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“The glamour, Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast, Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.” – DH Lawrence
I used to sleep in the Rogues Gallery, a room just off the main corridor. Across the hall was the big living room, a huge old Federation space which might have been called a drawing room somewhere along the line.
Next to that was the formal dining room, where the adults would take their brandy-and-drys in to dinner. I could hear them laughing late into the night. It didn’t bother me, it was a comforting sound. Still later in the night, I’d hear my Uncle Bill creaking down the hallway to the bathroom, sometimes several times.
Before I went to sleep, I’d lie there looking up at the photos on the wall. The 1936 Wallabies to New Zealand. The 1963 Wallabies to South Africa. The great Army XV’s of the war years. My Uncle Bill was in all of them. Rogues Gallery, the grandly named spare room, held his souvenirs from a hundred tours.
On the floor was a zebra skin, brought home from Africa in the days when you wore a suit and hat to fly Qantas, holding your airline bag which said proudly “Australian Rugby Team – Tour to South Africa 1963”. It was on one of those tours when Uncle Bill was asked by the great Dr Danie Craven whether the Australian rugby union would ever pick a black player to tour. “You wouldn’t do that to us would you?” said Craven. “My oath I would” said Bill. “If he was good enough, we’d pick him”.
Rogues may have been Uncle Bill’s childhood bedroom. The house was certainly his home as a boy. Just up from Parramatta Road it was, at 77 Shaftesbury Road, Burwood. About a mile down the hill was Concord Oval, where my Uncle Bill played his rugby with Western Suburbs, and not too far from Speedy Springs, his first job after school.
Also not far away, but in the other direction, was his old school, Newington College. Funnily, at school he was more of a cricketer than a rugby player. A good keeper the old timers used to say.
It was only in winter that I used to sleep in Rogues Gallery with the zebra skin. In summer, I’d sleep on the side verandah, which was closed in with lattice and fringed with jasmine. It was scary out there sometimes, open as it was to the night air and the sounds of the street not far down the drive.
The driveway was also the thoroughfare to the squash courts at the rear of the house and in the evenings, I could hear men talking and laughing among themselves as they walked to and from their squash matches.
In 1960-something there was a standoff in the drive between gangster Lenny Macpherson’s thugs and some rugby players. McPherson owned some courts at Five Dock and sent his gang to close down the McLaughlin’s competing courts. The rugby players had other ideas and told McPherson’s boys where to go. Uncle Bill’s courts stayed open.
Many of the squash regulars were rugby players. Some from Wests, but lots from other clubs and places. Uncle Bill’s courts were always a rugby hangout. A lot of the players were in the photos on the wall and as a kid I knew more about the greats of the 60’s than I knew about the current players in the 80’s.
Years later when I met Rob Heming at my Uncle Bill’s funeral, I could hardly reconcile the lean and spritely Manly optometrist, with the framed sepia image of the brawny Heming flying above the pack in a lineout at Newlands. At his peak, he could clap his hands over the crossbar from a standing start.
In the Wallaby team photo in Rogues Gallery, Heming’s head was cocked at an odd angle. A closer investigation revealed cunning razor cuts and a replaced head. Apparently he made a funny face during the shoot, so the printers had to manually replace his head in every picture.
Near Heming in the back row of the same photo was CP ‘Charlie’ Crittle. I was lucky enough to tour with an elderly Crittle to the 2011 World Cup. He remembered going to the Burwood house several times, once to watch a television broadcast of the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire in 1974.
It was Crittle who made a prank call to Uncle Bill on the 1963 South Africa tour, convincing a local lass to call the Wallaby hotel and accuse centre and Baptist lay-preacher Ian Moutray of molesting her. Bill heard Crittle giggle down the line from the phone box. The next day saw Crittle as duty boy for an undisclosed period, and Bill ordered several double whiskies on the Crittle hotel bar account.
Standing on my toes on the zebra skin, I could gaze up at the big 1963 photo for hours. It was the centrepiece of perhaps 30 or 40 rugby team photos on the wall. A bit further along the row from Crittle and Heming was Jules Guerassimoff, the Queensland tearaway who once locked a monkey in Uncle Bill’s bathroom during a boring moment on tour. Bill chuckled through the smoke of his Rothmans as he told the story.
As a small boy, staying with Aunty June and Uncle Bill for holidays, I’d venture down the drive in the afternoons to see Uncle Bill at his desk at the squash courts. He’d often palm us a Golden Rough from the trays next to the till. If we were lucky and mum and dad weren’t around, we’d get a Fanta, but we’d have to wait until the players were finished chatting to Uncle Bill first.
Our Aunty June was a capable lady. She had to be, with a husband who was on tour overseas for around half of their first 30 years of married life. She’d walk us from the house down Shaftesbury Road to the Burwood Station for a train outing to the city. Sometimes the Museum, maybe the QVB for tea and cakes.
If the station was dirty she would tut-tut about how Neville was doing an ordinary job of keeping things in order. I thought Neville was the station master, it was only years later I found out that she meant Premier Neville Wran.
They had one of those gruff marriages typical of their era. When we kids were old enough to eat at the dining table with the adults, we’d delight in seeing Uncle Bill bring a torch to Aunty June’s candlelit dinner. “Jesus June!” he’d faux-grumble. “Can’t see a bloody thing!”.
This was the same man who as ARU President sent down a written warning to Wallaby coach Dave Brockhoff to “call off the dogs” during the second Test against England in 1975; and the same man who as Wallabies manager, sent home Wallaby hooker Ross Cullen for biting Ossie Waldron in 1966.
But to us, he was just Uncle Bill living at 77 Shaftesbury Rd in front of the squash courts.
When they could no longer keep up the courts, the house and buildings were sold to the Presbyterian Church, and the courts were turned into a theological college. For years, I would drive past if I was in the neighbourhood and look at the old place. If I closed my eyes, I could hear the chat of the players as they trotted down the driveway in the late evenings, while I was tucked up on the verandah.
My sister went past the house yesterday. It had been demolished – a block of units was under construction. I looked in disbelief at the photo she sent me. The half-built boxes looked like a crappy Meccano set covered with mud. The Federation elegance was torn apart and buried somewhere under the muck.
Luckily, the memories stay with me, as clear and vivid as ever.