..Hello, and  Welcome..

....... to Ovada at Berthong Street

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Berthong Street was both the way to Berthong, and the street

where I lived in my childhood years. Today, it is a digital memory,

a place for collecting treasures.

It was more like a country lane as I remember it, a long and

sometimes happy route to our home, but that depended

on what had happened to start me on my journey, and what

kind of reception I could reasonably expect. The coming

of the telephone to our street had one major disadvantage: it

allowed teachers to tell their tales faster than I could walk.

Now, a street full of happy memories,

of family, old motor cars, trucks and

dogs. Horse-drawn bakers' and milk

carts there were

and unseen wagons

worked  through the night, but the

valiant draught horses were being

displaced by noisy, unreliable trucks

of all shapes and sizes. Most of them

had done their duty in New Guinea, and Borneo and other such

dreaded, war torn lands, another world and another time.

There was new hope in people's faces in those days as men

returning from war, were building new homes and new lives.

The street was becoming a busy thoroughfare, and might

soon be decorated with a narrow strip of  black macadam

surface, flanked by wide, weedy fairways reaching down

to nondescript, unsealed gutters.

To our city dwelling visitors, there was something

perplexing about these three-lane roadways, one of

asphalt,  flanked by weeds. But those city folk ought

to have been well aware of the folly of allowing narrow

lanes to morph into Sydney's busy streets. Colonial

planners had learned hard from the experience and by

mid 20thC, even in Berthong Street, the gutter-to-gutter

limit would be of such a width as to allow various

horse-drawn carts to turn without unharnessing the team.

We were a family of builders, rarely rich except in the popular

belief of those people who owned the hidden  faces at

windows as I passed. We rode the pendulum of fortune from

plenty to penury whilst government agencies deferred payment

of their debts from one budget to the next.

Like the farmer who spent the family savings planting a crop

that he might never harvest,  there   was an element of the

gambler in such men. Wisdom spoke of the foolhardiness of

such unmet payments, but wisdom seldom put food on the

table.

There were many happy days, and when school was

mercifully closed, the boys  might roam the grassy

hillside in the company of their Collie dog. Then, the

street and the rolling grassy hills were just likea little

bit of heaven.

The delighted Collie Dog thought so too!

Then, Ovada Berthong Street was ...

............................Our Laughing Place!

............................

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