A Turramurra Childhood

The display at the New South Wales State Library of Ethel Anderson’s ear trumpet brought back a host of memories for me of my childhood in Turramurra in the 1940s, memories in which Ethel Anderson has a firm place. Nowadays routinely referred to as part of the “leafy north shore”, Turramurra was all that and more sixty years ago. Many of the grand houses that lined Kuringai Avenue stood in acres of land that has now been devoured by development, while the outer parts of the suburb were still quite rural with settlement quickly petering out into paddocks and bush. And although Grace Cossington Smith, who lived and painted in “Cossington” in Kuringai Avenue, had painted her Eastern Road as long ago as 1926, some of the farmlands she depicted in that picture were still there.

There was a baker’s cart that delivered bread early in the morning and milk that was delivered even earlier from Apps’s dairy on the road to Bobbin Head. But there was nothing bucolic about Ethel Anderson, the author of the classic children’s book Seven Little Australians, which I’m glad to see still remains in print today despite being so different in character from current “teen lit”. With her connections to vice-regal society through her husband, Austin, who had been Sir Philip Game’s private secretary, as well as her personal renown as an author, she was also Cossington Smith’s greatest champion. And she lived in her elegant house “Ball Green” just down the street from my family home.

At Ball Green she was ready to welcome a child into her house and to offer me the slightly scary opportunity to converse with her through her ear trumpet—not the silver one on show in the library, for my memory is of a splendid tortoiseshell device. Her husband, Brigadier Anderson, seemed no less an exotic but welcoming figure. He allowed me to handle his military sword and don his shako, and though my memory of this latter item is clear I’m puzzled now to find that he was a gunner, so that form of headdress seems odd in retrospect.

Turramurra all those years ago seemed to be populated by a surprising number of interesting adults who were ready to talk to me, which I now realise was very much a tribute to my parents. But it was also, I suspect, a reflection of how few children then lived in the suburb. There seemed to be an abundance of spinster ladies, such as the Misses Sievers, who rewarded my retrieving and returning a purse dropped in the gutter with a gift of an omnibus volume of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels, not those with Sherlock Holmes as the hero, but the now largely forgotten books set in medieval Europe and in England at the time of the Civil War. Sir Nigel and The White Company undoubtedly played their part in cementing history in my mind as a subject to be loved as much as to be studied. How could it be otherwise when Conan Doyle’s novels depicted a world that seemed so much more real than the Arthurian stories I had already read. Both novels introduced me to such things as obscure collective nouns applied to groups of animals and the furies of the jacquerie attacking a chateau when the White Company fought in France. To go many years later to see the memorial to Sir John Hawkwood, with whom The White Company has a loose connection, in the Duomo in Florence, was to remember how exciting those novels were.

As a university teacher, when there was only one university in Sydney, my father had a particularly wide range of acquaintances. These included H.V. Evatt, or “Uncle Bert” as I addressed him, and his art-loving wife, Mary Alice, who lived directly across the street from our house. I have no memory of my parents and the Evatts ever discussing domestic politics. Rather, this was an example of neighbourly friendship enhanced by the fact that my father and H.V. Evatt knew each other through the University of Sydney. I was regularly welcomed into the Evatts’ house, and even more importantly into their wonderful library. There were plenty of books in our house, but his library was different, with its floor-to-ceiling bookcases and a library ladder to reach the upper shelves. To my delight I was allowed to spend hours reading in the library, always provided I was quiet. And when the time came to go it would be through Evatt’s misquoting Wordsworth to me by declaiming, “Milton thou shoulds’t be leaving at this hour”. On one occasion my visit to the library was capped by Uncle Bert giving me a copy of George Bernard Shaw’s Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism as a gift. I was grateful but a little uncertain about this gift to a ten-year-old.

For a child there seemed to be an endless procession of interesting and important people visiting the Evatts, at times when I, too, was in their house; a group of Test cricketers was one such example. And there were other special “treats” as it then seemed, such as being allowed, with my parents, to examine three-dimensional photographs of bomb damage in Europe through a stereoscope.

Having the Evatts as neighbours led to their presence at one notable dinner party in our house which brought the decision in 1944 to appoint the then Professor of Botany at the University of Sydney, Eric Ashby, to be the first Australia scientific counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Moscow. I was allowed to watch discreetly as the dinner took place, observing it through the serving hatch between the kitchen and the dining room. Given the occasion, my parents had the meal catered, except for the dessert. This was my mother’s pavlova which, alas, collapsed at the last moment, leading my father, very unkindly, to refer to it as “Gwynneth’s grand ruin”, and later to sharp words.

For a child, Evatt was a puzzling as well as a very kind figure. I did not know what to make of this man, who I knew was important as Australia’s Minister for External Affairs, as he relaxed by playing hymns on the white upright piano in their drawing room, where the striking Modigliani hung, with tears streaming down his cheeks.

And then there was the time when he tried to have my father join him as a “doctor” at a Rugby League judicial hearing—was it into the infamous Bumper Farrell ear-biting occasion? “But I’m not a medical doctor, Bert,” I can still hear my father saying at the front door when Evatt came across the street to make the request. “Of course you’re not, George,” Evatt replied, “but the others won’t know! They’ll just know you’re Dr Osborne.”

My father turned down the request, just as he later would not be moved by Evatt’s lobbying him as President of the Royal Society of New South Wales for the award of a medal from the society. I see them now on that occasion, two rather overweight figures with different political views; a pair of neighbours, both dressed in khaki shorts and white singlets, talking animatedly at the front gate.

It’s all a long time ago. But now, living as I do in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, whenever I read conventional press descriptions of Turramurra suggesting it is leafy and dull I mutter to myself, “I don’t know how true that is today, but it certainly wasn’t always so.”

Milton Osborne is a visiting fellow at the Lowy Institute in Sydney. His most recent book is Phnom Penh: A Cultural and Literary History (Oxford, 2008).