I will start this story with my father, Charles Douglas Collin. Dad was born on the 2^nd June 1918 at 26 Newton Road in Wimbledon (today the suburb is called Merton) England, the first child of my Australian born grandfather and my English born grandmother. He was the first of five sons for Charles and Kate Collin. 

The Collin family moved to Australia in 1919, and in 1920 located themselves in Adamstown, the suburb where my grandfather had lived prior to going off to the Great War. My father’s early education was at Adamstown Primary School, and when the family moved to Wellington, his secondary education was conducted at Bowral High School. He did not tell me too much about Bowral, but I do know that whilst he was at the high school he did obtain a sports ‘blue’ for excellence in Rugby League and athletics. A ‘blue’ is the highest distinction that can be awarded for sporting ability at high school, and such awards are not given out lightly. If you take my school for example, in 40 years only 5 had ever been awarded. He only told me about this once and never brought up the subject again. He never seemed to have bragging rights on anything associated with his past. 

With the family returning to Adamstown from Wellington in late 1935, Charles Jnr at the age of 16½, started work at the Newcastle Lamp Works as a Capper. His job was to put the outer metal caps on the light bulbs. In 1936 he gained an apprenticeship at the BHP as a Boilermaker. During this apprenticeship, he was seconded to the Commonwealth Steel Company for eleven months to work on the erection of their new Open Hearth. 

In 1940 he left his employment at the BHP and moved to the State Dockyard which was being established at the Dyke End in the harbour. The war had just broken out and ship-building was an essential part of the war effort. Shipbuilding at the Dockyard started in 1942. Whilst building ships, he got the romantic notion that he would better serve the war effort if he enlisted and he tried to enter in the armed forces in 1941. He was not accepted however when they found that he was employed at the Dockyard. Again he tried in about 1943, and again he was rejected. Ships of note he worked on during the war were the Corvette Strahan, and the Frigate Condamine (1944). The Yard also produced what were known as ‘D’ Class Freighters, as well as barges for use in and around the islands of the Pacific. He told me in later years that Dockyard employees were two distinct groups, those who were disappointed about not being eligible to serve overseas because of where they worked, and those who were thankful that they were in an industry that kept them at home. They were however united in one thing – to produce quality work ahead of schedule, knowing that the war effort and the lives of many depended on their tradesmanship. 

Chas left the Dockyard around 1954, and started out in a business known as Collin & Kemp with his brother-in-law Albert. This business, amongst other things, manufactured and installed large steel water tanks for the Hunter District Water Board in and around the Newcastle district, but the brothers-in-law eventually went their separate ways in about 1959. My uncle Albert continued the business under the name of A.A.Kemp & Co until his retirement in about 1970. Chas went back to the Dockyard to his old job, but he only lasted two years as the environment had changed since his previous encounter. After running his own business and being a ‘jack of all trades’, it was hard to again get used to the unionism and the continual problems associated with demarcation etc that was rife in the Australian Shipbuilding Industry at the time. 

He worked for Frankipile until the mid 1960’s, and I can recall him being on a piling-rig at the BHP when I was still a trainee engineer. Dad moved to Production Welders in about 1965. This Firm went on to be called Newcastle Electrical Services. He had at last found his niche in life and he happily stayed with them making electrical switchboards until his retirement at Christmas 1982. 

On the family scene, Chas met my mother at Caldwell & Smith’s Dance School that was located in Hunter Street Newcastle in the block that is east of Civic Railway Station. She was Laurel Reeves, and was born on the 25^thMarch 1919 at 43 Phoebe Street Islington. Laurel was the eldest child of Harold Henry (known as Harley), and Frances Adelaide Reeves (nee Schroder).

Mum claimed that she spent the first twelve months of her life in an old butter-box on the counter of her father’s shop, as her parents served customers. She admits that her education was fairly basic, and she left Mayfield East Public School in sixth class (1932) to work in the family shop.  

Her father claimed she would better serve the family by working then, and being tall meant she could achieve this without too many questions being asked. So, although Laurel was only 13, she worked the shop and generally ran the business together with a local girl by the name of Daphne Dix (Cupples) who then became her lifelong friend. In later years this poor education would frustrate her with many opportunities missed because of that fact. She reasoned that she would have gotten somewhere if it was not for her father’s somewhat blasé attitude to education. In spite of this she was very worldly and I considered her as being as smart as a tack with above average intelligence. 

I asked her about her younger years but she was not very enlightening. She did not see anything that she did in her early years as being of interest to me and seemed to always change the subject. I asked her what she did as a teenager and never got an answer of substance. I asked her to describe to me her memories and feelings about ‘The Depression’, but apart from one or two generalities relating to the forced two years in Dungog because of that depression, nothing of substance was forthcoming. Even the photo below of her and the horse (or for that matter any other photo from the past) failed to trigger any animated discussion. 

So Laurel’s early years have come and gone without any kind of recognition apart from working in her father’s smallgoods shop from the age of 13, and that is kind of sad. 

Charles and Laurel were married at St. Peters Church of England in Hamilton. They went to live at 86 Bruce Street Cooks Hill as tenants of a Miss Hestelow (See chapter relating to life at Cooks Hill) and this was our abode until late 1959. They originally purchased a property in Ulick Street Merewether West, with a view to living there, but ultimately sold that to purchase a block of land in Kempster Road Merewether in the mid 1950’s with plans to build a new house on it. These plans were put on hold and the vacant block was sold to the then Manager of the State Dockyard. The family then moved to an old house at No.2 Pell Street Merewether in 1959 that was purchased for 4,600 pounds ($9,200). 

2 Pell Street was a four-bedroom house with great ocean views and for us kids it was a dream come true as it was only about 150 metres to the beach. There is a separate chapter relating to this house further on. When I look back on life I see that mum and dad had made a very special effort to get that home. It was their pride and joy and they had every reason to feel that way. He was ‘just a Boilermaker’ (his words, not mine) and yet he was there in Merewether living with Lawyers and the like, immensely proud of what he had achieved for his family on an ordinary wage. Having been old enough to understand the huge divide between Cooks Hill and Merewether in regards to social standing and thinking, Leonie and I can fully understand the achievement in getting out of Cooks Hill, something that our two younger brothers would not probably understand as they spent nearly all their young lives in Merewether. 

THE CHILDREN OF CHARLES AND LAUREL COLLIN 

Barry Charles                born Newcastle                        1944  -  

Leonie Frances              born Newcastle                        1947  - 

Mark Hayden                born Newcastle                        1954  - 

Bradley Warren             born Newcastle                        1956  - 

When I asked my parents what they would consider highlights in their life, they were somewhat muted. They were not very reflective people and sometimes I felt that the gleaning of history from them was akin to trying to get blood from a stone. They did agree however, that the day that World War II ended in 1945 was pretty special, and dad suggests that that particular day was the biggest drink known to man! In addition, moving to Pell Street Merewether in 1959 to their very own home was also considered a highlight. 

An interesting little side-light was when Charlie and Laurel were planning to go on their first overseas trip in 1980, Charlie could not get a passport because he theoretically did not exist. His mother Kate had brought him off the ship from England in 1919 in her arms, and it appears that he subsequently did not show up on the paperwork as being a passenger who disembarked. So in 1980 there was a mad scramble to get him made into an Australian citizen so that he could apply for a passport. We all had a bit of fun with this, including having a little ‘welcome to Australia’ party for our very own illegal ‘wetback’. 

Charlie retired in 1983 and used his retirement in the right way. He and Laurel were hardly at home, being on some trip or another. They seemed to live life to the full until Laurel started to slow down just a bit in the early 1990’s and Charlie’s knee started to give him a bit of concern. This knee was the one he used to apply pressure to steel plates when he had to rivet them together whilst ship building. You can imagine the impact loads that would go through this knee when the rivet gun (rattler) was used to knurl over the rivet head. He had been placed in a queue for a knee replacement, but the queue never seemed to get shorter, and being a pensioner, he had not been seen as a priority. 

I used to always think of my father as being bullet proof, and even at 80 he was still able to do most of the maintenance around the house. So it came as a great shock when he suffered a heart attack early in September 2000. He seemed to recover from that well enough to be sent home from hospital after about 5 days, although he did not look that well to us. He had a second attack on the 12^th September 2000 that took his life. I was fairly well devastated by this – upset because I lost my father who I believed would live forever – upset because I never got to say goodbye – and upset because I took him for granted throughout life, never really appreciating what he had done for me until he was gone. When I look back on life, I see that he was a major influence on mine. When I was a little boy he used to take me everywhere on his pushbike, including when I had to go to Newcastle Hospital when I was sick, and for visits to my grandparents in Adamstown. He took me to football games and motor bike races, just the two of us, as described in a later chapter, and when I was an adult he and I used to play golf and bowls together on a regular basis. I was playing Rugby in the 1960s and for two seasons he was our football team manager. Of course the boys used to dag him off because he was my dad, and he just loved it! He loved it because he was part of something and part of something that I was doing. He was a completely different man when you got him away from the family scene, away from Laurel and the restrictions that she unconsciously imposed on him. However he was always a dedicated husband and in the 1990s was rarely out of Laurel’s sight as he devoted himself to her needs because of her health. I see this man now as being ten feet tall, and despite the few shortcomings that he had, I will always consider him as a greater human-being than I will ever be. 

Charles was cremated and his ashes are at the Beresfield Memorial Gardens, East Chapel Cloister Lot P12. 

When I review my mother’s life I see her as the ‘power behind the throne’ in our family. Laurel normally had a determination about things and invariably got her way. It was interesting that when she described to me her own father Harley (and there was little love lost there) she was in fact describing herself. Her description of him was that he was a man who did not suffer fools too well, who was opinionated and hard to sway away from his aims. She would hate me to say this but in my mind she was a clone of her father. 

I noted when I was just a boy, Laurel’s great interest was tennis, which she played perhaps twice a week at various courts in Newcastle. And that’s the only memory that I have of her having a great interest in anything. When we purchased No.2 Pell Street, for several years in the 60s she worked in Charker’s Wine Bar in Hunter Street, no doubt to assist in paying off the mortgage. She told of various incidences at the bar that from time to time required the use of a baseball bat that was conveniently located under the counter. She was a ‘no nonsense’ woman whom the locals admired and respected. It was the ‘out of towners’ like sailors etc who occasionally needed to be physically explained the local code of conduct.  

So time marches on and in the 1990s Laurel was not enjoying the best of health, with Charlie being seen as the ‘carer’. To his credit, Charlie did a wonderful job in that role. When you compared their health, it was always considered that Charlie would outlast Laurel, that is, the ‘carer’ would outlast the ‘patient’. So it came as a great shock when Charlie died in 2000, leaving Laurel on her own. Mum tried living on her own with the help of family and of course assistance from Government Aged Care, but her health was deteriorating, and after a bout of pneumonia in 2002 decided to apply to move into an Aged Care Facility. In August 2002 she moved into the new Fig Tree Point Facility at Toronto and the house in Merewether was put up for auction to finance that move. The house was sold for $805,000 (a record for the street at the time) via an auction which was featured on a TV Show called “Hot Property” on the ‘Seven’ TV Network because of the great interest in the home and the skyrocketing property values in Merewether. 

Laurel lived at Fig Tree Point for about 20 months before succumbing to complications relating to an on-going battle with leukaemia on the 6 April 2004 at the Mater Hospital in Waratah. Her remains are located at the Memorial Gardens at Beresfield Crematorium, East Chapel Cloister Lot P13 beside Charlie’s ashes in Lot P12. 

And so for my side of the family, another generation passes on and we all move up one more rung on the ladder of life.