The Good Boy (27 page)

Peter Millane and Nora (nee Fyans) set up house in Campbells Creek, on the outskirts of Castlemaine and, like his father Seamus, Peter had five sons (and one daughter), the middle son being Will, my grandfather. Will went on to have five sons too (plus two daughters, one of whom was my mother).

In 1862, less than 30 years after the arrival of the first settlers in Melbourne, and buoyed by the enormous wealth resulting from the discovery of gold in central Victoria, the government of the Colony decided on a ‘national project': the construction of a railway from Melbourne to the goldfields in Bendigo, passing through those at Castlemaine. Peter Millane and his older brother Patsy (Patrick) joined what became the Victorian Railways and were involved in work on the lines north and west from Castlemaine. Patsy worked as a surveyor and ended up in the head office of the railways in Melbourne. Peter stayed ‘in the field', moving his family slowly north-west as the lines were extended to Maryborough, Dunolly and on to Tarnagulla, Bealiba and St Arnaud (and eventually to Mildura). Will, my grandfather, and his brothers Walter and Jim, followed the family's earlier example and joined in the grocery business, extending it beyond Castlemaine by loading their goods onto a wagon, following the prospectors and diggers into the bush, and supplying them with the picks and shovels and flour, tea and sugar that they needed, and the booze and tobacco that they did not need but certainly did want – all, it would seem, at outrageously inflated prices. The partnership of the three brothers eventually broke up, however. My grandfather chose to settle down in Maryborough where he ran the grocery business alone from a shop, with residence above, in a prominent building in the main street. It was at this stage that Will met my grandmother, at a ball in nearby Carisbrooke. My grandmother provided me with a clue as to what went wrong with the partnership of the three brothers when she said one day: ‘They should have made a fortune – well, they did make a fortune, but Jim and Walter drank too much and left all the work to your grandfather.' The demon drink was the devil among the ‘clever Millanes'.

Peter and Nora were living in Dunolly, some fifteen kilometres north of Maryborough, when Nora contracted cancer and died. My grandfather was very close to his mother and, according to my grandmother, (Fanny's daughter Gell Sullivan whom he was courting at the time), he drove his buggy or rode his horse out to see his mother every evening after closing the shop. My grandparents were married in the year after Nora's death and set up house above the shop in Maryborough, where my mother was born. She was baptised Mary Athenry (but was always called ‘Athen') and was said to have greatly resembled her grandmother Nora, the girl from ‘the fields of Athenry'. Will and Gell moved shop and home to Dunolly in 1901 and to Hamilton in the Western District a few years later. In Hamilton, Will took Jack Sullivan, his wife's brother, as a business partner and then merged their grocery and general business with the Strahan family's hardware store, creating the very successful ‘SMS' – Strahan, Millane and Sullivan – the town's first department store. Grandfather Will was a sensible, sensitive, intelligent, very hard-working man, one with strong feelings of loyalty towards his family and of love for his wife and children. He went to Mass every Sunday but practised a less devotional form of Catholicism than did his wife. He was very fond of animals, particularly of his horses, and rode, or drove his buggy, around Hamilton until retiring. He never drove a car. Never interested in sport other than horseriding (and, in retirement, lawn bowls), he always declined requests for financial support for the cricket, football, shooting and other sporting clubs. On the other hand, he was a tireless worker for the hospitals in Maryborough, Dunolly and Hamilton, spending many years on their governing boards.

Probably as a result of his experience with his two tipsy brothers, who tended to drink what they were supposed to be selling, he had a strong aversion to the consumption of alcohol, and visitors to his home were rarely offered more than an occasional glass of sherry. He seems to have almost been the ‘white sheep' of a rather wild family; while he and his brother Frank, in the railways in Melbourne, led settled, married lives and raised and educated large families, his erstwhile business partner brothers seem to have led rather precarious existences featuring only sporadic work, frequent bouts of drinking, unhappy marriages, neglected children and financial disasters. According to my mother, my grandfather would never accept that his two brothers had turned out so sadly, and was forever helping them out financially and trying to get them to start afresh. One died in Beechworth Psychiatric Hospital of alcoholic poisoning while the other disappeared into the Riverina and is rumoured to have been rescued, and wedded, by a wealthy widow.

The fifth and youngest brother, Joe, was almost lost from sight once his mother had died (when he was just 21). He seems to have gone to the Riverina with his older brother, Walter, and to have fairly quickly made his way to Sydney. There he made contact with the William Barrett Theatre Company, then touring the colonies from London, and in 1900 he sailed for England and took up a career on the stage, beginning with bit parts with the Barrett company which was playing in London in 1902. He worked his way up from minor roles to that of leading man and from collaborating in the writing to being both playwright and producer. Posters and photos show Joe as a rather handsome chap. He married Mabel Rose, a governess from St Helen's in Lancashire, who then joined him on the stage and in time played the leading lady in many of his productions. Her family looked askance at the young colonial who had involved their daughter in the Bohemian world of the theatre. The marriage produced two daughters, and in Canada there are now descendants of Joe's daughter Nora Elizabeth (his mother's names) who migrated there in the 1930s. From her we heard of Joe's strong interest in photography, and of his in-laws' decision in the 1930s to burn or otherwise destroy his very large collection of what they termed
risqué
and ‘art' photos. By 1915 Joe had been sharing the billing as co-author and leading man at the Theatre Royal in Leeds in the play ‘Somewhere a Voice is Calling'. Later, the Millane Players were advertised as presenting the play ‘Women and Wine' at His Majesty's Theatre, Carlisle. One cannot help but wonder whether these two titles indicate a surfacing of the wilder Millane genes in Joe's life on the other side of the world … and just what it was that seemed
risqué
in middle-class Lancashire in the early 1930s. Joe was visited by Will's son, Ray, my uncle, in the late 1930s and, having survived two world wars while living in the UK, he died there in the Midlands in 1950. Ray spoke glowingly to me of the time spent in England with his uncle Joe whom he likened to his own father, ‘a wonderful man, just like Dad' … but Joe remained for me an adventurous, artistic and somewhat mysterious member of the family.

My grandfather had just one sister, my Great-Aunt Nora. I never met her but I do remember taking letters to the letterbox near my grandparents' house in Bendigo addressed to ‘Mrs Nora Waurn' in Sydney and asking my grandmother who Mrs Waurn was. The answer had been that Mrs Waurn was my great-aunt, that she lived in Woollahra in Sydney with her only child, Mabel, and Mabel's husband, Jack, who ‘was very good to his mother-in-law'. I subsequently discovered that Mabel and my mother were of almost exactly the same age, that Mabel had spent holidays with her cousins in Hamilton and that she and my mother had not got on very well as teenagers. (There was a story told by my Aunt Nell, and rather unconvincingly laughed off as ‘nonsense' by my mother, that on one visit Mabel had ‘stolen' my mother's local admirer/boyfriend for the duration of her visit.)

In the late 1970s when in Sydney with my mother, we visited Mabel who was then in hospital with a fractured hip. I was amazed at how alike the two cousins looked, and at how similarly they seemed to speak and think … no longer sparring but cautiously reminiscing. The family genes were very much in evidence. I was a little shocked to hear Mabel running down her long-dead mother, Auntie Nora. ‘She went and left me in that Good Shepherd place in Abbotsford',
⁵⁴
Mabel complained. ‘Left me there for two years while she went gadding about God knows where! I'll never forgive her for that.' My mother later explained that Auntie Nora, like her brother my grandfather, had not been at all happy when her father had remarried within a few months of the death of his wife. Nora had moved to Melbourne with him but had moved out of the house there when the second wife moved in and had married the ‘first man who proposed' … who turned out to be a handsome English cad and con man, by the name of Waurn (my grandmother said he was some sort of ‘Remittance Man' who had claimed to be related to the Lascelles family in Harewood, England). The marriage had lasted just long enough for Nora to become pregnant with her daughter Mabel and Waurn had then disappeared, leaving Nora penniless. She survived the following few years with the help of my grandfather and his young wife, who remained very close to her for the rest of their lives. When Mabel was of school age, Nora certainly did place her in the care of the Good Shepherd nuns at Abbotsford, and set off to make her living as a ‘commercial traveller', selling linen and lace to shops throughout Victoria and southern New South Wales. She made a success of this and within a couple of years had established a business and a home for herself and Mabel. In her old age she lived with Mabel in Sydney. Famously within the family, she was in bed in their harbourside home soon after the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1942 when a Japanese submarine started to shell the shoreline. Air-raid sirens went off and everyone was supposed to move to the air-raid trenches just beginning to be dug throughout the city. Auntie Nora declared: ‘They can bomb me in bed,' and refused to move. Fortunately, the submarine was quickly found and put out of action and no civilians, in or out of bed, were harmed.

Both Nora and Mabel were, I was given to believe, ‘pretty tough old birds'. Mabel inherited the Millane business acumen from her mother and successfully ran a number of small businesses in Sydney, even her own paintings meeting with some commercial success. According to my mother Mabel was always a ‘smart dresser', and at least once a year she would travel to Melbourne from Sydney to ‘buy up' at Le Louvre, for decades a temple of
haute couture
in Collins Street. Mabel once met my mother in the city for lunch on one of these visits and, after appraising my mother's outfit, probably bought ‘off the hook' at Myers or Ball &Welch or Georges, said, ‘For God's sake, Athen, go up to Le Louvre and get yourself something decent.' My mother thought Mabel was both eccentric and extravagant, Millane characteristics not shared by my mother, who seemed to have had more of the cautious Sullivan and steady Hockey genes in her make-up.

While my grandfather was a quiet chap, certain other Millanes were not really known as people of few words. One of them, my grandfather's first cousin Rupert, had so much to say to the courts and governments of Victoria that to keep him quiet he was, by a special Act of Parliament, declared a ‘Vexatious Litigant', i.e. he was denied further access to the courts and told to go away and to be quiet. This was the first instance in Australia of such legislation being passed.

Rupert was the son of Great-Uncle Patsy and Great-Aunt Anne. Rupert and his brother Gilbert were highly intelligent, well-educated gadflies, flitting from one idea to the next, one project to the next, initiating but rarely bringing to fruition all sorts of business, real estate and engineering ideas. In 1912 Rupert had won a design competition, the prize being a six-month trip to the United States. On his return he urged the Victorian Railways (for whom his father and grandfather had both worked) to replace steam trains by railmotors on the less-frequented country lines, as he had seen done in the USA. His proposal was eventually accepted, but the cheaper and under-powered versions of the railmotor introduced by the VR (against Rupert's advice) proved unsuccessful and were withdrawn after only a few years of operation. Rupert invented a cheap and quick way of building concrete houses, recycling old kerosene tins (of which there were plenty in those days) for the form-work, but the prototype house built in a Melbourne suburb did not conform to local building regulations, was described as ‘ugly' by neighbours, and despite Rupert's protests and lawsuits, was demolished by the local council. Then Rupert and a group of friends started bus services across the city, from Brighton to Preston, without securing the necessary vehicle registration from the Motor Registration Branch of the State government. Rupert argued strenuously in court over this issue, always representing himself and displaying an incredibly good grasp of the relevant legislation. The Melbourne
Truth
of 8th August 1931 gleefully reported, under the headline:

M
ILLANE DRIVES STAGE COACH THROUGH BUS LAW
He pays 5/- a year for a stage-coach licence to the Melbourne City Council; and by virtue of a statute of Charles II, he needn't, apparently, pay any more. Prosecutions were piled up against Millane and his friends. The City Council secured 37 convictions, involving £1168 in fines against him … and never col lected a penny. Now they cannot, because the Supreme Court has made an order in Millane's favour that practi cally sets aside at least one of his convictions, and the Crown allowed him a walk-over.

Eventually, of course, Rupert lost his battle against the government, and he served a six-month term in Pentridge Gaol for refusing on principle to pay the fines imposed. Once released and seemingly undeterred, he re-entered the fray and soon thereafter put up barricades in Collins Street and started to dig a hole in the footpath (just for fun?), as he had discovered, while browsing through the legislation, that it was then still legally possible to take out a ‘Miner's Right' over any Crown land, anywhere, to dig for gold. He paid his £5, obtained his certificate from the Mining Warden's office, which apparently did not check to see exactly where the prospecting was to be done, and dug his hole in the footpath of one of the city's main streets.