ESSAYS ON BASS COAST LOCAL HISTORY

The homing instinct

22/9/2023

This story was first published in The Current community newspaper in September 2004. Cherry McFree died in 2018, aged 93.

A lifelong Phillip Islander, Cherry McFee didn’t like to go too far from the sea. Photo: Gill Heal

By Gill Heal

CHERRY McFee remembers being a little scared of her grandfather, hot tempered William Thomas McFee, ironmonger and importer. But then, he had a reason to be cross. He'd lost most of his fortune in the 1890s Depression.

William Thomas - there's been a William going back through eight generations - had bought land in Rhyll and built a holiday house there. When the crash occurred he sold up the family home in Auburn and took up farming in Rhyll.

And this is where young Cherry McFee grew up, going to school in the Mechanics Hall which her grandfather helped to establish.

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Hanley's Dairy

11/8/2023

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Photo courtesy of Altona Historical Society

By Carolyn Landon

LAST summer the Wonthaggi Historical Society held a series of “15-Minute Talks,” which usually lasted for half an hour and only ended when the mine whistle blew everyone out of their seats and rendered the speaker silent. The talks were well attended and always interesting.

One of the most thorough and meticulously prepared talks, that could have kept the audience spell-bound for another hour were it not for the mine whistle, was given by Peter Hanley. It was based on the recollections Peter (the second born of seven children) and his mother had of Hanley’s Dairy, which operated on McKenzie Street from 1960 until 1983 and was owned and managed by Peter’s parents, Chick and Sadie Hanley. (While Peter and his mother were comparing memories of the family business and the people they worked with, they sometimes had to correct one another and had to admit that others might have different recollections. Nevertheless, the detail is wonderful.)

Their story takes us back to a time when milk was delivered daily to households and businesses by horse and cart. The sound of yesteryear that many of us still remember is the clip-clop of the draught horses pulling milk wagons through quiet streets before dawn, accompanied by the jangle of bottles in their crates and the sound of running footsteps made by the milky as he ran past the bedrooms of those just waking to drop off his delivery on the back verandas of the kitchens and retrieve empty bottles which were noisily placed in crates on the wagon while the faithful horse kept going slowly through the streets it knew by heart.

Daily routine
Running a business such as Hanley’s Dairy in the `60s and `70s, before the horse-and-cart days were overtaken by motorised milk trucks, was complex and relied on honest workers dedicated to the smooth running of a stressful daily routine that could easily come undone. It required workers willing to rise at 4am and set to work without delay loading carts from the cool room with milk (bottled or bulk) and cream (bottled), harnessing horses in their stables, leading them to their milk carts and hitching them up; then commencing home deliveries in the pre-dawn to be completed by 8am, when they would return to the dairy and unload and clean the milk carts, all before washing and cleaning and releasing the horses into their turn-out paddocks.

Various other tasks also had to be completed (some of which were the responsibility of the Hanley children before and after school). These included bringing coal from the backyard coal stack to the kitchen; cleaning the stables, the washroom, and milk carts and trucks; sweeping the landing and loading bay; stabling horses in the late afternoon; delivering late orders; and myriad household jobs. Most importantly, they had to make sure the cool room was ready later in the day for Arthur’s Dairy milk truck from Frankston to deliver the next day’s supply of milk and take away the rinsed and stacked crates of empty bottles, which would be sterilised and re-filled at Arthur’s.

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Our whale turns 100

19/7/2023

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Hundreds of sightseers made the long trek out to Wreck Beach to see the dead whale, July 1923. Photos: Wonthaggi & District Historical Society

By Catherine Watson

OF ALL the objects in the Wonthaggi Museum, this is Mark Robertson’s favourite: a vertebra from the 74ft whale that washed up at Wreck beach, now Harmers Haven, 100 years ago (July 4th, 1923, to be exact) after heavy winter gales.

The centenary of the whale’s beaching was marked this month in typical Wonthaggi style. The Wonthaggi Hotel, AKA Taberners Hotel or The Whalebones, tied ribbons to the iconic whale jawbones at the front entrance. And on Thursday, members of the Wonthaggi Historical Society gathered for a supper of fish and chips and some good old-fashioned yarning about our whale.

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Historic hospital plans return to Wonthaggi

23/6/2023