#52 Ancestors # Week 18 – Road Trip
It’s 730ks from Lismore in Northern
NSW to Sydney, the State capital. These
days the trip from Lismore to Sydney can be a pleasant 1 hour flight. Or an 8 and a half hour drive, most of it on
a dual carriage motorway. If absolutely
desperate you could take the train from Casino – about a 12 hour trip in air
conditioned comfort.
My father, born in 1913, had his first
trip to Sydney at the age of 17. In
1931, he had finished the Leaving Certificate and won a scholarship to attend
the University of Sydney, which was the only University in NSW at the
time. In the next four years, he would
make the return trip three times a year.
It was complicated and uncomfortable, and for a student on a very small
scholarship, expensive.
There were three ways he could do
this. The first was by boat, from Byron
Bay to Sydney, after a short (30 mile) train ride from Lismore to Byron
Bay. The boat left on Saturday afternoon
and arrived in Sydney early on Monday morning.
Dad’s grandfather did it regularly.
His mother did it once and was so sea sick she vowed never to do it
again. Dad seems not to have considered
this an option.
The second was by train. Until the bridge over the Clarence at Grafton
was built, this was actually three train trips.
The first one stopped at Grafton and passengers took a ferry across the
river to South Grafton for the trip to Raleigh.
Here they disembarked and boarded a “bus” to Macksville, where the line
began again. This train went to
Sydney. The whole trip took about 23
hours.
The third was another combination of
road and rail. Sydney and Brisbane were linked by a railway
which travelled up the New England route, crossing the border between the two
states at Wallangarra. The nearest this
route came to Lismore was about a hundred miles away at Tenterfield, on the New
England Tableland. It was a regular
route for the intending passenger to catch a New England Motor Co. service car
(a sort of charabanc) and travel through Casino, Mallanganee, Tabulam and Drake
to Tenterfield, a journey occupying most of a day, to catch the Sydney-bound
train from Brisbane. This train followed
the tablelands to Sydney, arriving there the next morning.
This is how Dad described it in his
memoir:
For people
prone to car-sickness, the bus journey over the winding and badly-surfaced road
was sheer hell!
The road
between Lismore and Tenterfield, in 1930, was very different from the highway
of today. Even this highway is not, by
any means, the best road in Australia, but it is infinitely better than the
winding, undulating dirt and gravel and loose blue metal horror of 1930.
Lismore is
about at sea level, Tenterfield is about 1000 metres above sea level. To rise to that elevation the road has to
travel through the Great Dividing Range.
At times, it rises by comparatively gentle gradients, then it twists in
one hairpin bend after another while at the same time going up in a low-gear
rise or down in a sickening decline, sometimes seeming to descend but actually
rising all the time until it reaches the top of the range at Tenterfield.
For the
traveller in the charabanc, there was the continuous roar of the hard-working
motor, the swish of tyres, the constant clatter of stones thrown up by the
wheels to hammer the undercarriage of the bus, the grinding of moving luggage,
and the creaking of straps, while as a constant background there was the smell
of hot oil and the over-riding odour of petrol.
And all the while, a fine layer of dust was settling upon the
passengers.
The
passengers were usually crammed together, shoulder brushing shoulder, and legs
unable to move without hitting someone else’s legs. From time to time, the rapid variations in the
motion would cause an overstressed stomach to protest, and an unfortunate
passenger would discharge his breakfast over the side ( if he was lucky enough
to be in an outside seat) or over himself and his neighbours if he wasn’t, and
all the time the bus charged forward determined to reach its destination in
time to catch the afternoon train from Brisbane.
(On one occasion, some years later, when I
was teaching at Quirindi, I travelled on this service intending to catch the
train which would pass through Quirindi on its way to Sydney. It was the last day of the September vacation
so it was important that I catch the train.
My luck was out, however. When it
was about 25 miles from Tenterfield, the bus broke down. Since, in addition to its other deficiencies,
the Tenterfield road was one of the loneliest and most unfrequented roads in
NSW, this mishap was serious, as our only hope of relief came from the
possibility of flagging down a passing motorist to ask him to relay our plight
to the bus company in Tenterfield.
Fortunately, a motorist did indeed come and within an hour a relief bus
had arrived. As we still had plenty of
time to catch the train, we were not unduly worried and we set off again for
Tenterfield. We rejoiced too soon. We had only gone a few miles when that bus
too broke down. This time there was no
hope of relief. Not another vehicle
appeared for an hour. By this time, the
train had already arrived in Tenterfield and gone on. By the time we eventually reached
Tenterfield, we were more than an hour late.
As I had very little money on me, and as the night was balmy, rather
than cold, I finished by sleeping that night in the park at Tenterfield and
next morning I caught a slow train that got me to Quirindi too late to report
to work that day, as a result of which I was docked a day’s pay.
A New England Motor Company vehicle of the period
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