We moved to Ballarat when I was nine.
I learned to recognise elm trees by checking the leaves. The two halves of the leaf didn’t quite meet at the same point when they joined the stem – always a handy piece of information to tuck away!
But the trees that really became a part of my life were the plane trees. Huge trees with giant leaves right along both sides of Pleasant Street. It wasn’t so much the trees themselves but the gifts they gave.
At the end of summer, little round seed boxes sprinkled the footpath. The naughty boys at school would collect these, crush the powder out of them and, lo and behold, they would end up with a handful of ‘itchy powder’. Put some of these down the back of the shirt of some unsuspecting victim and watch them writhe!
The other gift was so generous – piles and piles of leaves dropping right through autumn. Pleasant Street, and many other Ballarat streets, had wide and deep bluestone gutters and here we had a ready-made fire place. We three girls and Dorothy’s friend, Val McKenzie, who lived just round the corner, spent many a Saturday afternoon raking leaves into great piles and setting a match to them.
At first we just thought it was fun to have a warm fire on a cold Ballarat afternoon but then we extended our entertainment. We threw some potatoes into the fire and then enjoyed adding leaves and stirring them up with sticks. At the end of the afternoon’s fun, we carefully flicked the potatoes out, dashed inside for some butter and the salt shaker and a knife to slice open the blackened skin and then tentatively tried the scorching insides, yelling with joy at the delicious taste, alternating with the paying the necessary price of a burnt tongue.
Our little brother joined in every now and again, to the extent a four-year old could be part of such grownup cooking ventures, but never, as I remember, did our parents feel it necessary to come out and oversee or direct.
If you walked all the way down Pleasant Street, across the tramway running down Sturt Street, you came to Pleasant Street State School. We knew every fence post and puddle as we walked that way not just to school and back each day but also home and back at lunchtime.
The school astonishingly included a very small, high walled, very cold swimming pool among its assets. At the far end of the yard was ‘The Branch’, not in this case a part of a tree, but Form 1of the far-away High School, which had run out of room for all its pupils.
If you kept walking past the school, you came to Lake Wendouree. Here the dominant trees became willows, circling the lake. We went swimming at times, wading in with feet sinking into several inches of mud before we had sufficient depth of water to splash around in.
Great memories!
I learned to recognise elm trees by checking the leaves. The two halves of the leaf didn’t quite meet at the same point when they joined the stem – always a handy piece of information to tuck away!
But the trees that really became a part of my life were the plane trees. Huge trees with giant leaves right along both sides of Pleasant Street. It wasn’t so much the trees themselves but the gifts they gave.
At the end of summer, little round seed boxes sprinkled the footpath. The naughty boys at school would collect these, crush the powder out of them and, lo and behold, they would end up with a handful of ‘itchy powder’. Put some of these down the back of the shirt of some unsuspecting victim and watch them writhe!
The other gift was so generous – piles and piles of leaves dropping right through autumn. Pleasant Street, and many other Ballarat streets, had wide and deep bluestone gutters and here we had a ready-made fire place. We three girls and Dorothy’s friend, Val McKenzie, who lived just round the corner, spent many a Saturday afternoon raking leaves into great piles and setting a match to them.
At first we just thought it was fun to have a warm fire on a cold Ballarat afternoon but then we extended our entertainment. We threw some potatoes into the fire and then enjoyed adding leaves and stirring them up with sticks. At the end of the afternoon’s fun, we carefully flicked the potatoes out, dashed inside for some butter and the salt shaker and a knife to slice open the blackened skin and then tentatively tried the scorching insides, yelling with joy at the delicious taste, alternating with the paying the necessary price of a burnt tongue.
Our little brother joined in every now and again, to the extent a four-year old could be part of such grownup cooking ventures, but never, as I remember, did our parents feel it necessary to come out and oversee or direct.
If you walked all the way down Pleasant Street, across the tramway running down Sturt Street, you came to Pleasant Street State School. We knew every fence post and puddle as we walked that way not just to school and back each day but also home and back at lunchtime.
The school astonishingly included a very small, high walled, very cold swimming pool among its assets. At the far end of the yard was ‘The Branch’, not in this case a part of a tree, but Form 1of the far-away High School, which had run out of room for all its pupils.
If you kept walking past the school, you came to Lake Wendouree. Here the dominant trees became willows, circling the lake. We went swimming at times, wading in with feet sinking into several inches of mud before we had sufficient depth of water to splash around in.
Great memories!
Carmyl Winkler
March 2022
March 2022
Lake Wendouree, Ballarat
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