BUSES - this is my autobiography

BUSES

THE 203

There is excitement. We are to get our own bus. We will no longer have to trudge for a quarter of a mile along the more or less flat Edinburgh Road to catch the 207 from East Lindfield as it winds its way up and down the rolling, curving hills of Eastern Valley Way. True, it is only to be a peak hour (a fairly new term?) service however the last one in the morning for Wynyard leaves at nine thirty which is ideal for a going to town. And one leaves town at about six thirty to get the fathers home. Though some of them stop off at the pub at Northbridge before continuing the journey on the 207.  It is to leave from the top of Sunnyside Crescent which is more or less at the top of our steps. It feels like our bus. It does not run on the weekends so we still trudge along Edinburgh Road after lunch with a clean handkerchief, a shilling and a piece of chocolate to the pictures at Northbridge (a barn with a corrugated iron roof which drowns out the sound of the film in the rain) or the much more luxurious one in Willoughby – ‘The Royal’. The Northbridge one is just known as ‘The Northbridge Picture Show’. Both, on busy corners, are soon to be converted to petrol stations.

We are not the sort of family who has bus timetables so we either know the times the buses are said to come or we just turn up and wait. I play a game: after the third car the brown roof of the 207 will appear over the top of the East Willoughby hill and then its green body. I have faith in this magic, excusing its every lapse. I also believe when I press a screw and bracket at the front of the bus upstairs, the bus will start. I must have developed a fine instinct for this. Children are not allowed upstairs unless accompanied by an adult. Adults are allowed to smoke upstairs. I love being upstairs. The stairs are edged with sharp toothed metal treads to stop you slipping but would do terrible damage to your head or face if you did. My short legs find them quite a challenge. The view is magnificent. The Harbour and the thrilling distance from the Bridge to its water make the pit of my stomach drop away. I keep asking my mother if you would die if you jumped. I’m sure she would have replied, ‘Don’t be silly.’ There are nearly always neighbours on the nine-thirty 203. ‘Going to town’ is something housewives seemed to have to do at least once a week. Perhaps some were condemned for ‘always going to town’. The view from upstairs down to the swirling, tidal channels underneath the Cammeray Suspension Bridge (no longer suspended, it is said to be the longest concrete arch bridge in the Southern hemisphere – a common Australian boast in those days; our chief rivals being South Africa and Argentina) enchant me. The glimpse of the sand and mud flats with their meandering channels sometimes filled with water – by tide and rain -  is always too brief. Ten years later I am forced to play football where they once had been. I see shells in the churned black soil and long to tell what I once knew but the knowledge is too common to offer, or too precious to share. I mourn what was. The school is very proud of having drained the Pontine Marshes for football. Perhaps my grief goes some way to explaining how nearly unbearable I found athletic days and football (some sort of rugby – I soon escaped to the despised soccer held a train’s ride from the school).

After the Suspension Bridge is the Cammeray Hill up which I urged the labouring buses, always reduced to lower and lower gears, each time with a sickening pause (would the bus slip backwards down the hill, faster and faster, unable to take the turn at the bottom?) and crunch of gears.

The 203 arrived in York Street and left from across Wynyard Park in Carrington Street. The Carrington side of the park had a sandstone wall (it is still there) on which adults would sit and onto which, in my earliest memories, I would beg my mother to lift me. She must have done so often enough because I remember the delight of walking along its two feet wide top, running and skipping until my mother took me down again in disgusted apprehension. Her feet always ached after a day in town.

Soon enough more wonderful news arrived – the 203 was to have its route extended down Edinburgh Road to Linden Way. But the times were not extended. I’m not sure they ever have been.

There was a 203 School Special which I was to catch for the four years I attended Willoughby Public. My sister caught another one which took her to Castlecove Public – a much longer journey. We were sent to different schools because we were considered too close and Willoughby Public was divided into Girls and Boys and I believe it was concluded I would benefit from all male company as I was a sissy. The School Special I caught at eight-thirty every school day went along Edinburgh Road, turned into Fourth Avenue where I was to live after my father died, along to the Catholic School where the Catholics got off, up High Street and into Oakville Road where we few from Castlecrag who went to Willoughby Public got off to be ready for school at nine-thirty. The Publics and the Catholics did not speak to one another on the Willoughby School Special. Once someone manufactured some animosity, ‘All the Catholics are getting off at last!’ and someone a response, ‘We’re getting away from the public school kids – good!’. The bus became crowded as it picked up kids along the way but I always had a seat as I was one of the first to get on. I think I always sat in the same place – behind the driver’s cabin. Between the front two seats was a big silver metal hump which got very hot in summer, schoolboy mechanical lore held that it contained the gear box.

The buses had bus conductors and the fare was one penny to school. It was tuppence for children into town. The penny ticket had a brown stripe on them. Sometime the bus conductor ran out of brown stripes and tore off a purple striped one from their brown leather bound ticket case. Many wore a finger pad to facilitate the tearing of tickets from their line of blocks – say twelve – down their long narrow case. Along the sides of the tickets was a series of square encased numbers for the ‘sections’ which the conductors would punch with an instrument like brass scissors.  This was done for the tuppenny tickets but I don’t think they bothered with the school ones. I sought ‘readbacks’. A number was printed at the bottom of each ticket and repeated at the top (the number at the top usually remained with the conductor on the stub of the block of tickets). A ‘readback’ was a numerical palindrome – 16461, for example.

I don’t know if it was a function of those simpler days, before television or if children universally use whatever is at hand to create meaning, or if it was an idiosyncratic obsession but the ticket numbers were of great interest to me. I think we hoped there were ‘collectors’ who ‘would pay a lot of money’ for a readback. But the tickets rarely lasted beyond the alighting at the destination. I wanted one which was all 0000)s. This was granted me on my last homeward journey from Willoughby Public when I must have been let out early and raced up to the bleeding rough barked angophoras beside which the School Specials queued outside the Infants’ School. The conductor had a new block of tickets. She swept off the first and handed it to me with some suspicious resentment for I had seen what I was to receive and was avid.

The conductors were known to us. Some were ‘cranky’ (’you kids sit down and shut up’), some ‘nice’.  One was infamous for being what would now be called a ‘single mother’ who had put her baby out to adoption and now wanted her or him back. There was a court case. She had bleached hair and looked ‘tough’ or ‘common’ and I think she smoked. In those days there was little sympathy for her, especially as the contesting adopting parents appeared in their newspaper photographs as a respectable middle class couple tragically unable to have kiddies of their own. They won.

The first pair of the rows of seats facing forward downstairs were elevated – a much desired perch by school children – but the very first seats encountered on the bus were narrow sofas which faced one another perpendicular to all the other seats downstairs. These sofas were not desired as they appeared to offer a more exposed and insecure perch than the rows of two seaters which dutifully faced the front of the bus and the driver’s little cabin. Under these facing initial sofas was a kind of porthole. A boy on one of our buses stuffed newspapers into it and lit them. According to us this could have caused a terrible accident because that was where the petrol tank was. Anyway, we knew that bus because it had been repaired and the back seat on one side was now different, I forget how but remember it seemed prophylactic after its repair. The boy was said to have  ‘got away with it’. I don’t know how naughty we were. I suppose some of the cranky conductors ordered us to shut up and sit down. Others shouted at us to keep our heads in the windows which could be opened right up and out of which we loved to hang. Some conductors spent the journey with their own heads stuck through the little window into the driver’s cabin talking to the driver though TALKING TO THE DRIVER WHILST THE BUS WAS IN MOTION was PROHIBITED. I suppose I must have been ordered to move from my favourite seat to effect this. Many of the conductors swung at the back of the bus off the chrome pole which rose on the alighting platform on which PASSENGERS were PROHIBITED to stand. Some conductors swung up and down the twisted narrow stairs with gymnastic ease; I very much admired their élan.

I think I carried nothing home on my last day of primary school except the 0000000 ticket, for the beautiful slender rose wood attaché case my father had made and which my mother insisted I use, against his gentle remonstrations, had broken under the pressure of the things I had stuffed into it. I remember asking my teacher if I could take it to the incinerator and, sickened by my wanton and deliberate act of destruction and the smell of the incinerator and by the apprehension I felt at leaving this loathed place for who-knew-what-further-hells, flinging the lot – broken wood, hanging brass hinges, filled and near filled exercise books – onto the pile waiting for the janitor to burn. Maybe after this I fled straight to the bus.

Willoughby Public had been a purgatory of boredom and humiliation. So my education was to continue.

My happiest times seemed to have been walking down Edinburgh Road eating the lolly I had bought with my penny bus fare home because I had been let out of school early on Friday afternoon for completing my sums quickly. These were absurdly complicated calculations involving square inches, chains, acres, ounces, pounds, tons, quarts and gallons and pounds, shillings and pence. It was amazing what the stimulus of an early mark and the possibility of an aniseed slate pencil could do for my faculty for Mental Arithmetic. In delight, I would flee down Oakville Road, glancing into the gloom of the Produce Store which sold pigeon peas, shell grit and dog biscuits in bulk to cross High Street onto the East Willoughby end of Edinburgh Road which led over a mile and across Eastern Valley Way to my home. Sometimes the School Special would catch up with me at the Castlecrag Shops just over Eastern Valley Way and I would wish I had not spent my penny bus fare on the now sucked to oblivion lolly. Once I was distressed to discover the Council had lopped all the trees along the East Willoughby end of Edinburgh Road. They looked raw and severe, like my mother just after a perm.

Twice, in a bubble of excitement I had tried to catch the School Special after I got home. This was when my beloved for a while Fourth Class teacher, Mr King, was going to Northbridge Baths for a swim after school and some boys were going with him. I jumped off the bus at Sunnyside Crescent, rushed down our steps, yelling explanations and begging my mother as I grabbed up my cossie and an old towel. She must have given me the threepence for the bus fare and baths entry for I made it back to the bus stop to wave my hand at the driver now returning from the terminus at Linden Way to carry the few remaining kids onto their homes in Northbridge. But he did not stop. Determined, I hurried on to walk to Northbridge Baths, along Edinburgh Road and The Rampart, plunging down the bush track to cross to Northbridge. But I got there too late on both occasions. Mr King and co were leaving or had left, the baths were thrown into cold shadow and were closing. I trudged home. My mother might have said, ‘What did I tell you? You’ll never learn.’ But I had.

My sister must now have had to catch the Willoughby School Special as she was attending Willoughby Domestic Girls’ High. Her trips to Castlecove had early become a focus for family concern as she developed a headache every day when her bus swung around the ‘curve outside Nana Page’s’. We had lived near Nana Page on Eastern Valley Way while our house in Castlecrag was being built. Nana Page was the mother of a childhood friend of my father’s. Much family angst focused on my sister and this daily headache which evaded all cure for a long time.

My father took me to on his bus to my first day of high school. I was allowed on because I was with him. Normally school children had to catch the School Specials. I think some children who went to private schools in town were allowed on this business bus. For the next five years I caught the 203 School Special which took kids all along its route to various schools on the Lower North Shore. It was rather more rackety than the School Special I had caught to Willoughby Public. Its passageways soon blocked with those standing up and their bags. It was at this time that secondary school students began to be burdened with not one but two school bags – ideally a Globite schoolbag and a plastic airlines type bag in their school colours and imprinted with the school’s crest and motto. I was allowed neither as my mother was determined not to ‘spoil’ us. These bags were sometimes packed in the crevice created by the stairs which arose from the alighting platform. The pile of luggage could become formidable and getting a bag from the bottom of the pile extremely difficult. I always tried to carry my bags with me though this sometimes caused me to be the subject of abuse by other students and the conductors.

On the few occasions I missed this bus I had to run along Edinburgh Road to Eastern Valley Way in the hope of catching a 205, 206 or 207 School Special which had dragged all the way from East Willoughby, East Roseville and East Lindfield respectively. The 207s, having come the furthest, were quite often full by the time they got to Castlecrag and the drivers would not stop. Catching these was almost an adventure; I knew practically everyone who got on the 203 along its route.

At some point early in my secondary education, the Transport Department introduced passes for school children which had to be bought in the school holidays from a hole in the wall of a small dingy not-yet-antique office in town. Of course purchasers had to queue; the subtext of public service business in those days was Keep the public Waiting and Make it Ugly for them. Kafka comes to mind. These passes represented a saving on bus fares for school children and may have saved bus conductors ulcers and grey hairs. We were issued forms at school for them but my schooling was almost over before my mother’s scorn for them and my ability not to lose the desired bus pass abated sufficiently for her to accede to my begging for this luxury. We flashed them at the conductors from behind the transparent panels in our wallets.

My father died suddenly of a heart attack and I was sent to school the next day (a Monday). News had already run along the bus route. Nearly fifty years later someone told me he would never forget me standing white faced at the bus stop.

It took me four years to realise I need not be desperate to get home from school. I hated high school probably more than I had hated primary. My life was elsewhere, in a dream world which I could not at the time have given an account of and cannot now.  The occasional demands of school took me from my inner haven, thus I resented them. I could not wait for the bell to go at three-fifteen and would rush to catch any bus which would take me anywhere near home. As this was not the peak hour, there was some chance an ignorant or careless bus driver might allow me onto a bus not a School Special. This was an occasion when not having a bus pass could be an advantage as they were sometimes not accepted on ordinary buses. Often the buses were very crowded and there was a mob waiting to stampede onto any which stopped. I was not good at shoving so I took to running to the bus stop before the one on the corner of Falcon and Miller Streets, North Sydney which was the one we were expected to use. I left school by the back gate, fleeing down a dead-end which serviced an ice and milk works next to the school. Several turns saw me at the bus stop. I passed a horse trough. One day some Council men had stopped their dray and were allowing their huge poor old draught horse to drink. I knew this was the last time I would ever see such a thing. Our baker (‘Billy’) had long since given up his high yellow cart on which I longed to ride down Edinburgh Road and his horse for a dull green van.  Oh, the patience of those horses. Behind a huge camellia tree at this bus stop stood a Baby Health Centre. It was dark and silent. Coldness emanated from it. Only once in all those years did I see anyone enter or leave it: a woman left after very carefully locking the door behind her. 

I loathed sport even though it took me from lessons. We had to traipse for miles from school and across a golf links where our presence was abused by the golfers to the almost inaccessible Primrose Park – all to play football. We were watched for talent by the school enthusiast. I would have preferred my efforts at obscurity and avoiding the ball remained unnoted however I need not have worried, my disappearing act was beneath contempt. In summer, I swam. Cricket was a foreign country. Once the family doctor asked me what did I do when I came home from school; his sons played cricket. I must have looked at him astonished and nauseated, no-one I knew played cricket. In the end I told him I didn’t know then lied about doing my homework. On the one occasion I remember being forced into a game on the unspeakably desolate Hallstrom Park on Willoughby Road, I was ordered to put the stumps in. I tried to bash them into the impacted clay with a bat. A rather kindly boy came running up and snatched it from me. It already had gouges in it. ‘Not that way,’ he said tearing his astonished gaze from me in order to check over his shoulder, ‘you’re supposed to do it with the handle. You’re lucky Mr Treadfast didn’t see you, he would have thrashed you.’ Mr Treadfast was an arrogant Latin teacher whose unchecked temper and sarcastic comments to a lot of schoolboys I had the sense to hold in contempt. He probably would have struck me hard and got away with it. My saviour bundled the ruined bat into the bottom of the kit, pulled out another and proceeded to pound the stumps in with the end of the bat about the same size as the stumps. I absolutely despised cricket – the boredom. I spent the game and days afterwards in a cloud of anxiety that my ill-treatment of the bat would come to light and I would be humiliated in front of a school assembly. I suppose they concluded they had someone who could really swipe a ball out there somewhere or that we *** us? house players were hardly worth bothering about.

I could swim though. Unlike other sports to which we were ‘to make our own way’, buses were ordered to cart us off to a selection of swimming pools. This was done by the calendar so the first few weeks swimming (there was of course no avoiding going in once there) were in water cold enough to take your breath away. We were required to charge fifty-five yards down the pool in class groups in order to prove we could swim. Then the whistle went and we had to rush to dress in order to be born back to school on the buses. I would drag my clothes onto my still wet body and stand drying as the bus chugged roared and whined its way back to school where we were released. Pleasure was inconceivable for school children. The school motto was Vincit Qui Si Vincit – translated as ‘He Conquers Who Conquers Himself’. All of the many dull sermons expatiating upon this theme offered up over my years at high school emphasised the self-punishment entailed in this concept. I wish I could blame it entirely for my failure to accept myself.

Later in my secondary schooling a new breed of single-decker bus appeared. They were very smart, relatively manoeuvrable and fast – ‘efficient’ in the buzz word of that era and blue and white instead of green and brown. Everything for the public in New South Wales in those days had been cream, green and brown. One sat in them radiant with the freshness.

THE 266 AND THE 267

When we caught it to go to Crows Nest the 266 had Osborne Park written on its indicator, the 267 McMahon’s Point. I never went to these terminuses and have little idea where the former is, a less vague idea of the latter. When we caught them to go to Chatswood they had Chatswood Station up. In those days Crows Nest and Chatswood were rival shopping centres. Castlecrag was more or less in the middle of the labouring journeys of these buses. They passed through Willoughby so we used them to visit our grandmother who lived in that suburb.

The Transport Department committed their ancient single deckers on these routes for they had a small carrying capacity and the routes involved the most complicated weaving through Cammeray and Chatswood and parts of Greenwich where my other grandparents lived. The 266 and the 267 were, as were at least some of the brown and green double deckers, Daimlers (my research seems to suggest there were no Daimler double-deckers in Sydney, it is claimed they did not meet the Standards so were sent to Adelaide however I am sticking to the idea some double-deckers were Daimlers; most were Leylands). The nuggetiness of the diminutive 266 and 267 would have been comical had it not been admirable. They were slow and, as I was later informed, ‘buggers to drive’. They disturbed the buffalo lawned smugness of Edwardian Chatswood/Willoughby and the torpor of rather more struggling Cammeray/Crows Nest. They were antiquated, redolent of narrow, winding English lanes over which Spitfires and Hurricanes screamed in pursuit of the Luftwaffe. I admired them for what seemed like their resolute natures and their rarity – I believe there were few of them in operation and they were used on routes double deckers would have had trouble negotiating such as the runs to the North Shore wharves – Cremorne, Neutral Bay, Athol … and the meandering route which took in Crows Nest and Chatswood which were much more directly linked by the 273, a route I never cared for. They were less social buses than the double deckers, one did not crane around on them to talk to the person sitting behind. Perhaps this was because they collected people from such disparate communities that no ésprit de corps could develop.

We caught them after they had laboured down and up the Eastern Valley Way hill from Northbridge, past what had been a dairy and was now a scout hall across the road from what had been a Chinese gardens, later used to run goats to feed babies allergic to other milk at the district hospitals – The Mater Misericordia (those Catholics certainly knew how to brighten things up with a name) and the Royal North Shore. Anyway, the 266 trundled past it on the Pacific Highway before it took the plunge down Osborne Road into Greenwich.

My sister and I, allowed at very young ages to ‘go shopping’ in Crows Nest and Chatswood which both had Coles and Woolworths (the odour or talc, candy, cardboard, processed straw and thin plastic all the way from Japan) – cheap chain department stores where you could buy gee-gaws beyond imagination and usefuls such as press studs, flints for pistols for lighting your gas stove and wicks for your kerosene lamps. They also had a marvellously long counter with a curved transparent plastic top under which lay a hugely long line of arranged lollies into which the assistants would expertly plunge aluminium scoops to shake out on the scales; satisfied with the weight, they would then upend the curved scales tray into little (or quite big) white paper bags which they would adeptly twirl over to secure before handing you your purchase. I think these experts wore candy striped white smocks. My sister and I were sometimes refused service on the grounds the amount we wished to purchase was too puny. At the end of these wonderful counters next to the entrance they sometimes sold improbably lurid ice-creams - an almost frighteningly purple ‘Mulberry’ for example - and ‘Dairy Queens’ which were a soft ice-cream pulsed into their cones in a spiral form from a special machine. These ice-creams were so popular and their production so difficult that they could not be counted on to be available. I once shoplifted in the Chatswood Coles. My mother caught me clutching a tiny plastic capsule of cigarette lighter flints. She made me put it back and then asked me what I was going to do with it.

We were allowed to visit these fascinating bazaars occasionally on Saturday mornings and in the school holidays. We had to be careful not to get too carried away on Saturdays as the last bus left about twelve-thirty, the shops having closed at midday. These market places along Victoria Avenue in Chatswood and Willoughby Road and the Pacific Highway in Crows Nest fell next to silent on Saturday afternoons and Sundays, as did the city itself.

Besides Coles and Woolworths there were other fascinating shops: delicatessens which sold salmon croquettes, ox tongue and that great delicacy, steamed fowl, toy and hobby shops, book shops and haberdashers, bike shops and my favourite, pet shops. We were taken on the 266 or 267 to buy our school uniforms. I caught them after having caught the train from Artarmon Station to Chatswood to escape soccer on Artarmon Reserve.

Sometimes we caught them at noon on Saturday afternoon to see a special feature film showing at one of the several picture shows in Chatswood and Crows Nest (The Northbridge Picture Show only exhibited B Grades and serials on Saturday arvos). One Saturday my sister and I and a friend were allowed to go to the Crows Nest Metro to see Brigadoon. But it was not on. The ticket-box lady in her smart but glamorous uniform told us it was on at the Chatswood Arcadia. As we deliberated our plight a tram going down Willoughby Road to Chatswood Station pulled up. My sister and our friend were vacillating but I jumped on and thereby saw Brigadoon. My recounting of its wonders went some way towards mollifying my mother about my cavalier actions. Perhaps my sister and our friend saw something equally wonderful at the Crows Nest Hoyts if whatever was on at the Metro had been unpalatable (though nothing was). The other picture shows in Chatswood were the rather small Kings Odeon and The Esquire which was almost as plush as The Arcadia. The Arcadia survived being turned into a garage (petrol station) as it was not on a corner and that side of the railway line at Chatswood which it graced suffered a decline. The Australian Broadcasting Commission Symphony Orchestra used it for practice for many years and I think recorded there. I think I remember black clothed, instrument-case carrying types still wandering out of it in the eighties when I lived nearby. The other major fate of picture theatres was demolition for or conversion to supermarkets, the idea for which had just arrived from America. Castlecrag had one of – if not the first.

By the time I had got out of Brigadoon it would have been too late to catch a 266 or 267 home so I must have caught a tram. It passed The Esquire in Victoria Avenue and just after it had turned into Penshurst Street, The Gothic, which like the Northbridge Picture Show was given to almost unruly Saturday afternoon kids’ sessions. The décor of the Gothic however, gestured more firmly than the Northbridge Picture Show at Art Deco glamour. It became a supermarket. The Gothic partook a little of the schoolchild reputation of the infamous Green Parrot Milk Bar opposite where bodgies and widgies took refreshment milk shakes and ice-cream sodas.  I enviously wondered where they got their clothes. Surely no-one’s mother would sew lime green, Mitchell Blue or pink on black? What father would buy his son a pink and black Speedwell Racer (bike)? I would get off the tram in Mowbray Road, walk along it, up High Street and into Edinburgh Road. It was a route familiar to me from Willoughby Public. I never waited for a 203 at Castlecrag shops as it was only half a mile (let’s say a kilometre) further to my home and the route was like home itself. Besides, the 203 did not run on the weekends. I probably floated home on this occasion, the sights and sounds of Brigadoon being reprised in my head.

I wish I could remember the last time I caught the 266 or 267, as I can the last time I caught a tram – in order to return to my high school from a visit to Willoughby Public for my last Salk vaccine draught against polio. There were no more trams on the North Shore after 1958. I have a memory of standing at the corner of Eastern Valley Way and Edinburgh Road in my school uniform having alighted from a trip from Chatswood, probably after a game of soccer on Artarmon Reserve. There were clusters of kids in school uniforms on three of the four corners and I felt I was growing up. But surely that cannot have been the last time?

THE 190

The 190 went to Palm Beach. Its route still holds great charm for me though it has changed much since the days when Narrabeen High School was a swamp and Warriewood was interesting for its vistas of tomato plant glasshouses with broken panes and The Boots and Saddle Riding School with its grazing ponies. Home construction did for it and wider roads to take all the cars streaming into town from those once fairly remote locations, the Northern Beaches. They were backed by bush clad hills broken by the occasional red tiled and corrugated iron roofs.

I boarded it in Falcon Street into which it had turned after crossing the Bridge. It journeyed through Neutral Bay, Cremorne and Spit Junctions which were interesting enough but then it began the gentle descent to Spit Hill at the top of which was Parriwi Junction and the first glimpses of the wide Pacific, at this point through the North and Middle Heads of Sydney Harbour. The Pacific billowed its breath through the open windows. Sometimes you would glimpse the Manly Ferry heaving as it crossed the Heads. For a few weeks in early summer the steep descent down Spit Hill to the Spit Bridge offered a Renoir-Monet-Gauguin as the mauves and smoky pale lilacs of bougainvillea and jacaranda profused on the Beauty Point hillside. The Spit itself was very charming with its row of Norfolk pines and the clear green water flowing though the very narrow passage further into Middle Harbour. We could see Castlecrag Boat Shed from which our father rowed my sister, brother and I on Sunday mornings to a swimming meet at Northbridge Baths. It was a dark green shed with slips on which some launch or yacht was always having its bottomed scraped and then it grew another storey, turned light blue and was a presence on the waterfront.

The old Spit Bridge was two laned and, if I remember correctly, the middle section rose to allow yachts, ferries and the bigger kind of launch through into the Roseville reaches of Middle Harbour – past Pearl Bay, Quakers Hat Bay, Sailors Bay which I knew from nights spent bobbing on phosphorescent water trying to catch bream with our lines just off the bottom but more often hauling in toadies which blew their poisonous spines out at us, Powder Hulk Bay, Sugarloaf Bay which I also knew well, Bantry Bay … We prayed the bridge would not open before we passed, as the raising of its road, the passing of the boats and the lowering seemed to take ages. My sister, brother and I scattered some of our mother’s ashes in the waters of The Spit, the rest in the waters of Careel Bay at Palm Beach.

The 190 ascended steeply away from The Spit, winding up Battle Boulevard which offered glimpses back towards Clontarf and Balmoral. It seemed to pass through trees as the houses on one side were below the road and on the other elevated with front gardens which hid them somewhat. One night in the seventies I caught a 190 to see a surf film somewhere – Collaroy? Avalon? – and as I was very anxious and desperate, rashly took a lot of tranquillisers. It was at this point on the journey my shoulder muscles uncoiled. The sensation was extraordinary. They had been tense for so long.

The 190 rolled along the ridge of Balgowlah hill, bearing me ever closer to the beaches. But first it had to pass that dispeller of Northern Beach magic, Brookvale Oval. What relief when the Grand Final arrived in October, the football season was over and summer was almost upon us. Dee Why has become increasingly unlovely over the decades. I hope the nadir was reached when the Council indulged some graffiti artists who were allowed to express their misanthropic vision in the main bus shelter.

Dee Why shops gave way to the Dee Why lagoons and the magnificent sweep of Long Reef back to Dee Why Beach, then as the 190 rounded  the hill into Collaroy … the whole coastline evaporating in salty light. You are there. Narrabeen with its lagoon, Mona Vale … the detour avoiding the Newport Hill around by the Newport Arms Hotel thence into the surf beach part of Newport where I spent so many childhood holidays.

Always at Easter when the water had begun to turn champagne chill and clear after the fizzy lemonade of summer. We were bought Easter eggs from a charming English woman who ran a small shop up a drive, perhaps it was a converted garage in front of her home. She allowed us back many times as we deliberated our choices. Girls fantasising about being in the arena at the Easter Show exercised their ponies on the oval in front of our rented holiday house. There were no board riders to speak of in the surf. In the afternoons we would walk around to the wharf below the Newport Arms and fish – nearly always yellowtails but sometimes mackerel which had to be bled. I gutted with great expertise. I doubt I could take a fish off a hook these days. I abjured fishing on one of those phosphorescent nights in Sailors Bay when I was seventeen and had actually caught a little bream: it was too beautiful lying, fibrillating in the moonlit bottom of the boat.

Avalon and then around the curve where the Victa House hovered, an Earthed flying saucer, before the camping ground and Palm Beach itself. We traipsed the sand and climbed the impossibly steep and rocky track to Barrenjoey Lighthouse. We believed that once a month a Landrover took supplies up this improbable road to the lighthouse keeper. ‘But what about milk?’ we asked our mother. ‘They have powdered,’ she replied.

In later years I caught the 190 and then the ferry to stay at Patonga. Now you can catch the ferry to Ettalong. Decades previously my father had told me there used to be a service but the crossing across the mouth of the Hawkesbury was too dangerous. And indeed there are bomboras. I have never made that crossing. Perhaps I will. Once I caught a seaplane from Rose Bay to Palm Beach. My fellow passengers were a shallow wooden crate of cream cakes going to a restaurant. It was a wonder to me that the cream was not contaminated with the dense reek of petrol in the cabin. The pilot flew low over the beaches as we traversed the Peninsula, it seemed I could just jump out and be on Warriewood Beach, the same with Newport pool where we, being good swimmers and the pool being confined and mostly shallow, were allowed to go by ourselves each morning of our holidays. It was bliss to be buffeted or swept off the far wall by big waves, or even over the near wall and along the gutter made by the high tide running on the beach side. Naturally we did not tell our parents of these adventures. Once I saw the pool drained. It was full of fish, big ones too.

We would walk back to our holiday home, our wet cossies chafing, often clutching our towels about us as a cool autumn breeze blew us chill.

I don’t think we ever made it around the rocks to Bungan which was rather inaccessible and wild. The house the poet Christopher Brennan lived in when he fled from the disgrace of his dismissal from Sydney University perched on Bungan cliff. Right on the top of the headland between Newport and Bungan stood a little castle. Not as beautiful as our own Willis’ Castle overlooking Sugarloaf Bay but more romantic and wild, partaking of the local sandstone more than the Scotch Baronial Willis’, the yellowish sandstone blocks of which had a bushfire patina.

Many, many years later I was to take part of the 190 route in the 180 which would deviate at Dee Why, taking me up to Collaroy Plateau to visit my mother in the War Vets Nursing Home. Later, the 185 which would drop me off just before Narrabeen so I could climb the hill to visit her in the Collaroy Aged Care Facility. After my visit I would walk along Narrabeen Lakes, past ducks galore and rabbits and bladerunners to catch the L190 at Narrabeen shops (it has become an ‘Express’, stopping at major shopping centres only) back into the city and my work. I would slump in one of its seats comatose with the horror of the weekly observation of her terrible, inevitable decline.

I tried to use the 190 to find my way.  Still at school, I would catch it every now and again on Saturday nights in the hope I would find other young people interested in literature and the arts (about which I knew next to nothing). I felt they would live on the Peninsula, if anywhere. I had glimpsed some such, but too old – beatniks probably, emerging from Rowe Street into Castlereagh Street in the city after drinking black coffee and smoking Sobranie Black Russians, no doubt. They were beyond my desires. So, desperate, I caught the 190 in winter, sat upstairs (we are still in the era of the old green and brown Leylands and maybe Daimlers) and smoked (Stuyvesants) while reading Literature. Swinburne comes to mind. Incomprehensible but I gave him a go. There were young people but I was so alarmed by them that I immersed myself in Swinburne or a book on the Pre-Raphaelites (what were they on about?) and chain smoked. I remember looking up to get off at Newport and being appalled to see the number of cigarette butts around me and my black duffle-coat covered in ash. The young people had noticed too and were amused.

I would buy a cardboard cup of milky coffee and sit on the cold sand at Newport, smoke another cigarette and catch the bus home. Once my sister came with me to see what the interest was but she could discover none.

Back at Falcon Street we caught the 207 home.

THE 207

The 207 ran from town to East Lindfield and was the bus we most often caught when the 203 was not running or when we could not be bothered waiting. There has been no time in my life when there was not a 207. When it first reached its terminus in East Lindfield the setting must have seemed like remote bushland to the driver. Now there is a 208 but it came after my time on the North Shore. At the 207 terminus was a track which led to a shack a woman my neighbours knew lived in. She was English and had been a medical student but something had happened and she came to Australia. In those days there were shacks in the bush all over the place, left over from the Depression when people had to live where they could and from the times when people had to have somewhere to live while their houses were being built or they built them. I loved shacks. They had corrugated iron rain-water tanks and shutters which propped open instead of windows and doors with brown porcelain handles from other places. The English woman lived alone in her shack down this enchanting bush track along which she walked every day to catch the 207 to town and her work. She had summonsed my neighbour to collect a microscope and slides and I accompanied him to pick them up. He was considered to be of an age now when such things would interest him and be good for him. She warned us not to break the slides for some of them contained germs. This seemed improbable to me as the slides were obviously old: surely the germs would have died? All the same I was a little apprehensive about releasing typhus and cholera into our quarantined air. The legend of Typhoid Mary was still amongst us.

I caught the 207 on one of the happiest days of my life. It was cold and a strong wind was blowing, driving showers before it. It was the university holidays and I was idling the morning away with my dear friend Christine Ronald. We caught the 207 to Northbridge to go to a café. Christine would have drunk tea and I may have had coffee. I most certainly had a piece of cake. It was a fluffy, lemon cheese cake – absolutely delicious. We were dressed against the cold and for the moment free of the dread of the future. We were safe, secure, in good moods. I was possessed by a gentle but very powerful happiness. We talked and smoked in the café. It had paintings for sale on its walls. I thought one was marvellous. Rather Graham Sutherland, it caught for me the atmosphere of The Bulwark in Castlecrag, recently extended and built upon – winding through bush which the sun could only dapple occasionally because The Bulwark ran along the bottom of the wrong side of the ridge. Water trickled down the hill and gathered in clear puddles and pools beside the newly built road. Strange tiny frogs, black with a red splodge on their minute backs floated immobile in some of these cold clear puddles. I suppose they are extinct now.

We decided to catch the 207 from Northbridge to visit a school friend of Christine’s who live in East Lindfield. My happiness gradually dissolved as the 207 curved up hill and down dale towards our destination in the leafy flatness of East Lindfield. Our visit was very pleasant though.

My mother decided I must accompany her to the pictures. It was a week night in winter and I was about seven. But she must go. I was buttoned into my winter coat and we set off along Edinburgh Road. I was terrible pleased though my mother did not say much. It must have been important.

We caught the 207 which had very few passengers going towards town at that time of night and got off just before the Harbour Bridge. With many admonitions about traffic my mother hurried me across the vastness of four lanes (also very quiet) to the North Sydney Orpheum, about the last building before the Bridge began. I have no recollection of the film. Maybe it was incomprehensible to me. I was asleep on my feet while we waited in the cold and dark for the 207 to carry us home. It was that kind of sleepiness we observe only in young children, the kind which would possess through earthquake and bomb blast. No doubt my mother shook and encouraged me awake to almost no avail. I was probably too heavy for her to carry. The 207, with its yellow headlights must have finally appeared to carry us back for the walk down Edinburgh Road. I do not think this event was repeated. The Orpheum was swept away by the Warringah Express Way which was supposed to ease the nightly traffic jam on the Bridge but did not.

Who knows what the pictures offered to women trapped at home with kids at that time? From my classroom at Willoughby Public I had watched, girder by girder, the raising of the Channel Nine tower until finally a helicopter bore its summit antenna into place. Did T V with its determined brightness, its cooking and sewing programs, its crappy American series, offer desperate housewives any escape? Anyway soon after T V they were prescribing valium by the scoopful. What had my mother sought from the flickering silver screen? What hope did she receive?

Christine and I caught the 207 to and from university. We would get off in East Willoughby where I now lived and walk to either of our homes for toasted cheese sandwiches and cups of tea. How indulgent our parents were, for it was clear neither of us was in any way a serious student. We often met friends on the bus also making their way to and from university. We all smoked – at the back of the bus. The double-deckers were now being replaced by the smart blue and white single deckers which would soon pronounce bus conductors unnecessary – the driver himself (no women yet) could collect the fares as the passengers embarked. Signs still cautioned against talking to the drivers.

I worked as a bus conductor in the uni holidays. It was the best job I have ever had. We students worked broken shifts which meant we worked the early peak hours, had the middle of the day off and then worked the evening peak. The peripatetic life suited me. And I was discovering whole areas of Sydney I had not been acquainted with when I was leant out from my home depot (North Sydney) to other depots around Sydney. Obsessive and timorous at first, I soon learned to make fares up on routes I had not yet been to the end of. One would ask if the passenger knew how much the fare was (you could always tell when they lied, in any case the liars would instantly correct you if you overestimated the cost). Buses traversed the most improbable routes – Balmain Wharf to Strathfield Station, say. The passengers were fascinating. On about my second day, on the 238 from Balmoral Beach to Athol Wharf, an old lady who had doubtless survived Auschwitz, clasped my trembling hand with her diamonded one and smiling said, ‘It is a very easy job.’ I was desperate to prove myself in this my first real job. Fortunately we students did not have to punch the tickets with the number of sections the passenger was travelling.

My other duty as a bus conductor required me to stand at very busy stops with buses leaving in streams in the peak hours and transmit tickets from a machine hanging from my hips after having collected the fare and tossed the money into the capacious leather pouch slung from my shoulders. This was before decimal currency; the old copper pennies weighed a lot and bus fares were not a matter of paper currency. My endless mornings and afternoons at Willoughby Public doing absurd calculations paid off for this very brief period then decimal currency arrived. The drivers were grateful for this assistance.

I rather fancied myself in the thick navy cotton bomber jacket style shirt open at the neck and the incredibly heavy and hot serge trousers.

The 207 left town in this period from the top of Martin Place. Christine and I often caught it after having had a drink (frascati, toquay, white frontignac …) in Lorenzini’s wine bar then in Elizabeth Street. It was also a favourite gathering place before heading out for drinks at the Windsor Gardens Hotel in Paddington on a Saturday night.  If we missed the last one going home (11:40) we would walk to Wynyard and catch a 273 Chatswood Station, never a favoured bus as far as I was concerned, partly because it passed through a resolutely urban landscape of shopping centres and office buildings along busy roads. We would get off at the North Willoughby shopping centre bus stop where The Gothic had been and walk to her place from which I would walk home.

I caught the train to her funeral and walked from Chatswood Station to a small stone church hidden away off the Pacific Highway. It was an almost unbearably hot and humid day in February. The church was so full that people had to stand outside. I was ushered to a seat in a front pew. We had been estranged for twenty years. As the song goes, I always thought I would see her one more time again. Her death was a great shock to me. I was informed of it by email which I took at work. No-one had warned me she had cancer.

Towards the end of my time at university I had abandoned the 207 - I had been given a car for my twenty-first. I gave it to Christine when I moved to Melbourne.

THE 311

The second time I caught the 311 was to go to Kings Cross in the hope of finding Christine a twenty-first birthday present. I was at my wits’ end. Presents so often disappointed her; she took one’s imaginative failure as a failure of empathy, of appreciation. And I did not have much money.

Non-drinkers and non-smokers are impossible to buy presents for: so went a mantra of our coterie. She was certainly neither but I could hardly give her a leather-covered spirits flask or a cigarette-lighter (she already had one and a little tartan purse ashtray she used to get out while smoking her way through almost unendurable tutorials).

Surely in the Cross I would come across some reasonably priced treasure in an obscure boutique?

The first time I caught the 311 was at its stop outside Wynyard Station in George Street.  It turned into Hunter Street to meander through the city up to Macquarie Street then on to St Mary’s Cathedral down into Woolloomooloo past Harry’s Café De Wheels and up the lovely Macleay Street and into Kings Cross after its deviation down and around Elizabeth Bay. On this first journey I had got off in Macleay Street, crossed the road outside the old, scandalous Rex Hotel to a boutique opposite and bought a pale blue linen shirt at a very reasonable price. This shirt has remained my Platonic ideal of a shirt; in the nature of such things I have never found its like again.

It was perhaps this experience that inspired the belief I would find something exquisite for Christine if only I trusted where the 311 would take me.

This time I got on it in Hunter Street for the 207 now also stopped there after crossing the Bridge before going on to its city terminus (at Phillip Street?).

I bought Christine a brass Moroccan filigree ball. It held a candle. I was in love with Henry James’ The Golden Bowl at the time and thought of it as a kind of golden bowl.

It did not do the trick; Christine was obviously disappointed. But years later she used it to light a dinner party and it created a magical Von Sternberg effect. By then brass products, after having been out of fashion for four decades, were ‘in’ and the quality of the golden bowl was far superior to what was then so readily available. I felt it had come into its own.

The 311, having gone through Kings Cross, continues to Railway Square via Oxford Street before continuing on its roundabout route back to Circular Quay. To this day, the drivers have to warn passengers hoping to be transported from Central Railway to Circular Quay or vice versa that the trip is very indirect. I always want to interfere and advise those who are tourists to take it for they will get an insiders’ view of Sydney very cheaply.

I moved to Elizabeth Bay to escape the irksome heteronormativeness of the North Shore. I had been going to parties and dinners there for years and when an opportunity arose to share a lovely flat, jumped.

The era of those dinners and parties evaporated with Sydney’s spreading sophistication and the property boom. In the seventies and eighties those dinners and parties were held in grand old deco flats, amongst the first built for inner city living in Australia. The parties waxed and abated  through them to all hours without the neighbours calling the police. Heavens knows they were decorous in their fashion. These days my neighbours invite people over to bellow at the plasma football and the police are called promptly at eleven if there are any signs of hilarity. I miss drag queens turning up at midnight.

And being able to pick bay leaves. Where the 311 turns to pass ‘Boomerang’, a Spanish Mission mansion built by a man who made his fortune selling penny song books in the Depression, is a block of flats built on what used to be part of the ‘Boomerang’ estate. Outside this block of flats struggled a little bay tree (it did not get enough light) spilling over onto the footpath. For many years, every three months or so, I would sally forth scissors in hand to snip say six leaves for drying. Not after this block of flats was renovated. There was a singing lesson going on inside. It stopped. A window shot up and a ferocious but amused face demanded to know what I was doing. Sure enough of my legal rights I replied, ‘Why do you need to know that?’ The face had a good time abusing me.

Next time I was at the Kings Cross organic markets I bought a packet of bay leaves. Later, when I was going for a walk I noticed the bay tree had been cut to the ground. I was in for another shock when I got to ‘Boomerang’. One could no longer glance in at the little Alhambra gardens with their tiled pool and splashing fountain because the new owner had clad the Spanish wrought iron gates in massive sheets of black prison iron and filled the port holes in the stucco wall with opaque glass. They sure don’t believe in giving anything away in Elizabeth Bay these days.

In this spirit Sydney Buses cut the 311 service. Previously it had run in both directions every twenty minutes during the day with increases in peak hours. Though its devious route has been altered often in fairly minor ways over the years, Sydney Buses had neglected to reduce its frequency. One alteration in route saw the 311 now turning into Elizabeth Street instead of Macquarie on its journey to the Quay. This change bred the conspiracy theory that David Jones department store had somehow influenced this route change in order to allow the women off at  David Jones Elizabeth Street store outside which the 311 now stopped. This change also required that you caught it home at the bus stop outside the Castlereagh Street entrance to this store instead of outside the Births and Deaths offices next to Saint Mary’s Cathedral at the end of Macquarie Street. The convenient-to-DJs theory was shattered when the bus stop for home was again moved, this time to a location in Elizabeth Street not at all convenient to DJs. The vagaries of the route from William Street into Woolloomooloo hence up into the Cross has confused many a driver. One night I myself saved one from imminent emotional breakdown caused by these vagaries.

The bus stops in Macleay Street defeat all but those who catch the 311 daily. They and their accompanying shelters are a dreadful uniform mélange designed to confuse all. Stops and shelters dedicated to tourist routes are next to regular 311 stops and shelters and the signage amongst the sensory confusion of the street is so minimalist as to make distinction between them impossible though their different functions are jealously insisted upon by the bus drivers. One can only conclude the strategy is deliberate by a government department which has betrayed its ‘core business’ for two decades now. Any regular commuter on the 311 could tell them how to fix this particular source of frustration and dismay.

Those of us who catch the 311 form a community; like the 203, it is almost impossible to get on it and not know someone. Travelling on the 311 one learns who has a new partner, who has fallen ill (they tell you they are off to the specialist in Macquarie Street or to visit so-and-so in St Vincent’s Hospital) and who has new neighbours who have no idea. One regular turned from her seat in front to inform me of the sudden death of a man she knew I had known for several decades. This, even though she passed by my home most days and had my phone number. For years she, I and a few others ,including a schoolboy whose wedding I later attended, caught the first bus of the morning at its pivotal stop, the loop Elizabeth Bay Road makes at its end (in Castlecrag, we called this roundabout effect beloved of Walter Burleigh Griffin who laid out the southern side of the hill which the suburb straddles, ‘islands’).

After circling its Elizabeth terminus loop then going down past ‘Boomerang’, up by Elizabeth Bay House and into Greenough Avenue, the fate of 311 passengers is sealed, for it is at this point it either turns right towards the Quay or left towards the Railway. Regulars know one can never be quite sure where it is actually headed until this point for the drivers can neglect the written indicator and the number indicator is 311 regardless of Quay or Railway destination. Many drivers express irritation with any passenger who dares to seek reassurance that the bus is going where it says it is going.

That the bus indicator says 311 for these opposite routes has always been a source of confusion – increasingly so when the area filled with hotels to cater for Sydney’s inflating tourist trade. The post Olympics dysphoria saw that balloon deflate, its shrinkage marked by the conversion of hotel after hotel into apartment blocks. The converted hotels have been filled with residents fleeing the fatal suburbs. Many of whom are young couples ready to resile when the kiddies need a yard to play in. They hope by then their apartments have risen in value concomitant with their salaries and they can afford the sort of traditional home in the type of traditional suburb which will see no diminution of their status. When the kids are off their hands, no doubt they will move back and spend their time between the city and perhaps a rural or beach retreat. Those who do not have children have, where allowed and sometimes where not, dogs, some of rare breed and immense dimension. I recently met a ‘French Terrier’. It was the size of a grizzly.

One ages on the 311. At a certain point you start to catch it up the hill to the supermarket and wait for it outside Kings Cross railway station to carry you back down again.

I have asked several Mayors in person if I might not graze a donkey on the grassy Elizabeth Bay ‘island’ bound by the Elizabeth Bay Road loop. Some just stared at me. One laughed. His Honour John Fowler (I was informed he liked to be bowed to) said he would prefer I kept Angora goats, one of which might assist me with a pannier on its back to carry my groceries home from Coles (which is what I wanted the donkey for); the others might provide the basis of a local cheese industry. That shut me up.

If it arrives on time, the 311 is wonderful for catching to the Opera House to see whatever, though the wait to be carried home again afterwards can be cruel. I also use it to go to Sydney Theatre Company productions. I get off at the Circular Quay stop and walk through the Rocks and down a huge and mossy flight of stone steps and I am almost there. I dare say I will be murdered on this route one night trying to get through the Rocks to catch it home again. Better that than a nursing home.

CODA: THE PRIVATE BUSES

I will take two examples of private bus routes as evidence of the magic they have brought to my life.

In the days when I caught them they were characteristically khaki as if, in their devotion to their duties, they had not yet had time to adjust to the fact that the war was over.

Occasionally we did not go to Northbridge Baths for a swim because my parents had decided on a picnic day. These were nearly always Sundays when buses were few and far between. We all walked along Edinburgh Road to catch the 207 to Babbage Road, East Roseville. At Babbage Road we waited in a sandstone bus shelter for the Private Bus which went from Chatswood Station to the wilds of French’s Forest to arrive. It was a small, rugged looking bus rather like the 266 and 267 for a large bus was not required on such a route – few needed to visit the poultry farms of French’s Forest. It wound down Roseville hill and let us off at Roseville Baths. Above the Middle Harbour shoreline which ended at the baths was a pleasure garden/park with a winding path and garden walls of little sandstone bricks. If I had to guess, I would say it was the result of a Great Depression public works program. This was where we also went for Sunday School picnics with their horrible races and uncharitable games. At one extent of the Roseville pleasure garden/park was Roseville Boatshed in front of which Uncle Ernie, Nana Page’s son and a childhood friend of my father’s, kept his boat. My father on one or two occasions took me out in it. It was of the old school with an engine midships which was started with a leather strap wound around a thingummybob flywheel and heaved. Once Uncle Ernie’s boat broke down in the middle of Middle Harbour. To my embarrassment, my father, having declared the engine ‘seized’, hailed a passing boat and had us towed back to Uncle Ernie’s mooring off Roseville Boatshed to which the rowboat we had used to get to it had been moored. My father was a marine engineer, son of a marine engineer. At a later date he impressed me by simply hailing a passing vessel to take us from the city to a dock at Balmain. One glorious sunset my cousin and I caught fish after fish off Uncle Ernie’s boat. I think they might have been mackerel. I remember my father’s lack of excitement. We were very fussy about our fish in those days, no-one would eat mullet, for example.

Roseville Bridge was, I think, even smaller than the old Spit Bridge. It also came to be a terrible bottle-neck as it offered an alternative route through French’s Forest to the Northern Beaches and many people now drove to the beach on the weekend. Late one Sunday afternoon we failed to get the private bus from outside the Roseville Baths; a crowd swept onto it and there was no more room. Roseville Hill up to the 207 bus stop was too steep and long for us to walk so we waited in the heat for a long time. Eventually another Private Bus appeared and we caught it. There was another wait for the 207. My mother flew into a rage, abusing my father for failing to provide a car. After he died she bought one; it liberated her from much.

Roseville Baths was unpleasantly muddy at low tide but on the whole we found it an exciting change from the very familiar Northbridge Baths. Beyond it, past the Roseville Bridge was a most interesting little dredge mining sand amongst  the mangrove tidal swamp. Now the whole area, like the playing fields under the Cammeray ‘Suspension’ Bridge has been ‘reclaimed’ and is a municipal tribute to nature. A freeway flew over the old Roseville Bridge thus relegating the old winding Roseville hill to a complete backwater. I wonder if the pleasure garden/park is still visited. Once, returning long after I had left it to the university I had attended, I encountered a friend from those days marooned there. He had had some sort of breakdown and was now a fixture. He was lying in a greasy overcoat at the entrance to Manning House beneficently addressing those entering and leaving. We fell into conversation and he told me he had seen fairies in the pleasure garden/park. I could only believe it.

Before I fled the North Shore for Elizabeth Bay I lived in Chatswood not far from the old Arcadia Picture Show. Each working day I caught the train to Hornsby. Forced onto my resources by a train strike, I discovered a private bus which perambulated up the old Pacific Highway. This was a nostalgic journey for me as the old route had been superseded by various freeways and bypasses and I had not followed the Pacific Highway up the North Shore for years. It was a most enjoyable leisurely journey with people getting on and off at various recognisable points such as the stop for the Ku-ring-ai College of Advanced Education and P L C (Pymble Ladies’ College, once Presbyterian Ladies’ College). The most interesting were young women with transparent skin, stretched carriages and hair pulled tightly back into buns; there must have been a serious ballet school along the route (I cannot now remember where they got off). They seemed so young to have dedicated their opportunities to that terrible life. As a teacher, I worried for their education.

This Private Bus was blue and spacious and quiet in every way. It carried me through the past now sidelined to its advantage like the lost route down to Roseville Baths. I caught it every now and again as a panacea for the stresses of my working life. It got me through.

Ian MacNeill