General News
3 February, 2026
From Edinburgh to Castlemaine by Val Dwyer
My Scottish family of six — the Alexanders, sailed from Liverpool in England to Australia, in April 1949, on the renovated warship ‘The Georgic.’ I was 10, my siblings 11, nine and four.
As the days of our four week journey drew to a close, excitement was mounting that we were actually arriving in Australia at last. We had visions of wild animals and jungles, gained from our frequent viewing of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies. These ideas were quickly replaced by the reality of docking in Port Melbourne.
It seemed half of Scotland was there to meet us. Friends and relations, all Scottish, jabbered, laughed and hugged us.
We boarded a suburban train for Preston, where a great celebration was being prepared for the new generation of Scots immigrants. We then proceeded to eat, drink, sing and make merry, until the wee small hours of the following morning.
On the last leg of our journey — our landlady, we six Alexanders and the driver who was enveloped in a haze of Scotch whisky, all squeezed in to a Morris Minor, to travel to nearby Coburg. We piled out of the car and in to the land lady’s house and ran through all the rooms looking, touching and calling out to each other, “Hurray, a piano!” “Look at all the cats!” “It has more than one room!” It had six rooms, also grass growing in the front yard and a back yard.
From a two roomed tenement building, two storeys up, in Edinburgh, this seemed heaven on earth. Our land lady was flattered at our admiration of her humble abode, by Australian standards it was quite modest. Finally beds were allotted, piano farewelled, each cat petted and six new citizens of Australia settled down to sleep in their new home at 721 Sydney Road Coburg.
We were two doors away from the fire station which was on the corner of Gaffney Street, with a hair dressing salon in between. We were immediately befriended by the children, from the fire station and the children from the hair salon. We loved Coburg and mum and dad got jobs immediately, mum at a clothing factory and dad at “Ultrays” which made hospital x-ray equipment.
We lived just a few doors from St. Paul’s Catholic School and were the only non-Australian children there — and were made very welcome. Maureen Ryan age nine (we stayed friends all our lives) and I were in grade five. Maureen said later, that at an assembly before we arrived the head nun had announced, “These children are arriving from war torn Europe and have never seen a banana.”
On our first day we were inundated with bananas. Very soon afterwards the Greek and Italian children began to arrive, — they without English — and were welcomed and integrated.
We children had the run of Melbourne unsupervised. One day having 10 shillings, an 11th birthday present, I caught a tram by myself from Gaffney Street Coburg, to the city centre at Flinders Street Station and visited the slot machine alley close by. To dress up for the day I heavily rouged my cheeks with mum’s lipstick. I got there and back without incident and my family never knew about my birthday treat to myself.
Poor little Ivor aged four, who had not attended school in Scotland was thrown in at the deep end. He wore a kilt to school and the kids queried, “Are you a boy? Are you a girl?” He sometimes ran off home as the “bubs” teacher was a crabby old thing.
When Catholics get together we always have negative stories of the nuns and rarely talk about the kind, gifted ones, but Sister Mary Berchmans, our grade seven and eight teacher was a saint. I managed to track her down and visited her in 2005.
Most Catholic girls went through a stage of wanting to become a nun and Maureen Ryan my best friend and I did too. Maureen went in to a convent aged 12 but only lasted a week and got her dad to come and collect her. She did not contact her mum, as she would have insisted that she stay. Her sister-in-law Julie aged 13, went in and stayed for a year. I escaped their fate by saying to my dad that I wanted to become a nun and he said, “We’ll have none of that.” I thought, “They won’t let me,” so I dropped the subject. It took me a long time to figure out that dad was joking as in ‘none/nun of that,’ so he inadvertently saved me, for if I’d said it to one of my teacher nuns, they would have probably have snapped me up.
Visiting my old haunts years later I was surprised to see that St. Paul’s School was now a Muslim establishment. How could this be? The Catholic Church was the most important religion in the world? The words “There is no God but Allah,” across the top of my old school, disputed this.
We attended St. Paul’s Church which rubs shoulders with Pentridge Gaol. The old Irish priest was a tyrant. His claim to fame was his yelling out at the top of his voice from the altar to any late comers, “Come up the front you!”
As an aside — the famous Phil Cleary was recently a guest speaker at the Highland Society here in Maryborough — and speaking of his youth and the crabby old Father Norris, was delighted when I interjected, that I remembered the old tyrant too.
We loved the Brunswick baths, Luna Park, ice skating at ‘The Glacarium’ in the city and swimming in the Coburg lake. My Aunt lived in Bell Street Preston and attended The Sacred Heart Church there, where my future husband Brendan was an altar boy. As we sometimes went to mass there, Brendan and I probably scraped hulls, but were not to meet for another thirty years.
“We’re going to live in the country,” my mother announced in 1951. As far as we children were concerned, we thought Coburg was the country. Compared with the grey tenement buildings and cobbled streets of Edinburgh, Coburg felt like the country because of the numerous grassy paddocks and beautiful lake and gardens close by. We loved Coburg and had explored the surrounding suburbs and Melbourne city with gusto and now our enthusiasm for Australia and the Australian way of life was to overflow to embrace Castlemaine and environs.
Mum and Dad had answered an advertisement in The Age for an old stone cottage in Castlemaine for 1200 pounds, which turned out to be a bad proposition, instead they bought a new house at Wesley Hill in Castlemanie, for two thousand five hundred pounds, overlooking the deserted goldfields.
So once more we planned and packed and said goodbye to our new Aussie friends. With our endless youthful enthusiasm we explored the surrounds of our new environment. The fascinating mine holes and municipal tip were a fascinating and interesting playground for us.
One of our adventures was to walk up over Kalimna Hill on our way to St. Gabriel’s and St. Mary’s schools, entirely out of our way, just for the sheer enjoyment of exploring the creek and climbing the hills and trees along the way. There were two enormous holes up there that the Aussie kids told us were elephant graves.
Life seemed so much simpler then, full of youth clubs, dancing, basketball and tennis, before the onslaught of TV.
TV was invented in Scotland in 1926 by John Logie Baird, but took thirty years to reach Castlemaine. Seventy five years on — my family has circled the globe in varied company and different circumstances, but none as memorable as our two year journey from the tenements of Edinburgh to Castlemaine.