialized, as though they were created out of the fog and gradually returned to being part of the fog as they passed.

In 1954, Ballarat celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Eureka Stockade rebellion which few Australians know about.  This small rebellion against British rule and the cost of a mining licence and having to pay tax although they did not get a vote a group of miners decided to build a stockade on Bakery Hill and defy the red coats.
The rebellion was defeated in about twenty minutes but had far reaching consequences.
The final result was that Australia eventually got to rule itself and the Australian flag with the Southern Cross on it was adopted.  The flag of the rebels was the Southern Cross but without the union Jack in the corner, the same as the builders labourers’ union now use.  The rebel leader, Peter Laylor, survived and became a member of parliament.
The people of Ballarat are very proud of this stand their forbears took against unfair rule and are still very alert to any attempt that authorities might make towards getting overbearing.
The School of Mines Ballarat had a democratic system of school rule where any student caught doing a miss deed was tried by the student court.  While I was there one student was caught cheating at exams and was duly tried and found guilty and his punishment, decided by the student court, was to repeat the year.  He probably would have been expelled had it been a bureaucratic decision.

*****