Alan Tookers memories of Rosedale
This is a piece, written by me, that appeared in my 1964 School Magazine:
Night and Day
The sandy beach has rocks at either end which jut out into the sea.
They are surrounded by deep water which reflects the glaring sunlight in a dazzling manner. The sky seems washed out in comparison with the sea. An island, close to shore, seems desolate with sparse cliffs and scattered scrub growing along the top.
Above the beach is a hillside covered with trees. Small cottages are perched upon it. Boats out at sea rock in the swell. The surf rolls onto the beach leaving long trails in the sparkling sunlight in vivid detail. The sights, sounds and smells are all exciting and fresh.
At night a different picture emerges. The pale moon forms pale reflections on the water. The gloom of night surrounds the jagged rocks and the dull roar of the surf floats on the cool night air. The island is now a dark blob with weird shapes appearing on the top.
The neat cottages on the hillside cannot be seen except for little windows of light shining out to sea. The sea mists come rolling in, and the lonely call of the seagulls dies away.
As the night grows old a stillness descends upon the place; the lights are abruptly extinguished and an air of peace settles over the beach as the moon gently lowers itself over the horizon.
The beginning:
Plenty of purple prose, but what do you expect at the age of 14? Anyway, that was the effect Rosedale had on me. It was probably the best and longest lasting highlight of my teenage years. My family and I got more than four years’ enjoyment out of it before we left for Geneva on April Fool’s Day, 1968.
We spent our 1962 Christmas holiday near Batemans Bay. While we were there, we drove over to Rosedale to have a look, because somebody Mum and Dad knew kept raving about the place. In those days, Rosedale was well off the beaten track,
about a 20-mile drive along badly maintained dirt roads through the bush. After a week’s solid rain it was cut off from the outside world.
We all approached the place with a certain cynicism, but changed our minds very quickly once we saw it and had a walk around. Mum and Dad pretty much decided to buy a plot of land and build a house on that visit. Once we’d bought the plot,
we used to go down for weekends to clear the ground, build a dunny (that also served as the lockup tool shed) and prepare for the building work. We used to sleep in two fairly small tents. My brother Paul and I were in the smallest one, and we slept on potato sacks stuffed with bracken. The people next door let us help ourselves to water from their water tank.
We erected the frame and the roof of the house in three weeks during the 1963 Christmas holiday. The house was a kit, made of a timber frame with a corrugated zinc roof and with asbestos cladding for the walls, so most of the work consisted of sorting the pre-cut timber and nailing it together. At that time, we had a large square tent with a centre pole for our living quarters and Mum and Dad’s sleeping quarters. The tents were like furnaces during the day.
The house was substantially completed by the following Easter, although there were one or two little hiccups along the way. The most spectacular was when the lorry came to deliver all the asbestos sheeting. It was parked across a fairly steep slope at the front of the house, and while the driver came to the door with the delivery note to sign, his mate undid all the ropes anchoring the asbestos.
Result: one load of asbestos slid sideways off the lorry onto the ground. Most of it was smashed beyond all possible use. The driver got very upset with Dad because Dad, for some strange reason, refused to sign the delivery note. (“If you don’t sign the note, we’ll have to load it all back on the lorry again and take it back” …….. er, yes).
Nostalgia plays tricks, but Rosedale really was brilliant. We had a huge amount of freedom –what could happen to us? (Apart from several brushes with death, not much).
Some memories, in no particular order:
When a school friend and I stayed down there for a week on our own, we were messing about on the creek with another lad, sharing his boat (I can’t recall if it had changed ownership and become brother Paul’s at that point) and his fairly powerful air rifle. We all impersonated big game hunters by courageously shooting a few tits and other similar-sized creatures. As night began to fall, my friend and I got into the boat and rowed it towards the rickety landing stage where it was moored. The owner of the boat decided it would be good fun to use us as target practice. Our protestations were met with mad, hysterical laughter
and the sound of lead pellets ricocheting off the water. My friend realised he was a much faster rower than he previously thought, and we reached the landing stage, jumped out and ran like the clappers up the road.
A couple of times, two friends (Hugh Legge and Bill Tweedie) and I slept down on the beach, for something to do. “Slept” is an inappropriate description. Sand feels incredibly hard around three o’clock in the morning, when you’re dog tired, the fire has burnt out, the cold is really getting into your bones, and your throat is telling you it really can’t face one more cigarette. The word “stupidity” springs to mind when I recall that we did this more than once.
For a lot of the time, there was a hard core of about 15 – 20 of us teenagers and pre-teenagers (the “locals”), which could almost double in size over Christmas. We very often had a fire on the beach at night, and it was great fun sitting around the fire, piled high with driftwood. The main activities were smoking cigarettes (with a sharp eye kept out for parents sneaking up on us), telling very tall stories and jokes, singing to the guitars, and flirting innocently with members of the opposite sex.
I got into lots of trouble at Rosedale. The most common reason was for getting home late, and I only had myself to blame. Once Hugh, Bill and I went out to Jimmy’s Island, spear fishing. We got back to shore as light was fading, and then built and sat around a fire smoking and chatting unhurriedly while we warmed ourselves up. I did deserve everything I got when I finally arrived home – Mum and Dad were both getting worried that I’d drowned, and of course there was nothing like a bit of good old-fashioned corporal punishment to soothe Mum’s frayed nerves.
Mr Quigley, who had a house out on the point, owned a boat, which he allowed Hugh, Bill and me to use sans engine. We used to row it out into the bay and throw out our hand lines, and just drift on the swell, smoking. Did we also have bottles
of beer with us at the age of 15? I can’t honestly remember, but I think we may have done. We rarely, if ever, caught anything during those trips, but we didn’t care.
In cold weather we used to wear rugby shirts in the water when we went spear fishing. Once Bill Tweedie got an enormous blue bottle inside his shirt, some distance from shore – he could do nothing about it until he reached the beach.
Bill was pretty stoic, but he could be heard all the way to shore. Rather him than me! My brother once came up to the surface underneath a blue bottle. I have never seen such impressive wheals as the ones that instantly appeared on his back. He was standing in the water shaking while Dad scoured his back with handfuls of sand, an accepted treatment in those days. There was still sign of the wheals a week later.)
Walking around Rosedale at night-time really helped us to develop night vision. It wasn’t too bad on moonlit starry nights, but on nights of thick cloud it really was pitch black, and it was next to impossible to even pick out the road’s surface. Lying on the beach on a star-lit night, you were almost guaranteed to see shooting stars, and the stars themselves were so bright. I loved staring at the stars – and even after more than 30 years in England, I miss the sight of the Southern Cross. It’s one of the first things I look for in the night sky whenever I visit Australia.
Once or twice my older sister and I went with Hugh and his older sister to a dance at an old community hall somewhere near Batemans Bay. Hugh and I were supposed to chaperone our sisters, but, naturally, we parted company as soon as our parents dropped us off and didn’t see each other until we were due to be picked up at some unnaturally late hour –about 10 o’clock. Those were the days when “Bombora” was in the hit parade and we danced the “stomp”!
I loved going for long walks on my own, or with our dog Peggy. I must have walked those beaches hundreds of times, and also walked overland to other beaches further afield. There was one small one that used to get loads of seaweed piled up on it. The rotting putrid smell really used to make me gag as I crossed it.
It never seemed to bother Peggy though. I loved getting up at daybreak, and walking for an hour or more before breakfast. There was never another person in sight, but there were plenty of wallabies and other wildlife around at that hour. The birds would also be in full song – kookaburras, magpies, currawongs, etc.
I got a fishing rod for my birthday, my pride and joy, and used to fish off the rocks at either end of the beach or further afield, with very limited success. I lost an enormous amount of fishing tackle though. I also occasionally caught bream in the creek. A favourite bait was cunjevoi, which grew freely on the rocks. It squirted water at you when you trod on it, and looked quite
disgusting. I suspect the fish weren’t especially enamoured of it either. I’ve never seen it or heard of it in Europe. I think I caught more eels than fish.
They were disgusting –big mouths with big razor-sharp teeth and very slimy green-brown bodies. Before I knew better, I used to try to recover my tackle, which involved killing the eel and cutting the hook out of it. The battle to the death really was a tussle, and the line would get in a hopeless tangle. In the end I wised up and just cut the line as soon as I saw an eel on the
hook.
I used to set off on every fishing trip with incredible optimism – a triumph of hope over experience. I used to go in all weathers, daytime and night-time.
Freezing winters, scorching summers, cold driving rain with a plastic raincoat on. And I thoroughly enjoyed it!
Catching fish really came to life when my brother Paul got a shiny new hand spear for a Christmas present. The rest of us teenagers realised very quickly that, for the price of a wooden curtain rod, a spearhead and a rubber, we could all assemble our own hand spears. Ours were not only affordable, they had the added advantages that they were easier to grip and that they floated to the surface when released – an important point when fishing in deep water. There was one disadvantage to the home-made spears – I once saw a 30-pound grouper come flying past me with a spearhead and two feet of wood sticking out of it. I turned round and saw Bill Tweedie looking both surprised and dismayed through his mask, clutching the other half of the spear.
We had a series of lobster pots, but they were often washed out to sea in heavy swells. The cost of the lobster pots must have far outweighed the cost had we bought the odd lobsters that we did bring home from the sea. Mum sometimes cooked abalone fritters – they were completely inedible unless minced (too chewy), and barely edible when minced, and I didn’t much like them.
We spent many weekends all the year round as well as longer holidays “down the coast”. When I worked after school at Coles in the Monaro Shopping Mall, I’d finish at 9 o’clock on a Friday night and walk straight out to the car, where Mum and Dad and Paul and our dog would be waiting. Mum would usually have a big jar of food already cooked – liver and bacon was a favourite. When we got to the house, we’d light a fire, have dinner, and go to bed – with the whole of Saturday and much of Sunday in front of us. Sheer bliss!
In the early years, Paul and I slept on an open verandah. Even in the winter, when it got pretty chilly, and the rain could drive in as far as the beds, we still felt really cosy. At night we’d lie in bed between sandy sheets, listening to the surf crashing onto the beach (if there was a heavy swell) or gently surging in and out, or the rain thrumming on the corrugated iron roof, or the wind howling through the tree next to the verandah, or the possums scampering across the roof on a hot still summer’s night. We could see the moon and stars out to sea.
This is starting to sound like purple prose again, which is how I started, so I’d better stop. But Rosedale was, for me, a magical place, and it played a very prominent part in my teenage years.
Alan Tooker
Night and Day
The sandy beach has rocks at either end which jut out into the sea.
They are surrounded by deep water which reflects the glaring sunlight in a dazzling manner. The sky seems washed out in comparison with the sea. An island, close to shore, seems desolate with sparse cliffs and scattered scrub growing along the top.
Above the beach is a hillside covered with trees. Small cottages are perched upon it. Boats out at sea rock in the swell. The surf rolls onto the beach leaving long trails in the sparkling sunlight in vivid detail. The sights, sounds and smells are all exciting and fresh.
At night a different picture emerges. The pale moon forms pale reflections on the water. The gloom of night surrounds the jagged rocks and the dull roar of the surf floats on the cool night air. The island is now a dark blob with weird shapes appearing on the top.
The neat cottages on the hillside cannot be seen except for little windows of light shining out to sea. The sea mists come rolling in, and the lonely call of the seagulls dies away.
As the night grows old a stillness descends upon the place; the lights are abruptly extinguished and an air of peace settles over the beach as the moon gently lowers itself over the horizon.
The beginning:
Plenty of purple prose, but what do you expect at the age of 14? Anyway, that was the effect Rosedale had on me. It was probably the best and longest lasting highlight of my teenage years. My family and I got more than four years’ enjoyment out of it before we left for Geneva on April Fool’s Day, 1968.
We spent our 1962 Christmas holiday near Batemans Bay. While we were there, we drove over to Rosedale to have a look, because somebody Mum and Dad knew kept raving about the place. In those days, Rosedale was well off the beaten track,
about a 20-mile drive along badly maintained dirt roads through the bush. After a week’s solid rain it was cut off from the outside world.
We all approached the place with a certain cynicism, but changed our minds very quickly once we saw it and had a walk around. Mum and Dad pretty much decided to buy a plot of land and build a house on that visit. Once we’d bought the plot,
we used to go down for weekends to clear the ground, build a dunny (that also served as the lockup tool shed) and prepare for the building work. We used to sleep in two fairly small tents. My brother Paul and I were in the smallest one, and we slept on potato sacks stuffed with bracken. The people next door let us help ourselves to water from their water tank.
We erected the frame and the roof of the house in three weeks during the 1963 Christmas holiday. The house was a kit, made of a timber frame with a corrugated zinc roof and with asbestos cladding for the walls, so most of the work consisted of sorting the pre-cut timber and nailing it together. At that time, we had a large square tent with a centre pole for our living quarters and Mum and Dad’s sleeping quarters. The tents were like furnaces during the day.
The house was substantially completed by the following Easter, although there were one or two little hiccups along the way. The most spectacular was when the lorry came to deliver all the asbestos sheeting. It was parked across a fairly steep slope at the front of the house, and while the driver came to the door with the delivery note to sign, his mate undid all the ropes anchoring the asbestos.
Result: one load of asbestos slid sideways off the lorry onto the ground. Most of it was smashed beyond all possible use. The driver got very upset with Dad because Dad, for some strange reason, refused to sign the delivery note. (“If you don’t sign the note, we’ll have to load it all back on the lorry again and take it back” …….. er, yes).
Nostalgia plays tricks, but Rosedale really was brilliant. We had a huge amount of freedom –what could happen to us? (Apart from several brushes with death, not much).
Some memories, in no particular order:
When a school friend and I stayed down there for a week on our own, we were messing about on the creek with another lad, sharing his boat (I can’t recall if it had changed ownership and become brother Paul’s at that point) and his fairly powerful air rifle. We all impersonated big game hunters by courageously shooting a few tits and other similar-sized creatures. As night began to fall, my friend and I got into the boat and rowed it towards the rickety landing stage where it was moored. The owner of the boat decided it would be good fun to use us as target practice. Our protestations were met with mad, hysterical laughter
and the sound of lead pellets ricocheting off the water. My friend realised he was a much faster rower than he previously thought, and we reached the landing stage, jumped out and ran like the clappers up the road.
A couple of times, two friends (Hugh Legge and Bill Tweedie) and I slept down on the beach, for something to do. “Slept” is an inappropriate description. Sand feels incredibly hard around three o’clock in the morning, when you’re dog tired, the fire has burnt out, the cold is really getting into your bones, and your throat is telling you it really can’t face one more cigarette. The word “stupidity” springs to mind when I recall that we did this more than once.
For a lot of the time, there was a hard core of about 15 – 20 of us teenagers and pre-teenagers (the “locals”), which could almost double in size over Christmas. We very often had a fire on the beach at night, and it was great fun sitting around the fire, piled high with driftwood. The main activities were smoking cigarettes (with a sharp eye kept out for parents sneaking up on us), telling very tall stories and jokes, singing to the guitars, and flirting innocently with members of the opposite sex.
I got into lots of trouble at Rosedale. The most common reason was for getting home late, and I only had myself to blame. Once Hugh, Bill and I went out to Jimmy’s Island, spear fishing. We got back to shore as light was fading, and then built and sat around a fire smoking and chatting unhurriedly while we warmed ourselves up. I did deserve everything I got when I finally arrived home – Mum and Dad were both getting worried that I’d drowned, and of course there was nothing like a bit of good old-fashioned corporal punishment to soothe Mum’s frayed nerves.
Mr Quigley, who had a house out on the point, owned a boat, which he allowed Hugh, Bill and me to use sans engine. We used to row it out into the bay and throw out our hand lines, and just drift on the swell, smoking. Did we also have bottles
of beer with us at the age of 15? I can’t honestly remember, but I think we may have done. We rarely, if ever, caught anything during those trips, but we didn’t care.
In cold weather we used to wear rugby shirts in the water when we went spear fishing. Once Bill Tweedie got an enormous blue bottle inside his shirt, some distance from shore – he could do nothing about it until he reached the beach.
Bill was pretty stoic, but he could be heard all the way to shore. Rather him than me! My brother once came up to the surface underneath a blue bottle. I have never seen such impressive wheals as the ones that instantly appeared on his back. He was standing in the water shaking while Dad scoured his back with handfuls of sand, an accepted treatment in those days. There was still sign of the wheals a week later.)
Walking around Rosedale at night-time really helped us to develop night vision. It wasn’t too bad on moonlit starry nights, but on nights of thick cloud it really was pitch black, and it was next to impossible to even pick out the road’s surface. Lying on the beach on a star-lit night, you were almost guaranteed to see shooting stars, and the stars themselves were so bright. I loved staring at the stars – and even after more than 30 years in England, I miss the sight of the Southern Cross. It’s one of the first things I look for in the night sky whenever I visit Australia.
Once or twice my older sister and I went with Hugh and his older sister to a dance at an old community hall somewhere near Batemans Bay. Hugh and I were supposed to chaperone our sisters, but, naturally, we parted company as soon as our parents dropped us off and didn’t see each other until we were due to be picked up at some unnaturally late hour –about 10 o’clock. Those were the days when “Bombora” was in the hit parade and we danced the “stomp”!
I loved going for long walks on my own, or with our dog Peggy. I must have walked those beaches hundreds of times, and also walked overland to other beaches further afield. There was one small one that used to get loads of seaweed piled up on it. The rotting putrid smell really used to make me gag as I crossed it.
It never seemed to bother Peggy though. I loved getting up at daybreak, and walking for an hour or more before breakfast. There was never another person in sight, but there were plenty of wallabies and other wildlife around at that hour. The birds would also be in full song – kookaburras, magpies, currawongs, etc.
I got a fishing rod for my birthday, my pride and joy, and used to fish off the rocks at either end of the beach or further afield, with very limited success. I lost an enormous amount of fishing tackle though. I also occasionally caught bream in the creek. A favourite bait was cunjevoi, which grew freely on the rocks. It squirted water at you when you trod on it, and looked quite
disgusting. I suspect the fish weren’t especially enamoured of it either. I’ve never seen it or heard of it in Europe. I think I caught more eels than fish.
They were disgusting –big mouths with big razor-sharp teeth and very slimy green-brown bodies. Before I knew better, I used to try to recover my tackle, which involved killing the eel and cutting the hook out of it. The battle to the death really was a tussle, and the line would get in a hopeless tangle. In the end I wised up and just cut the line as soon as I saw an eel on the
hook.
I used to set off on every fishing trip with incredible optimism – a triumph of hope over experience. I used to go in all weathers, daytime and night-time.
Freezing winters, scorching summers, cold driving rain with a plastic raincoat on. And I thoroughly enjoyed it!
Catching fish really came to life when my brother Paul got a shiny new hand spear for a Christmas present. The rest of us teenagers realised very quickly that, for the price of a wooden curtain rod, a spearhead and a rubber, we could all assemble our own hand spears. Ours were not only affordable, they had the added advantages that they were easier to grip and that they floated to the surface when released – an important point when fishing in deep water. There was one disadvantage to the home-made spears – I once saw a 30-pound grouper come flying past me with a spearhead and two feet of wood sticking out of it. I turned round and saw Bill Tweedie looking both surprised and dismayed through his mask, clutching the other half of the spear.
We had a series of lobster pots, but they were often washed out to sea in heavy swells. The cost of the lobster pots must have far outweighed the cost had we bought the odd lobsters that we did bring home from the sea. Mum sometimes cooked abalone fritters – they were completely inedible unless minced (too chewy), and barely edible when minced, and I didn’t much like them.
We spent many weekends all the year round as well as longer holidays “down the coast”. When I worked after school at Coles in the Monaro Shopping Mall, I’d finish at 9 o’clock on a Friday night and walk straight out to the car, where Mum and Dad and Paul and our dog would be waiting. Mum would usually have a big jar of food already cooked – liver and bacon was a favourite. When we got to the house, we’d light a fire, have dinner, and go to bed – with the whole of Saturday and much of Sunday in front of us. Sheer bliss!
In the early years, Paul and I slept on an open verandah. Even in the winter, when it got pretty chilly, and the rain could drive in as far as the beds, we still felt really cosy. At night we’d lie in bed between sandy sheets, listening to the surf crashing onto the beach (if there was a heavy swell) or gently surging in and out, or the rain thrumming on the corrugated iron roof, or the wind howling through the tree next to the verandah, or the possums scampering across the roof on a hot still summer’s night. We could see the moon and stars out to sea.
This is starting to sound like purple prose again, which is how I started, so I’d better stop. But Rosedale was, for me, a magical place, and it played a very prominent part in my teenage years.
Alan Tooker
