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Australian History- Bert Hill The Castle |
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The castle Bert Hill was not our only neighbour
to live in a temporary dwelling while giving his spare time to the erection of
a permanent abode. Next door to us, Dave Napier, a building tradesman and
red-hot unionist, worked on a fibro house while his wife and six kids lived in
a tent and what they called the shack. My parents were different. I was an
only child; my mother worked; and my father had supplemented his wage as an
unskilled tannery worker by pencilling for a bookmaker on the flat. Yet they
were lucky to get their five square weatherboard - and- fibro house finished
just before the Menzies government came to office and lifted price controls. A
year later, my father's best friend paid almost twice as much for a slightly
smaller dwelling which wasn't even up on stumps . Bert Hill built his house brick by
brick, throughout the 1950s. He did it by himself. Most men got their mates or
relatives to help them with the bigger tasks . He had to pay for the
electrician and the plumber because the council insisted on qualified
tradesmen. The house was double- cavity brick
throughout. Whenever Bert had saved enough money he would order another
truckload of bricks and cement. The interior bricks could be unloaded by the
driver and his offsider, but Bert insisted that the face bricks be stacked
one-by-one. For this task, his children were marshalled and I would lend a
gloved hand. He watched over those expensive bricks as if they were eggs. Their
condition would show his face to the world. He laid them with a precision which
would have impressed any craftsman. After troweling out the mortar, he applied
his spirit level along each addition, tapping it until it was not so much as a
twentieth of an inch out of alignment. This meticulousness slowed down
construction but was essential to his project . He did not have the energy for
anything less than perfection . Gapites considered Bert Hill a good
husband and father. Unlike the men on either side, he did not drink. Every
penny went into the house, or for the housekeeping . His one indulgence was the
cheapest tobacco which he rolled into cigarettes as thin as wax matches; he
unpicked his butts to make another from the charred ends. His match-thin legs
stuck out beneath the baggy khaki shorts he wore as he worked on his house . Bert Hill never went on holidays,
unlike Dave Napier who packed his family into their tiny ute to spent the
holidays in a smaller tent , fishing and swimming in the Tewantin river. Dave's
fibro was cheaper and easier to erect than Bert's bricks. Bert had no time or money for
friends or hobbies . He joined the local ALP branch after the 1957 split but
came to few of the fund raisers at our house when he would have only two beers,
while his doll-like wife, Marcia, sat on her single shandy throughout the
evening. Two beers were enough to make him tipsy and he would join the singing
around the piano, croaking out the choruses between draws on his fag . Just as he had no friends, so he was
not drawn into the Balkan of suburban squabbles. He confined hostilities to
emptying his chamber pot over the fence into the vegetable garden of that
'German bitch', Mrs McAllister. If she were unwise enough to complain he would
ask her what time her Andy had got home, how drunk had he been, and how many
jobs he had lost that year. The McAllisters lived in a temp with not as much as
a trench dug for their house. Bert growled at his kids but rarely
raised his hand to them. The only violence I witnessed was one night when he
came in from plastering one of the four bedrooms to sit down for his meat and
three veg. I was puzzled as to why he ran his finger along the edge of his
plate two or three times. Then, he picked it up and threw the meal into the
corner, plastering the tiles with potato, pumpkin and gravy 'You can't even
give a man a bloody hot plate,' he shouted as he barged out . None of the men
in out street were known for beating their wives. The only case of domestic
violence I heard about was that Mrs McAllister might beat up Andy when he came
home drunk and broke. One morning as I waited at the
bus-stop, the oldest of Bert's four daughters, Beverley, ran across the main
road into the path of car overtaking the parked bus. Tossed into the air,
screaming, she spun several times, her sky blue dress and hooped white
petticoats, part of the fashion for Square Dancing , creating a pattern against
the sky which called to my Catholic imagination a visitation by Our Lady of
Fatima. I left my schoolbag on the footpath
and raced up to the Hills to break the news that she had been killed. Mrs Hill
ran out of the temp in her slippers. Beverley had landed on her buttocks with
compound fractures to her left thigh. She was lucky. A neighbour called Bert at
his work as a telephone technician - he never afforded a phone. When Bev came
home from hospital, with her leg in plaster up to her hip, she lay on a cane
settee on the porch which was open to the street because Bert could not yet
afford to build its glass doors. From there she chatted with passers-by, and in
that condition contrived to get pregnant. Bert Hill's cough had been how I
used to identify him before he came into sight. I dreaded the spitting more. As
he put the final touches to his masterwork, he began to grow ill. At first, the
days off work offered opportunities to plaster and paint. Then came periods in
hospital. He had cancer of the lung. As he lay on his now completed porch,
puffing away, he kept its doors open but not many people stopped to chat with
this cantankerous man who had difficulty breathing let alone conversing. I saw
little of him for I now drove everywhere in a 1952 Austin A40. He never owned a
car. Bert died in his early fifties, his
monument complete and his family secure in the house he had built for them. In his day, Bert Hill was considered
a good provider. Now the work to which he gave his life is to be knocked down.
The architectural value would be worth preserving only as one more exemplar of
what dedication during that decade of suburbanisation summoned forth. More
difficult to know is how to evaluate the manner of his generation of men. An
autocrat of the meal table? Or a frugal father who expressed his love in the
way he thought best, as brick upon brick?
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