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Anne was one of the Lysterfield Taylors. This is her story of growing up in Lysterfield and of her marriage with Doug Dobson.
Born Annie Taylor, Anne Dobson spent a great part of her childhood in Lysterfield together with her younger sisters Ina (now deceased), Joyce, Gwen, Jessie and brother Frank. Her parents Orwell (Ossie) and Laura Taylor were married in 1918 and after their marriage lived in Whittlesea. They were no relation to the Taylor family who lived in Rowville and gave Taylors Lane its name.
Anne was born in 1919 and for a time stayed with her maternal grandmother Annie Elizabeth Trainor after whom she was named. At the age of six she arrived with her parents in Lysterfield and Annie Trainor came to live with them. They lived at “Bamfield”, a large property off Kelletts Road where the clump of trees are on the Aarunga property north of Karoo Road. “Built ahead of its time,” Anne said. “Although it had been neglected and was run down it was beautiful. And big! All the rooms were big. There were two huge rooms like ballrooms and bay windows and French doors opening onto the five verandahs which ran around the house.” She recalled roses in the garden and tall date palms which seemed out of character with the surrounding countryside. There was even a windmill. “There was a water tank under the house and you could get to it by lifting up a big trapdoor in the kitchen. Dad used to hang buckets of milk so they dangled in the water or just over it to keep them cool.” (Ossie Taylor ran a dairy herd at this stage although later he turned to market gardening.)
To Lysterfield State School
Anne was seven before she went to school. She had to wait until the next sister was old enough to go too. Ossie would drive them in a rubber-tyred jinker to the corner of Wellington and Kelletts Roads then they would walk up the hill the rest of the way to Lysterfield School. One day something happened to cause the jinker to bounce rather more than usual and Anne bounced right out onto the ground and a wheel ran over her. She picked herself up, ran after the cart, climbed back on and continued with her school day as usual. When she arrived home that afternoon, she found her mother frantic with worry. Laura hadn’t believed Ossie’s version of the incident and had convinced herself her daughter had broken bones at the very least.
As each one of Anne’s sisters and her brother became old enough, they joined the others at school. They would walk the three miles home together with Anne responsible for their safety. An open drain ran through the property and was crossed by a small footbridge. It flooded every time it rained. Coming home one day, Gwen lost her footing crossing the bridge when the drain was running full. In imminent danger of being swept away and drowned she was saved by the quick action of Anne who caught hold of Gwen’s schoolbag and hauled her to safety.
When her brother Frank started school he was all of four and must have been a feisty little fellow. Anne remembered his first day well. “He got into a big fight with Marty Alberni over a tree-house he felt was not being built the right way.” The Taylor children often called in on their way home to have milk and biscuits at their paternal grandparents’ farm where the pine trees are in the middle of the Lakesfield Estate.
Francis (Frank) and Martha Taylor were the parents of nine: Ida, who married Ted Wiseman and lived until she was almost one hundred years old; Florrie, who married her cousin Reg Taylor; Annie, Nina, Margaret, Renee, Bill, Jack and Anne’s father, Orwell. Obscurely, Orwell was named after an English racehorse. Frank had come from England so no doubt the connection lay there. Martha came from the Western District.
As well as running the farm, Frank and Martha boarded the Lysterfield schoolteacher. When Anne first went to school, Mr Scanlon was schoolmaster and he lived in what she described as “a little white hut” at the Taylor farm. The school was the focal point for many activities. There were sports days with inter-school competition, parents’ days when they joined in the sports as well and the schoolhouse doubled as a church at the weekend, holding Sunday school classes as well as services, “Methodist one day and Presbyterian the other,” said Anne.
Gwen’s ‘Surprise’ Birthday Party
One day Gwen asked everyone at school to come to her birthday party at home later that afternoon. This meant a number of parents would come too and stay because distances between homes in the area were considerable. There was only one flaw in her plan; her mother knew nothing about the party. Neither did Anne. It would seem Gwen was very careful about that.
All was fine until Mrs Alberni turned up with Marty in tow. She didn’t speak English very well but haltingly told of her pleasure at being invited. She lived some miles away and had walked all the way to “Bamfield”. Laura Taylor didn’t have the heart to tell her it was a mistake and turn her away. Soon after, the other guests arrived.
With a muttered, “Why didn’t you stop Gwen asking everyone?” to Anne, whose protestations of ignorance were ignored, Laura rose to the occasion by pouring homemade cordial, putting out peppermints and Milk Arrowroot biscuits with pink icing which she sprinkled with desiccated coconut. Anne said that she got into the most frightful row after everybody had gone home. When you were the eldest, bad things had a habit of turning out to be your fault whether you deserved it or not.
The time came when Mr Scanlon was replaced by Mr Mephen at the school. The young Taylors were all agog to see what the new teacher would be like and gathered at their grandparents’ home to greet him. His arrival made a lasting impression on Anne who remembered him coming in an old car with probably everything he possessed not only crammed inside the vehicle but tied on the outside and on the roof as well.
New Year’s Day was a time when the entire Taylor clan went to the Ferntree Gully National Park for a gigantic picnic. Frank and Martha had a big buggy and there were horse-drawn gigs and jinkers full of aunts and uncles and cousins. In later years, everyone piled on a truck and headed for the beach at Aspendale. “They were great days.” The pleasure Anne felt then was still evident. “My grandmother used to make a Christmas cake and she’d put coloured jubes on top of the icing. We kids loved that cake and everyone wanted a bit with a jube on it.”
The Depression of the thirties came and with it the loss of “Bamfield” and a move to Boronia. Anne was fifteen. Ossie obtained a job at a foundry in Richmond and Anne travelled to Melbourne each day to become a milliner. During her train journeys she made friends with other young travellers and, in the course of events, was invited to go with a couple to the pictures and accompany the cousin of one of them. She didn’t feel it was a blind date at the time, as she was under the impression the cousin was a girl. The cousin was Doug Dobson.
The Dobson’s were a well-known family in the district. Doug’s cousin ran the Post Office in Scoresby at one stage and Doug’s parents had a dairy in Stud Road, almost opposite Seebeck Road. They rented 40 acres next to the Police Paddocks to run dairy cattle and cleared it themselves. Snakes abounded and as they were caught and killed, were hung on the fences like washing hung out to dry.
While World War Two was in progress, Dobson’s dairy delivered milk to the military camp on the corner of Wellington and Stud Roads every morning and night.
Doug Goes to War
Anne and Doug were married in August 1940, one week before he went to war in the transport division of the Army. They were the first couple to be married in the Boronia Presbyterian Church.
Doug sailed from Sydney in the Queen Mary which had been turned into a troopship. He fought in Crete and later in North Africa where he became one of the ‘Rats of Tobruk’, trapped there for five months.
There being little call for milliners in the war years, Anne went to work for the Watson family at ‘The Leasowes’ in Lysterfield Road. ‘The Leasowes’ was a dairy farm, so the owner Alec Watson was exempt from military service and share-farmed it with the help of a manager, Mr Pearson. Anne was employed as a live-in nurse/housemaid to the family.
She also occupied many an evening attending functions held to assist the War Effort at the Lysterfield Hall which had been built on the corner of Wellington and Kelletts Roads. The hall was host to a number of balls as well, for the quality of the dance floor was renowned. Years after, it became home to the 1812 Theatre but sadly was destroyed by fire in the early 1970s.
A telegram was delivered to Anne one day in 1942 from Fremantle. Doug was coming home on leave. Seven days later he was on his way back to war to fight the Japanese in New Guinea where, like so many others, he caught malaria which remained an unpleasant reminder of the war fought in tropical jungles.
When the war was over, Anne and Doug settled in a new house in Stud Road where Stegbar now has its factory, and it became the family home for 35 years.
Raising a Large Family
Although Doug’s peacetime occupation had been a farmer, he went to work for W.G. Hicks of Pinehill as a cartage contractor. Anne stayed home looking after their family of eight. “They were hard times,” she recalled. Although Stud Road was always busy with traffic, theirs was the only house for some distance and the bus she took to shop in Dandenong only ran three times a day. “If you missed your bus, you were gone! I always had at least three of the children with me when I went shopping,” she continued, “I’d pile things under the mattress of the pram and the bus driver could hardly lift the thing into the bus!” The family had time for entertainment however and went to the Rowville Drive-In Theatre regularly.
Doug and Anne were involved in many community activities while the children were growing up: Scouting and Girl Guides, the Red Cross (she was a regular blood donor), church committees, the Scoresby Football Club and the Rowville Junior Football Club. Doug was the first treasurer of the latter when a committee was formed in 1970. The first team had been fielded the year before. Son Andrew was voted best and fairest in the under 15s the same year.
Both Anne and Doug were enthusiastic in joining with other parents and friends to raise funds for the fledgling club. House parties used to be held at a different home once every month and something like a hundred people attended each time. Anne grinned, “they were great parties”. In 1972, Ossie Taylor died after suffering a stroke. Then in 1975 Doug was involved in an accident with a tip-truck which left him a paraplegic. He spent twelve months in the spinal unit of the Austin Hospital after which he went to a nursing home, coming to his own home for weekends. Despite excellent care, he never quite came to terms with his disability and died in 1977, twenty months after the accident. This was not a good year for Anne as three months later Laura Taylor died peacefully at her home aged 83.
By now Anne’s children had grown up and left home but she continued living alone in Stud Road until they persuaded her to move. She moved to a unit in Dandenong and has lived there for the past fifteen years.
Several times since 1986 the family has hired the Rowville Hall at the football ground to celebrate Christmas Day with her children: Murray, Elizabeth, Raymond, Charles, Rosemary, Lloyd, Andrew and Noel and their children and their children’s children. There have been gatherings reminiscent of the days at the National Park when Anne was a child. In 1995 she had 28 grandchildren and one plus four ‘on the way’ great-grandchildren. Having overcome a number of major health problems including blindness for some 18 months (an implant with an in-built bi-focal lens has returned almost full vision in one eye) Anne considered herself lucky. Legacy, Red Cross, War Widows, Blind Craft and her favourite – Save the Children Fund – together with an abundance of baby-sitting, occupy all her time.
Anne Dobson is still lunging at life full tilt.
Interviewed by Pat Hatherley.
First published in the March and April 1995 editions of the Rowville-Lysterfield Community News.
Obituary. Taken from the tribute prepared and read by Margaret Dobson at Ann’s funeral service.
Ann Dobson was the second youngest of six children of John and Mary McIntyre who ran a small mixed farm near Heywood. They were a hard working pioneering family of that district who trapped rabbits in order to supplement their income. Those early days were not easy for her but Ann was not afraid of hard work and always helped on the farm working long hours beside her parents, brothers and sisters.
In 1935, following the death of her parents, Ann along with two of her brothers, Lou and Jack, put their herd of cows on the train to Dandenong in hope of finding a more productive place to farm. They found such a place next to the Dobson farm in Stud Road, Rowville.
The McIntyres and Dobsons became good friends, Ann and Gordon particularly so, and they were married on 6th. January 1945.
They built a small cottage facing Police Road and for many years worked together milking cows and doing the many farm chores.
Each week Ann would harness her horse into the jinker and set out for Dandenong to do the weekly shopping.
When Gordon took on his droving and stock transport business, Ann was a great backstop. She was always there to answer the many phone calls. The kettle was always ready on the wood stove for when Gordon would drop in for a quick cuppa on his way to market.
Ann’s home was modest. She never had many of the modern conveniences which most women enjoy. It wasn’t that they couldn’t afford them – it was that she never wanted them.
Those early pioneering days were in her veins and she was never really able to make the change.
However, contentment always seemed to radiate from her. Ann was a very good wife to Gordon, and their only child Jean was showered with her love. When Jean married, Ann welcomed John as a son and was extremely proud of her two grandsons, Lloyd and Rohan. Her many nieces and nephews recall very happy holidays spent at the farm with Aunt Ann and Uncle Gordon.
Over the years Ann was a member of the Scoresby Primary School Mothers’ Club and an inaugural member of the Rowville Red Cross, the Recreational Reserve Committee and of the Rowville Uniting Church from the time of its humble beginning in the meeting room opposite the farm in Police Road. One of the small but important duties Ann performed was that of “keeper” of the key for the Rowville Tennis Club courts and many Rowville tennis players will recall Ann’s words of encouragement when they collected the key before a match.
Ann was never one to seek the limelight much preferring to work in the background at the many charitable functions she attended. She was a gracious lady and all who knew her will miss her very much.
Ann Dobson passed away peacefully at Jean and John’s farm at Yea on 8th. October 1991. She was aged 82.
For many years Gordon Dobson was the man the farmers of Rowville and beyond relied on to get their stock safely to and from the Dandenong Market.
Reliability was the word. No matter what the weather or the circumstances, Gordon would be there. And it was an education to watch him handle stock: always calm, patient but firm, he could load the most obstinate animals without the bluster and beatings that some other stockmen employed.
As Rowville became an area for the agistment of horses during the 1970s, Gordon was in much demand to transport ponies to gymkhanas and pony club events and again his patient way of handling these often flighty horses was a great lesson to their young owners.
Scoresby Days
Gordon Dobson was born at home on his parents’ farm in 1915. His father had a thirty acre block on the north-west corner of Scoresby and Ferntree Gully Roads where he ran some cattle. He was a very good horseman and worked as an agent for Scott & Co., the Dandenong Auctioneers.
At the time of Gordon’s birth the area was very sparsely settled and the nearest doctor was in Oakleigh, so Gordon’s mother was assisted by the local midwife, Mrs Cove, who also happened to be their next door neighbour.
Gordon’s father and mother were both members of the very large and extended Dobson family whose original ancestor, Thomas Dobson, was one of the first men to fell timber in the Dandenongs.
Gordon’s father was Charles Dobson and his mother Charlotte Dobson; their respective fathers were both named Thomas Dobson and these two Thomases were second cousins.
Gordon’s father was brought up on “Rushdale”, the best known of the Dobson properties in Scoresby. As a young man he enlisted to fight in the Boer War and went to South Africa with the Melbourne contingent of mounted riflemen to serve there for two years. He turned 21 while in South Africa.
When he returned to Scoresby, he became active as a Methodist lay preacher and got to know Charlotte who was a Sunday School instructor at Ferntree Gully. Their marriage was a very happy one and produced five children: Raymond, Douglas, Sydney, Gordon and Mabel.
Gordon couldn’t remember when he first rode a horse, but recalled with a laugh an incident which occurred when he was barely four years of age. His father had warned him not to attempt to ride a particular pony called “Little Dick”. Gordon thought he knew better and when his father had gone off, he caught the pony and mounted it but had only trotted it a few paces when the pony suddenly dropped his head and sent Gordon flying. Fortunately he wasn’t hurt but he couldn’t catch the pony running about with the telltale bridle on. Finally he had to go and beg the assistance of neighbour, Tom Williams, who not only caught the pony and removed the bridle but kept quiet about the incident.
Gordon enjoyed growing up on the farm and remembered his favourite task was feeding the calves. He had to make up a mixture of separated milk and pollard and while the calves were feeding on this he’d put on their coats before turning them out into the paddock.
At Ferntree Gully State School
Gordon completed all of his formal education at Ferntree Gully State School. He rode his pony the two miles there and back each day and left it in a paddock next door to the school with the ponies ridden by the other children.
Gordon enjoyed school. In those days there were about 60-70 pupils in two rooms. The Head Teacher, Mr Ginardini, was a wonderful man who treated the children very fairly. However, one day he gave Gordon a slap with the strap because his arithmetic homework answers didn’t agree with those of the other pupils and he thought Gordon was guilty of not trying hard enough. Gordon stood his ground and insisted that he had done the homework diligently and, what is more, had had it checked by his brother Sydney, who was very good at arithmetic. Mr Ginardini then checked all the answers and discovered that Gordon’s were correct; all of the others had copied the wrong ones. He apologised to Gordon.
Like all kids they had plenty of fun at school but Gordon remembered one boy, Bert Harrison, who was always getting up to mischief. One day Bert brought a big fire cracker to school and planned to explode it in a very large galvanised iron water tank beside the school residence. He got permission during a lesson to go to the toilet and went out, lit the fuse on the bunger, tossed it into the tank and raced back to the school expecting that the fuse would burn long enough to allow him time to reach his seat and be sitting there innocently when the explosion occurred.
Unfortunately for him the bunger went off with a tremendous bang before he reached the school door so there was no doubt about his guilt. In later life Bert became a school teacher.
The Timber Block in Rowville
When Gordon left school he used to ride each day with his brother Doug down to Rowville where his parents owned a thirty acre bush block on the high north-east corner of Stud and Police Roads, opposite the present recreation reserve meeting hall. Gordon’s parents had owned this block for as long as he could remember and had worked for years steadily clearing it. Clearing thirty acres was a slow job. Gordon and Doug spent their days grubbing out the soil from the roots of the tree stumps and then using devices such as a Trewalla Jack and a Forest Devil to lift the stumps. Later the family leased land from the Closer Settlement Commission – 300 acres bounded by Police Road, Stud Road, Dandenong Creek and the Police Paddocks to the east (and including the land where the football ovals are now) and 70 acres on the other side of Stud Road which is now the site of Tirhatuan Golf Course.
All of this flat land was covered with wattles and blackberry – “you couldn’t lead a horse through it” – and clearing it was a long, hard and tedious job. (The first stockyard they “built” on it was simply a cleared space in a dense patch of blackberry.) By spraying and slashing they finally cleared it and sowed strawberry clover in the grazing areas. It was beautiful land but, said Gordon, “It would break your heart to see it now, overgrown with blackberry and gorse again”.
They also grew vegetables and crops of maize and oats. Gordon well remembered the disastrous 1934 flood which completely washed away their oat crop and cut off Rowville for a week. The whole flat area between North Dandenong and Rowville was covered with water and the Plume (petrol) man had to stay with them until the flood eventually subsided.
‘Stud Road was a Bush Track’
The ride between Rowville and Scoresby along Stud Road could be hazardous. The road was very rough with great rocks on it and in places the bush came right down to the roadside barely leaving enough room for two vehicles to pass. One night Gordon was riding home to Scoresby in the dark when he was passed by a number of young fellows in a ute. They stopped a couple of hundred yards in front of him and Gordon realised that they were up to no good so he galloped his pony towards them. One young bloke tried to grab the pony’s bridle but Gordon thumped him over the head with the butt of his stock whip and scattered the others.
In those days, Miss Bergin ran the little Post Office and her Uncle Nick was the blacksmith next door. Gordon used to take the horses there to have their feet done. Nick was a strong man and liked boxing. One day a big Irishman came and invited Nick to put on the gloves and “he’d show him a thing or two”. Nick obliged and knocked the Irishman backwards into the big trough of water he used for cooling the hot metal.
On another occasion, Nick came off second best when another powerful man and local character, Jack Murphy of One Tree Hill, called in. Nick told Jack a yarn about how a very strong man had visited him the previous week and had lifted his anvil and carried it across the road. Jack saw that his reputation was being challenged so without a word he picked up the anvil, carried it across the road and heaved it over the fence. He then dusted his hands, mounted his horse and went home. Nick had a terrible job getting the anvil back to the forge.
The Family Moves to Rowville
By the early 1930s the family had moved down to live at Rowville and steadily built up the farm. However, when World War 2 broke out Gordon and Doug enlisted in the army and were stationed at Caulfield Racecourse. Doug was sent overseas and fought at Tobruk and New Guinea. He was wounded but survived to return home safely. On the other hand Gordon was ordered to return home to the farm as his ageing parents by this time could not continue to work it. Such are the mysterious ways of the army!
After the war had ended Gordon leased the area where the Rowville army and P.O.W. camp had been sited. He was riding through it one day when his horse stumbled into an unfilled trench overgrown with blackberry. Luckily the mare was strong and alert and managed to throw herself forward and scramble out safely otherwise they both would have taken a bad fall.
Towards the end of the 1940s a new family named McIntyre moved in to lease the farm next door and Gordon took a liking to Ann McIntyre. They went together to the Saturday night dances at Scoresby and Lysterfield and were married in 1950. They had one daughter, Jeannie, and now have two grandsons.
Gordon becomes the Rowville Stock Agent
Gordon’s oldest brother Ray had followed in his father’s footsteps and used to handle all the stock work for Scott & Co. as far away as Ringwood and up into the mountains. However, when Ray became seriously ill, Gordon took on the work and continued it right up to the time of his retirement in 1981.
In those days Gordon drove the cattle – in herds of up to 60 – along Stud Road with only the assistance of two good cattle dogs. He’d sometimes pick up additional cattle penned in Scott & Co.’s holding yards opposite where the T.A.F.E. College is now. If he did so he’d turn the herd up David Street and then down Cleeland Street to the stock yards which were then located where the Dandenong Produce Market now is. One day he was taking the herd around the corner at Heatherton Road and, where the BP Service Station is presently located, there was a farm house with a lovely garden. The front gate was open and a number of Gordon’s steers got in and trampled the garden. Gordon expected “a proper blow up” but when the lady of the house came out she apologised for forgetting to shut the gate!
Market day was a very long one for Gordon as he would muster several sale lots of cattle and drive them to Dandenong Railway Station before returning to round up the day’s purchases for the farmers of Rowville and beyond. It was often late at night before he’d driven the last lot to a farm.
“Old Sandy”
Gordon’s affection for his working animals was apparent throughout the interview. It was obvious that his horses and dogs were very dear to his heart but he spoke of one cattle dog with particular fondness. “Old Sandy” always stuck close to him and this devotion, according to Gordon, probably saved his life. The occasion was an everyday movement of cattle around the farm but Gordon hadn’t noticed that the bull had got in behind him. He rushed Gordon, knocking him unconscious to the ground. When he came to, “Old Sandy” was standing his ground between the angry bull (whose snout was bloodied from Sandy’s fierce bites) and his fallen master. Sandy eventually drove the bull off and ever after gave him a very hard time whenever he wandered up the paddock towards the house. Sandy always slept on the verandah outside Gordon’s bedroom window.
As the years went by and traffic increased the cattle had to be transported by truck, so the role of the cattle dogs was not so important – although they still were great workers in the yards when the cattle had to be loaded.
Gordon and Ann retired to North Dandenong, not too far from their beloved Rowville.
Interviewed by Bryan Power PHOTOS
First published in the July 1991 edition of the Rowville-Lysterfield Community News.
