A Good Year
The year was 1964. Sir Robert Menzies was the Prime Minister.
The Beatles visited Australia. La Trobe University in Bundoora opened its doors. Dawn Fraser won gold at the Tokyo Olympics.
There were mixed feelings about Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, but the EH Holden was universally popular.
Babies born in 1964 included country singer/songwriter Lee Kernaghan, cricketers Ian Healy and Mark Taylor, Australian Rules football player Dermott Brereton, businessman Eddie McGuire, television presenter Larry Emdur, actress Georgie Parker, Victorian minister for climate action Lily D’Ambrosio… and author/illustrator Amaria Stark.
The family photo shows Amaria as a baby with her parents, Menno and Willy van der Staal, Benalla, 1964.
The artwork for “Silent Sentinel” was completed in 2024, sixty years after I was born. The double-page illustrations throughout the book show moments in time which are about sixty years apart. Only six of those moments span more than the entire history of Melbourne since European settlement of Victoria.
To us, a two-hundred-year-old house is a "historical" building, part of the earliest colonial history of the area. In Europe, where those earlier settlers came from, there are buildings dating back to Roman times. When the redgum in my book first sprouted, the steam engine and reading glasses had just been invented, but it was already three centuries since Johannes Gutenberg had developed his printing press. The industrial revolution was in full swing, and by the time the first settlers arrived America had fought for her independence from England, but the Norman conquest of Britain had taken place more than seven centuries earlier!
In the meantime, life for the first inhabitants of Australia went on as it had done for millennia! They told stories, created art, followed the ancient songlines as the seasons came and went, took from the land what they needed and passed on the knowledge of caring for Country to the next generation. Until the settlers arrived and suddenly, in the space of five lifetimes, the land had changed beyond recognition.
“1964 - A good year” - one of the double page illustrations in “Silent Sentinel”
The above illustration represents the year I was born. It was also the year that the EH Holden, a car which is regarded with fondness by many, first appeared on the scene. I decided to include a ute in this painting, complete with a kelpie in the back and the driver’s arm resting casually on the ledge of the open window. No seatbelts and no air-conditioning- just the breeze and a sunburned right arm! That arm was also used to signal a turn (straight out for a right turn and a crooked elbow for a left), and to give a wave to other motorists as they passed. A bit of research revealed that licence plates in 1964 started with “H”, so I changed the plate I’d given this car from EHH (for EH Holden) to HEH064. It’s the little details that lend authenticity to the story… and there would be sure to be someone who would notice the error if I’d missed it!
In the timespan between this spread and the previous one (c.1904), both my parents and grandparents had been born. I was born in Benalla where life was not so different to the rural outskirts of Melbourne, and similar scenes were familiar to my parents. The superseded Massey-Fergusson tractor rusting away in the paddock even brought back childhood memories for my mother of visiting her uncle’s farm in the Netherlands.
Looking at this picture, can you imagine the sound of car tyres crunching over the gravel road? The sound of the magpie’s sudden carolling, the rough rope between your hands and the smell of eucalyptus leaves mingling with that of rubber? The sun on your face and the breeze in your hair? There may be differences in language and culture, but it is our common experiences which connect us across distance and time.
An article in the Whittlesea Leader captions this image “Smith's Epping Garage, on the corner of Cooper St and High St, in 1976. Picture: Major Road Projects Victoria”. While the car in front of the garage may date from the late 1950s, there are also newer cars in the picture which support this date.
Smith’s Garage was the “model” for the garage in the painting “1964, A good year”. Did the tyre swing in the painting come from this workshop? The Goodyear Tyres Manufacturing Plant was established at Thomastown in 1966, although the company had been operating in Melbourne since 1915.