Chapter 1: Wonthaggi - my start in life

My birth and news of my father and grandfather...

So, let's begin at the beginning. I was born in the coalmining town of Wonthaggi in the Gippsland region of Victoria, Australia, in September 1937. The actual birth took place in 1 Hunter Street, Wonthaggi, then known as the Wincarness Maternity Home.

My parents were John S. Richardson and Rena M. Cox who were married in April 1936. It was a double ceremony with Rena’s unidentical twin sister, Eelin, who became the wife of Cyril Grant. Because it was unusual for a double wedding for twins, it earned a place in the popular newspaper, the Sun News-Pictorial

My parents had a reasonably long courtship and by the time they married my mother was 24 — passably late for those days — and my father was 25. My mother admitted to me that although she had liked my father, she hadn’t loved him when they married. That had come later, which I know it certainly did. I suspect that a contributing reason for getting married was to get away from her abusive father, Arthur J G Cox, whom she loathed. (More about him in later chapters)

My father was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and worked as a printer and sometime writer for the Wonthaggi Sentinel, now the South Gippsland Sentinel-Times. He was also a keen Baptist and had ambitions to become an ordained minister, but that was never realised. However, he became a popular lay preacher throughout his life in a variety of Protestant churches, not least the Baptist Church in Wonthaggi.

My Richardson grandfather emigrated to Australia twice — once before The Great War (WW1), then again after it was over. The first time in 1913 was to seek work as an engineer before bringing his wife and my father and his brother, Edward, “Ted” Richardson, out to Australia.

He was given a job on the mines in Broken Hill, but was left destitute by a strike and is said to have been physically shattered by a walk back to civilisation along the railway line to Sydney. He was nursed back to health by his half sister, Margaret Waugh, in Gympie, Queensland. He then is believed to have found other work but the war intervened. He signed up with the 6th Infantry Battalion, Australian Imperial Force, and was sent to Egypt with many of the ANZACS, stationed in a camp within sight of the pyramids at Giza. He never saw action in Europe because he fell ill with an unspecified disease that he never full shook off.

When his health improved sufficiently, he was sent to Salisbury in England to help with training and was joined there for a time by his wife, Elizabeth “Bessie” Richardson (née McDearmid) and their two young sons.

Towards the end of the war, he was moved to munitions at Inchinnan in Scotland and became chief inspector for the R34 airship, the first airship to successfully cross the Atlantic to the USA in both directions.

In 1919, “Jock” or “Scotty” Richardson as he was most frequently called, returned to Australia to be demobilised and found work as a foreman pumper in the State Coalmine in Wonthaggi. Bessie and the two boys followed him a few months later.

I never knew my paternal grandfather because the health problems he first incurred in Egypt caught up with him in Australia. He died aged 54 before I was born of kidney disease and heart failure in April 1935 in the Caulfield Military Hospital in Melbourne.

By all accounts, he was an entertaining character with an entrepreneurial flair, although not a very successful one. He set up a laundry in the Buffalo Hall in Wonthaggi in 1922, but that failed because it coincided with a strike, meaning that few people could afford to get their laundry done there. He and his brother, Jim Richardson, who also lived in Wonthaggi for a while, started a private mine in the early 1930s in the nearby Woolamai district for coal, gravel and limestone. Although successful in locating these minerals in quantities they ultimately were unable to turn a profit.

Not long before he died, Jock prospected for alluvial gold in the Dargo River on the Dargo High Plain in the Dividing Range in south-eastern Victoria. He went with a fellow coal miner, Hugh Hunter. They camped there for months, leaving the Richardson family behind in Wonthaggi. The prospecting was unsuccessful.

My mother recalls that her then-husband-to-be, John, took her, his mother, Bessie, his brother, Ted, and his violin teacher, Miss Fitzwater, to visit the two miners for a holiday. They went there in my father's T-Model Ford. She recalls that a section of the road was so steep that the car had to be backed up it to ensure that the petrol would gravitate to the engine. There were also so many punctures that the outer tyres had to be stuffed with bracken to get home. Here’s a photo taken on another occasion. The car was later sold so that my parents could afford to get married.

And another picnic scene. This time in Dargo. Photo probably taken by my father.

My grandfather, whose substantive military rank was corporal, is buried in the Wonthaggi Cemetery:

My paternal Scots Presbyterian grandmother Bessie was deeply religious and by all accounts a formidable woman, although in later years she mellowed and we grandchildren adored her. She and my equally formidable mother were not always comfortable with each other. When my parents returned from their brief honeymoon, the house they were planning to rent was not yet ready, so they had to stay with her at 7 Edgar Street, Wonthaggi. Despite their married state, she insisted that they slept in separate bedrooms. My mother also reported that Bessie insisted that women’s underwear should be kept out of sight when my father was in the house. My parents must have been thrilled to be able to move out and into their first home together, in 9 Strickland Street.

I gather that when I was born, my grandmother wanted me to be called John Smith Richardson, just as my father had been and his father had been and his father had been. My mother wouldn’t agree so a compromise was reach. I was called Ian which was Scottish for John, although it should really have been Iain, with the middle name of Duncan taken from Bessie’s brother, John Duncan McDearmid. It amused us greatly to discover decades later that the original John Smith Richardson was the illegitimate son of Elizabeth “Betsy” Smith, a domestic servant on a farm, and William Richardson, an itinerant ironstone miner. My grandmother would have been appalled to learn this.

My memory of Wonthaggi is sketchy to say the least. I recall being carried in my mother’s arms one night as she hurried home with a bushfire in the background. But even that may well have been a dream, rather than an actual memory, as I was just four when my parents and I and my toddler brother, Jeffrey, were about to move 380 kms away to St Arnaud in the Wimmera region of Victoria.

But that’s for the next chapter.