This is an awesome story. 🙂
Comment on Discussion Thread: Tuesday, 4 March 2025
Thornburywitch@aussie.zone 13 hours agoBack in the 60s my parents moved the whole family from England to Australia - all the big furniture (including a piano) went in a shipping container made of wood (!!) which was just plonked by a crane onto the front lawn of the house we moved into in Ringwood. Once emptied, the timber was repurposed by Dad into the lining of the garage so he could put hooks & shelves anywhere not just into the structural supports. We moved out of there in 1988, and the lining timbers were just as good/bad as new. The timber was kinda hairy and shed splinters all the time, but was structurally strong. I wonder to this day just what that timber was and where it came from. I’ve never seen anything like it since. Nearest guess would be messmate, but this stuff didn’t warp like messmate does.
Seagoon_@aussie.zone 10 hours ago
RustyRaven@aussie.zone 12 hours ago
Ringwood would have still been nearly rural at that time! They were probably there when they moved the clock tower! My family would have moved to the area not long before you moved out. Now every time I look at the older houses I’m going to wonder if it has a garage lined with shipping container!
TheWitchofThornbury@aussie.zone 11 hours ago
It was. There was still a cattle/sheep/horse/pig market in Croydon, the Ringwood one had closed recently for large animals but you could still get goats and chickens there. Actually, we pre-dated moving the clock tower - which was opened by my granddad and there’s still a plaque on it with his name. We even pre-dated Eastland! The first version of that was built while I was in secondary school. My grandparents moved there in the early 1950s after my grandad left the army, and bought a large house on Warrandyte Road which is still there. The house was built in the 1910s for the manager of the antimony mine in Burnt Bridge, and it had a circular carriage drive, carriage house and stables, a hutch in the whacking great kitchen for bread and milk & meat deliveries, a huuuuge bath with a mahogany surround - and outside toilets. One for the gentry, and another one for the servants. And I think from memory about 6 bedrooms, though some of those had been re-purposed as the library etc. Great place for a family to grow up, but suburbia covers all eventually.
RustyRaven@aussie.zone 10 hours ago
Funnily enough my family moved to the area (Croydon Hills) after my dad left the army. Not quite so fancy a house for us, and Eastland (in its early brown brick square format) was already there. I had a look at some records and we moved in '82, and I’ve mostly been in the area since then. Suburbia is definitely covering everything, and in higher density than ever before too.