Can My Pony Come Too?

by Rosemary Esmonde Peterswald

  Rob Peterswald, or Bob as he was then mostly known as, was one of the cadets who had left his car at Ijong Street for us to look after the year before, as cadets weren’t allowed to keep one out at Duntroon until their last year. I think leaving his car with us was more that he, as well as Eugene, fancied the rather striking Indian university student, Leila, living next door and Rob could visit her at the same time as his Renault Floride. I was often sunbaking in the back garden when he came, but being much younger at that time (in your teens three years was quite a difference in those days) had not made much of an impression. Or so I thought.

  We’d also had Rob’s twenty-first-birthday party at Ijong Street the year before he’d asked me to the Queen’s Birthday Ball. Parties at Ijong Street are fondly remembered – we’d cram into the small living room with music blaring; cheap wine and beer, sausage rolls and chipolatas being our main sustenance. Sometimes my parents huddled in their bedroom, or, if forewarned far enough in advance, took themselves off to a country hotel. On thinking back, they were more than understanding. Somehow or other we managed not to destroy the house and a quick clean up the next day usually put things in order.

  Many romances commenced at the parties in Ijong Street. Many have survived to this day, including a few couples that have recently visited us on Sea Dreams in the Mediterranean.

  A photo that sits on our bookcase shows me with Rob at his 21st, standing under the haughty ancestors in the small hallway – with me dressed in the trusty grey linen suit with polka-dotted silk blouse. However, that was in October ’64. It would be June ’65 before we had our first real date, as we were both going out with other partners and I was going away.

  At the beginning of ’65, Viv and I went to Cairns in far north Queensland. For some reason we made the front page of the Canberra Times as we set off.

  First we flew to Sydney, then on to Brisbane, where we caught the train the rest of the way. The only problem was that the train we caught was also the mail train, so it took an eternally long time to get to Cairns, as it stopped at every mail-box along the endless stretch. I remember the dry and parched Queensland landscape scorching in the blazing sun; how dilapidated the farms were as we chugged through the middle of cane fields; the old Queenslanders built on stilts with huge verandahs and corrugated iron roofs and falling down outhouses; the dusty gardens; the sound of cane toads; the deeply lined burnt faces of the farmers; Aboriginal children with trousers held up with string playing in the dirt; mangy dogs lolling under the tiniest piece of shade; and the smell of burning cane and spirals of thick smoke rising to hide the tree-covered mountains in the distance.

  Not much has changed over the years I’ve driven that stretch of road since.

  Finally arriving at our destination in Cairns it appeared not to be what the brochures proclaimed it to be. For across from the esplanade, where we were staying in a rambling Federation bungalow, there was little more than a mud swamp when we woke the next morning with the tide out. Later, when the tide came in, it was better, but nothing like the Cairns of today with its fancy boardwalk, magnificent pools and huge marina where we’ve stayed on our yachts a couple of times. I have to say that in ’65 the coral reef was more spectacular than it is today, as it struggles to survive the onslaught of tourists and the dreaded crown-of-thorns starfish. I remember looking at the coral though my mask as if it was a magical window to another world where I’d been given the keys to a supernatural city of millions of different shapes and textures, with the enchanting residents being one of the most astonishing communities on this planet.

  When we’d first arrived in Cairns, Viv and I were feeling a little down at mouth after the long journey until we’d the good fortune to meet a group of fun fellows in the flat next door who proceeded to show us the sights and give us a grand time, or a bit of craic as they say in Ireland. As we’d no car they drove us everywhere, including up the winding hill through the thick rainforest with crystal clear waterfalls, small creeks that sparkled like diamonds and green satin ponds surrounded by tropical flowers with petals as thick as a sow’s ear, until we reached the Atherton Tableland. Another day they drove us along the spectacular coastal road to the sleepy village of Port Douglas, a far different place to the tourist mecca it is today after the renowned developer, Christopher Skase, moved in. Another day we ventured inland to the country town of Mareeba, where groups of Aborigines squatted by the side of the road and huge anthills sprouted from arid fields.

  As we’d arrived in Cairns on the off-season, jobs were almost impossible to obtain – something we’d overlooked in the planning of this ‘working’ holiday. So after Viv had a stint as a housemaid on Green Island (where a Texan with a girth like a whale asked her what a gorgeous girl like Viv was doing cleaning his room and she agreed, leaving that day) we stayed for another few weeks before boarding the plane south.

  When we came back to Canberra, I started the course at the Metropolitan Business College for Ladies, where I was supposed to become an efficient short hand typist. I mastered the typing in a fashion, but I certainly never managed to master the shorthand.

  Chapter 17

  Falling in Love

  Dressed to the nines in a blue taffeta dress with matching shoes and handbag and my hair in a new bob, I waited in the hallway at Ijong Street for Rob to arrive to take me to the Queens’ Birthday Ball in June, 1965.

  Resplendent in a dark-blue dress uniform with a patrol neck collar, gold buttons on the jacket and red stripes down the side of his immaculately creased trousers, he carried a bunch of red roses. I thanked him profusely for the carnations, gushing they were my favourite. My mother, mortified, was trying to gesture they were roses. I was so nervous I couldn’t tell the difference.

  The ironing board was up the right way, a vase of fresh flowers from my father’s garden in pride of place on the top. Rob was not sat down for a lengthy dissertation on the ancestors hanging in the hallway; however, my mother, being somewhat smitten herself, spent far too long chatting him up in the kitchen before we got away, telling him roses were in fact her very favourite flower of all time.

  ‘It was then,’ she told me fondly not long ago, ‘that I decided Rob reminded me of my beloved brother-in-law, Phillip.’

  The ball was held in the function hall at Duntroon, which doubled as the instruction room during the day, where huge sand models of battlefields predominated. We danced to Hang on Sloopy, The Lion Sleeps Tonight and Under the Boardwalk. Despite the fact that alcohol was limited, it stopped no-one from enjoying themselves. Mind you I feel sure some of the soft drinks had a touch of illicit liquor added.

  All in all our date was a huge success. Rob decided I was worth asking out further, and I was certain at the ripe old age of eighteen that I’d fallen blissfully in love.

  Rob still tells the story how a few months after that first date, at a party in Torrens Street in Braddon, he asked me to dance. After a moment I gave him a huge smile and said: ‘Yes… of course I’ll marry you.’

  The music was loud and he assures me I misheard. That is not true, but it makes for a good story. I think after fifty years he actually believes it now and almost has me believing it too.

  Rob was born in Taree, New South Wales. A long time further back his family came from Europe. A number of years ago we discovered the Peterswald castle in Poland, which was Silesia, and have visited it twice. We have now also found the Peterswald Chateau in Buchlovich in the Czech Republic, a magnificent estate on acres of manicured grounds, miraculously surviving world wars, communism, and depression.

  Recently Rob has written an historical novel, The Castle at Peters Forrest, depicting his family’s history.

  After Europe, one of his ancestors went to England as Master of the King’s Horse. Eventually his great-great-grandfather, William John Peterswald, arrived in Adelaide, where he became the third Police Commissioner of South Australia. It would appear he was regarded as a somewhat controversial character, but one to be revered. Only last year we pu
rchased the plot of land in the Adelaide cemetery, where he’s buried in good company – between the hugely ornate graves of the noted Downer and Ayers of Ayers Rock families. There is even a mountain, Peterswald Mountain, in the Northern Territory called after him.

  Rob’s family moved to Sydney in the 1950s and Rob went to school at Manly Boys High where he and his friend Max Doerner, not only played truant if the surf was up, but also tennis and squash together, Rob becoming the New South Wales Schoolboys Squash Champion in 1960. During the course of the six months since I had my first date with him and leading up to his graduation in December, I often watched him play rugby, tennis and squash. Rob was the only cadet in Duntroon’s history to win both the squash and tennis championships for four years in a row, getting a full colour in rugby as well and a half colour in athletics.

  Years later I met General Cosgrove, the Chief of the Australian Defence Forces and future Governor General, at a function in Hobart. He was a few years behind Rob at Duntroon.

  He told me: ‘You realise your husband’s a legend…one of the best athletes to ever go through Duntroon.’

  To say I was proud is an understatement.

  I also went to Avalon in Sydney to meet Rob’s family, where thankfully I seemed to pass muster. I’d previously met his brother, Dick, a lawyer in Goulburn, a rural town not far from Canberra. Rob and he often played in opposing rugby teams and we’d spent a few evenings together celebrating their various wins or commiserating a loss. Sometimes the headlines in the sporting pages of the Canberra Times would herald: Peterswald outclasses Peterswald.

  I learned early on that Rob’s family, his father John, mother Hazel, sister Wendy and Dick were very dear to him.

  Graduation Day at Duntroon was quite an occasion, comprising a Passing Out Parade, morning tea in the lush grounds of Duntroon House and a great gala ball at night to pin the pips on the graduating cadets’ epaulettes. This job of pinning on Eugene’s pips was to fall on my mother, together with Allison Griggs, my great friend whom I’d met at business college and whom I’d introduced to Eugene. For over two years they went out together, until it petered out. Eugene met someone else, and Allison met Fred Lewis, who ended up an Admiral in the American Navy in Washington where they still live and we visit.

  Rob’s mother proudly helped me pin Rob’s pips on, and an honoured guest was his Uncle Keith, who played a central part in Rob’s life, together with his wife, Winsome. Keith had been a Rat of Tobruk, also slogging it out on the notorious Kokoda Track. Despite this arduous ordeal the army became a great love of his. He was overjoyed when his nephew was accepted into Duntroon – even more so to be at his graduation. Dick had newly married during the year, to Fran Wilson, a lovely dark-haired girl, whose family was well-known and respected in the Goulburn district, where they lived until recently when they moved to Murrumbateman, the picturesque wine district north of Canberra, close to where their daughter, Joanna, lives with her husband, Tim, and their three children. Nearby in Canberra, their son, James, lives with his wife, Marianne, and their two children.

  Mid-morning we were on the front steps of Ijong Street ready to go to the Passing Out Parade. I wore a pink checked suit with a short skirt and an Audrey Hepburn style hat. Standing beside me, my mother appeared regal in a floaty floral dress with a matching hat of silk flowers and Dibs shone in black and white. Waiting for us anxiously in the car, my father looked debonair in his dark pinstriped suit brought out of mothballs especially for the occasion.

  Despite the searing heat, Rob, Eugene, and the rest of the cadets looked resplendent marching on the parade ground in full dress uniform. Jim Connelly was presented with the Sword of Honour and went on to become a Major General in the Australian Army, as did three others from that class.

  Years later, a TV series based on the class of 1965, called the ‘Sword of Honour’ was produced with a well-known actor playing the part of Jim. Loosely based on the cadets’ experiences, it was difficult to identify individuals.

  Watching Eugene march and receive his commission from Lord Casey, the Australian Governor General, my mother and father were seeing their dream come true. The grass was definitely looking greener now. Here was their beloved son carrying on the great tradition of the Esmonde family in the military forces. Suddenly all the struggling seemed as though it was worthwhile and I felt enormously proud of him, Rob, and the other cadets, many of whom have remained our greatest friends and allies over the years since.

  After the parade we had morning tea under a thick arbour of trees on the lawns of Duntroon House, built by Robert Campbell in 1870. Every time I go there I admire the beauty of the building, which boasts wide verandahs with stone pillars covered in vines. In this grandiose setting the graduating cadets were treated as officers for the first time and we all felt a part of a special happening.

  However, my trip to the hairdresser later in the day in preparation for the ball was anything other than a special happening. I returned home with an unbecoming heavily lacquered beehive. Dear Eugene helped me wash it out and style it into a smooth bob. His kindness is something I’ve remembered fondly all my life. I wore a white sequined slinky evening dress with a split up the side and a deep v to the front. By far the most sophisticated item I’d ever owned. Later I dyed it black and wore it for years.

  Rob had now graduated to the position of 1st lieutenant in the Royal Australian Infantry. Eugene was a 1st lieutenant in the Royal Australian Artillery. I remember watching my parents elegantly and happily dance the night away to the Royal Military College Band. It was ages since I’d seen them waltzing together. A picture of hunt balls, elaborate parties in Dublin and Drominagh flitted through my mind. With all the hard work in keeping the wolf from the door over the past eleven years they’d not had much time for relaxing. Let alone dancing.

  And I, of course, was in heaven in Rob’s arms.

  The highlight of the evening was the parading of Casey, an authentic complete human skeleton, mounted on the skeleton of a horse, accompanied by enormous cheers and catcalls. The story goes that Casey, fed up with his miserable life as a first year cadet at Duntroon, where bastardisation was the norm, retired to a remote cupboard. Here he remained until some years later the door was opened, whereupon he fell out in his present skeletal condition. How the horse got in the cupboard with him remains a mystery. Not enough of a mystery, however, to spoil a good yarn and tradition.

  Over the next few years many of those cadets, including Eugene, went to the battlefields of Vietnam. Some went to Malaya; others, like Rob, were posted to Papua New Guinea or to various postings around Australia and the globe.

  As a forward observer it was a dangerous job in Vietnam for Eugene, causing us deep concern. He managed to return safely, much to the family’s relief, although he’d lost a lot of weight. Yet he soon put it on again, making his way to Brisbane to GOC Northern Command as ADC to General Hassett, where he spent two years. This is where he first set eyes on his wife to be, Jenny Sharpe.

  His second trip to Vietnam was in 1971, after which he returned to Australia and married Jenny, whom we all thought extremely glamorous. He eventually retired from the army in the early 1980s as a Lieutenant Colonel. With Jenny he then took over the Sharpe family business, from Jenny’s father, Sir Frank Sharpe, who unfortunately had become seriously ill. Sir Franke had received a knighthood for his services to the Queensland community, in particular being the first to introduce avocado farming and commercial radio to the state. For many years he also had the Bells helicopter franchise and held a pilot’s licence well into his seventies. He was an amazingly talented man.

  As well as the family business, Eugene and Jenny now have a development company and have three lovely children, Godfrey, Eugene and Grania, all enjoying careers of their own: Eugene in China and Godfrey and Grania in Brisbane.

  After graduation, Rob returned to Mona Vale with his parents. I joined him in January, when we announced our engagement. That summer in Sydney seemed to go on forever. We were
young, happy and carefree, despite the Vietnam War hanging over our heads. Rob and I shopped for an engagement ring on the Corso at Manly and celebrated our announcement at the Music Hall at Neutral Bay, with Dick and Fran. For hours we sat in the hot sun, turning ourselves brown as hazelnuts in the wonderful beer garden at the Newport Arms, watching the yachts tugging at their moorings in front of the Royal Prince Alfred Yacht Club in the blue waters of Pittwater, where thirty seven years later we anchored our own yacht, Oceania, as we sailed north, compiling our photographic book Beyond the Shore. We met up with many of the class of ’65, as they flitted in and out with old and new girlfriends. We devoured delicious seafood at the Spit or at the famous Doyle’s Restaurant at Watsons Bay (which we featured in Beyond the Shore), and swam at Manly and Bondi, where I burned my feet to blisters on the searing sand. We partied at friends’ houses and in discos and surf clubs, often rolling home in the wee hours of the morning. A few hours’ sleep and it started all over again, but not before Rob’s mother had insisted on bringing me a huge cooked breakfast in bed.

  It was a wonderful long hot summer in more ways than one.

  However, all good things come to an end. Soon Rob had to head north to his new posting as an Infantry Officer with the 1st Pacific Islands Regiment in Port Moresby. I had to go back to Canberra and my job as a less than enthusiastic secretary at a solicitor’s office.

  It was sad saying goodbye, but Rob was excited to be taking up his first posting. As there were a few of his class going with him to New Guinea, he’d not be altogether amongst strangers. The idea was that Rob would come back on leave from Moresby at the end of the year, whereupon we’d get married in Canberra. Then I’d join him. At just nineteen, I was regarded as far too young to set off with him to New Guinea. Also, where would I live? Rob would need to reside in the Officers’ Mess, and housing was impossible to find. Most importantly I had no money and needed to save. So I worked at my secretarial job during the days. At nights I worked as a waitress in a new atmospheric jazz club come Italian restaurant, in Garema Place in Civic Centre. The ferocious chef only turned up when in a good mood, so a lot of the time I was the chef as well – trying to placate a room full of disgruntled patrons. But I saved a handy bit of cash and wrote to Rob most days, waiting anxiously for his return letters. Yet I couldn’t wait for the year to pass, so that we could get married and I’d join him in New Guinea.