Frank Coldebella

The other war

22/1/2024

A DIY plaque on the Wonthaggi War Memorial.

By Frank Coldebella

Last week the annual truth telling commemoration for Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner was held at Wishart Reserve in Wonthaggi. The two Aboriginal men were publicly hanged in Melbourne in 1841 after being convicted of murdering a sealer at what we now know as Harmers Haven. In 2014 Melbourne City councillors voted to fund a memorial to the men, recognising them as freedom fighters.

More than 100,000 Australians have died in overseas wars. We don’t know the number who died during the war in Australia because it was a one-sided campaign and the winners got to tell the story. But facts that are left out of the official history distort our past and mislead us today.

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The hut people

17/6/2023

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Shack Bay, 1970s. Photos: Frank Coldebella, unless indicated otherwise.

By Frank Coldebella

In the early 70s about 40 per cent of Australia’s 12 million population was under 20. Some teachers still used corporal punishment. Kids could be humiliated in front of the whole class or school assembly. The poor, non-Anglos and those who weren’t good at sport or academia were regularly reminded of their social inferiority. It put some students off education for life.

But American TV was starting to change the values, culture and tempo of Australia society. Kenny and Ronny ‘The Rat’ were gentle-souled refugees from a tough Melbourne where sharpie wars were still raging. They were lured to the Cape Paterson Surf Lifesaving Club by the promise of free weekend accommodation but couldn’t handle the military-style marching and drill of the club or the crash-through mentality of surf boat rowing.

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The men who could make anything

26/1/2023

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Danny Carr with “The Cropper”, one of the machines he and his crew salvaged from the mine workshop when it closed.

By Frank Coldebella

COAL mining was classified as a vital industry during the Second World War – the miners didn’t have to go to fight – but a shortage of just about everything, including money, made operating the State Coal Mine ever more difficult.

The men in the mine workshops salvaged, reused, repaired and recycled every piece of metal available to repair the mine’s and power station’s ageing equipment to keep the coal moving and the power on.

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'Select few' sink town plan

13/12/2022

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Going, going, gone … Concept drawing of McBride Ave, Wonthaggi Activity Centre Plan, April 2021. The plans have been drastically altered after an exclusive consultation process with traders.

By Frank Coldebella

THE last most of us heard about the Wonthaggi Activity Centre project was in April 2021 when the council unanimously backed the Wonthaggi Activity Centre Plan.

This plan was the result of six years of discussion and consultation, and included extensive streetscape works to slow traffic and improve the safety of pedestrians and cyclists.

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Lessons in life, country style

21/7/2022

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Not actually Tommy, the delivery horse, with co-op bakery cart, but close enough. A job at
Wonthaggi's Country Style bakery was a job for life, even for the horses,

By Frank Coldebella

When I was growing up, Wonthaggi made a lot of stuff. We manufactured agricultural machinery and clothing. The people who came from Melbourne had their Levis and famous brands but we had our own stuff that was made right here in the town. Shirts and windcheaters were made at Exacto, now the Plaza Arcade. Pants and jackets were made at the Aywon factory on the corner of McBride Avenue and Watt Street. That’s where my mother and a lot of other mothers worked.

You could always get a job in the holidays if you wanted one. In December 1968 our neighbour in Reed Crescent, Andre Van der Craats, got me a holiday job at the Country Style Bakery where he worked, and for the next four years of school holidays I got an education in life.

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The heart of our town

9/4/2021

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McBride Avenue. Artist's illustration.
Source: Wonthaggi Activity Centre Plan

By Frank Coldebella

SO THE Wonthaggi Club is opposing a plan to make the bottom block of McBride Avenue more pedestrian friendly.

With respect, I don’t think the liquor and gambling industry should be telling us how to use our public space.

There is ample parking within 200m of the club. People are not going to give up playing the pokies because they have to walk from Graham or Murray Street.

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On common ground

19/3/2020

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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.”

During the Depression of the 1920s and 1930s many single men were forced to leave home to look for work or food. They camped wherever they could, including along the coast. One such was Jim McDonnell, who was still living in a hut on the coast between Harmers and Cape in the mid-1970s, preferring a moderate and harmonious life away from the noise, competition and trivia of town, attuned to nature’s positives.

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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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