Greenland Eve

Eve Bailey was born in England in 1910, the seventh child of Herbert and Ethel Bailey who lived at Wargrave near Reading, west of London. When Bert and Ethel were told the grim news that their third child, Alfred, had contracted tuberculosis they decided that they would have to move to a warmer climate and for a while considered immigrating to Argentina. However, they finally agreed instead that Bert would travel by himself to Australia and if he found conditions there to be satisfactory so far as climate and work were concerned, he would send for the rest of the family. As it happened, Bert who was a bricklayer by trade, received an offer of a job in Melbourne from one of his fellow passengers. Bert liked the city so much within a few days of his landing that any thoughts of Argentina were abandoned and he sent a message to Ethel to pack up the family and join him as soon as possible.

So in 1912 Ethel gathered up her eight children and set sail for Melbourne in the SS Macarina. Eve was only two at the time and her younger brother Syd was only three months old, so you can imagine the consternation when only a few days into the voyage, Ethel fell and broke her leg. However, the other passengers rallied around and cared for the children while Ethel was immobilised.

The ship reached Melbourne on Christmas Eve 1912, a happy time for the family to be reunited. They first lived at Albert Park and then moved to Oakleigh and Malvern before finally settling in Elsternwick.

World War One

With the outbreak of World War One Bert was drawn by strong feelings of loyalty to support his motherland and so enlisted with the Field Engineers division of the AIF. After training in Melbourne and then at Moore Park in Sydney, he embarked on the troopship Euripides on the 31st October 1917. The ship headed to England via the Panama Canal and eight weeks to the day after leaving Sydney, safely drew into Plymouth Harbour on Boxing Day 1917. Bert had sailed from this very port to Australia six years previously on 28th December.

After several months training in England, Bert’s unit sailed to France in the Prince George, going ashore at Havre just before dawn. His diary of his time in the French battlefields is a remarkable document presenting a first hand account of an ordinary soldier’s experiences of the horrors of war.

Bert was for a time based at the village of Villers-Bretonneux and was involved in the defence of the nearby French cathedral city of Amiens. Amazingly, unlike thousands of other Australian troops who were killed in those terrible battles and whose bodies lie in the great Australian War Cemetery at Villers-Bretonneux, Bert escaped unscathed. Ironically, it was not until after the war had ended that he was badly injured. While repairing a bridge his unit uncovered a number of gas shells which exploded. Several of Bert’s mates were killed but he survived although badly gassed.

Ethel Starts a Business

Bert was repatriated to Australia and was in and out of Heidelberg and Caulfield Military Hospitals. The doctors told Ethel that he probably would only have six more months to live.

During Bert’s absence at the war, Ethel had started up a second-hand furniture business in Elsternwick. The shop did well, allowing Ethel to buy a horse and canvas-covered cart for deliveries.

On the weekends Bert would set off with his older sons in the horse-drawn cart to go camping in the bush as he was determined to live and believed that the fresh air of the countryside would assist his recovery. On one weekend they headed out North Road and then along its continuation, Wellington Road, until they came to a large sign advertising “The Lysterfield Heights Estate”. This was at the corner with Hallam Road (now Cornish Road). There they met an old bullock driver who suggested that they go up and camp on the Estate.

Bert immediately fell in love with the land and after talking the proposal over with Ethel, bought two adjoining bush blocks.

The Lysterfield Air Saves Bert’s Life

With the assistance of his three eldest sons who were all in building trades, Bert put up a temporary home. It was decided that Bert would move there together with the two youngest children, Eve and Syd, who felt it to be a great adventure to be moving to the bush. Eve had been a member of one of the three large Grade 6 classes at Elsternwick State School so she found it very different to be in a grade consisting of only two pupils – herself and Duncan McColl – at Lysterfield.

The school then was an old Church of England building in Wellington Road near the corner of Powell Road. After about a year there they were delighted to move, in 1920, to the newly completed one-room school on the present site. Eve remembered, “We thought it was paradise.” The Head Teacher, Mr Robert Scanlan, treated all the pupils as if they were his own children; he was like a father to everybody.

Eve’s mother kept the business going in Elsternwick but on Saturdays she would pack the van with provisions for the following week and make the long drive out to Lysterfield. She always felt sorry for the horse making the long pull up Wellington Road and then up the steeper track along Cornish Road.

Bert worked steadily on clearing the land. With a mattock he’d grub out the soil from around the roots of the trees and then would use a Trawalla Jack to tip the tree out of the ground. It took him about a day to fell one tree. At the weekends, the older sons would help him cut the trunks of the felled trees into fence post lengths with a cross-cut saw, he then split these logs into fence posts with wedges. The ordinary posts sold for one shilling (10 cents) but the unsplit strainer posts were worth two shillings. Bert cut up the branches and smaller trees for firewood which fetched five shillings a ton. Rather than worsening his health, this heavy work seemed to give him added strength. He had a tremendous determination to survive and he always credited the clean air of Lysterfield with his recovery.

Bert was a keen gardener and soon had fruit and vegetables growing in abundance. He was not very good with animals however but fortunately Syd was and he loved milking and separating the cream.

They loved to watch Old Bill working with his team of eight bullocks. He felled tall straight trees, trimmed the trunks and then the team would drag them down to Wellington Road. He sold them as electricity and telephone poles.

For two years Eve helped her father with the cooking and other housework and was very glad when her mother finally moved up to be permanently reunited with them in 1923.

Eve left Lysterfield Primary School at the age of fourteen and a half after gaining her Merit Certificate. Neither she nor her younger brother or sisters went on to high school in Dandenong because there was no way of getting there on a daily basis and the family could not have afforded for them to board in town. However, when she was seventeen, Mr Scanlon, the Head Teacher of Lysterfield State School, offered her the position of sewing mistress. Eve was happy to take the part-time job; she assisted with the infants in the afternoons and took the girls for sewing on Fridays at a commencing wage of nineteen shillings and twopence a week. After seven years her salary had grown to twenty five shillings a week.

Building the Lysterfield Hall

Meanwhile, Eve’s mother had settled quickly into the life of the Lysterfield community. She was soon on the School Committee and then became one of the group of locals who formed the Progress Association. They decided that they would build a hall in Lysterfield. Families took out debentures to provide funding and this was supplemented by door takings from entertainments held in the school. Mr Williams was a builder and Eve remembered the Hobbs, Newton, Dicker, Taylor, Stewart and Alberni families as being involved in the project. The Gills from Rowville also helped.

When it was completed, the hall became the social centre for the district. Dances were held on Saturday nights; the entrance was one shilling and every family was expected to bring a plate of supper. The hall was lit with kerosene lanterns and milk for the milk coffee was heated in a kerosene tin. The four gallon tin of milk was stood in a copper of water that was heated by a wood fire. Balls were special occasions with the hall decorated with paper streamers.

Many romances first commenced at the dances at Lysterfield Hall. Eve first met her husband Bill Greenland there when he played the piano at the dances and two of her sisters also found their future husbands there: Grace met Martin Alberni and Wynn met Reg Gill.

The boys would walk the girls home up Cornish Road then go back to the hall to collect their horses for the ride back to their own homes.

There was a lovely community spirit; everybody was there to help everybody else. Eve’s mother Ethel was not a trained nurse but she was a very capable person who could do anything. Because of this, she was often called in to assist when babies were due. She safely delivered several babies before anxious husbands could fetch a doctor from Dandenong.

When the first quarry opened about the mid 1920s on the right hand corner of Cornish and Wellington Roads, the manager Mr Batcheldon boarded with the family. One of the boys would take him into Dandenong on Friday evenings in the jinker to catch the train home for the weekend and then pick him up again on the Monday morning. Eve’s brother Alf (‘Snowy’) obtained a job in the quarry as a powder monkey and later worked with a horse and scoop as part of the team excavating the Lysterfield Reservoir. The dam wall was constructed with stone from the quarry.

The Rowville Tea Rooms

In 1927 Eve’s older brother Harry was severely injured while working for the railways as a station assistant at Ballan on the Ballarat line. He was only twenty two at the time and returned home for a long period of convalescence. To give him some work he could handle, Eve’s parents leased the 40 acre property owned by the Manley family on the north-east corner of Stud and Wellington Roads. Harry ran a herd of milking cows there and sold the cream to the Dandenong Butter Factory. Eve remembered living there in the Manley home opposite Nick Bergin the blacksmith. Her mother and Nick’s niece, Miss Lil Bergin who ran the Post Office, became great friends. Lil suggested to Ethel that she should open a tea rooms business in the front room of the house. Ethel put up a sign on the corner of the road and soon had people stopping for her tea and scones. She also sold lollies and cigarettes and Eve remembered that the Queensland black trackers stationed at the Police Paddocks Depot were some of her most regular customers for tobacco. “They were very nice people” recalled Eve, “Only the men were there, not their families”.

She also remembered the old brick well there. Her father covered it for safety and they never used it. It was only a hole in the ground; there was nothing built above ground level like a wishing well.

Nick Bergin the Blacksmith

Old Nick and Lil would come over to sit around the fire at night and talk. Nick was a gentle giant and Eve remembered he was so good with the kids, he was always ready to tell them a yarn and to make something for them. “My younger brother Syd was a scallywag and would use any excuse such as having to look for the cows, to be late for school. I can remember Nick saying to him, ‘You know Syd, when you get as old as me you’ll wish you’d gone to school every day and not missed one. I used to do those things but I regret them’!”

Whereas Nick Bergin was a big man, his assistant Paddy Fogarty was tiny. He was like an elf but he could manage the striker (the large blacksmith’s hammer). “He was a nice old fellow”.

With the completion of the Lysterfield Reservoir, the Bailey farm was declared to be in its catchment area. The family weren’t allowed to have pigs any longer and eventually, despite great opposition from all the farmers affected, State Rivers took over everything.

Ethel passed away in 1941 but Bert and Harry stayed on until State Rivers paid everyone out. The house was moved, taken in two halves and re-assembled in Hammond Road, Dandenong. Bert then bought land at the corner of Chandler and Heatherton Roads in Noble Park. In 1947 he moved to Ormond to be near Ethel, one of his daughters. He died there in 1963 in his 90th year.

Eve now lives in Dandenong and although aged 84 she is still very active and even has the patience to baby-sit her great grandchildren. Dylan Ricardo, her sixth great grandchild, was born in 1994 and became a fourth generation Bailey descendant living in Rowville-Lysterfield as he and his brother Jack, with parents Wendy and Phillip, live in Lancom Rise, off Dandelion Drive.
Interviewed by Bryan Power