February beginnings: "You are my sunshine, when skies are grey"*

Cottesloe Beach, and Indiana Tea rooms, Perth,  Western Australia

"On this blazing February day a hot pungent wind brought aromatic scents to our nostrils after seven weeks at sea.  I struggled over the blistering sands, shod in highly unsuitable English boys' sandals, and felt a calamitous sense of loss.    Where were the white chalk cliffs?  Where were the coarse shingle, the diagonal concrete groynes with their threaded green slime and seaweed, the slippery chalk rocks over which one lurched with a shrimping net?  This had been the prospect from Rottingdean, framed by distant views of the Palace Pier three miles away in Brighton, and broken by an impressive row of cyclopean stone piles from the abandoned Maritime Railway.  This was the only 'seaside' I knew and it had always been backed, befriended, or overhung -- depending on the skittish changeability of damp grey English skies -- by towering chalk cliffs at least eight hundred feet high.
But Cottesloe Beach!
The sun melted the tar on the road and it stuck to the unsuitable sandals.  The sea was a series of deep translucent unbelievable blues.  It was Nile green and sapphire blue…"

The Road to Gundagai  Graham McInnes, 1965

Graham McInnes was eight when he and and his younger brother the novelist Colin MacInnes were uprooted to Australia,  after their mother had remarried, and as Mrs Angela Thirkell moved with her children and their stepfather to Malvern, Melbourne.  Perth was their first point of call  (I too crossed the Indian Ocean decades ago, and still remember how incredibly green and beautiful Perth seemed after weeks at sea) before sailing on to Melbourne. His memoir gives a vivid picture of growing up  there in the 1920s.

  Melbourne :  Flinders Street station and Swanston Road, 1927 

* "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine," Louisiana song lyrics, attributed to Jimmie Davies and Charles Mitchell, c. 1939

'Along the road to Gundagai' - new boys

"My brother and I came to be enrolled in Scotch College ('Oldest in Victoria; biggest in Australia; best in the world!!!') entirely by accident…. . Mother went along to interview the headmaster to see if he would accept us (and she him).  Though the creeper-clad surroundings appealed to her she was so shattered by the Head's devastating Australian accent that she did not honestly feel she could let us be corrupted to that extent. …..
So she went to visit the preparatory school of Scotch College, and there interviewed the Head,…. [His] command of English, his expression and accent were sufficient for Mother to be convinced that Good Old Scotch was where we were to go.

As new boys we received notebooks in which to do our homework. On the cover was a label with name, school, number and form.  We wrote in our borrowed* names, and our numbers, mine was 1064,  Colin's 1065. Opposite the word 'form' I wrote 2B, but Colin who had misread 'form' as 'from' thought he was supposed to write his address.  Spelling not being his strong point, he wrote: The 4 Gas Set, Melborn, Australia, Sea, World, Sola Systim, Univers.  The School's motto was Deo Patriae Litteris.  This was generally construed by the Latin scholars as follows: (To the glory of) God: (For the good of one's) country: and (for the advancement of) learning.  During my period at Scotch the student at the lamp of learning, hunched somewhat after the manner of Rodin's Le Penseur was replaced by the flag of St. Andrew, the voyaging lymphad, the Southern Cross and the Burning Bush common to both Moses and the Presbyterian Church."
[*surnames 'borrowed' from their stepfather, George Thirkell]

The Road to Gundagai  Graham McInnes