10 Things # 50

GH is on the road again

1/ The open road!

2/ Who doesn’t love a road trip? Our annual northern pilgrimage took us via Holbrook, whose boss submarine looked superb against the golden hour sky….

…and the accommodation was right up to the standard of the Shit Box From Hell.

Anyone for dinner?

Oh, it’s closed. As in Perth, we even had room 13 again.

Nothing spooky about that

Anyway, you’ve got to have a sense of humour about these things.

Might as well relax.

3/ But what’s this in Gundagai? The Australian Pen Museum?

Yes, in an 1881 assembly hall in the main street of Gundagai, pens: proprietor Bruce Wilks, a retired electricity linesman, an oxy welder and a hardware store owner, has been collecting writing implements and accoutrements for almost seventy years. To display a selection from his more than 4000 items, he then spent six years renovating the hall, which opened in March 2023. What can I say? A singular man with a singular vision.

In the near corner, you’ll see a 1967 vintage Parker Pen cabinet, with a superb selection of this premium product. Bruce is particularly proud of this pen, handmade by the patriarch for Roy Coyle, who flew the company DC-3 from 1953 to his retirement in 1978.

There’s presidential pens.

There’s Onoto Pens

Check out this delirious riot of steel nibs.

Anyway, you’re getting the idea - you could spend hours here and we did. Bruce likes to say that his oldest item dates back 4000 years: it was fashioned around the time of Irish potato famine from ancient bog oak, and features a harp and shamrock.

Here’s another to appeal to Pete too.

4/ But wait, there’s more. Bruce has antique letters, contracts, parchments, copying devices, and these magnificent page turners. No, not that kind of page turners, but actual page turners..

Bruce’s collection of classic letterheads, meanwhile, is improbably adorned with….Alice Cooper’s School’s Out? Why, yes, it is.

5/ In fact, school is in. Out the back, Bruce has assembled this perfect facsimile of a state school classroom, featuring desks with inkwells, blackboard with dusters, school milk bottles and portrait of King George V.

Anyway, we loved chatting to Bruce, and came away so laden with merch there was no time for the Truck Museum or the Land Cruiser Museum, let alone the dog on the tucker box. In any event, we were hastening here.

6/ It’s been a while, but I’m pleased to report that the Bradman Museum is actually looking quite spruce. There’s an enjoyable exhibition on women’s cricket; the strains of ‘C’Mon Aussie’ still waft from the theaterette; the core Bradman collection is replete with choice items, including that resonant self-proclamation, committed to paper after he had played just the one Test….

…while Bruce would rejoice in the ink stand featuring the ball that Bradman caught to end the 1936-37 Ashes.

7/ Bruce would approve of the letterhead on this too: in the context of the squalid end of Harry Hodgetts, a Bradman letter from the very week.

‘It has been dreadful,’ says the Don. ‘Amidst the storm I have started my own business and am afraid it will be a matter of very hard work and little return for as far ahead as I can see.’ Rather worse for his old confrere Hodgetts, of course.

8/ This dossier of advice on captaincy written almost seventy years ago to Ian Craig, Australia’s youngest office holder, also surely deserves a wider audience.

9/ Still, cricket in Bowral is not all about the past. A friend of Et Al, Bernadette Mahony, imparts the great news that Bowral Public School, Bradman’s old Alma Mater, recently finished joint champions of the New South Wales Primary Schools’ Cricket Championship. Bernadette’s grandson, Mikey Mahony, was part of the successful team; the team’s coach, Natalie McLean, guided them through a campaign of almost a year, training on Bradman Oval because the school’s playground is too small for cricket; parents and grandparents drove the boys all over the state to compete. ‘I think that this team of year 5 and 6 school boys from Bowral are probably the first young men to put Bowral on the map for school cricket since Don Bradman,’ says Bernadette. ‘I am sure he would have been proud of them.’

10/ It’s also worth an alert that the Don has just played a part in improving Bowral accommodation. After changing hands last July, 52 Shepherd Street, Bradman’s family home between 1911 and 1924, has just reopened as a bed and breakfast. I wrote about this fascinating house ten years ago, and am pleased to advise it does not have a Room 13.

Anyway, see you all tomorrow at 3pm at the Akasha Tap Room in Five Dock for Cricket Et Al’s live pod with special guests Ed Cowan and Rhys Muldoon. To miss it would be….