Under the MacRobertson Bridge
I went walking in South Yarra on Thursday and ended up walking down to the Grange Rd Bridge which crosses the Yarra River on the intersection go Alexandra Parade and Grange Rd. It’s official name is MacRobertson Bridge and was opened in October 1934.
Back in the late 50’s my Dad, George was his name, took a liking to bicycle races. Not as a participant because he smashed his leg in a car accident on his way to Shepparton to win my Mum’s heart way back in the late 1940s. He’d picked up a hitchhiker, smashed his car soon after and the bloody hitchhiker disappeared leaving my Dad with a badly broken leg and a smashed car.
If my memory serves me right there was a bicycle velodrome somewhere at the end of Grange Rd where it crosses the MacRobertson Bridge. The year must have been about 1960. It wasn’t too far from out little house in Pridham St, East Prahran.
This became our regular weekend haunt back then which for me was fantastic because at this time in my then short and young life I had become addicted to collecting returnable soft drink bottles so I could cash them in with the vendor and pocket the refund.
Bicycle riders were thirsty bastards which worked extraordinarily well for me.
After each race the majority of the riders would down a Tarax or Coke, sweet coloured liquid that would replace their lost carbs and also probably send their insulin rocketing, all old men now or dead and gone, but young and vital in 1960. Wearing little leather crash hats that looked like the hair of a child returning from Bali but black instead of blond. A bead of sweat dripping down their foreheads and the smell of ligament rubbed on burning legs everywhere.
For me the excitement of scrounging for the empty drink bottles was far more interesting and lucrative than watching these men race around the velodrome, up and down the angular rising and subsiding track that was located proudly next to the murky waters of The Yarra River.
Back then I had no idea that it was really more of a stream compared to rivers I have now seen like the Chao Praya in Asia or even the mighty rivers of Tasmania and New Zealand.
But it was our river and that made it fine, no matter it’s small stature as far as rivers go.
My memories don’t extend to the exact amount that I would get for the returned bottles but to me it was a princely sum, maybe “thrupence” (3 pennies) and some of the bigger more elaborate bottles may have returned sixpence. Big money in the day. Back then mass production was only just in it’s infancy so the bottles were still designed and created with a certain pride that didn’t take the bottom line into account in the same way it does today with the thin poisonous plastic bottles and wafer thin cans. Back then the bottles had texture, weight and felt like they were worth saving.
The bottle collecting period of my life had strong attachments to what for me was the closest I ever had back then for being “on the road” or somehow living a little of the life of adventure that I watched on the little black and white TV set in the front room of our little white house in East Prahran. And that was our bi-yearly visits to my country cousins in Shepparton. Wide open roads, gangs of young boys roaming big empty spaces, walking on hot country asphalt roads and putting our ears to the glistening train track, wondering when the next train would roar down the tracks. Sometimes to make our adventure even more complete we would do this while standing on a railway bridge which seemed to tower over the thick brown waters of the Goulbourn River. Melbourne’s cramped inner city streets seemed lame compared to this majestic “adventureland” filled with dams, yabbies, hidden pads of cow shit which were a disaster to put your foot in.
Shepparton was where I learned the fine art of collecting bottles to make a meagre but rewarding sum of money, sometimes enough to buy 6 hot, crispy potato cakes that we ate on the top deck of an old wrecked, dilapidated double decker bus in Mooroopna, just 2-3 miles away from my Grandmother’s farm where my Auntie Jean lived and ran a boarding house filled with crazy, interesting men who seemed so exciting back then, fruit-pickers, itinerants, men on the move. It was almost like they walked straight out of a Jack Kerouac book. They had guitars, fancy clothes and girly magazines.
Looking back I realise that it wasn’t the money we made from cashing in the bottles, it was what it represented. A certain freedom and independence that was somewhat impossible to reach for in Melbourne. If I had of known who Jack Kerouac was back then I probably would have felt like I was a character in one of his books.
Cousins were important and powerful people back then in the days before the Beatles and moving into the teenage years.
That’s me on the left, my sister on the right and one of my Shepparton cousins in the centre about the same time.
So the MacRoberston Bridge is a symbol of these times and walking under it yesterday evoked some powerful and pleasant memories of my distant past as well as an acknowledgment of the power of childhood experiences that you didn’t need to or have to share with your parents. Little acts of naughtiness that helped to define your individuality.
Addendum
I rang my sister, Nett this morning to check her memories. They were not anywhere near as vivid as mine, except that she did remember me coercing her to approach spectators and riders to commit their empty bottle to us, even when they were still yet only half through their drink.
