The Third Kitchen Tape

Recording #3 of 24 Recorded 12 April 2018

GM:  This is a recording of Trenna Mahney made on the 12th of April, 2018.   Tren, let’s talk about the time you lived down near the Old Mill. 

19 Mill Point Road

THM:  Alright, OK, well that was 1975.  I was heading to being 17, 18.  I had been living previously with some of the girls I had met from GFS.  I eventually had to move because my friend Rose’s mum died.  Rose had to go home and look after the children, her younger siblings.  She was the oldest.  I had nowhere to live.  

Finding New Homes

I had recently quit my work at Girlock and had gone to live with Nancy and her husband Jim for a short period.  Shorter than I expected, because after two weeks of living with me they told me I had to find somewhere else to live because it wasn’t a place for someone like me.

They were a young couple trying to have a baby, and I should find somewhere else to live. 

So I spoke to my brother Colin, who was at the time, and had been for a long while, living with Barb and her husband Alan in their house in Balga.  Colin had been through university [studying civil engineering] and was working.  He had said it was about time he left, so I moved into the room he had at Barb’s place. 

I had been living there for a couple of months. The plan was to get out and find a place for myself.  I was still unemployed. 

Then I got a letter from my friend, Helen Rice.  Helen and I had kept in contact from when we both left Craig House when it closed at the end of 1972. 

She went to Swanleigh, which was a boarding place for kids coming down from the country, mainly.   It wasn’t like Craig House for people who were primarily there as a result of having the loss of a family member, so there weren’t a lot of children with traumatic backgrounds where Helen went. 

It was just a boarding place in the Swan Valley, which had a large property.  She went there with a couple of other kids we’d grown up with in Craig House. 

At a later stage, Matron from Craig House went there as a house mother or house mistress.  But she never had the authority she had when she was at Craig House.  

Helen had finished school and had a boyfriend, who she had met at Swanleigh, Don.  He lived in the country and she also made very good friends with a girl called Diane.  Diane and Don I think knew each other from the country. 

Don was a typical, good looking, in the Australian sense, blonde, country boy.  He was very different to the people that Helen was going to meet in future years.  

Helen and I decided to get together and move in together.  She’d been sharing a house in Guildford Road in Mount Lawley with her Mum, and then later with Wayne Johnson, also of Craig House and Swanleigh, and Mark, who became a friend of ours. 

They had moved out, I think it had been their house first.  That’s right, they moved out, Helen moved in. 

Her mum came to town, and Helen and her mum lived together.  As always her mum, Betty, when sober was a lovely woman, but she was an alcoholic, and when she drank she would do, as we would say, a runner. 

Helen would have no idea where Betty was and wouldn’t hear from her for – sometimes for years.  

Helen had said she was now living by herself and she really couldn’t afford to live there.  Did I want to move in with her? I thought that was a great idea so we moved in together. 

She had saved or got a dog from a man down the road.  It was a mongrel dog.   I had told her once upon a time the story of Zabadak and she had named her dog Zabadak.  She was a very naughty black kelpie cross, and got pregnant while we were there.

I remember when she got pregnant, though we didn’t know which dog it was, but there was a husky there, twice the size of her, and they were stuck together.

We had to get the hose and hose them apart because they couldn’t separate from each other.  We were laughing so much, but they were obviously in some discomfort.

We lived there [in Guilford Road] for a while, I don’t recall how long – time really moved quickly in those days.  It may have only been several weeks.  It may have been several months. 

The people who owned the house told us their son was going to move in and we had to find somewhere else to live. 

To South Perth…Again

We looked around that area, but in the end we came back to South Perth.  We came across a house that was right next to the Old Mill, by the Narrows Bridge. 

There were very few high rise buildings in the area in those days.  There were some standard 1960s, slightly flasher than blocks of flats, but pretty well that was it. 

It wasn’t considered a well-to-do suburb quite yet.  There were still a lot of basic red brick homes. 

The home that we ended up getting was a turn-of-the-century, red brick, homestead house.  We never confirmed it, but we think it was related to the running of the once working, flour mill there [the Old Mill]. 

At the time there was a band who were living there, but they couldn’t afford the rent.  It was a local Perth band.  The name slips my mind at the moment. 

It was a coincidence because one of the band members, Paul Felton, turned out to be a former friend of my future husband Greg’s, oldest sister and brother [although we didn’t make this connection until years later]. 

What happened was they were going to move to a house at the back.  There was a lane at the back of the house.  They we’re going to move to this house at the back because it was a lot cheaper, and for good reason!  It was a strange house. 

I wish it was in the era of everyday photography because it had bare Jarrah floor boards, they may have been treated in some way, but they were just Jarrah boards. 

It was a sort of two storey weatherboard house.  Maybe it was a 1 storey house with a mezzanine, but it did have steep steps that took you to a higher level. 

It was a small house but there was a big enough property area.  They felt they could still do their jamming sessions.  

They loved the house that they were in, the house that we ended up taking over, for I think about $37 a week rent.   The house had been condemned and it was owned by Bond Corporation. 

We often had trouble with people from another real estate agency.  It was a well known agency at the time, Roy Western & Co.  They would quite often snoop around the house without our authority to come onto the land and we would send them packing.  

So we had negotiated with the guys in the band and there was the main man, who lived there, Paul had a wife who was lovely.  There was also a girl, a very beautiful but slightly crazy girl, who obviously was on drugs.  Her name I don’t remember, but she hung around the band as a groupie or whatever.  She was a sewer. I think she sewed some of their costumes. 

We would hear the band, or watch the band occasionally, and were occasional friends with them.  We did things for them.  On the odd occasion we would let them use the big dining room at our place. 

That house we moved into, 19 Mill Point Road, became our house.  It was a fabulous house and one that changed Helen’s life significantly, because she met my friends.  They were quite different from her friends. 

We had virtually no furniture so we slept on the floor.  We did have some mattresses. 

There was a stove, but an old Metters stove.  I don’t think we had to fire it up with wood, I think it had been converted to gas although that might not be right. 

Lots of Rooms

There was a bathroom and shower in the middle of the house, but the toilet was outside about a 50 metre walk from the back door.  So, quite a hike. 

And it had a fairly broken wooden door and was exposed to the elements because some of the bricks were missing.  And the window pane was missing. 

It was cold and windy in the toilet so you didn’t want to stay out there too long, and there were certainly lots of spiders and things like that.

This house was on a large property, it would have been a quarter of an acre or more, and there was a quarter side of land attached to it.  Only the front fence remained, an ornate limestone fence.

It was a house that looked like it was a grand house in its day.  It had a front porch with French doors, and real French doors, heavy Jarrah, that led into a large lounge room.  

The front door, leading to a passageway, so on this porch there was both a large front door, and, to the side French doors that led into the lounge. 

When you went through the front door there was a very wide entrance hall almost a room in itself.  Then there would be a right angle that turned down … or at the very start, to the left was the master bedroom.  

The main bedroom faced the street and it also had French doors that led onto the right side, a sleepout.  It had a half height wall and louvered windows. 

Then to the right led up to another room.  French doors went into the second bedroom. 

So that was as you came in from the front door the main room was to the left.  You turned down a passageway to the right where there was the second bedroom which also had the French doors going out to the sleepout, and there was a door to the outside from the sleepout.  

So, I think security really wasn’t a concern when this house was built because there were so many ways of getting into this house. 

As you continued along the main passageway to the left you came to the bathroom.  As I said, there was a large bath, a shower had been added, and there was a standalone basin with the plumbing, exposed pipes at the bottom. 

“In the beautiful grand dining room there was a hole in the wall … the hole was the size that a male human could come in and out of”.

It also had the usual press-button wooden cabinet and a very worn mirror that you could barely see through.  There was no electricity in the bathroom so you couldn’t use any electrical items in the bathroom.  

Facing the bathroom, on the other side of the corridor you walked into a room and there was a door, a large door with stained glass above the door. You walked into that room which was the main lounge room.  A large room which had a true bay window with leadlighting, that looked towards the mill.  And as I said, to the right hand side of the room were French doors.  

On the left-hand side was a large double fireplace.  By double I mean it went through to the next room which was a huge dining room, so that you could light it and it warmed both rooms. 

It was very grand, something from another era.  We loved it. 

Probably it wasn’t that efficient, but it was really cool in the sense that it was groovy for parties. You could light the fire and the parties would always be in the lounge room and the dining room.

I don’t think we ever had a dining room table.  That room was big enough to hold a dining room table of 20 chairs comfortably.  That room also had leadlight windows facing the mill, and facing the back of the house. 

It had an interesting entrance from the corridor, because it was a half wood balustrade and brick entrance.  It was clear you we’re going into a room, but it was only waist level and it didn’t shut out any of the air that flowed through the house.   

Immediately opposite, on the same side as the bathroom was the kitchen.  The kitchen was basic.  With the fire – the old stove that sat in where – once it would have been a wood stove because the chimney remained. 

We had a very old, little fridge.  There was a basic sink which I don’t recall had hot water.  I think we boiled the kettle to wash the dishes.  It was very basic.  It was a stainless steel one, but a basic one, and very little dish space, with one very dodgy power point.  

We often had issues of power failure.  And of problems with all the lighting throughout the house. I think there was only one light fitting which was in the passageway. 

I think all the other lights were just hanging cords with a bare bulb on the end, and that was in every room. 

There was a 3rd bedroom at the back of the house, to the left, on the same side as the kitchen.  That was a smaller bedroom.  Obviously not made for the main stayers of the house.  It had just a small window. 

I don’t recall that there were any power points in any rooms except the master bedroom, and the second bedroom.  There must have been one power point in the lounge but I’m not sure.  But we did play records so I think there must have been something there. 

That last room, at the end of the passage, there was a long thin leadlight window that looked towards the backyard.  Then to the right there was the back door.  That had a couple of steps that led down into the back yard. 

The house was condemned for more reasons than that. In the beautiful grand dining room there was a hole in the wall and the wall was double brick.  The hole would have measured about 2 feet wide and the hole was the size that a male human could come in and out of. 

That was completely exposed to the elements once we had burnt the piece of wood that covered it up.  So, anybody could enter that house, and certainly our dogs came and went as they pleased.

“We had innocently said “well, there were no doors when we arrived ”.  But of course, we had used them for firewood.”

There had obviously once been beautiful gardens.  There were roses and hibiscus, and many trellised plants were still there.  I was still at an age when gardening was of no interest to me, other than it was work. 

There were flowers, purple and red and yellow flowers, but I don’t know what they were. 

You walked along a little path.   We did have a garage [but no car].  There was a section in the middle that wasn’t paved so that you could lie on it to work under a car, it wasn’t a deep pit but it was an indented pit. 

It had two, large heavy Jarrah doors that were there when we arrived, but weren’t when we left.  Even when questioned once by the man from Bond Corp, when doing an inspection, he had asked about the doors. 

We had innocently said “well, there were no doors when we arrived ”.  But of course, we had used them for firewood. 

The house was condemned so in those days there was no such thing as retrieving and reusing beautiful, thick, wide, perfect Jarrah boards.  Shame on me, but…  

As you walked down the path, to the left, there was a kitchen.  These out buildings were weatherboard buildings, with I guess asbestos or tin roofs. 

They were substantial, they weren’t just  thrown together.  Someone who had been – a craftsman had made them in their day. 

The laundry had rooms, large rooms,  two rooms together.  In hindsight I would say there was the washing room, and then there was the drying room, for those days when clothes would not dry outside. 

I don’t remember anything other than a bench remaining in those rooms.  I don’t think there was a copper.  There may have been a trough, I don’t recall. There certainly weren’t any window panes left in the windows.  

Next to that was where the toilet was.  The door didn’t shut properly, it didn’t lock.

On the other side of the garden, behind the garage was what looked like trellises where grapevines might grow. 

There could also have been further buildings which had fallen into decay, and there was only the structure that supported them remaining.  The fence that went around the back of the house was a picket fence, but one with a picket, a space, picket, space, picket, space fence.

[GM:  At this point the phone rang and the recording stopped for the day.]