Paddling, Dipping the Toes In

How can we possibly live up to our theme photo of this week.  It is just about perfect  Let’s just look at it.,  A group of four young ladies being very daring and raising their skirts so that they could paddle in the lake.  And the two young boys tagging along.  Can’t you just hear one of the mothers saying You can’t go walking unless you take Billy and Johnny with you.  And there are the boys, not quite a part of the group but on the periphery.

Like most groups of girls there is a range of personalities.  Look at the haughty  expression of the front girl facing the camera,  challenging the photographer to please explain what he thinks he might be doing.  A much more demure but mischievious young lady in the dark dress carrying a  more sensible hat is seeing the funny side of the situation while the other two girls pretend that nothing is going on.

A moment in time but all is not still. The movements of legs in the water has created ripples, expanding out in all directions.  And wouldn’t it be nice if they expanded all the way to author Toni Jordan so that she could create a back and future story for these six characters.

And then from the sublime to something a bit less sublime, the beach at Apollo Bay c 1936.  Have you ever used the phrase a face only a mother could love.  I think some photos fall into that category too.

A grandmother doing supervision duty on an empty beach.

Going back further in time, to some time between 1880 and 1900 , at the State Library of Victoria we find an elegantly dressed woman and formally dressed man  at the edge of some water watching the  two older children have a paddle in a little byway of a larger expanse of water.

And  closer to home, the sea water Paddling Pool in front of the enclosed swimming area at Eastern Beach in Geelong.This photo from the State Library of Victoria was taken about  1949.

Water is not the only  medium  which makes for fun  paddling, and hands are good for paddling in mud  too.  – Melbourne 1962These are the photos which have sprung to my mind when looking at this week’s theme photo for Sepia Saturday. Other people have contributed different photos and they can be found through the links on Sepia Saturday

And the Bride was …..Eliza

I don’t think any Saturday Sepians will have trouble coming up with a nice wedding photo to satisfy this week’s theme.  My choice is the 1901 wedding of Eliza Fricke and Robert Butler  in Central Victoria.  They married at Christ Church in Maryborough then this photo was taken in  the garden of the bride’s home, Park Farm  in Carisbrook.

The wedding of Eliza Fricke and Robert Butler in 1901

I have Eliza’s granddaughters to thanks for this lovely photo of the two families.    Let’s look at the bride’s relations in the photo.

The Bride, Eliza Fricke, born in 1873, grew up at Park Farm in Carisbrook and married to shift a few miles down the road to become the wife of a butcher and farmer at Newstead. She was the seventh child of eight surviving children and we have seen her before playing croquet in the front garden of her home while her father watched on.

 

Alfred Fricke , born in 1867. was the oldest boy and  is seen sitting next to the bride.  As his father had died in 1899 Alfred escorted his sister down the aisle for her wedding..  He now owned Park Farm and wasn’t to marry for another 10 years.   We have seen him before with guests in the garden of Park Farm

 

 

. Eliza Fricke, nee Bosley, the mother of the bride, is sitting next to the bridegroom    Eliza Bosley had come to Australia from Coleford in Gloucestershire in 1863  with two of her sisters.  Both of her parents were dead and she  came to Carisbrook as she had a cousin Edward Aston living there.  There was also another cousin Charlotte Eager and the cousins kept the school well supllied with pupils.

 

Seated on the ground at the right of the photo is Eliza’s brother Charles Fricke, born in 1869.  He now owned the other Fricke farm at Apollo Bay and would marry in tthree years time.  He is my grandfather.

 

 

Seated on the ground at the left side is the youngest of the family, Matilda Louise,  born in 1877 and known as Tilly. She married in 1903  to F,W. Wangman and went to live in Melbourne.

 

 

In the back row  behind the bridegroom is Eliza’s brother  Albert , born 1872.  He had already been married for 3 years.  He started work with the Lands Department in Melbourne, later represented  the Victorian Government in the USA encouraging immigration to the irrigation areas of Victoria.  He was theri Representative for Victoria at the opening of the Panama Canal and finally became Head of the Lands Department in Victoria.

 

Not present that day were another brother and two sisters.  The rest of the people in the photo are Butler relations.

Meanwhile part of Eliza’s life was the Butcher’s van and a visit from a a niece, Enid Fricke, from Apollo Bay, one of many visits between the two families. Before the days of Health and Safety Regulations the butchers did their own slaughtering on the farm then travelled around  selling the meat.

Then from the oldest wedding photo in my family collection to the latest in 2014.  This time it is of the newly married couple with the bridegroom’s family in the shade of some gum trees in the middle of a paddock  on the Bellarine Peninsula.  Grandma is happily clutching grandson’s arm.

You are now invited to  join in more weddings through the links in Sepia Saturday

A Soldier’s Farewell to his Girl

Sepia Saturday’s them for the week  – trains, trams, transport.  But  if  I say trains and transport then the next word is troops.

I prefer to use images from the family albums but this time I am going with my favorite photo from the State Library of Victoria.   It is listed as being from the Melbourne newspaper of the time, the Argus on August 14th, 1940.  However it does not appear in the paper. but  is one of a collection which came from the paper.  Why ever wasn’t it used.  Every photo tells a story and this photo tells a very powerful story.

The unanswered question is – Who are these two central people ?

14th August 1940

Is she his wife,  fiancee, girl friend ?  Was this an embarkation leave farewell?  Troops were still being sent to the Middle East .  Did he come back safely or was he killed at Tobruk like the driver of the bread van in my home town ?

In this second photo  you can again see her on the shoulder of some strong person.

Aug 14th 1940

Another time we see the soldiers marching down platform 10A at Spencer St Station  in 1944,  the engine for their train waiting t in the background.

 

Then in 2012  Toni Jordan published her novel Nine Days which was inspired by the kiss photo.  She put her imagination to work to give a story going both back to the past and forward  to the future.  It is so believable and particularly enjoyable to anyone who enjoys their inner Melbourne suburbs and the idea of life as it was,  in this case  inner-city Richmond.

The photo, with the help of a bit of colour, was used for the cover of the book.

How the novel came about, The Age, Aug 19th, 2012

Review of Nine Days by Toni Jordan in the Age, August 26th, 2012

And a bit of trivia for the young-uns as to those beautiful marcel waves in the first photo.  These days with all the electric wands for straightening and curling you might not know that in the 1930s when these marcel waves were popular, to make them at home you used these torturous butterfly metal grips with sharp teeth which pinched the damp hair together into ridges.  When dry the hair would comb out into waves.

Making Marcel Waves

 Go to Sepia Saturday to read more stories of earth-bound transport of every imaginable kind.

 

 

The Big Apple – in Carisbrook

Note: Before starting I want to say that I mostly use the spelling Bismark but many sources say Bismarck or say that one is the synonym if the other,

And now for a different kind of Family History Tree,  My great-grandfather Freidrich Eberhardt Fricke  emigrated from the village of Gros Mahner in Hannover.  He became a farmer at Carisbrook in Central Victoria.

Freidrich Eberhardt Fricke

One day on the goldfields at nearby Harrison’s Hill he found an apple core which he took home and planted the seeds which grew into a beautiful apple tree with very large  apples  and he called it the Bismark Seedling Apple.

Wax model in the Museum of Victoria made in 1875  from an apple grown on F.E.Fricke’s Bismark apple tree

My first port of call was in 1985 at the Museum of Melbourne and this is a wax model of  one of Mr Fricke’s apples which he  sent to the Museum  in 1875  Just look at the size of it.  It is described as  “a winter fruiting, cooking apple and is a very large, yellow-skinned apple with just a slight red blush.  It appears to be about eight times the volume of a Golden Delicious apple.  It was used for cooking and export.”   (See Note 1)

On page 245 of “Victoria and its Metropolis – Past and Present”, Vol 11,published in 1888 it says ” The celebrated Bismark apple, a seedling, was first grown in Mr. Fricke’s garden; the tree is twenty-five years old and its fruit is shown in the Melbourne Museum “.

And a newspaper obituary notice dated Oct 6th, 1899, believed to be from a Maryborough paper, says – “One day he picked up on the diggings an apple core which he took home and planted.  The seedling which grew was never grafted but it produced a magnificent apple, which in honor of the late Prince Bismark, was given the name under which it is now known. ”

To add to these facts which I discovered  last century 🙂  I can now add this newspaper article from  1893 which I found recently.   An overseas news column in the Australasian  told about  London’s Great Crystal Palace National Co-operative Vegetable, Fruit and Flower Show then it went on to tell how  the Curator of the Royal Horticultural Gardens in Victoria had written to The Journal of Horticulture in England with information about the Bismarck Apple. (See note 2)  This is as close as I can get to F,Fricke writing the letter himself.

.Due to the wonders of the internet I was able to look through the 1893 publications of the Journal mentioned but cannot find that the information Mr Neilson gave them about the origins of the apple was passed on to the members of the Society.

These days if you go to Google for information on the Bismark/Bismarck apple you can’t really find anyone willing to commit as to the origins of the apple. They give you the choice of New Zealand or Tasmania or Clarkson of Carisbrook or Fricke of Carisbrook.  Remember the childhood game of passing a whispered message down a line of people and how the message would get distorted. And so it goes on in Google. Nowhere can I find any mention of someone in Tasmania or New Zealand actually growing the first tree. Just speculation, speculation.

c1863  F.E.Fricke grew the first Bismark apple tree from either a seed or a seedling found  on  the Harrison Hill diggings near his farm.

Mr Benjamin Clarkson, a nurseryman, later got cuttings from the tree so that he could graft them and raise trees for sale.

1873 Mr Clarkson took apples from his grafted tree to the Seedling Fruit Committee of the Horticultural Society of Victoria who officially named it Prince Bismark.

1875  F.E.Fricke gave one of his Bismarck apples to the Museum of Victoria so that a wax model could be made.

I plodded away on this story  before internet information was available.  I  couldn’t find a living tree.   But in 1993  after appealing through a newspaper  I found one in Central Victoria, about 38 km south-west of Carisbrook, a 50 year old tree which was a direct descendant of F.E.Fricke’s tree and  I was able to get some sample fruit and take some photos.

Descendants of the original Bismark apple tree as seen in 1993

 

then like my great grandfather I sent some to the museum.

Melbourne Age, 16 Aug 1993

This was from an article in the Melbourne Age by John Lahey titled “Images of Forgotten Fruit”. and showing Liza Dale with some of the wax models.

From article by John Lahey on Images of Forgotten Fruit in the Melbourne Age, 16 Aug, 1993.

Are there two different Bismark Apples ?

In these photos I have moved copies of the scales onto the apples.

Bismark Apple from F, Fricke

Bismarck Apple from National Fruit Collection, UK

1.  On the left is the present  photo of the Fricke Apple on the Museum of Victoria website.  The scale 2 cm per block, making the apple nearly 130 mm wide.  The Museum say 1230 mm

2.  On the right is a photo from The National Fruit Collection  in the UK showing a Bismarck apple at a scale  of 1 cm per block (It has 5  cm written at the end of the 5 blocks) making the apple nearly 90 mm wide.  Their notes say 92 cm wide.

3. From John Bultitude: Apples, A Guide  In 1992 Burnley to the Identification of International Varieties, 1983, MacMillan Press Ltd, London

79 mm wide and 67 mm high

Surely two different apples.  This question is also asked in the Apple Database of the Heritage and Rare Fruit  Network     This was brought up  in an interesting correspondence with Neil Barraclough in those early days of research.

It now needs some unbiased person with the right  botanical and research skills, and the time, to try and solve the question of the origins of this Bismark apple and hopefully give F.E.Fricke his five minutes of fame as the person who first grew the tree, followed by Clarkson as the first person to then propagate it for sale.

Note 1   : I have nothing but praise for the sharing nature of the people at the Museum of Victoria, in particular for the Information supplied in 1985  by M.L.Hallet, then Curator of Rural Science, Museum of Victoria and in 1993 by Liza Dale, then Curator of Primary Production in the Scienceworks section of the museum.

Note 2.   The Australasian (Melbourne, Vic. : 1864 – 1946), Saturday 7 October 1893, page 11, Notes from Other Lands

Links:

The National Fruit Collection – Bismarck

The Museum of Victoria – Bismark

The Heritage and Rare Fruit Network

This week Sepia Saturday let us choose for ourselves what we would like to write about.  So while I had been waiting for fruit, apples, food, eating, enormous things, mysteries or wax models to be given us as a theme, now I have to wait no longer and can wax to my heart’s content about wax models in this week’s post.   In the meantime I hope we are never given fruit, apples, food, eating, enormous things, mysteries or wax models as our theme as I have no other photos which would fit the bill.

Now it’s time to see what other Sepian Saturday members have found in their un-themable collections as shown in the links at Sepia Saturday.

 

 

A Fishy Tale in Traralgon – More Treasure from Trove

In February 1916 the fishing in the river at Traralgon in Gippsland was going well and was reported in the Gippsland Farmer’s Journal on February 8th, mentioning   Bandmaster Tom Tansey and two of the bandsmen.

But lthe following year  it was a completely different story.

In the Australian song Waltzing Matilda the trooper comes riding down on his thoroughbred  to the billabong and asks the swagman to show him the  stolen Jumbuck (sheep) that he has stowed in his tuckerbag

In this story the policeman rode down to the riverbank and asks the fisherman to show him the undersized trout that he has stowed in his tuckerbag. On Feb 27th 1917 the Traralgon Record screamed the heading

The local resident  in question was the town’s Bandmaster,  Tom Tansey, one of the local “fisher folk”  who “betook themselves” to  the banks of the Traralgon Creek to fish but not observing the regulations as to size.

Even the Bairnsdale Advertiser on March 3rd, 1917, gave a full report.

… and there espied John T. Tansey dangling a rod and line in the placid waters of that stream near Koornalla. The inspectors approached the fisherman and the constable remarked. “Hullo, got any fish. Mr Tansey, ?” The   angler confessed that he had “one:” and on being asked to produce it for inspection he fumbled about his bag and then presented one about 14 or 15 inches long. That’s well  over the size,”said the Constable     “You’ve got some more there, let’s see them.” The sportsman demurred  but on being pressed  produced  another fish, ..

Gradually more and more fish were produced from the bag, all of them undersized, i.e. less than 11 inches long. The Constable took possession of the fish and  promptly took them to the local butter factory so they could later be presented in court in a nice fresh state as evidence of Tom’s naughty deed.   He was brought to court in front of three local magisgrates, and was fined  £2 plus costs.

What the newspaper doesn’t say is that Tom and at least one of the magistrates knew each other.  Dr McLean was President of the Town Band, of which Tom was bandmaster, and may have played a part in bringing Tom to Traralgon.  Dr MacLean had come to the town in 1904. as  a young doctor, fresh from the Geelong Hospital and was the only doctor in Traralgon during the years of the First World War.    He had also played football for.Geelong

So he had been  living in Geelong at the same time as Tom, when Tom was well known for his skill as a brass instrument player.  Tom had been winiing medals for his solo performances at the National Band Championships at the beginning of C20th,  a time when the bandsmen were revered in the same way that pop idols are nowadays.  When the Geelong Town Band was leaving for competitons crowds would follow them as they marched up the street to the railway station and  greet them on their return.

Here they are in the same photo when the Traralgon Band and Members made a presentation to Dr McLean. with Dr McLean in the centre, Tom with his medals to the left and a young Hilda Tansey at the top.

It is interesting to wonder if the news of Tom’s fishing trip made it back to his mother, in  England, or to his younger brother William.   At the time William was Gamekeeper at Cotterstock House in Northhamptonshire.   Tom and William, oppposite ends of a spectrum but half a world apart.  What would William have done if he had been inspecting the creek and had come across Tom fishing ! And as a bit of trivia, Cotterstock House is where the movie Woman in Black with Daniel Radcliffe was filmed.

Transcript from the Bairnsdale Advertiser and Tambo and Omeo  Chronicle, Saturday, March 3rd, 1917

UNDERSIZED FISH.
TRARALGON RESIDENT PROSECUTED
For some time past, says the Record, there has been a suspicion amongst members of the Traralgon, Fish and Game Protection Society that all the “fisher folk” Who betook themselves to the banks of the creek for the ostensible purpose of fishing for trout were not observing the regulations as to size ,of the fish they took from the creek. During last month Constable Lineen, an inspector of the Fisheries Department, and Christian Stammers, an honorary Inspector, paid a visit to the upper reaches of the Traralgon Creek and there espied John T. Tansey dangling a rod and line in the placid waters of that stream near Koornalla. The inspectors approached the fisherman and the constable remarked. “Hullo, got any fish. Mr Tansey, The angler confessed that he had “one:” and on being asked to produce it for inspection he fumbled about his bag and then presented one about 14 or 15 inches long. That’s well over the size,”s aid the Constable “‘You’ve got some more there, let’s see them.” The sportsman demurred but on being pressed, produced another fish. “That seems to be undersized remarked the constable. “Have you any more ?” “Uh, no” replied the fisherman “only a salmon trout”. “Well, let’s see it” persisted the policeman. A trout, somewhat smaller than the other one was produced. The constable informed the angler that he would have to take possession of the fish. He measured them in the angler’s presence, one measuring 10 inches and the other 9 ½ inches in length and both were cleaned and ready for cooking. In explanation of having these fish in his possession the fisherman said he had caught several smaller ones and had thrown them back, but the two in question were so badly hooked that they died when the hook was extracted and he put them in his bag. Such was the summary of the evidence given at the petty sessions when Tansey was called upon to answer to a charge of being in possession of certain fish of a less length than that prescribed by section 28  of the Fisheries Act, the said fish being indigenous to Victoria. Defendant was fined £2 with £14/- costs.