Recorded 14 April 2018

GM:  OK, so we’re here with Trenna Mahney.  It’s the 14th of April,  2018. Tren, you were going to tell me about when you left Mofflyn Homes and went off to Craig House. 

THM: Alright.  It is a blurr.  That time in my life was lost to me a little.  I was well… I thought I only went to grade 1 when I was aged six at East Victoria Park Primary School, but apparently not.  I was also there in grade 2 and part of grade 3.

Trying Trenna Out

My sisters and brother had all left Mofflyn Homes for Craig House, a Legacy hostel.  I had no idea what a Legacy hostel was but they had to move, to my knowledge, because they were too old to stay at the Mofflyn homes. 

A lot of my memory of this time is just not there. I think I only remember being there, and my sister Barb leaving me, going over to have a trial run at Craig House, and then coming back and going to live at Craig House.  

I now realise that I did go and have a bit of a trial run.  There was a time when I stayed over after a recent fire had happened. 

The fire had been in Matron’s sitting room fire – the wall that divided her sitting room and the main girls’ bedroom called the Blue Room, which held 5 girls’ beds.  It was only a single layer brick, rather than a double layer and the fire burnt through to the girls’ cupboards. 

The Blue Room had been fairly damaged by fire and when I arrived the girls who had slept in the Blue Room were sleeping in the lounge room, and that’s where I slept when I came to stay. 

Initially it’s where I thought I slept when I came to stay permanently, but  I now think that it was when I came as a bit of a trial to see how I would fit in at Craig House.

Craig House was for older children.  As a rule, they only took high school students. 

I also went there after an ANZAC Day March which I didn’t understand.  We walked behind the Wreath of Laurel flag which was the symbol of Legacy, a blue and yellow flag.  We marched along the [St Georges] Terrace and then down onto The Esplanade, and there was a flyover and speeches by the Governor and various military dignitaries.  

We went and Colin wore our Dad’s medals from World War II.  I know that at one stage the medals were put on me to wear.  I don’t know if it was that time, as a special thing for me. 

We marched, and I do remember I liked that because I was with my sisters and brother.  There were people who lined the streets watching the parade and they clapped us and I didn’t really know what it was for.  But, I was happy to be there. 

It may have been another time, but I think it all coincided with ANZAC Day and a sleepover.  ANZAC Day is a holiday. 

To Craig House

I don’t actually remember any official thing being done for my leaving Mofflyn Home to live at Craig House.  All the children I knew just moved.  There was no party or anything like that. 

I moved to Craig House and I shared a bedroom in the annexe with my sister Barb, and Nance had a room at the end of the annexe.  There were also Barb or Nancy’s friends who were in another one or two rooms. 

Near there was where the storeroom was, which is where all the food was stored.  It was quite often that there would be raids on the storeroom to get food.  

The annexe used to be the boys’ quarters and at some point when I moved there, which was in July 1965, a new, boys quarters was built at the back of the block of land. 

Prior to that the boys slept at the house next door, a grand old house that was owned by the Bonnerups.  The Bonnerups also had a house in Mount Lawley and they lived in that house.  They allowed their house in South Perth to be used by the boys until the boys quarters were built.  

The new building was quite modern for those times.  There were boys’ bedrooms, and at the end, a self contained flat attached which was for the housemaster and housemistress, who were employees who looked after everybody. 

Initially they just  looked after the boys but later, the girls too when Matron had breaks, and she would go away.  She would go down to Busselton [in the South West of the state, about 200km away] where her sister Faith and her family, the Hemsleys lived on a property down there.  Dr Hemsley was a GP in the Busselton Region and they were a well-known family who had a horse property, and they also had sheep.

So, I don’t really recall much of when I moved to Craig House from Mofflyn.  My sister knows more than I do in regards to me moving there. 

At first I shared a room with Barb.  I was always in trouble with her because in 1965 she was 14, and right at that age of being very much into pop stars, and loving pop stars. 

She was a fanatic about putting up posters, and placing stuff around the room which I wasn’t allowed to touch.  She recalls forever screaming at me to leave her stuff alone. 

I don’t remember any of that.  I was just really happy to be there,  because I was sharing a room with my sister, and she was very pretty, and all the boys liked her, whereas I was quite an ugly duckling of the family, the skinny girl with thick glasses and very bad teeth. 

I wore a plate to separate my teeth because they crossed over each other and were quite rotten and overcrowded. [GM: This was due to Marfan syndrome.]

Once I was at Craig House I started to go to Forest Street Primary School in South Perth.  My siblings had already moved to high school.  They went to Kent Street High School which is where I went later. 

At Craig House most of the girls were friendly, but all older than me, except for a little while there was a girl called Bettine Byron.  

Legacy

I didn’t know what this place was.  It was called a hostel.  It wasn’t a home, and it wasn’t run by the church, or child welfare. 

It was a place that was run by Legacy, which was an organisation, which was a patriarchal organisation that looked after the wives and children of the men who didn’t come back from, primarily, World War 2 and World War 1. They dealt with the families from other conflicts as well, but in my time it was primarily World War 2.  

When new children would come to Craig House I would ask if they were a double, or a single orphan, feeling that it was just an ordinary question

My understanding of how it worked was that people, men, from Legacy acted as if they were your father, or at least as a father figure.  This was especially the case for widowed women in the country areas who were running rural properties without their husbands to assist them. 

The children had to come to the city to get a high school education anyway.  So Craig House was basically a hostel, like a boarding school, except Legacy was a charity so these people were nominated to come and stay, and Legacy looked after the children and paid for their accommodation and some of their schooling. 

I guess it depended on how much the wife or mother of the children could contribute to their upbringing.  If they were sending their children to a private school the mother may have had money. 

Those things never came to me as being of any consequence.  It was just another place we went to because we were orphans, and I didn’t understand that, except that it meant that I didn’t have a mum and I didn’t have a dad.  So therefore, I was a double orphan.  

When new children would come to Craig House I would ask if they were a double, or a single orphan, feeling that it was just an ordinary question.

I had no idea of whether they would be suffering any pain, because up to that stage of my life, really, from 2 years old or being able to have any memory, the majority of people I knew were people who had either no parents, or no mother or no father. 

It was just a fact.  There were people who had parents, and there were people who didn’t. 

It didn’t make us worse off, but we were grateful to people who would take us in off the streets so we wouldn’t starve to death.  And Craig House was very much a place of “being grateful” to all those people who looked after us.  

The men who were assigned to each family were called Legartees.  It worked in the same way as a Masonic Lodge might work.  A person had to be nominated by another person who thought they were of good character and good civic mindedness, and quite often have potentially enough money to contribute money to Legacy. 

Because apart from charity tin collections, from people in the streets, I don’t really know how they got their money.  Some money was bequeathed to them by ex-military people, but I don’t know how the place was run.  It wasn’t run by the church. 

I was a “ward of the state” which meant that I came under the banner of Child Welfare.  A lot of the kids who went there came under the banner of Veterans Affairs. 

Each of those government departments gave various money, for various reasons.   Some people got more money than others and were sent to better schooling, or better accommodation than others. 

I don’t know how that worked.  I just knew that I lived at Craig House.  

As an adult my sister Nancy initially couldn’t remember that I was there, or when I moved there, but later on did realise that she lived at the same place as me for a time.  I think part of that, is that once we went to Mofflyn Homes our family relationship, by and large, disintegrated. 

Even at Craig House Colin was separated because he lived in the boys’ quarters.  He was a shy child.  He wasn’t intellectually clever, and he seemed to be a strange child and didn’t make a lot of male friends at Craig House.  

There was a housemaster there at the time called Mr Tognolini who did take a shine to Colin when Colin didn’t make it into high school because his results weren’t good enough.  Mr Tognolini was a very good swimmer.  I think he was a teacher. 

I don’t know if it was the case that the house masters had to be teachers, but as a rule they were.  And so were their wives, who really only in the late 1960s played any role at all other than being there for when Matron went away. 

Nevertheless, Mr Tognolini helped Colin very much with learning mathematics, which he couldn’t do at all, and Colin, later in life, became a civil engineer, which he did it with a lot of study and also that grounding from Mr Tognolini. 

She taught me how to do sign language, and I loved talking to her. She was always very sunny and happy to me.    

That meant that Colin was the first in our family to go to university and get a degree. 

Anyway, I was with Nancy for a very little time, a matter of months.  I think it was only until the end of that first year when Nancy moved out of Craig House.  I moved out of sharing a room with Barb, I think because we squabbled too much. 

When Betine Byron came along she was about my age but wasn’t really going to stay at Craig House for very long.  There was something different about her.  She was either the child of a Legatee  you needed to have some accommodation while her parents were overseas, or she was only going to be in Perth for a short amount of time. 

I think it was only a period of months that we were there together, but she was more my age and I did have fun with her.  

By 1967 I did get some younger people coming to Craig House but up to that point I was with all the older girls, who were the same age as my sisters Barb and Nancy. 

I would go to the lolly shop near Mill Point Road, at least I called it the lolly shop, to buy her a packet of Peter Stuyvesant.  Matron smoked them like a chimney.

Their friends were all friendly to me.  One of the girls in particular, Lynn, who was deaf, we got along very well.  She taught me how to do sign language, and I loved talking to her.  She was always very sunny and happy to me.  Some of the other girls were nice to me but not necessarily friendly to me.  

A New Friend

So, in 1967 Helen, who would become my best friend, came to live at Craig House.  She was 10 and so was I, and I was so excited that her birthday was the 11th of August, exactly 1 month before mine. 

The day she arrived Matron gave us a little job to do where we had to walk up to the local Mends Street shops.  In those days they were just a strip of shops with a petrol station on the corner. 

I would go to the lolly shop near Mill Point Road, at least I called it the lolly shop, to buy her a packet of Peter Stuyvesant.  Matron smoked them like a chimney. 

Helen and I walked up there, and we were so excited because Helen had a threepence which she showed me.  We had decided that we would try and find threepences because we would make a lot of money because the previous year Australian currency changed from pounds, shillings and pence to dollars and cents. 

So the threepence, which would be the equivalent of 3 cents was not around any more.  There was a 5 cent piece that looked a bit like it.  I was very impressed that Helen had threepence and we went and bought Matron her packet of cigarettes. 

I think we had a little bit of money and we bought some lollies, and I think we talked all the way there and all the way back.  I think I did most of the talking because I was so excited to have a new friend. 

Helen was quite quiet.  She did have a mum, but her Mum couldn’t look after her.  So she was just a single orphan, not a double orphan.  We moved in together into what had now become the Pink Room. It had changed from the Blue Room after the fire.  There were also three other girls who shared the room.  

Helen and I went to Forrest Street Primary [in South Perth] together, and she came to grade 5 with me.  We were in the same class because there was only one grade 5 class. 

An Adventure Every Morning

We walked to school.  It was quite a walk. 

We had to walk up past the zoo, so we would hear all the animals who were quite loud, and in those days you did hear the monkeys, and the elephants and the lions.  In later years those noises seemed to disappear to a certain degree.  I don’t really know why, but it was much louder in those days.  Probably because they were in smaller cement cages and weren’t treated as well as they were in later years.  

We would love terrorising all the younger kids at school

But, all along the road, on the verge there were large plane trees, up and down the street, so there was lots of leaf litter everywhere.  And there were squirrels everywhere. 

We loved the squirrels, but of course they were not considered to be animals that were wanted.  They were a pest.  They weren’t something that the zoo wanted. 

[GM: The link below has a very interesting account of the palm squirrels at the Perth Zoo, and what became of them.]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-07/the-rise-and-fall-of-perths-palm-squirrel-pest-population/8683784?utm_campaign=abc_news_web&utm_content=link&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_source=abc_news_web

They used to come and steal food from other animals, but we loved them and they were so cute. 

We would walk up past all the old houses.  Some of them were grand, with tennis courts out the front.  Some of them were spooky and dark and had lots of foliage and trees that covered long dark driveways.  

There was plenty of excitement on our walks because we could choose two different ways to get to school.  When it was mulberry season we would climb the fence of the Zoo to get the overhanging mulberries that were there to eat. 

Some of the houses had pomegranate trees, which we loved to eat.  We loved to smash them open.  I don’t know if we ate them all. 

There were also nectarines and apricots that were in people’s front yards, that we seemed to feel that we had a right to eat.  There were quite a lot of overhanging grape vines that we also took fruit from. 

There were other trees, jacarandas and also the orange flowered trees that were like a sort of orange trumpet creeper.   With those ones you could put your fingers inside the petals of the leaves and you could have long witch’s fingers. 

We would love terrorising all the younger kids at school with our witch’s fingers that we picked up along the way, they were very funny trees.

Before Helen had come along I did go to school at Forrest Street, and I came in the middle of the year.  I also went into what I think was a mixed grade 3 and 4 class. 

I don’t remember a lot about it except we were still young enough to sit on the square mats, coir squares.  We would sit and the teacher would read to us. 

There was a new reading system where you had coloured cards, and you would select the coloured cards, and I was at an age where I had started to do that.  I don’t remember what it was called, but even though I had very bad eyesight I was able to read quite well, and I did like reading. 

Except I didn’t like the process of going and picking out cards, because although they had colour-coded tops I don’t think I knew what that meant so I was always at a bit of a loss.  

The actual classes I can’t recall at that stage.  I think that was part of my lost memory, or maybe just young memory.  I don’t know when I made friends, but I did have some friends before Helen, and some of them had left before Helen came along. 

Jenny Phillips was one of my best friends. She was a tall gangly girl who lived across from the school oval.  We were allowed to leave school during the day and her house was opposite the Anglican church, St Mary’s. 

She had a house with a swimming pool and she loved west Scottish terriers.  The little white fluffy dogs.  They were very cute but I found them a bit too yappee. 

I liked big dogs and there was a dog at Craig House which was called Matron’s dog, Amos.  I think it was a stray that had wandered up from the very grand Haddon Hall, two or three doors along from us, towards the Narrows Bridge.

Haddon Hall had become a little derelict and was no longer being kept in its grand state. 

Scary Granddad

Anyway, Jenny had dogs, and her grandfather lived at the house behind her.  We could go to his place to make sure that he was OK at lunchtime.  I think it was a job Jenny had to do. 

To get back to their house we walked through his workshop and came out via a back gate to get to her house.  I do remember walking through a very cluttered workshop and knocking over an iron that was on an iron stand.  [GM: With Trenna’s bad eyesight she wouldn’t have seen it, not that Granddad would have known.]

He got very angry at me and shouted at me, and told me to get out of there because he’d been working on it.  I was absolutely terrified and refused to ever go to his house again. 

I thought she was very rich because she used to say “would you like to have a can of Heinz spaghetti for lunch?” 

Even when Jenny wanted me to go to her house I was always worried that he might come to the house.  

She lived that close, but down the hill was a girl called Nola and she was my friend.  She was one of a group of my friends, but Jenny was my best friend. 

My second best friend was Marie Kelvington who lived just past the bus stop.  You turned into a street on the right that was there and her house was a few houses along. 

Sometimes at lunch time we went to her house.  I thought she was very rich because she used to say “would you like to have a can of Heinz spaghetti for lunch?” 

I would only have the sandwiches that were made by the girls at Craig House, which were always horrible, with stale bread.  I don’t think I liked my sandwiches very much. 

She would have a can of spaghetti, and it wasn’t just unbranded spaghetti, it was Heinz!  Heinz was the best.  We would open a can of Heinz spaghetti, and they were only little ones so we would get 1 each. 

But we weren’t allowed to use the stove so we just ate it cold from the can or we could put them in a sandwich, and they were really delicious.  I thought eating them from the can was really special, and I loved it when we would go to her place and I would always ask if we were allowed to have some spaghetti for lunch.  

So I did make friends with people before Helen came along, but those girls didn’t stay around. I don’t know why they left, because my life was a life of people coming into it, and going out of it.

That didn’t seem odd. People came and went without saying goodbye, and I didn’t think there was anything peculiar about that.  

But as to the actual classes I do remember very little. 

I do remember we had an assembly every day.  I remember playing hopscotch in the playground, and there was a lot of gravel.  

We would play marbles, hopscotch, skippy, and elastics.  I know I was very good at elastics and skipping and I was the fastest person at skipping. 

We would also use wool and make parachutes out of wool with our hands.  I think that mainly all of those games were played before Helen came along.  I’ll have to check with Helen. 

She may have played some of them, but I do think they were junior school games. 

I don’t remember the name of my teacher.  I remember the name of other teachers, but I don’t remember the name of my teacher until I got to grade 5, which is when Helen came into my life. 

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