Aberdoon House Interview 2 Interviewee: Carole Roussel, born 1939 Interviewer: Frank Heimans,             for Baulkham Hills Shire Council Date of Interview: 17 May 2007 Transcription: Glenys Murray, June 2007

The Money family owned Aberdoon House, Rouse Hill from 1947 until 9 August 2000 when it was bought by Baulkham Hills Shire Council. Dr Rex Angel Money, his wife Dorothy "Noppy” and their daughters Angela and Carole used the property as their weekend retreat. Dr Money was a Macquarie Street specialist and pioneering neurosurgeon who had served in the Australian Army during World War I and World War II. After serving as a doctor he was sent to the Atherton Tablelands before being demobilised in 1944. While there he developed an interest in nutrition.

Now for those people who don’t know where it’s located can you give us a description of the location and what was on the property?

Rouse Hill is about twelve miles from Parramatta so that would make it about seventeen kilometres. I guess it’s roughly half way between Parramatta and Windsor. When we first went there, there was a tiny little village community at the bottom of what was then Mile End Road because they’ve changed the road names and they’ve got Mile End Road coming off the Windsor Road about three hundred metres before where Mile End Road used to be. Mile End Road used to have on the corner of it the post office and it was still party line on the telephone so it was very difficult for my father to get phone calls. The phone used to be switched off, I mean the woman would switch off everything I think about nine o’clock at night. So if he was required to go to the hospital urgently a policeman used to come on a motorbike to come and tell him that he was needed. It was a very tiny little community and most of the farms I think they were in the vicinity of twenty to twenty five acres. There wasn’t a very and still isn’t a very good financial venture that small amount. It’s also in I think they call it a rain shadow now. Rain everywhere, rain at Parramatta, it would rain a Windsor, it would rain at Dural, Castle Hill but it wouldn’t rain there. It wasn’t a very good choice from that point of view it was always very dry. Later my father bought the farm below which was called Araluen I think or Aralen (actually called Araluen). There was a man there who used to look after it and his name was Mr Beck and we used to joke about him because he would say “oh doctor it's terrible dry” and there was never any rain. We used to have to be very careful of the water. We had three different taps everywhere in the house. There was the hot and cold water which was water from the dam. It must have come through some kind of a filter.

Dam on Money property, now in William Harvey Reserve

It was pumped up from the dam which my father had put in into a well where it was held and from the well it was pumped to the house. Then we had rain water which came out of a separate tap which was for drinking and cooking. We even washed up with the dam water so it must have been OK. There was always a water problem and until this place was bought by the council in I think around the year 2000, 2001 (actually 2000) there was still no water there. That part of the world didn’t have water put on and we’re talking about sixty seven kilometres or something from the GPO. There was no water there until the year 2000.

So how did your father manage to grow citrus fruits and things?

He had this big dam. There’s a funny story about the dam leaking. He had it put in and it wouldn’t hold the water properly. There’d been a mistake I suppose when they’d bulldozed and set up the dam wall and it used to leak. There was another little dam that used to collect the water from the dam where it leaked. Which had been the original dam on the property but it was quite small. The dam is still there by the way its part of the historic environment of the house. It looks still very pretty it’s got reeds and they’ve built a little platform out on it. We used to swim in that when we were children but it was a bit gooey. So he had the dam put in and it was a very big dam for the time but it did leak. When I was first married my husband was working for a big French Firm called Citra. Daddy thought that because Pierre was employed at Citra that he could get the Citra people, they were building the dam in Canberra at the time, to come and do something about his dam that was leaking. It was quite embarrassing but anyway Pierre went and saw the managing director of Citra who was his boss and said my “father is wondering if when you’ve got somebody up there they’d come and have a look and maybe they could fix his dam” and they did it was absolutely fabulous. It never leaked again and I don’t think it leaks now so that was a good thing for the dam. The dam was very much part of our life and you’d go down there and collect frogs and do all those things that children do around dams and it was fenced off the cattle couldn’t get in there.

Angela Money (on Flicka) with sister Carole 1950s

Did your father re-instigate the rural scene?

He did very much yes.

What did he bring onto the property?

We had our ponies that used to get sent down from my mother’s uncle who had his place in Cooma where we’d gone during the war. He used to round up the brumbies in Cooma and train ponies for us. He used to break them in and send them down to us by train and we’d go and pick them up and ride them home from the train station. Nearest train station was Riverstone and that was always a big thing. Going to get our horses and riding home it was so exciting. So we had ponies, my sister and I both had our own ponies and Dad had his horse which I think was an old race horse or something. He was a very good rider. He’d been in the artillery in the First World War and had to ride a horse. So he was a very accomplished horseman. He used to make us look after all the bridles and saddles and we used to do the horses hooves ourselves. They weren’t shod because they never went out on the road. He used to do their hooves. That meant, if you’ve ever seen a horse having its hooves done, you’ve got to do it with a rasp and clean out the inside of the hoof which is called the frog and it smells horrible. We’d all be standing there holding our noses. There was always a lot of stuff going on around the horses. It had a very nice old split rail, what do you call it, where you collect the animals together a farmyard. That they could herd the cattle into and when we were still milking a cow, there was a special part for her and a part to keep the foals separated. There was the proper dairy for a while and then the dairy was converted into a house so that there could be a caretaker for the property.

Aberdoon House water tank and caretakers cottage (formerly dairy) 1989

So this very simple part where the cows had been taken to be milked suddenly got converted. Not very well but people weren’t so fussy in those days and there were obviously quite a few people who needed places to live after the war. There was a series of what we used call pensioners who were probably war pensioners who came and stayed there. Mostly they were single men and as young girls we weren’t very happy about most them so we never went too close to them. They didn’t always do what they were supposed to do. They were probably a bit sort of still shell shocked from the war. I know that there was quite a few ones that didn’t quite live up to expectations.

Then finally a Dutch family moved in and then the farm really took off. The Dutchman looked after the fruit trees most wonderfully and grew fabulous vegetables. There was always a wonderful veggie garden and there were lots of chickens, hens. Dad used to sell eggs to the Egg Board get into trouble sometimes because the yolks would be too dark yellow and he would be told that people didn’t like eggs with very dark yellow yolks. They had to get them paler, because they were not hens that were shut up. They were let out to scratch in the orchard and they were the most wonderful eggs in fact we all used to for years and years bought Dad’s eggs. Even we had to pay him for the eggs because it was part of the running expenses of the farm. We all paid for our eggs. He paid for his own eggs too. So did all my friends who’d go and pick up their eggs from the house. To the best of his ability he ran it as a proper farm and especially when the Dutchman went there it was really good. Dutch people are very good on small amounts of land and they looked after it really well. They made a very nice cottage garden. It wasn’t a terribly nice house for them, but they seemed to manage, they brought up their children there. They had two or three I think it was two, two girls. The girls would go school at, where would they go to school? I don’t think there was a school at Rouse Hill (actually there was one, but it was further west on Windsor Road) so they had to catch a bus but I’m not quite sure where.

Aerial view of Aberdour Avenue with Aberdoon in foreground late 1970s

Your father was very fond of his pigs, tell me about that?

Well the pigs were in the other farm down the bottom of the road which was on the way in. That was where Mr Beck lived “terrible dry doctor”. They talk about him there that people called him Doctor Rex, they didn’t they just called him doctor. I don’t think they would have dared call him Doctor Rex in those days.Anyway they didn’t, they called him doctor. They went into this pig business and it was meant to make a fortune but like all rural ventures, the bottom fell out of the bacon market or something like that. We hated the pigs they made this terrible squealing noise. They weren’t terribly close to us but if the wind blew in the wrong direction you’d get all the smell from the pig styes. We didn’t take a lot of notice of the pigs I have to say. Certainly we didn’t keep slops or anything like that for pigs. But there were quite a few of them at one stage and my father always named all the animals. So because it was Aberdoon he’d try and give them all names that started with A. My sister got really furious when one of the sows was called Angela. I managed to escape that because I didn’t start with A. He used to name all the cows, not the chooks so much. He used to do post mortems on all the sick animals. We used to have to help him do the post mortems and things would get put in jars and taken to Prince Alfred Hospital for pathology so you could find out what they died from. He was always worried that if they died from, especially the chooks, if they’d died from.

Visitors to Aberdoon inspecting the pigs c1950

Maybe there was a kind of avian flu in those days. If they’d died from something contagious he really wanted to know about it. The same with the cows, we don’t have foot and mouth, but they could get something that was called the staggers, never quite known what it was. You really needed to know what was wrong with every animal that got sick and died on the place, we’d do post mortems.

It’s not often that you get a neurosurgeon as a farmer?

Lots of his friends had farms. It was a very doctorish thing to do. They had farms, think of Doctor Penfold who had the winery and Doctor Lindeman, Daddy’s best friend was Grant Lindeman or one of his best friends who had Lindeman’s Wines. So they were all doing things. Doctors are very busy people there always doing something. I think because it’s scientific things to do with agriculture or vineyards attract doctors enormously rather than perhaps them being interested in engines or you know motors. Although Dad always had lovely cars, he had Rileys and he enjoyed his cars.

What other buildings were on the property?

Apart from the dairy area which became the caretakers cottage. There was a lovely old barn and the chicken shed, which we called the chicken shed, where the day old chicks used to get put. He used to buy them as day old chicks but there was a hatchery style place that was kept warm somehow for them to grow into bigger chickens before they were put into the hen runs. The chicken shed in now even more historic than the house. It was the first thing to get a historic classification was the chicken shed because it is made out of wood. It has little strips of tin between the wooden slats to keep the draughts out. That attracted the most enormous amount of attention in the beginning more than the house which is not as old as all that. 1887 there are lots older places around in the area. We used to love the chicken shed and the little day old chooks of course and that’s where all the chook food was kept as well. Bit of a fight between the day old chooks and maybe a rat here and there that would go in for the food and discover the chickens. I know there was always a big problem with foxes for the same reason. There was also a lovely big shed that could hold at least three cars. It had great big doors that opened wide like a double garage doors. You could go in there and play and it would be full of farm implements and stuff like that. Next to that there were two lovely stables.

Aberdoon House slab barn 1989

Proper stable doors if I needed to put a horse in which we didn’t really need to. But it could get a bit cold but I don’t think we used it much as proper stables. We’d keep all the saddles and bridles in there. It was all set up for the saddles and the bridles as well and had proper mangers for the horses to eat out of. It was really a lovely nicely proportioned building. It was made out of wood too that had been just painted by some kind of preserving oil of some description.

The house as you know was pink, painted pink in those days, painted with the special lighthouse recipe paint that we used to cook up on the stove. Really a sort of lime wash, probably Porter’s Lime wash would love to have the recipe. I still have the recipe and it made it very cheap to repaint the house because paint is such an expensive thing to buy. So the house would be repainted every four or five years to keep it waterproof. It was made of stone and now it has been taken back to the original stone, but the stone was very, very porous therefore wouldn’t have been waterproof without the veranda all the way around. It was very damp there was a huge problem with damp and my parents attended to that by having I think it was called Damp Master in those days. Little lozenge shaped, diamond shaped vents that you have put into the wall and it was very expensive at the time to do it. I think more or less some did cure the damp problem. We had these lovely wallpapers that my mother had put in and we were trying to preserve those and I keep thinking that the house was so much nicer when it had the wallpapers in it. It was warmer and more countrified with these beautiful wallpapers and lovely voile curtains. Very like something out of “My Brilliant Career” style stuff. The voile curtains would blow in the breeze. It hasn’t kept that country atmosphere unfortunately although they’ve put the veranda all the way back. Obviously they couldn’t I suppose they couldn’t keep the wallpapers or put in other wallpapers. But they were very typically flowery in the bedrooms and stripey in the living area. There were lovely stripey curtains.

How close was Caddies Creek to the property?

There was Caddies Creek which was a sort of fairly famous creek in the area I think. We used to from the house it seemed a long way when we were little. When you walk to it now it really isn’t very far we used to ride there usually on our ponies and carefully ride past the remains of an old house which I think would have been the first house to be built on the property. As there usually is when something becomes a ruin there was a chimney that was still there. There’s still a pile of stones there I think where the old house was. To get to Caddies Creek you had to get down to where the dam was or still is and then up again. There was a gully area which led into the creek as well at the back. So we’d ride down definitely past the dam cause there were often snakes near the dam because they were going there for water and then on up. We’d like to go past the old house and there’s a gravesite there too. Its still there with a gravestone nothing carved on it except a cross. The legend which I think Miss Fraser told us about was that you mustn’t walk on the gravesite or sit on the gravestone or let you pony tread over it or anything like that because it was a bit haunted and the person who died would come back to haunt you and maybe not be very nice, maybe kill you or something awful. So we looked at it a lot and checked up on it but we never actually rode over it or sat on it or anything like that.

William Harvey Reserve gravesite 1989

Then you’d go back down a rocky ledge and there was a way to get down to the creek. We’d go and sit down at the creek. It was a lovely place to sit. It was rather “Waltzing Matilderish” more like a billabong than a creek.

So the creek actually went through the property?

So it went through the property not in a very broad part of the property. Probably almost three hundred metres in my memory would have been the boundary to Caddies Creek.

Let’s talk a bit about living in the house and entertainment. What sort of entertainment was there for you people at night and so on?

It was a very familyfied place and we would take friends up there with us. Mum would spend a lot of time cooking lovely dinners and there was the fireplace and we’d sit around and we’d play. Were talking pre television days the mid fifties I don’t think we had TV up there until the sixties when I was already married. So we played games or read a lot. We read an enormous amount I can remember reading encyclopaedias and things like that up there. Obviously when the weather was bad and you couldn’t go out you really get stuck into things. With my sister we had a lovely theatre that we used to play with that our parents had brought back from England. You had a model of the Stratford –on- Avon Theatre and you set up little plays and had characters that you cut out of cardboard and little books that you read plays from. I can remember spending a lot of time doing that. Playing games with Dad playing Draughts and trying to beat him which I never could and playing card games I was someone who liked to play card games. So it was a time when we got to spend some time with our father because we were never with him otherwise. He was always late home for dinner and so we never saw very much of him. It really was a fabulous sort of family time and he’d get up very early and sometimes I’d get up and we’d go riding together or something like that. It was a beautiful place and I believe still is for the early mornings. Very misty and there’d be frosts in winter, surprisingly cold. It’s already part of the continental climate it’s no longer humid like it is in Sydney. It’s very interior Australian climate so it was so surprising to wake up and see everything covered in mist and lots of frost on the ground. It would get cold at night time and you’d come in and huddle around the fire because there was never any central heating there. Eventually we took up some of those Dimplex oil heaters. It was always freezing I was always really cold there.

Cattle on Money property Aug 1980

Carole, how often would you visit the property?

We went every weekend and school holidays, winter school holidays not summer school holidays. In those days the holidays were May and September so we’d usually have at least two weeks of each of those. Every weekend and there was this terrible business of having to go via Prince Alfred Hospital while Dad visited his patients at Gloucester House his private patients anyway. Sometimes also via Callan Park which wasn’t very nice where all the mad people were. We didn’t like that very much but you had to put up with it and we’d lock ourselves in the car. Whereas at Prince Alfred we used to go running round and visit all the people in the hospital. I think we were quite an institution. On the way home too you had to go via Prince Alfred Hospital so we got very good at listening to things like “The Goons” and those sort of shows. We had our shows that we listened to on the radio. On Sunday nights I can remember was the radio show that was Ron and Eth and the whole family and we used to listen to them, they were terribly funny. So we loved going once we got there it was always fun and we’d always be there by Saturday lunch time and leave on Sunday evening about five or six. My grandparents lived at Strathfield for a while and were still living at Strathfield in a big, big house and we’d go and call in on them for Sunday night supper which was really nice.

So most of your growing up years were spent at Aberdoon House. What was it like living in a place like that compared to your house in Bellevue Hill?

So different although the house at Bellevue Hill had a big garden at the back, vegetables and room to play, I think it was the climate change that was the most extraordinary difference. The simplicity of the house it was a lovely house in the way that it had these four rooms of identical size and the big hallway in the front that opened out and was part of the living area at the back. I suppose we did completely different things you see that was I guess the main attraction of it, the outdoorsy sort of things that you did up there. I think as a child you take a lot of things for granted but the one thing that it does do if you’ve always gone away for weekends you become very used to living in two different places and having different things in different places and wearing different clothes.

Aberdoon House front side view 1989

Just having the very more familyfied time on weekends, I don’t think our parents ever went out at night time. Sometimes we go to lunch at places over at Castle Hill, down to the friends who had what’s now the Irish pub but we’d always go too. Whereas in the city they were out a lot, it was a time when people went to balls and it was a fairly grand sort of life that they had in Sydney I guess.

So for you it was more of a situation where you could be more casual in that place?

Yes I guess so as children you’re not always casual I think the best part of it was the family side of it. We were a real family because there was no television you had a lot of family discussions and talked about things that was the most important part of it. The weather wasn’t always good in May and September so that you’d have to be resourceful and find things to do even if the weather wasn’t good. In the city when we were here on Saturdays we’d go down to the Wintergarden and go to the cinema. I think it was the climate change that was the most important part of it all.