An Afternoon of Time: Tales of the Great Ocean Road and country Victoria by Don Charlwood completely charmed me.
The collection of short stories and tales based on the author’s experiences began with a foreword saying that after Australian publishers Angus & Robertson was sold to HarperCollins, authors had the opportunity to regain rights to their work. The author did this and since then An Afternoon of Time has been published by Burgewood Books, a family company set up by his daughter to publish his books. Looking through my bookshelves I realised I already have several of Charlwood’s other books on local shipwrecks, which I’ve read multiple times, plus a novel, All the Green Year, that I am yet to read.
The book began with a piece called Reflections that was written in the author’s 95th year (my edition is a re-release with two additional stories to the earlier editions), which tells of Charlwood’s childhood in Frankston during the Depression, and how he discovered he loved to write while working on a local history school project – it was his mother who suggested he interview elderly locals. After leaving school Charlwood worked for an auctioneer, but when he turned 18 he was no longer required since the young woman he trained up to replace him would be paid a lesser wage. The author then travelled to the Western District of Victoria where he worked for his aunt and uncle at Burnside, their property near Nareen, north-west of Hamilton.
My jaw hit the ground in Reflections when Charlwood said that his grandmother had been shipwrecked ‘on a reef near Cape Otway’ on the Schomberg‘s maiden voyage. I spent my childhood looking out to sea at the Schomberg reef, reading books about local shipwrecks and wishing that the sandbar that the old people talked about still reached the reef. On one extraordinary occasion I actually visited the reef with my aunt, uncle and cousins on my uncle’s rubber duck (an inflatable boat).
I had always understood the cause of the wreck to have been the captain’s inattention, since he was below deck playing cards with a lady who was not a lady until it was too late for the ship to avoid hitting the reef. It turns out the story I knew was incorrect. The captain was indeed playing cards with the author’s grandmother, but it seems she was in fact a lady (not titled, but ladylike).
The Schomberg reef is the speck around the middle of the following photo, almost on the horizon. When I was a child, a lot more of the rock was out of the water. I expect that the reef was even more prominent in 1855 when the ship was wrecked.
The remainder of the collection was a mixture of stories (fiction with a very strong connection to actual places) and tales of people and places the author knew. Some were set around the coast of the Great Ocean Road and others were set inland around a fictionalised version of Burnside.
Salmacis, London was a short story (fiction) set near Princetown on the Great Ocean Road, where a 90m tunnel was created at the base of Point Ronald in 1906 to manage the Gellibrand River bar. The tunnel has long-since been boarded up, but in this story, the teenage narrator and Marcia, the daughter of another family who were also camping at the beach that summer, clambered through the tunnel to see the Sow and Piglets (the original names for the Twelve Apostles rock formations. Muttonbird Island was the sow and the other eight rocks – there were never twelve – were called the piglets. At the time of writing this post, there are only seven stacks left). Marcia was already familiar with the tunnel, having dreamed of it, but when they travelled through to the beach the narrator also began to see Marcia as she was in her dream – no longer a teenage girl but a man who had worked at the nearby Glenample Station and come down to the beach to save shipwrecked sailors. I loved the blend of the real place with the fictional story of a shipwreck. The time-travel had an additional element of strangeness since the story (for a modern reader) was already set in the past, and the characters time-travelled even further back into the past.
Dunphy’s Hide was also fiction and set somewhere on the Great Ocean Road, or the Ocean Road, as it was known when these stories were written. In this story the narrator, an eleven-year old boy and his schoolmate, Dunphy, visited a blowhole known as Glover’s Drop, which I think is based on the real blowhole at the Loch Ard Gorge. To get to Glover’s Drop they pushed aside a large rock, crawled through a tunnel then climbed around a narrow ledge inside the blow hole itself, as waves churned madly below them and the sounds of these thundered and echoed. The narrator only just made it around the dangerous rock shelves and was too frightened to attempt the return journey, so Dunphy knocked him out and carried him back around the ledge as if he were a sack of potatoes.
The Pilgrimage Year was a story about a fictionalised version of the author’s grandmother returning to the Curdies River to view the reef where the Schomberg had been wrecked when she was a young woman. The narrator accompanied his grandmother, uncle and cousin as they travelled through the Otways, stopping along the way to view the Loch Ard Gorge, where the Loch Ard was wrecked with only two survivors. As they drove through the bush they talked about other ship wreck sites they passed, numbering how many people had died at each wreck. Once they arrived at the headland overlooking the beach and the reef where the Schomberg had been wrecked (see the photo above) the narrator’s grandmother asked what happened to the sandbar that used to stretch from the spit to the reef only to be told it had been washed out years ago. Later, his grandmother hinted at a love triangle that was exposed during the shipwreck that had fractured her relationship with her sister.
To the New Country was a tale of the author walking through the Otways to the sea at Apollo Bay and from there to the Cape Otway lighthouse, then on to a farm near Princetown, past the cemetery at the Loch Ard Gorge and on to Port Campbell and Peterborough, where a passing driver offered him a lift to Hamilton, where an employee of his uncle drove him the rest of the way to Burnside in a buggy. The author stayed there until World War Two, when he left to join a Bomber Command with the RAAF.
Percy the Rabbiter was more or less factual, a tale of a man and his beloved dogs, all of whom had the most extraordinary names. Adolphus Bannockburn Ree, Dr Willie Roper, Barney Boo and Bill Stickers were just some of the dogs who accompanied Percy on his rounds, catching and killing the rabbits that overran Burnside. Percy was an absolute character who lived a simple life; ‘when he was not working in the open air he was either eating gluttonously or was asleep. Bedtime was’ … ‘eight o’clock.’
The Match at Fyan’s Creek had me laughing out loud (in public!) as I ate my cheese and vegemite sandwich in the sun outside my town library during my lunch break. Somehow or other, the local postmistress wrangled Charlwood into playing in a cricket match with the local team against the Fyan’s Creek team, despite the author’s reluctance. Charlwood grew even more apprehensive when Percy (the rabbiter) reported that Fyan’s Creek had a new fast bowler, ‘a reg’lar killer they reckon. He injured darn near half the Glenelg Crossin’ team a few weeks back…’ Percy was playing, along with ‘Jack Henshaw the fencer, Mick Hogan the publican, Neil Austin-Smith who ran ten thousand sheep somewhere to the west, Roger McIntyre who had seduced a dozen girls within fifty miles, Nick, an Aboriginal with long arms and flexible wrists, Alan Knowles, the new schoolteacher, Barney Moore, a jackaroo from Triabunna and lastly there was Claude Shippard, the captain, and Greig, his fourteen year-old son’ (the Shippards were fourth-generation squatters). On arrival, they learned the new fast bowler had once bowled the great Bradman out! Someone killed a snake on the cricket ground during the match and hung it over the fence, and when it was Charlwood’s turn to bat he somehow hit a four before being saved by a fire in Ginty Steven’s house paddock – players and spectators alike raced there to put it out, saving the house but not the shed. When they got back to the ground it was Fyan’s Creek’s turn to bat. Rain eventually stopped play.
I appreciated that the author was respectful of Aboriginal people and didn’t shy away from admitting that white settlers had taken their lands and lives, something that I think was rare when these stories were written. On one sad occasion he referred to, ‘a past going back into the days of the vanished aborigines,’ and there were other examples of these sentiments throughout the book.
The Brothers O’Connor broke my heart. I was left with a lump in my throat, tears, the absolute works and I’m generally not a crier. Gerry O’Connor was a shearer, a bachelor in his fifties, while his younger brother Terence worked at the local forge. When Charlwood brought in a horse to be shod, Terence said he thought life was passing him by – he’d rarely been to Melbourne, and he felt reading about the greater world was making him feel unsatisfied. Terence compared himself unfavourably with Gerry, who he said was the most contented man he knew because he lived for his work. A chance remark by Charlwood set Terence on a new path – he married and set up a home with his bride. The author then told Gerry’s history; his father had died when he was fourteen so he set himself up as the man of the house, working to give his nine younger brothers and sisters a chance in life – which they all took and ran with. But, when Gerry fell ill and had nothing to live for, things took an unexpected and tragic turn.
Reception at Kerry Hills was the recounting of several tales Charlwood’s uncle told him – no doubt the names were changed to prevent anyone from recognising themselves! On this occasion Charlwood and Percy attended a wedding at the home of a shiftless family who had been living rent-free in one of Charlwood’s uncle’s properties for twenty years or more. The wedding went well and the guests sat down to a fine meal, although most of the guests wondered how the bride’s family would pay for it. They found out when the bride’s father began auctioning a piece of furniture that the local women had been coveting the whole of their own married lives!
While I think An Afternoon of Time would be of great interest to readers from Victoria’s Western District, I also think that the stories and tales will appeal to readers who enjoy Australian history, and those who like stories and tales of bygone days in general. The author included himself in most of the stories and wasn’t afraid to poke fun at himself as well as those around him, but I also felt as if he genuinely liked and cared for his friends and neighbours, even though he could see their faults.
My copy included photos taken by the author during his travels and time at Burnside, which add to my enjoyment. I especially liked seeing Percy and some of his dogs!
My purchase of An Afternoon of Time continues my New Year’s resolution for 2026 to buy a book by an Australian author during each month of this year (February). I purchased this book from Collins Booksellers in Warrnambool.
I’m also counting this book in Reading Independent Publisher’s month, hosted by Kaggsy of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings.
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