Bondi Beach

These four photos are in a Phelan family album. It's Bondi beach, Sydney, some time in the 70s I think. Bondi isn't in our patch so it must have been a holiday. I suspect that the photographer didn't even venture on to the beach because the photos appear to have been taken from a car park, and probably on the same day. They probably just went to have a look at the famous beach. Nowadays about three million people a year visit the beach - but not all at the same time fortunately. On a warm weekend in summer you might have to share with only 40 000 other people.

Coastal New South Wales is almost like a foreign country to us because we never visited when I was a child growing up in the neighbouring state of Victoria, and my husband's family was the same. If we wanted a day at the beach or a holiday on the coast we went to one of the numerous sandy beach towns along the south coast of Victoria. And we never saw crowds like this. Sometimes we had the long stretches of sand to ourselves.

One disadvantage of our beach visits was that we didn't have surf lifesavers watching, we didn't have to swim 'inside the flags' (note the red and yellow flag on the left of the first photo), but luckily none of us ever had a mishap in the ocean. This beach is the home of the first lifesaving club, established in 1907.

I've never been to Bondi. Should an Aussie admit to such a thing?

Bondi Beach

Bondi Beach and famous Bondi Baths built in 1931.

The baths are saltwater and tidal and have a heritage classification. In fact, the whole beach has a heritage value. The baths are also the home of the Bondi Icebergs, a club for people who swim there throughout the year.

Bondi Beach

This photo was taken on a different family holiday at Mission Beach in Queensland. Warm days and kilometres of sandy beach to share with ... hardly anyone else.

Mission Beach, Queensland. 1990s

This post is in response to the theme photo, a postcard of Bondi as it used to be. You can see more responses over at Sepia Saturday. Or you could pack your bags and head downunder in time for summer.

Sepia Saturday: Rachel operates the rail gates

Today's theme photo is of a train, and I don't have any old photos of trains in my collection.

'Coach scene with train' a watercolour by A Esam c1880-1900 [State Library of Victoria]

But I do have an ancestor who worked on a train line, or rather, a railway crossing. She operated the gates, closing them when a train was due and opening them to allow the road and foot traffic through. The Rock (formerly called Hanging Rock and Kingston) was a small rural town south of Wagga Wagga in New South Wales. The Main Southern railway line was constructed in 1880 and the railway station precinct at The Rock today has a heritage listing.

Emily Rachel Young nee Chaundy

My grandmother's grandmother, Rachel Young, after a long and interesting life including moving to Australia from the city of Oxford when she was seven, was living with her daughter at The Rock in New South Wales. Early in the 1900s, in her senior years, Rachel was employed to operate the gates on the railway line.

I'm not quite sure what this entailed, or how busy the line was. It was and is a passenger line as well as a goods line. Some gate operators had to use semaphore to signal to the train drivers, some worked a wheel in a small building next to the crossing to open the gates, some opened the gates manually. Recently I saw a set of old disused crossing gates at Macedon in central Victoria. Were those at The Rock like these? Did she stay on site all day in some sort of hut (with a fire in winter hopefully), or did she just go down to the crossing when a train was due? Were the gates usually shut to road traffic and only opened when there was traffic? (Was there a bell to ring when you needed to cross the tracks?) Or were the gates usually open to road traffic and only shut when a train was due?

Old crossing gates, Macedon, Victoria 2014

Until recently there were manually operated gates at New St, Brighton (a suburb of Melbourne). They've now been replaced by automatic gates - a train crashed through the gates and the government got a bit edgy about the crossing - but I think the locals quite liked their quirky gates.

New St, Brighton

Port Elliott, South Australia c1910 [State Library of South Australia]

I suggest you check out more railway tales over at Sepia Saturday.