Immediate Neighbours: 21 - McLarty family; 25 - Pop McDonnell
Nearby Neighbours: Arne, Stella & Maureen Neilson; Bob, June, Alan & Anne Jobling
We arrived in Yallourn in May 1954 just after the Queen had visited. Dad had arrived some 9 months earlier and had been allocated 23 Tyers Avenue, and he borrowed Bill White's car to pick us up from the ship and drove us home. he had bought a kitchen table and chairs, a double bed for their bedroom, 2 single beds for our bedroom with a Koala on each - the bigger one for me, the smaller one for Anne (who was only 18 months old then). My mum was not impressed with the wood stove in the kitchen, an outside toilet - remember the night man - and a copper and mangle to do the washing (having come from her home in England with an electric stove, inside toilet and washing machine). My mum also disliked the colour green, and guess what our window sills were painted!! The houses were painted inside every 5 years and outside every 7 years - and when my mum asked if she could have blue window sills the painter said she could - if she was prepared to move!! as all the houses were colour coded and he wasn't prepared to change the plan.
The first day I went to the Primary School I walked home and after walking up from the school found myself in the back laneway which ran between the backs of Tyers and Narracan Avenues, and I couldn't remember what the back of our house looked like - so I was walking up and down the lane crying until Alan Mayes (the Taxi Service owner) who lived behind us, kindly came out of his garage and showed me where we lived.
Tyers Avenue had a lovely outlook - overlooking the town and Briquette factory - so when the wind blew one way all the washing was covered in brown coal from the mine, the other way and we got the APM smell! In front of our house was the park going around Reservoir Road and on the other side of Reservoir Road was the bushland in which all the kids around used to play and build tree huts - in time for the forestry workers to come in and cut them down. In those days the milkman delivered the milk in a horse drawn cart every evening - pouring it into the milk billy which was hung on the front gate - such excitement when we started getting milk bottles - except when the birds worked out how to get at the cream on the top by pecking into the silver tops. There were laneways between some of the streets, and I remember being dressed in my best Sunday clothes going down the laneways to Church singing away quite happily, until one of the boys on the other side of the fences told me to stop screeching.
I remember the night the Russian Sputnik came over Yallourn - all the families in the whole street was out in their back yard watching this bright light go across the sky. I remember looking on both sides of our house to see the neighbours all looking skyward.
...Alison Graham (Taylor) Aug 2014