​Sandy Beach has had a mention in a previous memoir as I remember. The complete commercial picture was a small grocery with post office, a baker’s shop and a lolly shop. It certainly didn’t include a pharmacy – or a doctor for that matter.

So when I cut my leg climbing about on the galvanized fence and the cut became infected, my mother had to send for help further afield. Mr. Swain lived over the road and drove his sleek green bus to Launceston and back, about fifty km. each way, every week day. Mother explained the situation and asked him to buy a particular ointment to treat the cut. By the time Mr. Swain had dropped his passengers and arrived at the pharmacy, he’d forgotten the name of the ointment. However, he passed on what had happened and the chemist sold him something he thought would be appropriate.

It turned out that not only did the ointment fail to heal the leg but it started eating into the flesh. Needless to say, that particular treatment came to an abrupt end and an order was put in for the original ointment. Mr. Swain made sure he got it right this time and brought it over as soon as he finished his run. It did indeed heal the leg, but I can still dimly see the scar on my calf eighty years later.

From Sandy Beach, we moved to Ballarat and I was off to Pleasant Street State School. In those days, if students didn’t pass their exams, they were left down to repeat the year. Barbara was fourteen in Grade 6 and much bigger than we eleven-year-olds. She was giving me a piggy-back one playtime and she set me down on a small post supporting the netball goal post. This had a large bolt poking out three or four inches. As I jumped down, this bolt tore a large piece of flesh in my thigh and left it hanging on three sides. Poor Barbara was horrified but, of course, it wasn’t her fault.

The thigh had gone completely numb – possibly some of the nerves were severed – so I couldn’t feel any pain but, as I recall, the office lady fainted at the sight.

Off to Ballarat Hospital to get a multitude of stitches and a piece of sticking plaster about five inches wide to cover the wound. I was off school for six weeks and recommended to stay off my leg.

I had regular check-ups at the hospital and these entailed dragging off the giant sticking plaster each time. It was agony. However, one of the nurses had a wonderful idea. She cut the plaster down the centre,  turned back the edges and threaded a lace through cuts in the fold. From then on, it was just a matter of loosening the lace each time a check-up was needed. I loved that nurse!

One time Mother and I went to the hospital in a taxi as the car was unavailable. It cost so much we had to return in the tram and I had to walk the longish block from the tram stop to our place, much to Mother’s concern.

However the wound healed and the scar remained.

Much more interesting than a tattoo!

​
Carmyl Winkler
April 2024

​We were living in a Methodist parsonage in Launceston when Dad decided to enlist as a chaplain in the AIF, so we moved down the Tamar River 31 miles to Sandy Beach*.

Mr. Twomey had a grocery and post office and also organised milk delivery. My mother once found him out the back of the shop watering down the milk. Mr. Parry had a lolly shop on the highway a few doors away. I guess he sold something else, but I don’t know what it was. Mrs. Robinson had a baker’s shop a few doors in the other direction. These are the only shops I can remember but I guess there was a butcher.

There was a Methodist church with Mr. Fletcher at the helm, Mr. Swain with a sleek green bus that he drove to Launceston and back every day and the fish man who knocked at the back door each Friday with flathead for threepence each or flounders for sixpence. And that was Sandy Beach.

Beauty Point was a mile back with a big harbour, where we once saw a Catalina Flying Boat, and Beaconsfield was another three miles and that was where we went to school.

We had three girls, six, eight and ten, a younger brother who was three, our mother and Dulce who came with us from Launceston to give Mother a hand. Our house had an attic where some of us slept.

Dorothy was in the top grade, a mix of grades 6 and 7. Mr. Calloway, the headmaster, was the teacher and sometimes caned the boys. Frank O’Toole could sing the first verse of Lilli Marlene in German, exciting admiration and suspicion. We learned to sing Land of Hope and Glory and Beautiful Dreamer.

I was in Grade 4 / 5 with the lovely Miss Dawes for my teacher. An inspector turned up one day and asked the class, “If an electric train is travelling at 60 miles an hour and the wind is blowing in the opposite direction at 40 miles an hour, which way will the smoke go?” Why do I remember? Of course, because I was the only one who said electric trains don’t have any smoke.

We made our own fun with Dorothy writing plays about Cavaliers and Roundheads and we girls dressing up and acting them out for Dulce, Mother and John. We read ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’ to kind-hearted John so we could see his eyes filling with tears when the ant turned away the hungry grasshopper.

​One morning we were on the school bus and people were on the road shouting, “The war’s over! The war’s over!” We kept driving to school where we had a short ceremony and then got the bus home. Two days holiday! Mother organised us and we went to Launceston in Mr. Swain’s bus and stayed there overnight. There were heaps of people in the city streets dancing and shouting. I’m sure Mother wanted to give us an experience to remember and she surely did.
 

​Carmyl Winkler
February 2024

*Now known as Ilfraville