Gleaming World Series future

I saw my first mainline diesel locomotive standing at the head of the afternoon workers’ train at Port Kembla platform one brisk September afternoon in 1961. I was six. I’d come to Port during the school holidays to help pick Dad up from work, and to travel home to Corrimal with him on that train.

The rhythmic rumble of the gleaming, fresh-off-the-showroom-floor Goodwin-built 44 Class Alco was mesmerising, and I clearly remember wondering in awe how these new diesels could possibly affect those venerable steam locos still scuttling around the Illawarra en force.

I didn’t know it then, but this was the manifestation of the American Locomotive Co’s internal combustion swagger on the global stage – a representative of Alco’s so-called World Series. A sister to almost identical locos arriving simultaneously on railway properties throughout Europe, South America and elsewhere in Australia. She stood motionless, smug, all shining tuscan red and NSW Government Railways golden yellow, girthed by a wafer-thin red waist band, with pitch black wheel frames, fuel tanks and buffing beams.

Standing aloofly at the head her ancient train of grimy, classless wooden passenger cars – the ones with Wild West American end platforms that remained well into my early adulthood – she juxtaposed eras on that chilly Spring afternoon.

In retrospect, she was more than motive power. Her rumbling heralded a technological avalanche poised to carry us all increasingly faster through the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and into a fresh, mechanically gleaming, greaseless New Millenium. And in retrospect, the sound of those familiar, elderly, venerable steam locos was really nothing more than the collective death-rattle wheeze of an industrial age fast drawing to an end. And the richly warm, oily aroma of steam would soon dissipate ahead of instant energy from brash fuel oil, and the sharp tang of graphite on new plate steel.

I can still feel that train sliding effortlessly out of Port station heading north-west into setting sun gold and smoke, threading its way through the industrial sidings between the station and the start of the Steelworks property. The 44 was barely aware of herload of hundreds of weary passengers heading homeward . . .

There was none of the slight to and fro pulling and rolling motion associated with steam locos starting from still. Her motion was smooth and effortless, without any sense of piston pause.

Falling between the rails

As much as they excited me from the earliest age, trains and railways could be deadly with little or no emotional notice.

Like the time we were walking along the platform at Otford, on the far southern end of the Royal National Park, south of Sydney. We were only kids, and my sister, Mary, would have been lucky to have been five. The year was perhaps 1963. The surrounding sub-tropical rainforest of this part of the National Park smelt damp and richly rotting, of aging timbers sinking back into the landscape, constantly washed by repeated rains. The bush birds called incessantly to each other across the narrow valley in which the station is jammed, and the brilliant Spring morning sunshine struggled to break through between the trees and branches towering over the station. But the smell and sounds came to an abrupt end as Mary somehow slipped on the edge of the station platform. One second she was with us, walking and chatting as part of our family along the eastern platform. Next second, she was sprawled between the tracks. One second more and she was on her feet, looking up at us, hands reaching upwards in begging grasps, looking for salvation. The look on her terrified little face said it all without a word. I have realised down through the years that I was terrified, instantly, of losing her, knowing the expected southbound train would be here at any second.

Dad leapt over the edge, and in a single, swinging motion, lifted Mary up to us and safety. Then, with a deft side hop and a push, he was up alongside us all – just as the south-bound, Wollongong train steamed around the curve to the north and rolled confidently, almost triumphantly, into the station area, gliding around the curved platform. The gap between fall and train rolling over the same spot couldn’t have been any more than 30 seconds, but it had felt like an entire slow-moving, shuddering, freezing afternoon. It still does when it comes to mind, which, interestingly, it does often. Ironically, Mary is now near 50, and the C32 Class steam loco of the day only survived another few years before falling to the scrapper’s torch.

Five years later, in 1968, early in my second high school year, I saw the ancient two-car diesel railmotor train rocking and rolling through Corrimal station on its high-speed morning dash from Thirroul into Wollongong. As it roared alongside the tall timber fence edging the classic brick railway worker’s cottage immediately north of the Railway Street level crossing just before 8.00am, the railmotor kicked up a huge, ominous dark dust cloud, swirling with sheets of paper. I saw it clearly at an angle from the platform on which I was waiting, another 100m further south, but didn’t comprehend.

Moments later, after the railmotor had screamed through Corrimal at better than 110km/hr, terrified kids in tears pelted onto the platform, racing straight into the station master’s office without knocking. This was the first I knew that Alice DeMartin had been struck, and the same empty sensation of untimely horror swept through me. Nothing as final as death was supposed to happen to us at this early stage of our life journey. Alice, my age, attended the girls’ school adjacent to our boys’ school. I can still see the ashen-faced station master and two teenage platform assistants darting along the platform and bobbing north across and between the lines to where a group of people were milling near the level crossing’s eastern boongate. I had known Alice since kindergarten. We went to the same Catholic primary school, high on Corrimal hill. Alice, with Italian parents and a younger brother, had always been quiet. I still cannot remember ever saying more than three or four words to her the whole time I knew her. High School Alice had always walked along the side of the railway line to the level crossing, her back to Wollongong-bound trains. Why she wasn’t aware of the speeding railmotor, I’ll never know. Like almost all other mornings, it was dead on time this fateful day. It has scooped Alice up from behind, and carried her forward at lightning speed before thrusting her headlong into a steel post by the level crossing. Alice would have been terrified for a second or two before experiencing ultimate pain that, in a blink of an eye, would have helped catapult her to somewhere infinitely calm, surrounded by angels.

As our school train slowly laboured through the level crossing, someone in the crowd milling around the fatal spot had thankfully covered Alice’s tiny body with a tartan car blanket. Looking down from my carriage window, full of panic dread, I also saw her smashed school case lying close by, along with one of her empty brown school shoes. That’s the last time I ever saw anything of Alice.

And apart from almost being struck myself by an extremely quiet and potentially lethal steam locomotive gliding through a freight yard many, many years later, I have never seen another rail accident at close quarters.


Rail fascination

I have always loved railway lines themselves from the earliest age. They, sometimes more than the trains that ran on them, stirred excitement in me. Roads carried cars, trucks, buses and other vehicles, and lacked discipline. They also lacked any sense of real permanence. I saw that traffic was free to roam from one side of roads to the other, to overtake itself and maintain a soulless modernity bred of ubiquity. Their very lack of control underscored the chaos generated.

Railway lines, those not torn up, remained permanent in my mind. Rather than shift, or allow for shift, they steadfastly held their position, sinking deeper and more gracefully into the same spot for decades on end if allowed. But never disappearing completely. I noticed that first the ballast shifted back into the earth. Then the sleepers, perhaps with only their bleaching tops remaining exposed to sunlight. Sometimes even these would succumb, leaving only the thread of rails meandering through weeds. To me, every piece of railway line I came across was connected to every other piece of line throughout Australia, by sheer dent of joining fishplates.

I remember the day Dad took us up a steep escarpment track behind Corrimal, until we reached a level space between the trees. I marveled at ‘discovering’ spindly 2ft-gauge tramway tracks among the fast growing bush. These I was later to discover were part of the Corrimal Colliery tramway that had operated from pithead to the very incline we’d climbed that morning. Coal in tiny timber skips was hauled along this tramway before descending the incline to the loading staithes of Corrimal Colliery’s standard-gauge line which ran down behind Corrimal Coke Works, and joined the main government line just south of Corrimal station.

Some kids imagined fairies and dragons and knights bravely battling strange and dreadful beasts. I always imagined, in equal wonder, what trains had run on such tracks, and why . . .



Train passion

You either love or hate
The smell of railways and their things.
That medieval smell of
Steel powder,
Stones
And heavy hammers.
Ancient passenger cars ooze this essence,
Along with that of sagging upholstery and
The mingling of a million human skin oils on
Timber window ledges . . .

I didn’t need to catch the train to high school – from one stop at Corrimal to the next stop further north at Bellambi. If I had walked the whole way to high school, I would have perhaps covered only an additional 400-500m beyond my walk to Corrimal station, and from Bellambi station, across the playing fields, to school. I was to later ride the distance, in my final high school years, on an old, colourless push bike I built and maintained myself.

Traveling by train was novel. A rite of passage. I still remember, as clear as yesterday, that bright, warm, cloudless January day in 1967 I strode towards Corrimal station, cutting down Harbinger Street to Railway Street, full of hope for a future I could barely imagine through my intense excitement. Resplendent in new long serge school trousers, looking down at new black shoes, I was proudly heading off to my first day at high school. My first day as a youth. My first day on the clear road to becoming an adult. I had been impatiently waiting for this day all through the Summer break. I was joining a much bigger group of youths-in-waiting, the majority of whom I’d never met, feeding in from any number of Catholic and other schools throughout the Illawarra district. And all wending their way to Bellambi in ancient end-platform timber passenger cars, painted in flaking tuscan red, hauled by over-taxed, equally tuscan 48 Class diesels. Several trains from the south, several from the north, and all converging on Bellambi, near our school by the sea, in good time before class.

These were the days before electrification. When the Illawarra line was still a Cinderella Way, populated by the rest of the NSW Government Railways’ rolling stock hand-me-downs and powered by what the Government brazenly described as ‘branchline locomotives’. The diesels were relatively new, but many of the passenger cars had been working the Illawarra for more than 50 years. And we rarely saw motive power bigger than 48s.

Nothing had changed on Corrimal station for more than half a century, the original timber buildings on both platforms dating back to the line’s duplication in the 20th Century’s teens. The backs of both platforms were lined by equally ancient slip-rail timber fences, and the side road between the western platform and Corrimal Coke Works was an undulating way of gravel acne, pock-marked with holes and ruts. It required deft hopping from end to end on rainy days. The platform buildings – waiting room, ticket office, ancient signal cabin and toilets – bore the hallmarks of more than 70 years’ grime and grit. A patina I was to find only appeared on or around railways and their equipment.

Bellambi station was of an equal vintage. Its main timber building, positioned at the extreme northern end of the island platform served as ticket office, station master’s office and signal cabin. Many years before, the private coal line from South Bulli Colliery had cut across the Illawarra line at right angles immediately north of the Bellambi Lane level crossing, itself at the northern foot of the platform, lending this building a far more important controlling influence.

With this as a backdrop, I can’t be certain exactly when I became Jennifer’s first boyfriend. Or she became my first girlfriend. We’d gone to primary school together, but only spoke matter-of-factly pre-hormones. But our delicious afternoon meetings, midway along Bellambi platform, followed by dreamy hand-holding all the way over the hill south to Corrimal was recognised, understood and accepted by our peers. I cherished those innocent days throughout my third and fourth high school years of 1969 and 1970. The couplings between the old wooden carriages had clunked and ground in unison as the ancient wooden passenger cars groaned with the diesels’ distinctive Alco exhaust beat. We held hands and stared into each others’ eyes, equally astonished by feelings we shared for each other – well ahead of experiencing anything like it for those life’s loves to come.

I still see myself, wishing against the clock, hoping the train would go even more slowly than its crawling reality, wanting to stay holding Jen’s hand as long as possible. Wanting to capture her sweet smell for as long as possible. Wanting to watch Jen’s excited, quivering, blushing smile for as long as possible.

When Jen left for boarding school at the end of Year 10, I happily took to my push bike for the ride down to Bellambi. There was no need for the circuitous train trips, my ride taking no more than 15 minutes each way. Jen and I stayed a pair until the end of our school days, but never again shared innocent hand-holding on trains. We shared kissing and exciting exploration at increasingly erotic teenage parties and dinners at home with my family in the months before university, but our train romance had ended forever . . .

My father's mother, Liz

Nana Elizabeth Heininger, nee Sandon, gave every impression of always being frail. She was tall, and had always been slim, and complained obliquely of this or that ailment, and about how she simply didn’t enjoy the best of overall health. Yet I remember clearly a day when Dad and I tried catching up with her as we all walked east down the main shopping area of Crown Street Wollongong. When we finally caught up with her, Nana complained she couldn’t take another step, and – after thanking God that we’d turned up in the nick of time – asked matter-of-factly if we could hail her a cab. Dad muttered something about being as fit as a fiddle, the old coot.

I always found it strange that Nana and Grandfather had separate rooms, both with large, austere iron double beds. Her room had a large metal trunk set under the bay window, and I always assumed it was filled with Nana treasures. Grandfather’s room was as Spartan as an aesthete’s – a bed and single wardrobe.

All floors in the house, including the main drawing room that was set up with a formal table setting we never used, were covered in ancient, dark and shining linoleum which all added to the aging aroma. The centerpiece of this long dining table was a green-grey ceramic bower birds' nest with several small ceramic eggs securely positioned deep inside. It became one of my rituals to always peer inside, and run my small fingers over these small, smooth, cold eggs, while the small pair of frozen ceramic birds watched down eternally from the top of their nest.

In my father’s old room, off this formal room, I found more treasures from another era. Several Boys’ Own annuals from the 1920s and very early 1930s, and an oval tin filled with Dad’s childhood marbles. I’d pour over the crude line drawings of these musty books, while marveling at the beauty of some of the marbles, already well past being found in Japanese marbles sold by the bag-full by our local newsagent.

Nana also had a distinctive smell, of finely scented women's toilet soap, and I would always love washing my hands with it in the bathroom attached to the back of the house. It was always Grandfather who stood behind me, guiding my dirty hands through this pre-lunch washing ceremony, using a not-so-soft cotton face cloth. Nana was as gently stern as Grandfather was gently pleased to be with us children. I’m not sure she was ever pleased to see us kids.

Nana’s history is even sketchier than Grandfather’s. I remember a story that as a very young child herself, she’d gotten into serious parental trouble for playing with the Aboriginal kids living beside Tom Thumb Lagoon and the southern edge of Wollongong. This playground of marshy swamp flats now forms part of Port Kembla’s inner harbour. Lizzie hadn’t been roused on for playing with the Aboriginals – but for failing to tell her parents where she’d disappeared to for the better part of a lazy Summer's afternoon, long before electric light arrived in Wollongong.

When it came time for Nana to die, she passed quickly, in a low-sluing nursing home at the foot of Mt Ousley Road, North Wollongong. Dad burried her at Lakeside Memorial Lawn Cemetry, near Dapto on September 1, 1973. I was 18, and remember the day because I entered it in my diary

My father's father, Ted

My Grandfather, Ted, my father’s father, was something of a formal man, a quiet individual from another era. He didn’t drive a car, relying, instead, on a dark, gearless pushbike with racing handlebars turned upwards to effortlessly and slowly peddle around Wollongong. He pinned his cuffed trouser legs backwith metal clips to avoid the greasy chain, and always wore an old Akubra hat that may have – at one time in the past 30 years – have been a dress hat.

Grandfather wore collarless white shirts and braces, his laced-up ankle-high boots were always a shiny black, and he smelt richly of plain soap and a lifetime’s experience. He died when I was young, and I valguely remember whispy white hair, a kind face and wrinkled, blotched softness of the back of his hands.

The only word I remember his saying was ‘Lizzie’ the name he gave his wife, Elizabeth Sandon – my father’s mother and our Nana. Grandfather would say ‘Lizzie’ richly and affectionately.

I was constantly fascinated by Grandfather’s small hall table hugging the wall of the narrow sunroom tacked on the back of the house in which my father grew up in the years before the Second War, and which he now shared with our Nana. In the drawer I could always find short lengths of sharp pencils I later realised Grandfather used to write down winners in whatever horse or dog races he was listening to on the wireless. In this drawer he also kept an old hair brush, scraps of form guides, ancient cigarette and tobacco tins, erasers, small notebooks filled with scribblings, boot laces and marbles. These contents always smelt musty, and genteelly old, like him. The walls above the table were lined with several familiar black and white frames pictures – several of prize-winning chickens Grandfather had reared and exhibited many years before, one of an anonymous race horse bedecked with show ribbons, and another frame containing pictures of two steam ships I was to discover had transported him to and from his War.

Grandfather had been a butcher, and had played rugby league for the Illawarra Diggers, the local team of returned servicemen, in the early 20s. While his football exploits earned him praise in the badly yellowed Illawarra Mercury articles I still retain, he’d gone on to play somewhat mysterious roles as an alderman on Wollongong Council and as a steward at Wollongong Dogs. He’d also been active in local rugby league circles. As a local government representative, he worked alongside Francis Xavier ‘Rex’ Connor, himself destined to become a Labour Minister in the ill-fated Whitlam Labor Government of the early 1970s. The lead-lettered names of Ted Heininger and Rex Connor still beam down from the white marble plaque affixed to the North Wollongong Beach changing rooms, as they have every day since the days before World War II.

One story has it that Grandfather and another butcher had built a thriving business before the Great Depression struck at the very vitals of the Illawarra. While Grandfather continued to give meat to those he knew would go hungry if he didn’t, his partner begged him to sell his half of the business before they both went under. In one of life’s strange ironies, Grandfather sold out, never having to work again, leaving my father – an only child – to grow in circumstances far less grinding than those of many around him.

Grandfather Ted had an older brother, Cyril Patrick, who was registered as a grocer from Woonona when he enlisted in 1916 to play his small part in the Great War. Ironically, having survived years of harrowing trench warfare in France and Belgium, Cyril was to die cruelly young – the victim of a collapsed drainage trench somewhere near Helensburgh – in 1923. He may not have been the same, apparently having seen too many things half way round the world to talk about.

Grandfather, on the other hand, joined the 12th Light Horse Regiment of the Illawarra, and steamed off to Egypt by 1917 to encounter the Turks in the Middle East. His war exploits are sketchy, as he spoke very little of them – especially to us children. All I knew was that he’d missed going to Gallipoli, but instead found himself doing time and patrols in the so-called Holy Land (Palestine, he always called it). Grandfather’s one great wish had been to reach Damascus, but never did. The war ended abruptly before his regiment could get there. Instead, he picked up a dose of Malaria in the Jordan Valley, something that took his years to fully recover from, and may have contributed to my father’s sickly young years.

I can only imagine how Grandfather and his fellow Australians viewed the exotic Middle East pre-oil wealth, pre-Israel and pre-routine international travel. They must have imagined at times that they were riding across the surface of another dusty alien planet. Grandfather always a softly spoken man, quietly and dispassionately described the Arabs as the dirtiest people he'd ever seen. But never to us children. He must have already realised that he didn’t want any prejudices rubbing off.

His crowning war regret - along with thousands of other yound Australian troopers - was that he had to kill his faithful horse before steaming back to civilian life. Having carried him from one end of the Hold Land to the other, there was no room for the horse in the New Australia.

Anyway, for whatever reason, Grandfather never went to Mass again, calmly saying there couldn’t possibly be a God after the things he and Cyril and thousands of other unworldly Australian youth had witnessed in warfare. But as a young child in a strictly Catholic family I forgave him this because of the superb baked lunches – beef or lamb and an assortment of plump, juicy vegetables and scratch-made gravy – he produced from the small Kookaburra gas stove and oven in the kitchen of the house he and Nana shared. Sunday traditional baked lunches in this neat, but Spartan, weatherboard house in Campbell Street became as ritualised as the Mass we always attended earlier that morning in Corrimal. We’d alight the orange and cream Hills Bus Service bus on the corner of Flinders and walk down Campbell Street, towards the boat harbour. We’d pass the Salvation Army Citadel on the corner of Campbell and Keira – always to the strains of strange hymns these people in dark military uniforms sang. I never saw them coming or going, but always felt sad that they’d never get to heaven like us real Catholics. And what always made me feel sadder was they always sang so well – and fervently. I had reached these conclusions independently, aided by side comments from the pig-ignorant, bog-paddy Irish nuns who taught us in primary school. I never discussed this with my parents.

As lunch was baking, Grandfather would whisk us small kids down to the park at the end of the street, or to the sheltered Brighton Beach on Wollongong Harbour on the other side of Cliff Road, and keep us there – all to his gentle self – until lunch could wait no longer. And after lunch we’d almost always retreat with him to the top yard, near the sheds with their secret photo albums, and rake leave into eucalyptus reeking bonfires. It was the very early 1960s. Another, simpler era that required bonding and the sharing of family pleasures, and generated no neighbourly complaints about smoky fires.