Often we sailed extensively around Tasmania, from Recherche Bay in the far south to Maria and Shouten Islands on the east coast, at times in the company of Cascades or Bruce’s Norfolk Bay. These were the days when you could throw a cray-pot over the side and know you’d end up with four or five good crays for dinner, or catch up to thirty flathead in a few hours of dangling a line over the side.
‘Not crays again for breakfast,’ was the cry one morning as the icebox was overflowing with succulent crayfish.
Nowadays in Tassie one has to pay over sixty dollars a kilo for crays, and even then they’re often not available, unless there’s been an upset in the lucrative Chinese market and fishermen are selling them directly off their boats.
We’d only been at Windermere for a few months when I decided to take up selling real estate again. The Peninsula was situated some one and a half hours from Hobart (it’s a bit closer now with the new road at Eaglehawk Neck). There was no real estate agent on the Peninsula, although Robert Stewarts had an agent working the area from Hobart. I decided to start where I knew someone. I called in to Henry Jones IXL, the office of the dapper fellow who’d sold us Windermere, assuring them they needed an agent on the Peninsula. I was pleased, if not slightly nervous as to how I was going to fit everything in, when they offered me a job to start straightaway. Within a short time, much to my amazement, I had a load of listings, mainly by going around and introducing myself and advertising in the local gazette.
I must have been doing well for I was asked to judge and present the prize to Miss Nubeena at the Nubeena Regatta – a great honour. Then Robert Stewarts (now Roberts) the well-known rural Tasmanian company approached me to join them. After a bit of persuasion I agreed. Shortly afterwards Henry Jones closed their real estate section anyway.
At this stage on the Peninsula the average block of land was selling for about five thousand dollars, so as you can imagine my commissions weren’t going to set the world on fire. Yet it soon started adding up and we had a good extra income coming in to supplement the orchard, farm, and Rob’s army pension.
My sales varied from a pig farm in Nubeena to the most expensive residential property sold on the Peninsula at Eaglehawk Neck (from memory it was fifty thousand dollars). I managed to fulfil my real estate obligations between working on the production line in the apple sheds and in the orchard. I either had an answering machine when I was in the orchard, checking it regularly, or if in the sheds I’d hightail it up the stairs in my overalls and gumboots to answer the phone. People on the other end of the line would imagine I was sitting in a plush office somewhere, not in a grotty cubby-hole covered from head to toe in apple pomace. If they wanted to look at a property I’d have a quick shower and change into something more becoming, before heading off to show them around. My main real estate outfit consisted of jeans, leather boots, and a tweed jacket, even if I was going in to have my fortnightly rostered day in the office in Hobart. One day, when some of the board were coming in for a meeting, the manager of Robert Stewarts asked me cautiously, ‘Rosemary…do you think you could possibly rustle up a dress to wear?’
How I wasn’t murdered in this job I’ll never know, for I ventured from one end of the Peninsula to the other – to the remotest farms and isolated wilderness areas to show prospective purchasers their dream. Anyone of them could have been a nutter. When I was really nervous I’d put Poppy and Gatsby in the car with me (Poppy more for the ride, rather than any great deterrent to a would be attacker, as he couldn’t see much anyway, but he did bring his walking stick just in case). Yet fortunately no-one seemed in the slightest bit interested in doing me any harm. I became bogged in a few places and had to walk to the nearest farm to get a tow, once having to wade through a river fully dressed in order to get help. Other than that I wasn’t worried at all.
Tragically a neighbour shot Gatsby. I can’t say I blame the man, as he’d been caught chasing their sheep. Gatsby was always a wanderer, no matter how hard we tried to curtail his outings. He grew far worse after he and the rest of the dog population on the Peninsula were compulsorily drenched for hydatids. Somehow he never seemed quite the same thereafter. Not long before he was shot he’d disappeared for a few weeks and we’d searched high and low. Eventually he wandered back up the driveway with his hair all matted and with the pads on his paws worn to a frazzle. For a while he stayed near home.
We hadn’t realised he’d disappeared until one of the girls in Georgie’s class at school was telling the children how her parents had shot a dog that morning who was chasing sheep. When Georgie asked what the dog looked like it sounded just like Gatsby. Poor little thing had to get through the rest of the day at school before she could tell us. That night we went up to the neighbours’ farm and found him. We brought him home to Windermere and buried him in the back garden under a pine tree near Poppy’s vegetable garden, all of us with tears rolling down our cheeks.
From apple juice we diversified into scrumpy cider and coolers. The scrumpy cider was so potent that it produced some unexpected results. One night, when we were having dinner at the Lufra Hotel at Eaglehawk Neck (which used to be owned by Reg Ansett), with some friends from Canberra and the Peninsula, we were treated to an impromptu floorshow. Next to our table was a group of attractive young women from overseas doing a tour with The Camping Connection. Rob offered them a bottle of our scrumpy cider, which they readily accepted. Within half an hour two of them were dancing naked on the staircase. We were all entranced, apart from Poppy who couldn’t see a thing and was furious he was missing out. The next week written up in the Peninsula Gazette was ‘The Great Scrumpy Cider Episode’, doing wonders for the publicity of our new product.
During this time we became quite well-known in Tassie through the many radio, TV, newspaper and magazine interviews we did about our apple juice and cider business. We basked in the glory when we weren’t in a screaming heap on the floor of the sheds with one machinery breakdown after another and a deadline to meet. At one stage we were pressing more apples for fresh juice (from as far away as the Huon down south and Tamar Valley up north) than any other apple processor in Tasmania, including Cascades and Clements and Marshall. In the end we decided we needed a distributor. It was becoming impossible to keep up with the distribution as well as production.
We employed a fellow who owned one of the biggest orange juice and mineral water businesses in Hobart. Unfortunately a few years later this ended up in a long protracted court case when he appeared to pocket some of the profits without declaring them to us. We were only made aware when we got a phone call from Coles and Purity asking why we’d put up the prices of our juices. When we informed them we hadn’t, it all came out.
Fortunately, we won the law case but it had taken its toll, both financially and emotionally, particularly as the fellow told me he’d run us out of town when he thought he was being shown up and about to lose the case. Also, in the confusion both Coles and Purity suspended any future orders until the court case was resolved, meaning our income was devastated. The day the verdict came out in our favour we went to the Sheraton Hotel with the girls to celebrate. I must admit the whole episode, not surprisingly, had taken the shine off the apple juice business and put a strain on the whole family.
Although at the time we thought it was the end of the world, a number of years down the track it was hard to even remember the finer details, apart from the fact we lost nearly all our money and had to completely start all over again. We also learned a valuable lesson that most manufacturers learn. No matter what product you produce you are at the mercy of the retail chains and distributors.
Chapter 31
Overcoming Adversity…Hobart
Well before the court case took place we decided to move to Hobart in late 1985, as both girls were boarding at Fahan School in Sandy Bay. Tasman District School only went to year ten and Charlotte was ready to go into year eleven. She’d boarded with a family in Sandy Bay for a term the year before when she went to Mount Carmel Con
vent, but she didn’t particularly like living with a strange family, so we thought boarding school for both of them was the best option.
This left Rob, Poppy and me on our own on the Peninsula. We felt that this was not the reason we’d come to Tasmania. It was also a long trip up and back each Monday morning to make the deadline for school at 8.30. And then there was the long trip up to bring them home for the weekend on Friday evenings. They were feeling unsettled and so were we.
I spent hours driving real estate agents in Hobart batty, trying to describe what we were looking for and not having a clue myself. Every time I’d find anything slightly suitable, I’d then drive down to the Peninsula and think we were crazy to be moving. Our apple sheds were so enormous that anything else looked tiny, until we found Hampton, a two-story Federation weatherboard divided into three flats on the bluff at Bellerive with spectacular views across the Derwent River to Mount Wellington. After we turned it back into one house, with Poppy having part of the downstairs as his living quarters, it was featured in the local press as Home of the Month, yet not before we’d ripped up acres of lino, pulled out thousands of old nails, knocked down numerous mock walls put in during the fifties, and installed a brand new Bosky stove, which ran the central heating, and nearly burned the house down at Charlotte’s 18th birthday when we tried to crank the heat up. The chimney caught fire, resulting in the fire brigade arriving (to the joy of the revellers). We also sanded the floors, painted it throughout, re-established the gardens and built a huge fence along the front to protect us from the prevailing winds howling across the water from Mount Wellington. We let out the house at Windermere to our production manager, who was continuing to run the sheds and produce the fruit juice, with Rob commuting a few times a week.
The girls and I would go down with him on weekends (staying in Poppy’s old cedar cottage) where we all worked frantically trying to keep the farm going and getting the next week’s production in the sheds organised. As I had now started in real estate again in Hobart, this soon began to take its toll. After much discussion we decided to sell up and move to Hobart permanently. We were sad to leave the Peninsula and the many friends we made there. Yet we go back often, staying with Sue and Don at Cascades. We have a wonderful room overlooking the luxuriant green valley fronting the Cascade River – where years ago we used to sit on fallen logs with a huge bonfire burning in our midst, and where sheep and cattle now graze languidly under the tall stands of blackwoods and bluegums.
After the first couple of weeks in Hobart I was offered a job selling real estate at an office in Sandy Bay and accepted. The next day I was offered the job I’d wanted in the first place and had to go down with a bottle of whisky to appease the manager at the Sandy Bay office. I started the next week at the office of Edwards and Windsor in the centre of town, moving into a tiny cubicle at the end of a passageway. It was from this cubicle that I managed to sell some of the most expensive houses in Hobart (including the record price ever achieved), but not without the guidance of Rob Windsor and Andrew Edwards, who’d started the firm a few years before. I went on to get my Auctioneer’s Licence and as far as I know I was the only woman conducting auctions in Tasmania at the time and one of very few in Australia. Some days I’d conduct up to five auctions. I adored doing them, particularly chattel estate auctions, often going on for a whole day and leaving me with a voice like a croaky frog. I also studied to renew my Manager’s Licence. The law in Tassie was different to Canberra so there were other subjects I needed to do. There were only a few of us selling at Edwards Windsor when I started. Then we expanded, eventually moving across to the other side of Collins Street to larger premises where I became the Sales Manager with twelve sales staff. Over the six years I was there I made many great friends with other staff members and the people I dealt with. It was a fun office. We worked hard, but we also had plenty of time for partying. Recently the talented writer, Rosie Dub launched my novel Bird of Paradise at Fullers Book Shop and I stood up and gave a speech to a large gathering in the very same spot my office used to be, for Fullers have now taken over the premises.
I became a National Real Estate Trainer, conducting training seminars all around Australia. On one trip I was sent to Echuca on the Murray River to train a group of Victorian country agents. It was during the airline strike. I had to fly out of Hobart on a Caribou Army plane to Melbourne, followed by a light plane to Albury and then a four-hour drive up the longest, flattest, and hottest road to Echuca, an old-fashioned paddle steamer town in Victoria on the Murray River, opposite its twin town of Moama, New South Wales. I arrived back in Melbourne the next day to conduct another seminar with a huge dead bird attached to my front bumper bar, wondering why people were calling out and pointing as I drove past. The next day I hopped back on the Caribou for Tasmania.
I enjoyed the training side and the travelling it involved plus all the people I met. I also loved writing columns for the Australian First National Training Magazine, doing so for many years. My numerous trips to Victoria allowed me to visit Dibs on her new farm, Glendalough Park, in the rich rolling countryside of the Gippsland area, where she and Kevin have set up their kennels and cattery at the bottom of the manicured lawns surrounding the homestead. Here they’d made a new life for themselves, both becoming absorbed into the local community as if they’d been there all their lives.
I was also able to visit Gill and Eugene. He and Jenny now had three children: Godfrey, Eugene and Grania. I hadn’t seen Gill since I flew up in 1985 for a grand celebration for my father’s eightieth birthday at Hardigreen Park where all the family gathered for a double celebration, as it was also Gill and Colin’s son Andrew’s 21st.
Sadly this was to be the last time we were all gathered together as a family, apart from Viv, who hasn’t been together with the rest of us as a group for close to fifty years, although we all visit her at separate times. When I look at the photos I feel a dreadful stab of sadness, for shortly after this photo was taken my parents decided that the long trip from Ireland was becoming too much for them to cope with. Neither ever came back to Australia again, relying on us to visit them in Ireland whenever possible. I look at the happy faces of the children. The rugby-mad Andrew, who has set up an enormously successful world-wide business in North Wales where he lives with his family, wife Jane and daughters Sian and Catrin; Allison, who has bravely overcome many health set-backs and Mia, a talented teacher to children with special problems; our precious Liam, who loved animals so much and is sadly no longer with us; and our two blonde blue-eyed girls, such a contrast to Gill and Colin’s brown-eyed lot. In a way it all seems so long ago. In other ways it seems like yesterday.
A house with children but without a dog is not the same. So it wasn’t long before Rob and Georgie set off to buy Georgie a birthday present. Hence, Polly, a wriggling shiny black Labrador, came into the family. For the next thirteen years she gave us incredible joy. Sadly she became so ill when she got old that we had to have her put down, leaving an enormous hole in the family. Not only was she a wonderful watchdog (taking to a burglar when Georgie and Charlotte were flatting together later and baling up a couple of blokes stealing from under our house), she was also great company, particularly for Poppy who adored having her around.
During our legal battle with our juice distributor, finances had become scarce, so we decided to sell Hampton and move to a smaller house in Albuera Street across the river in Battery Point. It adjoined the Anglesea Barracks, where we were often invited by our army friends.
Our new house needed a lot of work, but we weren’t daunted, as Rob had decided that with the help of a tradesman he could do most of the renovations himself. There was a large crowd at the auction, but few bidders. Not realising we were the successful bidders, Sue Becker, the radio personality and a client of mine, walked up to me afterwards, exclaiming in a loud Cockney accent, ‘My God Ro! Who in their right senses would buy a place like that? Have you seen the state of the roof?’
Chapter 32
The house at Albuera Street was on a long narrow block with an overgrown vegetable garden and chicken sheds up the back. I wasn’t all that sad to leave Hampton, for the wind howled relentlessly and in a way the house was far too big for us. Albuera Street was cosier; the rear garden a delight, with a wonderful walnut tree and a mass of spring bulbs and a huge jasmine vine covering the trellis off the back room.
Sue Becker was right – the house certainly needed work. The roof was in a dreadful mess with the outside eaves channelling water straight into the rickety sink in the small lean-to kitchen. There was only one tiny bathroom and the girls’ bedrooms upstairs had no power points whatsoever, a slight problem we’d somehow overlooked. Poppy was given the room running the whole length of the eastern side, with his bedroom being the enclosed verandah to the front. He was soon supplying us with lettuces, tomatoes, zucchinis and cucumbers from the garden.
From Albuera Street, after many renovations and a few additions, we had Charlotte’s 21st at Salamanca Inn (with what seemed to be the entire Hutchins Rugby Union team downing what we thought would be enough beer for the whole night in half an hour, sending us flying for more) and Georgie’s eighteenth.
Can My Pony Come Too? Page 30