Wooley: Australia Day celebrations sure have changed over the years
My attempt to recall childhood on the plateau might well be an unreliable memoir, but I know there was never the slightest thought of the 26th of January, writes Charles Wooley
Opinion
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The highlights of my early life as a “Hydro kid’ at Tarraleah on the Central Plateau actually took place 15 miles away in Bronte Park. Though in those slower days of imperial measure I am sure distances were longer.
Today “Tarra” would be an easy 25 minutes away on a winding but well-sealed road. Back then in an old bus on a vertiginous and muddy dirt road I reckon it was twice as long, even allowing for the impatient relativity of childhood.
Tarraleah was then just a raw slash in the impenetrable highland bush and everything exciting had to be celebrated at the more populous Bronte Park: Christmas Day, Easter, Anzac Day and that old colonial curio, Empire Day later renamed Commonwealth Day.
I don’t remember any consideration of what we now know as Australia Day. Us kids were encouraged to celebrate being British and were taught how our parents won World War II. It was quite clear that Bronte Park had played a major role in the downfall of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo.
We thought that those hardworking, hard-drinking men now marching with their medals might have once been “dam busters” flying in the war-torn skies above Germany.
Certainly, they were now dam builders in a Tasmania that was destined to become a new Ruhr Valley in the far south of the world.
That was the powerful electric vision former Tasmanian Premier Eric Reece once shared with us at a sausage sizzle in what was grandly known as the “Bronte Chalet”.
“Electric Eric” gave us a day off school, and we must have been eternally grateful for he served 13 years in leadership.
I vividly remember the huge fireplace, the centrepiece of the chalet which, after the hydro construction phase was finished, would become known as the “Bronte Pub”.
I trust that years later the famously huge hearth was not the cause of the joint going the way of so many great old Tassie bush pubs and burning to the ground.
My attempt to recall childhood on the plateau might admittedly be an unreliable memoir, but I know there was never the slightest thought of the 26th of January.
That came much later.
But I do remember how much my friends and I loved the “Empire biscuits”, served on every important occasion.
These were child-pleasing, crisp, jam-filled confections covered in white icing and sprinkled with those tiny, colourful sugar balls called “hundreds and thousands”.
As the name suggests they had countless purposes.
They could also be sprinkled on ice cream or on buttered white bread. The French supposedly called them “nonpareils” but though I looked for them I never saw them in France.
Still the French name translates as “having no rival” or simply “matchless”.
The way to our patriotic hearts was through our stomachs and when the name was changed to “Commonwealth cakes” we still maintained our enthusiasm. Sprinkled with those tiny colourful balls, the bickies really were matchless.
My Mum, Ella, told me how before World War I they had been called German biscuits. I think that was what first planted the seed of a worldly scepticism and the early germination of a journalistic bullshit detector.
Even the name of my favourite biscuit was merely a convenient and passing political confection.
Who could you believe?
Thankfully, despite what would eventually become known as “spin” the biscuits tasted just the same.
For Australia Day 2025, Bronte Park planned a return to its glory days as the centre of the highlands by staging an Australia Day cricket match at the caravan park.
Shane at the shop provided the trophy, the Bronte Goat-track Ashes, named after the much-neglected Marlborough Rd, a 40km rocky dirt track which connects the Lyell Hwy to the Highland Lakes Rd.
Todd at the caravan park took on the cricket ground, spending weeks pushing a mower to prepare the pitch.
Across the plateau word got around that the mob from the pub, at Miena, were going to field a team against the Bronte eleven. For a month there was great anticipation. Bronte would return to its glorious eventful past.
I was the self-appointed cricketing writer.
From the deep shade of my veranda, with a cold beer I would report the efforts of the white-flannelled fools on the green manicured lawns of the old Hydro heritage village smack in the centre of an island 17,000km from Lords.
Meanwhile, all over the country thousands of Australians were celebrating the national day. Though some were lamenting Invasion Day by attending protests in every capital city.
No such unhappy division at Bronte Park. At 2.30 in the afternoon, Dusty the dog and I inspected the pitch. Dusty assured me the wicket was well drained and with a good bounce.
It was a bright sunny day with an agreeable 18C temperature. But zero degrees of interest.
So far no players had turned up.
The team from Miena was unwilling to brave the Bronte Goat Track and the team from Bronte had apparently gone fishin’.
My son Dave, home from Italy, did just that and took the Marlborough Rd to Miena to catch a beautiful 4lb trout (they never went metric).
“How did the game go?” he asked on his return.
“You missed it,” I told him. “It was a draw.”
I was proved wrong because much later in the day the locals turned out for some fun playing among themselves. Practising perhaps for next year when we get better organised because this year certainly wasn’t the day we had anticipated.
Because Miena had failed to field a team, cleverly Bronte found a tenuous connection; a bloke who had once owned a shack at Miena was charged with recruiting a side which unsurprisingly went on to lose.
Shane at the Bronte shop now displays the Goat-track Ashes Perpetual Trophy awarded to Bronte for 2025 but will that be enough to shame Miena into fielding a team in 2026?
It would be a great pity if those slices of buttered bread sprinkled with hundreds and thousands should next year go into the bin uneaten.
This year thanks to the faint-heartedness of the opposition those sugary little balls have at least lived up to their French name, nonpareil, which only too well describes the Bronte Park vs. Miena cricket field this Australia Day.
Matchless.
Charles Wooley is a Tasmanian-based journalist
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