Frank Coldebella

On common ground

19/3/2020

Sunday soccer team, McMahons Reserve, Wonthaggi, 1951. Back row: from left, Dave Cook, Tony Della Rosa, Giovanni Campagnolo, Gianni Bonato, Sandro Panozzo and an unknown visitor from Naples. From: Giovanni Mabilia and his cousins Gino, Cerilio and Emilio Mabilia. Dave Cook, a Scottish miner, took the young men, newly arrived from Italy, under his wing.

By Frank Coldebella

WHEN the Wonthaggi township was planned, plenty of public open space was set aside for playgrounds and future needs. The social life that evolved around these shared spaces influenced the people who grew up there

Tracks through coastal woodlands provided magical imaginary diversions. Bushland reserves became adventure play areas for children and young teenagers and wild food habitat in hard times.

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All I want for Christmas

11/12/2019

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Dear Santa

This is what I want by Christmas 2020. It won’t cost you a cent and I’m willing to pay my share.

I want the economy to be the servant not the master of society. Market forces are not a law of physics.

Christian religions to practise Jesus’s teachings about wealth and poverty. It’s easier to be virtuous if your basic needs are being met.

More respect for evidence-based science, less faith in superstition

Free and fair speech. At present the more wealth you have the more speech you get.

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May Day in Wonthaggi

19/4/2019

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The Wonthaggi contingent of the annual May Day march in Melbourne, late 1960s.

By Frank Coldebella

THIS is some of the history I absorbed from the union men and women of Wonthaggi.

The imperfect democracy and good life most of us enjoy today were not handed down to us by royal decree or divine intervention. None of the progressive social movements in this country were started or led by our parliaments.

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A place to call our own

1/11/2018

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Bonds corner, looking south on McBride Avenue, Wonthaggi, on a Saturday morning in the early 1970s. The Wonthaggi Citizens Band has been performing. Photo: Frank Coldebella

By Frank Coldebella

FOR thousands of years, the north-facing slope of what we now call McBride Avenue would have been an ideal meeting place for local Aboriginal people, with a wetland at the bottom and an abundance of plant and animal food within in easy walking distance.

For most of the 1900s, McBride Avenue was still a meeting place, particularly on Friday night (late night shopping) and Saturday morning (when the shops closed at noon at the sound of the hooter). In a pre-digital version of FaceTime, two people would stop to chat; others would join in, some would leave, more would join.

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The hills are alive

29/8/2017

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Photos: Geoff Ellis

At a clearing sale in the hills, an old piano sings to Frank Coldebella of other days.

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The coast dwellers

27/8/2016

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Jim McDonnell had a succession of dogs called Pluto. Photo taken near Jim’s hut, 1980s.

By Frank Coldebella

THE mounds of shells dotted along the Bass Coast are evidence that these have been relaxing and bountiful gathering places for millennia. On meeting Australia’s original coast campers, Captain Cook noted “They live in a tranquillity … and are far more happier than we Europeans … They think themselves provided with all the necessarys of life … they seemed to set no value upon anything we gave them.”

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Welcome to country

12/3/2016

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Tree planters camped with their families at Tank Hill while they planted 3000 street trees around Wonthaggi in the early 1910s.

Years after houses replaced Wonthaggi’s tent town, many old people remembered their camping times as the best days of their lives.

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The scars of war

19/9/2015

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Seventy years after the end of the Second World War, many local people are still haunted by personal experiences of war.

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Still spoiling for a fight

25/4/2015

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Cartoon by Natasha Williams-Novak

"Australia is not a country that goes looking for trouble,” Tony Abbott said recently, but our history tells a different story.

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Class warfare

25/10/2014

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The 1960s finally came to Wonthaggi in 1968, writes Frank Coldebella, with a contingent of young teachers who didn’t use abuse, bullying or violence as teaching aids.

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‘The blacks are very quiet here now’

12/4/2014

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Measured in money, Henry Meyrick’s life was a miserable failure. His legacy is his words, which expose a dark chapter of Gippsland’s – and Victoria’s – history.

By Frank Coldebella

IN 2012 I was given an old book, Life in the Bush 1840-1847, that had been rescued from the dumpsters at the Wonthaggi Recyclers.

Written by F.J. Meyrick, it tells the story of the author’s uncle, Henry Meyrick, who was born in 1822 and who grew up in a vicarage in Ramsbury, Wiltshire, England.

Much of the book is based on letters Meyrick wrote home to his mother during his six years in Australia, ending in his death by drowning in Gippsland in 1847, aged just 25.

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A rupert of an election

5/10/2013

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Health and Education Party, anyone?

Handing out how-to-vote cards on election day provided plenty of opportunity for Frank Coldebella to contemplate voters, democracy, free speech and obesity.

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Talking 'bout a revolution

28/6/2013

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Graham Street, Wonthaggi, 1963

All over the world, 1968 was a revolutionary year. Frank Coldebella was in year 9 and watched the spark of revolution reach Wonthaggi.

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Love nest

18/1/2013

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It started with a clothes line, a peg, an electrical cord and some cobwebs, and pretty soon a couple of grey fantails had crafted a fine home in a Wonthaggi garage.

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Children of God

14/12/2012

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The author, aged 10

In his years at a Catholic primary school, Frank Coldebella never saw or heard of sexual abuse. What he does remember is a daily ordeal of fear, brainwashing, guilt and boredom. The miracle, he writes in this four-part memoir of life at St Joseph’s Primary School from 1959-65, is that any of them survived it.

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