Chapter 6: My youth in Shepparton, Victoria

Late in 1955 my mother, Rena Richardson, decided I should finish my printing apprenticeship with the Shepparton News. Shepparton is a very pleasant Australian city and when I was there it was best known as the centre of a fruit growing and canning area. I think the population was then about 30,000.

National Service lasting several months existed in Australia at that time, but I had been exempt while in Charlton because of my printing apprenticeship and the town being so far away from a training centre. Shepparton was much closer to the Puckapunyal Military Training area than Charlton, and as soon as the army learned of my move, I was sent a letter advising me to be prepared to do my National Service in the near future. My heart sank. Then a week or two later I received a letter from a different army department asking me if I wished to have my exemption extended. I replied “yes”, and that was the last I heard of my requirement to do National Service. My mate John O’Brien did National Service — widely referred to as “Nasho” — and joked that the only thing he learned was how to smoke cigarettes and drink beer.

My mother knew the Shepparton News owners, the McPhersons, through the Victorian Country Press Association. They had a very much bigger and more sophisticated operation than what I had been used to in Charlton. The large number of printers was headed by a foreman nick-named Tiger.

The McPhersons had organised for me to stay in Ma Harrison’s boarding house in Sobraon Street. Posh it wasn’t. It was a rather shabby weatherboard building with the inside of the walls lined with hessian covered by wallpaper.

I became the fifth lodger, the others being a couple of truck drivers, Jack and Bernie, and two broadcasters from the local 3SR commercial radio station, Tony Doherty and John Bright (real surname Breit). I was not to know that many years later I would be a colleague of Tony and John at 3AW Melbourne (more on that in a later chapter). I was assigned a bed in a twin room, sharing it with Jack. He had a girlfriend and most nights would come in very late, and in the dark would shed his neat suit and white shirt and colourful tie on the floor before getting into bed in his underpants. Next morning, he would hang up his suit and put the shirt in a clothes bin before getting into working clothes for a day of driving his truck.

Ma Harrison — I never knew her first name or her age or whether she had ever been married — was a well known character around Shepparton, partly because she would often phone 3SR with comments, using the name InAsMuch. I remember her once taking a presenter to task on air for giving out a soup recipe without mentioning that soup would require water.

Ma Harrison was likable but would brook no nonsense from boarders and was known to chase and hit them with a straw broom if they misbehaved, which they sometimes did. As Christmas approached, she announced that it was a tradition that the boarders would share the cost of her present, a whale bone corset.

None of us ever saw the corset, but I guess it must have been something like this, buttoned from the front:

It was also a practice that the first evening meal provided for newcomers would have a very realistic imitation snail in the salad or vegetables, causing great amusement to the rest of the boarders.

On my first breakfast at Ma Harrison’s, she asked Bernie if he wanted one or two eggs. “Two,” he replied. So she broke two into a glass which he drank raw. I nearly threw up my cornflakes or whatever, but got used to witnessing it in subsequent breakfasts.

From memory I was charged five pounds for full board, i.e. dinner, bed and breakfast. There might also have been tea and a biscuit before bed. This converts to $A110 at today’s rate. I can’t recall what the meals were like, but they must have been okay or I wouldn’t have stayed.

Tony Doherty suspected that Ma Harrison was steaming open his letters so he wrote a letter to himself containing rude contents about her and her establishment. The next day when he returned from a shift at 3SR she ordered Tony to pack up and leave. When he challenged this, he was told, “I’m not a prostitute”. Tony replied along the lines of “I know you’re not a prostitute, but it just shows you’ve been opening my mail. She confessed that she had but that made no difference and he must leave. The next time I saw Tony was when I joined radio 3AW Melbourne in 1963.

After a few months, I decided to leave Ma Harrison’s for reasons that now escape me and I moved in with the Price family, which was a significant improvement. Jim and Mrs Price had a son, Jim junior, who was about my age, so that was good. Jim Senior trained as an accountant, but he much preferred the less demanding work on the production line at one of the local fruit canning factories. Mrs Price was a simple soul not bothered by complex issues but was lovely and an excellent cook.

Jim Senior was a devoted fan of the Tarzan radio series broadcast by 3SR, although he suggested that it was Jim Junior and I who were the fans. If we talked, he would shut us up with the words “Be quiet you two or you’ll miss what’s happening”.

Jim and I became great mates and we decided to join a local ballroom dancing class. That was excellent and set me up for my youthful years, not least because it led to me meeting my wife Rosemary. (I will come to that in later chapters.)

When the Price family moved to accommodation a few miles out of Shepparton I went with them and rode a pushbike to the SheppNews, as it was widely referred to. When I tired of this and turned 18 I bought a motorbike, a BSA 850, just like this one:

Getting a motorbike licence was easy. I simply rode the bike to the police station in Shepparton and a constable told me to ride it about a kilometre along an adjacent road, turn around and come back. As I had made my way to the police station on the bike and didn’t fall off it during the test, I got my licence. There were certainly no road rules questions that would be part of a test today. There was also no requirement to wear a safety helmet, although I did wear goggles to keep insects out of my eyes and a soft leather helmet to keep my head warm in the cooler weather.

I considered having a motorbike made me “Joe Cool”, especially as the exhaust gave a lovely throaty roar during acceleration, but it was very nearly the death of me, which I will come to in a later chapter.

I don’t quite know how, but my mother was friends with a keen churchgoing Protestant family in Shepparton. They agreed to keep an eye on my welfare and to encourage me to attend church with them. I never did as I was well on my way to becoming an atheist and I soon lost contact with them.

My atheism had its roots in an incident after my father had died. I’d been a member of the bible class of the Charlton Presbyterian Church when the Revd E A Wale was the hugely respected minister. The Revd Wale was “called” to move to the Uniting Church in the town of Seymour. Not long after he took up that post, he was struck down and killed by brain cancer, leaving his wife and two sons in a difficult financial situation. There was a big and successful fund-raising campaign in Charlton to help the Wale family, but the elders in the Charlton Presbyterian Church blocked any contribution on the grounds that the Revd Wale was no longer a Presbyterian. This struck me as most unChristian. Gradually, over the years, I came to the conclusion that most religious beliefs couldn’t be supported. My wife and I got married in church because that was what was expected of us. Also we liked the minister for his relaxed attitude to religion. Any religious content in the wedding service was minimal.

Strangely, I remember little of what it was like to work in the SheppNews, except that it was mostly pleasant and advanced my printing skills. Despite the size of Shepparton, the fire brigade members were mostly, if not all, volunteers. One member was a printer at the SheppNews and every time there was a fire, an alarm would go off where he was working. He would then drop everything and run to the nearby fire station. We wouldn’t see him again until after the fire was extinguished.

After about two years completing my apprenticeship with the SheppNews the McPhersons received a phone call one Friday from my mother. She explained that she had bought two newspapers, the Quambatook Times and the Manangatang Courier which were handed over by the two brothers who owned and published it. Mum got my brother, Jeffrey, and printer Norman Abbott to step into the gap in addition to their responsibilities with the Charlton Tribune, but after one issue they refused to do it any more, claiming that the additional workload was too much. Mum told the McPhersons that I must return home immediately to take over her two new acquisitions. The McPhersons were not pleased at losing an experienced printer at such short notice, but over the weekend I said goodbye to the SheppNews and the Price family and rode my motorbike home to Charlton to begin a new adventure.

Next chapter: Quambatook: my job as an editor and just about everything else.