Welcome to Dr Roger K.A. Allen’s Blog

I always liked the way trams’ flanged wheels rolled on thin threads of BHP steel made silver with the years, and embedded into protesting bitumen and sometimes crazed pale concrete, their red gum sleepers hidden from adult eyes but not from the imagination of small boys and appearing only transiently by imperious jack hammers and chinking mattocks by muscled bronzed men wearing fading Jackie Howes and ex-Army boots.   These shiny snail tracks divide the traffic like Moses and the Red Sea and can be treacherous and slippery in the rain.

We mount the 171 at the Clayfield Terminus called the “Termo” which is unusual for us as Mum had to go to the Commonwealth Bank first. We usually catch it two stops up Sandgate Road on the Adelaide Street corner. The tram stands silent, still and empty as the driver changes ends and the electric rod that draws life from the deadly wires overhead. He has a long hooked pole that unsprings the electric rod that rebounds from the tram’s roof like the hind leg of a grasshopper. Impatient cars slow down and then accelerate past the obstruction. We cross the road, my hand in her warm glove, climb aboard and sit in the front compartment which is reserved by some unwritten code for women and young children. I look out the window at the Ohio Cafe on my port side and up the road is the picture theatre and people going shopping at the local supermarket, fruit shops, grocers, and dry cleaners.

All this complexity was to be relieved years later by a desert of real estate agents and a few chemists; remnants of an extinct species leaving a lifeless monoculture that people drive past on the way to some other destination.  

The tram is one of the old ones from before the war, made of wood and steel and painted in yellow and green and with varnished windows and rolled up canvas blinds in the exposed middle section that the conductor pulls down for the usual late afternoon summer downpours. Our ship clings to the electric life-line above, the sprung pantograph intelligently criss-crossing the maze of spurting and sparking overhead wires that run along the street and are held safe and taught by the strainer posts of telephone poles, those once tall beauties of white-barked eucalypts from the silent contentment of an abundant forest with memories of Dreamtime voices.  

“Two to the Valley, please, conductor”, my white-gloved mother says as cars and bitumen blur by my chin on crossed arms, my mind lost in wonderment on the varnished window sill.  The tram’s motor makes a “knock, knock” at times as if protesting. Then I hear the quick deliberate “ding-ding” by an experienced hand pulling a looping cord of leather worn shiny with the sweat and grease of humanity. It punctuates the trip as someone prepares for the next full stop at the end of an all too brief sentence. This journeyed liturgy consists of predictable paragraphs of time and place I know by heart and never tire of.  

The kepie’d driver is isolated in his ship’s prow inviolate from the rabble behind and the rear driver’s compartment is empty with its door locked lest bold boys enter its sanctuary and play with the dead man’s bronze handle rendered shiny by a million miles.  We are a mechanical shuttle darting across the loom of Brisbane, under the warp and weft of electricity of the Clayfield-Salisbury Line. The middle section was for men and boys like the aft section and our ship’s forecastle reserved for the gentle sex women and young children like on the life boats of the SS Arcadia on which we later spent a long, lonely month travelling to England.  Amidships was open to the vagaries of wind, rain, noise and car exhausts.

In the peak hour, this was where acnied faces with moon craters attached to long arms lolled from Bakelite handles connected to shiny steel rails by worn leather straps… a bit like orang-utans, and middle aged chiselled male faces stood with their worries shaded by Akubra hats and with the Telegraph or the form guide under one arm and a crazed Gladstone bag like those used by bookies at the races in the other. There the usual are vacant faces and attempts not to stare but we are lucky we are not in the late afternoon press of humanity, perfume and body odour. I get a wink from a nice man who can see me from amidships. I smile back. I see a young man in long grey flannels and a crisp white shirt and dark tie making the glad eye at an attractive young woman in her early twenties sitting straight and stiffly with her knees together as if just out of finishing school at June Daly Watkins. I spot young women unaware of a ladder in her left stocking.  

The conductor comes around. He wears a kepi too like the French legionnaires I’d seen in Beau Jeste and has hanging from his neck a mechanical marvel whose handle he turns to produce crisp new grey or brown tickets which he punches punctiliously with a clipper like on the ears of a young calf leaving his tell-tale brand for some later inspector, and aligned with the date and sector. Around his waist hangs a coin-dispensing machine of silent columns of copper pennies and silver treys, zacks, shillings, and two bobs and a leather pouch smelling stale from  unwashed hands and old green pounds and grey ten shilling notes. Pity help anyone who gives him a fiver for a sixpenny trip to the next sector. 

Mum had dressed me in a sailor suit complete with navy blue rectangular collar over my shoulders with a white border. It scratched a bit as she had a penchant for Silver Star starch which she mixed in a large earthenware bowl with boiling water mostly for Dad’s whites he wore at the surgery. I have on my new brown sandals and short white socks which sailors never wear and I don’t have a round Navy sailor’s hat with the flat white top and the ship embossed at the front, but I feel the part. Her brothers both went to war which was not that long ago and both were in the Army.  She has cream shoes with peep hole toes and a bright floral skirt and stockings and her soft hands were sheathed in soft white gloves that came up to her wrist unlike the black ones she wore to the opera. These came up to her elbow and were thus a cubit long, a measure I knew as God’s shipwright Noah measured his ark in cubits. 

We go past St Columban’s, a Catholic School for boys and a church, to our left and then turn a left curving corner at top of the ridge at Albion where the first road must have followed a goat track to the top of the hill and with no regard for the monotonous straight lines synonymous with Melbourne. The Albion pub is on our starboard side and it is too early for the usual pig swill of 6pm when rowdy men stand on the footpath passing beers out the window before early closing time and cheeky paper boys shout “Tele, Tele, City Final” in those days when papers like the Telegraph transmuted into yet new editions from dawn til dusk.

Down through the Albion Five Ways in those days a pentagonal confluence of traffic with ambiguous stop signs, no traffic lights and controlled either by a imperious motorbike cop in peak hour but mostly by the weight of the driver’s personality, vehicle size and sheer guts. Trams were the dreadnoughts of the road which most sensible people gave way to.  

We edge through like a snow plough, then rumble at speed down Sandgate Road parallel to winding Breakfast Creek, with its quaint wooden bay cruisers tethered fore and aft like obedient dogs to wooden pylons standing up to their drying waists with subtle V-shaped lines from the brown tide ebbing past. Mangroves obscure the right bank, a heron with a one tracked mind perches on top eying off his breakfast in the water, a shiny brown race horse up to his neck has a late morning swim with his strapper in the water up to his arm pits, oblivious of the risk of bull sharks, broken glass, bullrouts and stone fish. There’s a rusting car body dumped on a muddy bank, an odd car tyre emerging encrusted with barnacles and oysters, two bare-chested boys appear in a rowing boat, and nearby, a man, maybe their father, sits on a dilapidated jetty in the warm yellowing morning sun, rod in hand and a sandwich in the other. I see a cautious water rat gnawing on the red flesh of a black whiskered cat fish. I love rivers, creeks and wooden boats and bridges arching their backs across the creek in a half-hearted attempt to tame the banks.  

The Breakfast Creek Hotel looms up on the left, a colonial masterpiece dedicated to beer and the nearby Doomben races, and then we curve a hard screeching right across the wooden Breakfast Creek Bridge where the tramline meets the incoming line from Ascot and Hamilton; that sister line which follows the river’s edge on that long reach past big ships, busy wharves and ferries.  The bridge is a stone’s throw from the mighty Brisbane River where the English explorer, John Oxley had breakfast in 1824 when the river had sandy banks, fish and dolphins instead of rainbowed oil slicks and ships pumping out their foul bilges.

Mum tells me that in the war, Americans had their submarines here and Sunderland flying boats, those flying porcupines, landed on this reach bringing hope and mail from Mother England.  Then past Newstead House on the grassy point where the creek and river meet, where the colonial governor once lived and now the American eagle stands atop a sandstone column in silent testimony to those who passed this way in days of darkness.

We are in Newstead where a huge grey gasometer dominates the sky on the river side, I suppose loaded with deadly sulphurous coal gas and criss-crossed with steel bands, and intricate attempt by a government architect to transform this monstrosity into something beautiful. Somehow he has succeeded. Nearby are train lines running from the wharves and crossing the road and thus our tram tracks as if by magic and with a level crossing complete with gate and  warning bells, which rang all too seldom for a young boy intent on steam engines and laden wooden wagons. On our right is Cloudland on the hill, Brisbane’s Mount Olympos where our city state’s young gods and goddesses have always danced until late on suspended wooden floors and sprinkled saw dust and once when men were dressed in the proud uniforms of the all-prevailing allies.  

We will be soon at the “Valley” which Brisbane people say for Fortitude Valley, named after that ship, The Fortitude, which brought new settlers like Mum’s yeoman grandparents from Devon for a new life in the Moreton Bay settlement in 1849 when we were still a part of New South Wales. This part of town is fairly boring with more anonymous buildings, warehouses, repair shops, panel beaters, car yards, the now infamous Hardies asbestos factory in Longland Street where many a man met his premature and painful doom, the stately All Saint’s church, the stolid building of police headquarters, the Valley baths, a pub and then we’re here.

We stop at the Valley where Mum and I get off with a dozen others. She holds her hat with one hand as she has no confidence in her hatpins. McWhirters alluring front doors are just to our left with the machine which makes donuts as you watch on a magic conveyor belt of chains and steel, down into boiling oil, and then up and to drop into an ambrosial mixture of fine white sugar and cinnamon. I fan my mouth as they are hot and there are two more in my white paper packet. The day has just begun.

 

Two to the Valley

I was driving home from work one night

Peak-hour crawling,

An the red taillights trailing,

In the chill winter rain,

To the rhythmic lub-dub of the wipers.

In the black puddles,

White car lights like Cracker Night sparklers,

And the bitter-sweat memories of childhood.

And the tram tracks lie buried beneath me,

By a sudden Council decree,

The trams burned like Troy;

To a sad and inglorious finale.

 

Our trams said “knock-knock” when they started,

Enlivened by wires overhead, all electric,

Clayfield-Salisbury the line,

Route 171 blazoned in front, fore and aft,

With slats seats of hardwood, all varnished,

And armrests with brass art déco curves.

Sliding doors in the front and the back

And in the bare open middle,

Green canvas screens

That slid down in summer storms.

 

Old ladies with sticks

Swollen legs and hairnets,

And the smell of rouge and baby powder.

Young women with tight and shapely stockings,

And the occasional ladder,

Children holding Mother’s gloved hand

And school boys with their scratched ports,

Hanging like apes from Bakelite handles.

Trams were like tea and butter,

Predicable, clean and safe,

Governed by unwritten codes,

Women and children in the front compartment,

Men in the middle and rear.

And men and boys stood

For the fairer sex and the frail,

Like knights of the Round Table

For to do other was shame-

Unthinkable.

 

These trams saw baggy Khaki

And Navy with bell-bottoms

Creased with the seven seas,

And wings on wool jackets of dark blue,

Back from that other world,

That no one knew.

Then some girls wore “scanties”

Undone by a sudden gust

A glimpse of white thighs

Under those loose satin panties,

And the black rubber deck,

Was pock-marked by gum

By boys still to have Service Numbers.

I was about four and wore a blue sailor suit,

Too starched for my liking.

“Two to the Valley”,

Mum said to a middle-aged man,

Who looked more like a gendarme

With his kepi, dark belt and Sam Brown,

With a metal holder of coins

Like a diver’s dead lead,

On his crazed leather waist.

Heavy columns of loot,

Florins of 90% silver,

Rams’ heads on shillings

Silver threepence and zacks,

Coppers with kangaroos bounding,

And smaller half-pennies,

With George the fifth and the sixth,

Green paper pounds, fivers, and tenners,

And those awfully drab grey ten shillings,

In a latched cow-hide pouch

With the stale smell of money on leather.

 

A drunk from the races,

Gets in with his winnings,

A pound for a sixpenny fare,

To the wrath of the man

Who punches exactitude into his ticket;

Our route, time and place,

To be kept for a later inspector

In the sweat of a dirty shirt pocket.

 

At last we alight at the end of our section,

At that Mecca of Fortitude Valley,

“Roger, it’s this stop”.

I bet you she’ll shop til we drop, At proud TC Beirne’s

And “world-famous” McWhirters.

It’s now China Town

As the old “Valley” has gone,

To reside my own recollections,

But the trams will still run

While the sweet rails of childhood have traction.