by Liz Harfull
The first Harrow By Night Sound and Light Show was staged in October 1996. Ange was a nervous wreck beforehand, anxious that some of the locals who said it would never work might be proved right. Apart from anything else, she and her husband Jeff had $3000 of their own money riding on it, put up to pay for the sound system. ‘The stress was terrible, so I’d just go into the shower, turn the water on, and howl my eyes out. I’d be sobbing with fear, but I was too desperate and there was too much to do. I don’t know how it worked, but God was watching and it did. We found our niche.’
The show quickly became a phenomena, attracting national media attention and drawing people from across Australia and overseas. At one point, the community was running fifty-two shows a year, with two shows a week from October to December. Tickets sold out three months in advance. ‘It was that crazy,’ says Ange.
Local businesses began to thrive and community groups benefited, too. ‘I call it the octopus plan,’ Ange explains, adding in a whisper that she might be a bit of a socialist. Tickets to the event cost $28, and the proceeds were shared. If a community group or local business provided a volunteer, they were paid a dollar for every ticket sold. That basic system still works today, although the frequency of the shows has dropped to five a year.
The nature of the show has changed a little, too. In its early days, people started the evening with a meal at the pub and then climbed on board a bus which took them from site to site while they absorbed a show that was ‘reasonably serious’, strongly based on historical fact. Now the script is little more than a guideline and people walk the route along the main street as hilarious mayhem unfolds around them.
The evening starts quietly enough. Cast members arrive in character, wandering up to the pub much as they might have done in the 1800s. First to be seen are Bruce and his bay mare Gertie. A veteran of many shows, she stands quietly on the footpath in front of the pub while Bruce rolls a cigarette and chats away to people taking advantage of the warm evening to sit outside for a drink. Dressed as a police trooper, he is sporting knee-high boots, a dark blue jacket with corporal’s stripes on each sleeve, and a long, bushy moustache.
Before too long, someone sits down on a wooden bench under a window and begins to play a set of Irish uilleann bagpipes. Gentle Celtic melodies are still wafting across the street when Dr Potts arrives, sporting a long tail coat and top hat. The town judge is there, too, with his wife on his arm, and a strange leggy-looking chap with long black hair, gloomy features and popping eyes. In costume and make-up he is hard to recognise as full-time portrait painter Ron ‘Stretch’ Penrose, who walked away from sheep farming to set up a studio in the town’s old bakery. Tonight he is Bill the Undertaker. Everyone is seated in an undercover dining area at the back of the pub by the time the harlots arrive and the real fun begins. They help to serve the crowd their dinner on enamelled tin plates, in between an old-fashioned sing-along and dancing.
These are the scenes that met Marnie Baker’s eyes in 2011 when she and her husband, Nathan O’Brien, travelled from their home in eastern Melbourne to decide whether Harrow was their future. They had never heard of the Sound and Light Show, and were a bit startled when they walked into the pub for dinner. ‘There were all these people in period costume. They were everywhere,’ Marnie says. ‘The next thing you know there’s explosions going off. I can’t remember what I had in my hands but that went flying.’
In her surprise, she turned to one of the locals. ‘Oh my God, what was that?’
Hand on hip, he replied, ‘Don’t worry, luv. You’re not in Frankston now!’
What followed that evening proved the masterstroke in another textbook example of the Harrow community working together with single-minded determination to salvage its future. After thirty-five years running the Harrow garage, its owners, Bernie and Pauline Kelly, were planning to close the doors, bringing to an end a business that was the town’s only source of fuel and mechanical services. They had been trying to sell, without success, for some time because Bernie was ill and needed to retire. He could not keep the garage going any longer.
If one nun leaving could upset the balance of things, the whole town knew that losing the garage would be a disaster. The Harrow Progress and Development Group called a town meeting to discuss the situation and more than seventy people turned up, representing just about every family in the district. ‘It was very clear that all of us desperately wanted to sort something out. We wanted to help the Kellys because we loved them, but more importantly we didn’t want the garage to close. If we accepted that, what would be next?’ poses Ange.
The meeting in June 2011 formed a small committee to tackle the problem head-on. They considered options such as the community retaining the petrol bowsers with a visiting mechanic providing a part-time service, but what they really had their heart set on was finding a buyer. Top of the agenda was a publicity campaign, starting with stories in Wimmera newspapers and a dedicated Facebook page. Ange used her media contacts and approached The Weekly Times, a rural newspaper that has been the ‘Bible of the Bush’ in Victoria for almost 150 years.
A city girl through and through, Marnie Baker did not usually read it, but one of her friends did. That friend spotted the quirky story about Harrow and its quest to find someone to take over the garage, preferably a mechanic or a young family who could move into the three-bedroom home that came with the business. She pointed out the story to Marnie who was immediately struck by the community spirit it portrayed. In an odd way, it reminded her of the inner-city area where she grew up.
Marnie spent most of her childhood living in Richmond. Her mother, Judi, worked as a senior secretary for future Australian prime minister Bob Hawke when he was president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions in the 1970s. A carpenter by trade, her father, Phil, built sets and props for Channel Nine and the Playbox Theatre Company, before later working for a general builder. Her parents divorced when Marnie was about seven, and she and her younger sister, Amie, mostly lived with their father because Judi had to travel so much.
Their home was a large single-storey terrace house in a street with only two residential properties. The rest of the buildings were small-scale factories and warehouses, remnants of Richmond’s long and proud industrial history. Nearby was Bryant & May’s sprawling factory complex, which employed hundreds of people to make Redhead matches right up until the 1980s. The inner-city suburb was also home to Pelaco, a clothing company famous for its men’s shirts; the neon sign put up on top of their building in 1939 remains a Melbourne landmark. Rosella tomato sauce was made in Richmond, too, as well as Paragon shoes and Wertheim pianos.
Right next door to the Bakers was a Popsy factory, which supplied popcorn to cinemas. They didn’t need to go to the movies to smell it, or eat it. The aroma of hot popcorn embraced their house, and every year on their birthdays the workers gave Marnie and Amie bags of it bigger than they were. If they forgot the house key to let themselves in after school, they would hang out with the employees until their father came home, gobbling their way through their favourite treat.
When Marnie was growing up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Richmond was known for a low standard of living and considerable unemployment, but what it lacked in wealth, it made up for in a sense of community and a rich folklore that Marnie loved. Around the corner were the stables where Squizzy Taylor kept his horses. A colourful figure in Melbourne’s criminal underworld until he was shot and killed in 1927, the notorious gangster made his money from armed robbery, protection rackets, prostitution, gambling, and selling drugs and illegal alcohol. But in Richmond where he lived, to some he was a folk hero. ‘Round there he’s a bit like Ned Kelly,’ Marnie says.
In his spare time, Phil played in a pub band that started out as the Modern Throwbacks and ended up Guilty as Charged. Their style was hard rock, with a punk edge, according to Marnie, who says her father definitely enjoyed his music more than carpentry. The band’s main gig was playing at the Sydenham Hotel. The gir
ls had a spot behind the bar, near the loud speakers, where they would curl up in their sleeping bags. Their dad would wave at them from the stage, and the bartenders made them raspberry and lemonade drinks, which the children called Red Neds. ‘The only problem was that we would come out of there and couldn’t hear anything because the music was so loud.’
Phil gave up playing in the band before his daughters became teenagers. ‘As we got older he realised some of that scene became inappropriate. Looking back on it, Dad was good at monitoring how to raise two girls and changing when he had to,’ Marnie says.
When she was fourteen, her father moved closer to Camberwell where she and her sister went to high school. They also acquired a baby half-sister when their mother gave birth to a daughter, Katie. Judi was working nightshift at the time, so Marnie played a significant role caring for the baby while pushing through her final years of secondary education. On the same day she received the offer for a place at university, she accepted a full-time job at the Arnott’s biscuit factory in Burwood. ‘I needed to work, so I took the job,’ she says.
Over the next ten years Marnie worked her way up from factory hand, to personal assistant to the production and distribution managers. The plant employed about 600 people, making national favourites like Tim Tams, Iced Vovos and Monte Carlos before, quite contentiously, it was closed down in 2002. ‘I really liked the work and it was hands on. I had to drive forklifts and help load trucks, and in the end I had the job of going out and testing new machinery and making recommendations. They wanted me to get a business degree, but I was already doing everything I would do if I got one, so I didn’t see the point. And I didn’t want to stay there forever,’ Marnie says.
Instead, she took a completely different tack. She had been gardening and growing vegetables at her mother’s house where there was plenty of space. It seemed to make more sense to do something that she genuinely enjoyed, so Marnie studied horticulture while juggling part-time work at Arnott’s. Then she spent two years working full-time in plant nurseries. She loved her new career, but she was being paid a lot less than she had earned at the factory and by then she was a single mum, with two young sons to support. Sam was only two years old and Jesse was just three months old when Marnie and their father split up. The next few years were a financial and logistical struggle. Needing to earn as much as she could while working flexible hours, she took up casual work house cleaning and gardening.
Then in 2008, Marnie met Nathan on the last day of the Golden Plains music festival at Meredith. At the time, Nathan was a stagehand working on the award-winning HBO television series The Pacific. Part of the blockbuster American production was filmed in the You Yangs ranges near Geelong, not far from his hometown of Torquay. A qualified mechanic, Nathan took on the short-term position because he was looking for a change after ten years of being employed in a garage. ‘We started talking early one evening about music and life,’ Marnie says. ‘It was the easiest conversation I have ever had and six hours later the festival was over, it was time to pack the tents and we exchanged phone numbers.’
Given she was a little older and had two children, Marnie didn’t really expect to hear from Nathan again, but he called within a few days and made plans to visit. She was very nervous. ‘I was worried that I mightn’t find him as attractive in the light of day,’ she jokes. ‘I remember opening the front door and thinking, “Phew!” and then “Woohoo!” He was gorgeous.’ Sam and Jesse liked him, too, and despite her early reservations Marnie was thrilled to see that Nathan returned the children’s affection. After eight months of dating as a family, and long nightly telephone conversations, Nathan found work in Melbourne as a warehouse manager and moved in.
In March 2011, three years after meeting, they were married in a simple ceremony at romantic Woolrich Retreat in the Dandenong Ranges. Woolrich boasts an acclaimed garden that is more than a century old. It was the perfect setting for Marnie to walk down the aisle, on the arm of her very proud father. Her best friend, Melissa, was matron of honour and Nate’s best friend, Adam, was best man. Standing right there with them were Sam, who carried the rings, and Jesse, who was a page boy. Marnie’s favourite part of the ceremony came when the celebrant acknowledged that it was all about bringing them together as a family, not just a couple. ‘He recognised the boys and Nathan’s love of them, and the wonderful role he plays in their childhood,’ she says.
A few months later, Marnie and Nathan were trying to settle into married life in suburban Bayswater when the story about the Harrow garage appeared in The Weekly Times. They had often talked about moving to the bush one day, but thought of it more as a retirement plan. Yet the idea of Harrow and the potential life it might offer their boys kept niggling away at them. They started to think very seriously about what they valued from their own childhoods and how they could give their sons the same experiences and opportunities.
The more they considered it, the more they realised the answers did not lie in Melbourne. They felt disconnected from the community in which they lived, and they did not like having to worry constantly about the boys’ safety. Marnie recalls: ‘They had friends in the area, but to go and visit them I had to drop them off because to get there on their bikes they had to cross a lot of main roads. It may sound a little bit paranoid, but there were a lot of car accidents. We were on a dog-leg in the road and in the eight years I lived in that house, there were seven car crashes on the corner, and I had two cars stolen from the driveway.’
Then there was the methadone clinic which operated nearby. Heroin addicts often sat in the street drinking. ‘Someone told me that’s how you get the methadone to work. It gives you a bit of a buzz if you do it that way. It only happened once a week, but there seemed to be at least five or six people with their little toddlers or babies, calling their kids swear words. Sometimes the blokes would lie on the ground because they had fallen asleep.’
Marnie did not like her boys confronting these things at such a young age, and being forced to explain what was going on when they asked. ‘I felt like it was important that I was able to provide my kids with a life in which they could learn about things as they became age-appropriate,’ she says. ‘I’m not trying to be negative but there were things I couldn’t control. I can control what they watch on TV and the food I have in my house. While kids should have a clear view of the world, I don’t think they should be afraid. You need to enjoy your childhood while you can. We had a chance to buy the house that we were in because it was owned by a friend of ours so we could have got it straight from them rather than through a real estate agent, but we sat down and talked. We realised that we didn’t want to buy it, and we had always talked about living in the country.’
So Marnie and Nathan decided to hop in the car and drive to Harrow for a quick look. The trip took five and a half hours each way and they stayed for barely ninety minutes, but it was enough for them to know the idea of moving to Harrow was worth exploring. For a start, the landscape made just the right first impression. Marnie had never been to the area before but she knew the Wimmera was mostly flat, when she much preferred hills and mountains. Approaching Harrow from Balmoral, she was surprised to see rolling green hills. ‘It was August, and the sun was shining, and it was beautiful and lush. It was just one of those perfect fairytale things,’ Marnie says.
The town itself made a strong impression, too. Winding their way through towering gum trees, the O’Brien family crossed the Glenelg River and followed a road lined with what looked like an old-fashioned timber paling fence (it’s actually made of concrete) into the main street. To their city eyes, it appeared that someone cared. Marnie remembers noticing there were even liners in the public rubbish bins. ‘I know that might sound strange, but I wasn’t used to that. Usually bins are all funky, and there are things falling all over the ground.’
Pulling up in the centre of town, they paid a visit to the Harrow Discovery Centre, where they were fascinated by its award-winning displays about Johnny Mullagh and one of
the largest collections in the world relating to legendary Australian cricketer Donald Bradman. The volunteer in charge introduced himself as ‘Pop’ and made them feel very welcome. ‘He didn’t know why we were there—we were just passing tourists, but he was a barrel of laughs,’ Marnie says.
Afterwards they walked back along the street to the garage. Bernie was away, but Pauline knew they were coming. When they arrived, the place was deserted so they went across the road to the pub to make enquiries. The friendly barmaid turned out to be Pauline’s daughter-in-law. She told them Pauline would be back soon and offered them a drink while they waited. They had no sooner picked up their glasses when the missing garage owner showed up.
‘We better finish our drinks first,’ Marnie said.
‘No, you’ll be fine, take them with you,’ the barmaid replied.
‘Down the street?’ Marnie queried.
‘Yeah, don’t worry about it.’
Shaking their heads at how laid-back and accommodating everyone seemed to be, the O’Briens set off to inspect what might soon become their business. They loved the fact the garage had been rebuilt in 1995 using corrugated iron to complement the heritage feel of the town, complete with an antique petrol pump. Interested in history, they were also drawn to the transport museum set up alongside the workshop, with its fascinating collection of vintage cars and motoring ephemera. If they took on the garage, they would be running this, too.