Before A Kiewa Kid's Birth
Their parents Andrew (Ted) and Adaline White lived along the road at Tawonga South. Ted was also a carpenter and arrived in the valley 6 months before. They had been seeking work with their eldest son, Clarence Isaac (Clicker), you guessed it, also a carpenter. While working on the Hume Weir Dam construction 50 miles away, they were privy to the new and exciting work commencing up the valley. So they packed up their bags, as you did in those days and headed up to where the bread and butter was.
After Gordon and Charlie had settled their families into their scrap-material shacks with dirt floor, every work day they would walk 200 metres up the steep hill near the now "new reservoir" location. Here they would meet the bus coming from the Tawonga SEC camp, heading up to the Clover Power Station work area at Lower Bogong. As carpenters, this is where they helped build the associated works buildings, concrete form work and housing accommodation for married couples. As the seventeen homes at Lower Bogong were progressively completed in 1941, married couples ended up being allocated the houses. The two White families and the Roberts' then left their little tents and shacks and moved up to the Lower Bogong homes.
Life here for the growing White family was such a far cry from the life on the river and certainly from the dust, heat and flies of Victoria's Mallee and Central NSW's. This is from where they had left after helping to build the infrastructure for several locks, weirs and dams for the Murray River Irrigation System.
This little bush haven is where the second son of Gordon and Hazel White, Errol Bernard, in 1942, was brought home to, after being born in the only hospital for 50 miles, Yackandandah. It was here also that I spent the first eighteen months of my life, after also being born in the Yackandandah hospital. |
The Gordon Whites (house in foreground), the Ted Whites, Roberts, Whiteheads, Dixons, Holts, Hockings, Zeibells and Gardners to name a few, all moved into the modern housing comforts at Lower Bogong.
At left are the terraced foundations on the mountain slope near Clover Power Station that can still be seen at the Lower Bogong Arboretum. Click For Next / |