After our family pilgrimage to dad’s hometown of Ballarat in 2019, we all first planned to visit mum’s childhood hometown of Sea Lake back in 2020, and then 2021 and 2022. COVID had other plans for us and by 2023 the trip had fallen off the agenda. April 2024 was when our plans aligned with mum and dad’s, and Maggie was able to join us.
If I swept up all the impressions I had of Sea Lake over my life, it would be an ill-defined collection, evoking thick dust, at times stifling heat, 1950s country balls, yabby-fishing, my great grandmother’s bountiful garden orchard, a close-knit community and small-town childhood joys and pains. I had heard stories of mum’s childhood over decades but had never been there.
I didn’t even know how big Sea Lake was, or whether it was beside a lake or not. I had a notion that it might be like a ghost town by now. But two of mum’s brothers have contributed with a dozen others to the renovation of the remaining local pub a few years ago, and my uncle Roger had told us that pre-COVID, Chinese tourists were coming in their bus loads to see the local salt lake (named Lake Tyrrell, not Sea Lake) that had been photographed and publicized in China. Even so, I didn’t know how lively the town would be at the time of our visit given the decline of such small towns and decades-long increasing urbanization.
Though sheep are no longer farmed much nearby, Sea Lake is still a hub for the surrounding wheat, barley and other grains for feedstock, with plentiful sunshine and as treeless as it is flat.
Accompanied by the sound of the latest Taylor Swift Album that was released during our drive from Anglesea four and a half hours earlier, the approach to the town slowed us to 60 km/ hour along the main street, so we could see the beige brick and weatherboard houses on our approach. We were at the century-old restored pub in the centre of town before we knew it.
It was a lovely, atmospheric building diagonally opposite the small shopfront where my grandfather and his father ran their stock-and-station agent business – now a gift shop with deep turquoise walls and whitewashed white floorboards. The former General Store beside it, that mum explained sold everything from food items to clothing in her day, is now a FoodWorks supermarket. On the same side of the road as the pub was The Bottom Café down the street; a takeaway/ video game joint up the street, and in between, a more modern café; an op shop; and a shop selling gifts and small furniture. Across the road where the sweets shop used to be, site of too many lollies mum had with her friend Avis Wall, and now an electric car recharging station.
While the girls listened to Taylor Swift in the pub’s hotel room up the glistening staircase, mum took Maggie and I for a walk to see her old house at 94 Best Street, still connected to the back of another shop: four children crammed in to a couple of bedrooms, a small kitchen and loungeroom containing bunks for the boys (Jessie said that her father described how his possessions as a child fitted into a shoebox). The house was only centimetres away from the houses on both sides. Mum lived here with her then three siblings and her parents in the period between when she was a baby to five or six years old, and then again for the last couple of years before they all moved to Melbourne for educational opportunities. She showed us her paternal grandparents’ house one street down at number 12 Horace st, which was one domestic orchard away from her grandmother’s sister at number 8 and a stone’s throw from both her maternal grandparents’ house around the corner (now demolished for the senior citizen’s centre) and opposite the third house she lived in with her parents and four siblings at number 13 across the road. The orchard is gone, and so has the geranium path down the front garden of number 12 and the large white gum tree that reached up to the sky in her old garden. But the 30 foot silos behind mum’s old house are now a giant artwork of an Aboriginal girl on a swing, the blue sky above her blending with the blue sky painted above the girl.
We all had dinner in the 1920s-style restaurant in the pub: white walls, one framed delicate gold-printed bonsai-sized tree on one wall, a matching black one on another, with the frosted original windows each with a ‘RH’ Royal Hotel logo. There were two pubs in town when mum and her parents and grandparents lived there and one has since burnt down. This surviving one was only two doors down from number 94 Best Street where they lived. My grandfather had a drink there after work quite regularly with clients, or attended meetings at the community centre where he served on many community boards around the corner.
The next day after a quick stop at the small hospital where mum was born, we all drove the 6km out to Green Lake, a camping and picnic area with paddy melons resting in the shallow waters. Lara picked one up and I licked a piece of it, immediately regretting it because of the bitter taste. After lunch in the pub and a further poke around the shops and playground where the girls patted a ginger cat, we visited local farmer and old family friend Robert McLelland, who showed us around the huge planting and threshing machinery on his family farm 3km out of town, now run by his son. We climbed up the giant vehicles, both stored in the sheds and sitting outside beside a field, each one several times our height. Lara’s verdict after climbing the threshing machine outside in her thongs: ‘No offence but I wouldn’t want to be a farmer. Too dusty.’
One huge shed also housed the fertilisers and chemicals used, another one contained a car and caravan for contracted staff to use, taking up a small corner. A series of around six 10ft high silos are used to store the grain once harvested. There was a photo of these siloes in the night sky upstairs in the pub, beside other photos of the town in the 1940s and 1950s when my family lived in Sea Lake, with 1940s and 1950s cars along the street.
Our last stop with Robert was his house, to meet his wife Yvonne. She had been a midwife and remembered dad’s sister Kay, who had worked as a teacher in Sea Lake probably about 50 years ago. Confined largely to a loungeroom chair due to severe arthritis, she told us that her life as a midwife had been a lot like the show on TV, Call the Midwife, that I enjoyed back at my room that very evening.
Before relaxing in bed to watch it, we drove 10km north to Lake Tyrrell for sunset. The lake is currently almost dry, with a layer of salt which is harvested across the other end of its expanse and sold for domestic and tourist use. The natural system of the lake replenishes itself. It’s the oldest site of Aboriginal cultural significance in Victoria, still cared for by its traditional owners today.
The salt lake was approached by low, olive-coloured salt scrub, reminiscent to me of the landscape I saw in Namibia when Steve and I travelled there twenty years ago. We passed the viewing platform and drove on for another kilometre, now on a gravel road that was well signposted to the car park beside six foot rusty-looking metal lettering spelling ‘Tyrrell’. From there was a gray corrugated iron walkway as you would see along any walking trail, that led to a circular area with nearby single and double extended chairs also set out in a large circle to view the stars and their reflection against the mirror-like salt lake. The sun went down to soft pinks and mauves, there were a few other family groups and someone dressed in a silver outfit holding a bunch of silver balloons who was being photographed against the setting sun.
The next morning the girls and I got up at 6.10am and drove out to experience the sunrise over the lake. The sky looked similar to the night before and the silver woman was there again with their camera person, their car covered in dustings of snow and ice. Maggie had left early in the morning, and after morning potato cakes and hot chocolate/ coffee at the Bottom café, and Lara had had a hold of the 12-foot python owned by the café manager, the rest of us fitted in to one car and drove out past the houses of childhood friends. After that we took the highway out of town to the cemetery, located in bushland on a small hill.
Seeing all four of my great grandparents buried in couples, including the Schneiders and the McLennan great great grandparents also there, surrounded by McLellands, Keans, Stewarts, McKenzies and others of English and Scottish heritage, was compelling in conjuring up a bygone time. Mum had known many of these people – they were more than names to her. She was quite shaken by seeing a new gravestone from 2021 of an old schoolfriend who had lived and worked in Canberra and Melbourne. She hadn’t expected a contemporary to have died already, nor for him to be buried in Sea Lake after he had also left long ago.
Throughout our stay, I chatted with Deb, who worked 7 days/ week at the pub and had moved back only 6 months prior, to spend more time with her 91 year old mother, who still works at the op shop once a week and is actively involved in the community. Deb directed us to Wyn Barberry’s house as we didn’t have her address or phone number, and we visited her that afternoon.
Wyn had worked for my grandfather and great grandfather for six years until she was married. Having a living connection to them brought them to life in a way they never had been for me before. Wyn talked about how she had liked my grandfather, who was a good boss, but his father ‘Malkie’ (Malcolm) was her favourite. She had cried when she got the call that he had died. She also remembered my other great grandfather Errol, and had known his wife Beatrice somewhat. She surmised that my grandparents may have moved back to the small house behind the shop before moving to Melbourne to save money for their growing kids.
Wyn walks in to town every morning to get the paper, drives her car (though not to Swan Hill anymore – she does her banking there by taking the school bus), and is well looked after by a district nurse and meals on wheels five days a week. Her hearing is impaired but she is healthy and engaged. She bemoaned the fact that the local doctor was leaving and it was very hard to find a replacement – a significant reason was that the doctor’s spouse also typically needed employment and tended to also be a professional. She didn’t see her four children or her grandchildren very often, but this was to be expected given that none lived nearby.
I filmed her talking, including telling us how she had once driven Grandpa’s Jaguar to transport something for him – the only time in her life that she had driven such a nice car. She noted that her family were very poor. It occurred to me that she must have been born in 1930, just after the beginning of the Great Depression, and the Mallee was hit hard by widespread unemployment. Her early life must have been very hard.
We saw a sign for a missing ginger cat just before we left the next morning, but hadn’t seen it for more than a day so didn’t report sighting it. After a last breakfast of tea and toast on the balcony, the girls and I drove via a second painted silo at Nullawil, this one of an old farmer in his checkered shirt, with his black work dog, where we stopped for a photo. A fellow traveller took our photo in front of it, saying that he had gone out to Lake Tyrrell the previous night to see the comet but hadn’t glimpsed it.
We drove with mum and dad in convoy another two hours to Bendigo, the road mum had taken as a four-year old when she mistakenly got on the regional rather than the local bus with her friend, discovered on arrival at Bendigo. Another two hours of Taylor Swift and some podcasts, and we were in Melbourne.
Mum was beyond delighted to have returned to her childhood home and to see the town thriving, and show us around. She must have had a happy childhood there, provided by her parents and the forebears whose graves we visited. Sea Lake was their favourite part of the holiday, as it was mine.
I bought a large bag of local apples by the side of the freeway home, for snacking on and cooking, just like mum had at the back door as a child.
