Food, food, always glorious food, whether it be standing up at a buffet as in this week’s Sepia Saturday theme image or sitting at a rough-hewn table to have a cuppa and a sandwich.
The occasion was a visit by the Fricke family and a couple of others from Apollo Bay to see how the building of the Great Ocean Road was progressing and the time was about 1928. As yet I am not sure of the location.
So, the home grown milk was brought in a bottle – I wouldn’t have liked the task of getting the milk into that narrow opening. I wonder if she used a funnel. I think it was sandwiches they were eating made from home made bread and home made butter and an unknown filling. It could be jam. And they were wrapped in a napkin, not paper. At first I wasn’t sure what the gentleman standing was doing but now I see he is adding sugar to his tea. I wonder what the original purpose was of the sugar tin.
They met a couple of the camp cooks and saw the tents where the workmen lived.
The Great Ocean Road project was started after World War 1 to provide work for some of the returning servicemen, a road from Barwon Heads to Warrnambool, mostly winding around the south west coast of Victoria. They had to carve it out out of rock as it went around the cliffs and build bridges over the mouths of creeks and rivers.
It started with a group in Geelong who began lobbying the Government. I found a list showing that Charles Fricke donated £20 to the Trust so by rights of inheritance you could possibly say that I own a few pebbles in that road.
The men worked with picks, shovels and crowbars to make a “road for motorists”. Getting to Lorne was the first step and it was opened in 1922 with a party of 60 cars. They left Geelong at 9 a.m. and arrived at 5.30 p.m, a distance of 40 miles and it is well reported in the newspapers. “It may be stated here that the only persons who arrived at Lorne with clean faces and clothes were the members of the vice-regal party. That was only because they headed the line.”
The Trust then built the section from Lorne to Cape Patton while the Country Roads Board built the section from Apollo Bay to Cape Patton so my images from c1928 would be somewhere in that area. The opening of these sections was celebrated in 1932. Remember it was really just a dirt track, not the beautiful road that it is today. Ten years later I can remember when travelling by bus to Apollo Bay and at Mt Defiance, one of the high points of the road with rocks and sea directly below, the bus always had to do a three point turn to get around the corner on that narrow road. I was always bus sick on that trip.
The following video gives an excellent account, once you get past the tributes.
For more examples of things connected with wining and dining, cookpots and nametags, events and non-events, go to this week’s Sepia Saturday.
