Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 409
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[Page 409]
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building machinery, all of which was to constitute the Board's first equipment pool, and on which it was about to spend up to four million pounds, being the accumulated contributions (one third of estimated cost) of the Shires and Municipal Councils through whose areas the reconstruction of main roads was planned.
During the preceding six months my three sisters had all become engaged and married, one after the other, and now that I too was saying farewell to "Rosedernate", our beloved parents were being left alone to lead a quiet "Darby and Joan" life in the big house. Our entire family had enjoyed a few extremely blissful years together there during that much too short period when we were all finished with school, and were more or less grown-up but not yet married. Many a jolly tennis party we had there with our bosom friends on Saturday afternoons, with lucious afternoon teas for which my sisters spent many preparatory hours in the big kitchen; and finished the day singing choruses of the latest musical hits around the piano in the drawing room.
Ukeleles were very much in fashion and we all possessed and played one, with varying skill. On many Summer nights out on the lawn we and our friends would be accompanying our singing by strumming on these handy little instruments, with perhaps someone also playing a banjo or an Hawaiian steel guitar. On Sunday afternoons we frequently drove along shady roads in our motor car and took our ukeleles with us to enhance our singing.
During his term as Mayor, Dad had entertained many visiting overseas celebrities at "Rosedernate", and on every Christmas Day of recent years he had given sumptuous evening dinner parties there to a dozen or so of our closest friends, at which the wine flowed so freely and the mateyness became so unloosed that, as Dad would remark the next morning, wives were affectionately kissing their husbands. The breaking up of the old home was a very sad but inevitable occurrence.
Mother and Father continued to live there for another year or so, then Dad sold his Land Agency practice and also the home and moved to "Afton Water" in the hills beyond Tarcutta to become a grazier in his semi-retirement. "Rosedernate" was