​In 1951 our family moved from Ballarat to Geelong. To my joy, the annual sporting visit of Ballarat High School to Geelong High was scheduled for that very day so I blithely decided I’d travel to Geelong with the school and then find my way to our new home.

I had some vague directions and the address. A wonderful new acquaintance took me under her wing, travelled with me to Belmont and found the right tram stop, then remained on the tram as it travelled back to the city and out to North Geelong where she lived.

Within a day or so, I met Lorraine (aka Larry) who lived over the road and was a year younger than me. We rode the three miles to school together from then on and became firm friends.

In Ballarat my consuming interest had been in Girl Guides, held in the church hall next door. I really wanted to become a Queen’s Guide, the highest award attainable. I had finished my Second Class tests and was preparing for my First Class.

The problem was that Belmont didn’t have a Guide Company. Initially I caught the tram into Yarra Street in the city each Tuesday night but it was a disappointing substitute as it was a group of young Guides, none of whom had even passed Second Class.

After some months, I left Yarra Street as I had found a Guide Company from Morongo School which met in the city after school on Wednesdays. This was a much more satisfactory group except that I was the only student not at Morongo. I stayed until I had finished First Class and then gave it away.

In the meantime, Belmont provided all sorts of possibilities, mainly centred around the Methodist church. Ten tennis teams, three cricket teams, a vibrant youth group were on the doorstep. I had never been a star sportsperson but was welcomed into the D Grade tennis team at the bottom of the senior division.

The Youth Group opened even more doors. Giving concerts seemed to be a specialty and before long, Larry and I were putting on sketches together. I’m not sure where the scripts came from but we were extremely versatile and willing to have a go at anything. My father drew the line when I had cast myself as a drunk!

I became one of the more junior members of the church choir and taught a Sunday School class at the age of fifteen.

In 1952 I moved up to Form 5 or ‘Leaving’ as it was known. I was selected as one of the two prefects from Form 5, the other five being from Form 6. Ballarat had had a superb, somewhat classical, music teacher but Geelong put on a Gilbert and Sullivan end-of-year performance.

The church youth group included a good many ‘couples’ and probably the most significant thing for the year was Larry suggesting the name of a boy who was currently unattached and who might be suitable for me.

​I wasn’t quite sure who the boy was.

Some weeks later I walked home with him from a church meeting in Geelong, a week before my sixteenth birthday.

​I ended up marrying him six years later.


Carmyl Winkler
October 2025

The year 1976 started out no differently from any other year.  I had been boarding with Rita for almost seven years and could be likened to one of those kids who wouldn’t leave the nest. 
 
I don’t think I ever gave much thought to what I would do, or where I would go, once Rita could no longer have me. 
 
I was convinced that I had been left on the shelf - unwanted.
 
Early in 1976 my best friend Rod died.  He was a big drinker, and I had tried to keep up with him.  With his death, I started to change my ways. 
 
At this time, I was involved with the local Victorian Railways Institute.  We were running Old Time dances in our hall, and it was my night to run them.  Towards the end of the night, just after I’d finished reading The Herald, a lady approached me and asked me to dance.
 
This lady was Doreen Bamford.  I knew Doreen, her late husband Reg, and her two daughters, from playing golf and socialising at the Golden Vale Golf Club.
 
We arranged that if either of us needed a partner for a social event, we would call each other. 
 
On Friday 13th August 1976, Doreen and her friend Val were going to a ‘Parents Without Partners’ Ball at Mooroopna, so I tagged along. 
 
From then on, we were a couple.  Before this I had booked a cruise on the Arcadia around the Pacific Islands, which I went on and as planned, enjoying the experience immensely, while at the same time looking forward to continuing my relationship with Doreen when I returned.    
 
Doreen and her mother came from large families, so wherever we went, I would be introduced to friendly relatives.
 
Doreen’s two daughters, Cheryl and Lois, were living at home, and both had boyfriends.   We decided that the three couples would marry.  Lois was first, then Cheryl, then us - in 1978.
        
Rita was at last free of her boarder!
 
Having escaped parenthood, I soon became a grandparent to Derek and went on to have five wonderful grandchildren.  They had eight children of their own and so, having a 19-year-old great grandson, we are waiting for the next generation.
 
We have had a good marriage, travelling whenever we could. We have been avid bowlers, which has taken us everywhere, and we met and made good friends along the way.
 
Having moved into a wonderful retirement village, Cooinda, our life is easy - less housework and no garden to look after.  We’ve taken advantage of the social life at Cooinda and the U3A activities offered in Benalla.
 
It is amazing where life takes you!
 
We are now 89 and 90 years old, both still able to drive and do some physical tasks, for which we are grateful. 
 
We have been married 47 years –the third marriage for Doreen, who was widowed at an early age with two young children, and the first marriage for me.  
 
I wasn’t left on the shelf – unwanted - after all!
 
 
Max Tilbury
October 2025

​In February 1974, in my early thirties, I married the god daughter of an Anglo American farmer and her English husband who had befriended me when I was an agricultural student in England a decade previously. 
 
That period in the early 1960s changed my life too.  Before I went there I had thought of England as being almost the same as Australia.  I had not been ready for England’s rigid class system and sophisticated cultural diversity.
 
Distinctly middle class in English eyes I was accepted though; I was just branded in a semi serious way as a “bloody colonial”.
 
The couple of swinging sixties years I spent in England really opened my eyes to the wider world.
 
But forward again to 1974.   Newly married, I was about to be exposed to city living or should I say suburban Burwood living in Melbourne. I’d previously not spent more than a week or two at a time living in a city and it was initially vaguely oppressive being more or less confined to a suburban block.
 
It wasn’t always though.  I’d borrowed a tractor from my parent’s farm at Benalla and because it was difficult to start, had parked it overnight on the steeply sloping drive of a neighbour - who had just coincidentally bought my parents’ old house near Benalla.
 
The new Burwood neighbour was so cross about the monster presence on what was soon to be his drive, that I don’t think he ever really spoke to us.
 
The really big change in 1974 was that within weeks of becoming a married man I landed a journalism job with Stock and Land newspaper in Melbourne.
 
I’d been offered the job the previous spring when we were selling our Mortlake Hereford stud and I had done the artwork for a half page advertisement to go in Stock and Land.
 
I had laid Letraset type (remember that miraculous stuff) over a photo I’d taken of the cattle and despite the fact I was told that my type was slightly crooked, the Stock and Land editor must have thought I had potential.
 
Anyway, in March 1974 I started writing about farming with an article about King Island which I had visited several times in 1973 to list farms for sale.
 
In the newsroom I did deal not so much with the editor as with a sub-editor and in my case it was two.  I very quickly got feed back on what I should be doing and so started a steep learning curve on how to make an impact with words.
 
I learnt that the essential shape of a story should be an inverted pyramid: the what, when, why, who at the very top, gradually tailing down to the less important stuff.  That means if a cut is made to a story, it will be from the bottom and only relatively unimportant material will disappear.
 
I had always been a keen photographer so complementing stories with pictures came to me pretty naturally.  It was nice to have someone else do all the developing and printing though.
 
It was the taking of pictures which started a row with a former employee of Stock & Land who had just left to represent The Land newspaper in Victoria.  I don’t know whether it precipitated his move, but he had reportedly had a very public punch up with the chief sub editor in the newsroom.
 
Anyway I was member of the Australian Journalists’ Association and as good union members, we were supposed to have photographers trail along with us rather than take our own pictures.  
 
However at an event at the National Science Centre this objectionable individual, who went on to run Rural Press out of Sydney,  started shouting at me from a mezzanine floor for taking pictures. 
 
I never forgave him and when Rural Press bought Stock & Land in 1986, I resigned and took a different road rather than have to work under his bossy and dishonest eye.
 
My career as a Stock and Land journalist had ended after twelve years,  but my life as a journalist has lasted for over four decades since it started in 1974 – the year that made me. 
 
 
 
David Palmer
16 November 2015