Week 4 Close to Home
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| Map of South and Central Lismore - crosses mark the addresses of the White family |
The children of my great grandfather, Robert White, almost all established homes within a short distance of their parents after they married, so their children grew up in a strong extended family – the cousins played together and all went to nearby South Lismore Public School.
Robert and Ellizabeth White lived on the banks of the Wilson
River in South Lismore, NSW at No 2 Crown St.
Like most Lismore homes of the times, it was weatherboard with wide
verandahs, and built up on stilts to avoid the occasional flooding of the
river. I remember as a very small child
going to visit my great grandmother and being fascinated by a family of kittens
who were living under the house (She died in 1957, so I was probably about five
at the time).
Robert and Elizabeth’s eldest child was Ellen, known as
Nellie. She married John Victor Lehmann
in 1907, when she was 19 years old. They
moved into a house at No 4 Centre St, about a 2 minute walk from her parents
and they stayed here for many years before moving to a house at No 19 Charles
St, which was just across the road.
Victor Lehman died in 1945, and Nellie lived on in that house until her
death, forty two years later at the age of 99.
The next White daughter was my grandmother Alice. When she married John Gleeson in 1911, they
moved into a house in Webster St, perhaps a three minute walk from her
parents. I think perhaps that Robert
White might have owned the first house that Alice and Jack lived in, but they subsequently
bought the house after Jack became a permanent employee of the Railway, with a
guaranteed income.
The first four children were born in this tiny house, then they
decided to build on the allotment next door.
My
father wrote “The plan was that they would use much of the timber out of the
old house, supplemented by whatever new timber had to be bought. Since the weatherboards in the old house were
teak, this was not a bad idea. They employed
a carpenter named Dan Saville to do the construction, with Dad, who had taken
his holidays, acting as his labourer.
They borrowed 300 pounds ($600) from the Manchester Unity and went to
work. Dad was deputised to demolish the
old house, the family being lodged with our maternal grandparents in the
interim. I’m not too sure how long it took to build the new house. I do know that it was not really finished and
that, for the next few years, Dad, who was a reasonably competent bush
carpenter, and a fair concrete worker and general handyman, spent most of his
spare doing jobs that were left undone when the house was nominally “finished”.
* These jobs included internal lining of two bedrooms, building of an outside
shed to be a laundry as well as a general workshop, fencing the allotment with
a solid picket fence, laying concrete paths, erecting a timber guard for the
wide verandah that occupied the front and one side of the house and enclosing
the back verandah which was our main eating area. Eventually, too, the house was connected to
the town electricity supply (about 1928) and the town sewerage system (about
1930-31). All of these jobs were done
along with the making of a few items of furniture needed as the family grew and
grew up.
Of
course, all of this was dependent upon the money being available. The repayment of the housing loan had first
priority. I remember that this cost 3
guineas ($6.30) a month and it was one of my jobs, at regular intervals, to go
to the Post Office to get a money order for that amount. It seems a small amount today, but I am sure
that Mum found it a hardship to have to rake up this amount every month,
especially after the Great Depression hit us.”
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| Webster St house in the early 30s. |
It is interesting that my grandparents and their children moved in with Alice's parents during this time. It seems that
the White family home was always available as a refuge as there is evidence
that other grandchildren lived there at different times of their lives.
Violet
White married Roy Goldsmith in 1912 and they moved into a cottage at No 49
Phyllis St, South Lismore. This was
about a six minute walk from her parents and close to Nellie, Alice, Sis and
George. Their two children, Edna and
Edwin, were born here and then they moved across the river to Conway St, close
to centre of town. Roy was a tailor, so
perhaps he needed to be closer to where his business was. They moved again a few years later, around
the corner to No 4 Lockett St, where they stayed until Roy retired.
The
youngest White girl was Sis (Mabel). She
married Walter Day in 1920 and they moved into No 12 Crown St, a few doors along
the street from her parents. All five of
their children were born while they lived in South Lismore, and although they
moved to Sydney for Walter’s work in the 40s and 50s they returned to nearby
Ballina in the 70s, and Sis lived her last few years once more in Lismore. She was interviewed at Maranoa Nursing Home
in 1988, three years before her death at 91 in 1991, and had a clear recall of
life in South Lismore, and the swimming hole at the end of Crown St where all
the local children learnt to swim.
George
White was the younger of the two White boys.
He was at one stage a dairy farmer near Lismore at Bexhill, but in 1930
the electoral roll shows him living at 144 Casino St, South Lismore – about a
10 minute walk from his parents. By the
1950s, at the time of our family visit to his mother mentioned above, he was
resident at No 1 Crown St, directly opposite the family home. He was still there when he died, aged 90, in
1993.
Only
two of Robert and Elizabeth’s seven children really left their home neighbourhood
on marriage. Weenie (Eliza Jane) married
James Wood, who was a baker in Nimbin, which in those days was about an hour’s
drive from Lismore. When James died in
1941, Weenie was only 46 years old. She
returned to South Lismore – to Union St – and remained close to her family
until she married again 4 years later and moved a few streets away to Exton St,
North Lismore (a street coincidentally named after one of my husband’s
ancestors)
Charles
White, known as Boy, was the only one who left home and stayed away. Boy had an apprenticeship as a fitter with
NSW Government Railways, and on completing this, in 1918, he joined up to fight
in WW1. Luckily for him the War ended before
his ship left Australian waters, so he returned to Lismore. In 1920 he married Ida Elizabeth Staff and by
the time their first child was born in 1921 they were living in Newcastle, NSW.
Boy
lived all his working life in the Newcastle area, and then retired to the Gold
Coast, but he stayed close to home in another important way. Like his father, he was deeply committed to
the Manchester Unity United Order of Oddfellows, and he held many positions
over the years – he was a District Grand Master, and then was elected as Grand
Master in 1947.
As
a child, I accepted that my family would go where my father – a schoolteacher –
was sent, so it seemed quaint to me that his parents, and his mother’s
siblings, all lived in such close proximity to each other. I see now that this was more the norm up
until the middle of the 20th century, and that it is really only in
the last 50 or 60 years that families have come to expect to be separated. As global mobility increases, our children
live not just in different parts of this country, but in different parts of the
world, and families have to find other ways
to maintain their closeness.
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