Launched as part of the 2008 Ballarat Heritage Festival, the competition produced some real gems.

Fifteen entries were received and reviewed and the judge’s unanimous decision was to choose Brenda Ryan’s delightful account of “A childhood at Nazareth House, Ballarat” the reminiscences of Grace Ryan, nee Charlton. You can read her story below.

“The brick wall comes down” the unravelling of an intriguing family history puzzle by Val Weber was a very close second.

Third goes to Fiona Lane and her tale about the life of “Annie Convary”.

Congratulations to the winners and a big thank you to all those that entered.

A Childhood at Nazareth House, Ballarat
The reminiscences of Grace Ryan, née Charlton

Introduction
Mary Josephine Charlton died of pneumonia in July 1913 aged forty-two, leaving her husband, William Charlton, (whom she had married in November 1909), and three children.

Her eldest child, Margaret (Mag) Everard, was from her first marriage to Patrick Everard, who died in June 1903. Mag was 16 at the time of her mother’s death.

The other children were from her marriage to William Charlton. Gerard Charlton was almost three when his mother died, and Mary Theresa “Grace” Charlton, 16 months.

Some months after the death of his wife, for reasons about which we can only speculate, William Charlton left his family and went to South Africa, where he remarried, fathered five children, and saw out the remainder of his life. He died there in 1948, having had no further contact with the children he left behind.

As Mag was too young to be left with the permanent care of her half-brother and –sister, Grace was admitted to Nazareth House, Ballarat, in November 1913, and Gerard to St. Joseph’s, Sebastopol, in June, 1914.

Here, Grace takes up the story...

“Mag was about sixteen when our mother died. She was looking after Gerard and me at the hotel, (the Harp of Erin at Wallace, the family home), and our father just went out one day, and never came back. As the time grew late, Mag began to worry, and asked one of the men working at the hotel to fetch her uncle, Jim Everard, who lived nearby.

And that’s why I was taken to the orphanage. Our father never came home, and Mag couldn’t look after two little babies on her own. He wrote to Mag when he got to South Africa. I suppose he thought Mag would write back and say, ‘Nice to hear from you,’ but Mag never wrote back. Nevertheless, she used to say of him, ‘Grace, he did an awful lot of good things when our mother married him - he made life much easier for her.’

When I first went into Nazareth House, I went into the nursery upstairs, where Minnie O’Brien was in charge. Minnie idolised me; she loved me and I loved her. She loved Mag too. Minnie would always come to see Mag on the Sundays when she came to visit.

There were tiny little babies there. I remember one who was left at the gatehouse. No-one could get in unless the gatekeeper unlocked the gate and let them in, but maybe there wasn’t a gatekeeper on duty after a certain time at night.

Babies would be brought in in the middle of the night, screaming, and I’d always wake up. One night they brought this baby in and it was crying like anything, and one of the nuns came, and seeing I had woken up, she said, ‘Will you take the baby into bed with you, and get it warm?’ Oh, I thought it was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me, and I sat up all night looking at it. It was just left at the gate like a foundling. It never had a name or anything, so the nuns called her Margaret.

You stayed in the nursery until you started school. You’d be five or maybe six, before you moved downstairs.

If you had visitors, you could sit in the parlour with them, or you could go outside in the grounds. It was such a beautiful place! Mag got a job at a hotel in Sturt St, Ballarat, and had Sundays off. She came to see me every second Sunday, and on the other Sundays she went to see Gerard, at St. Joseph’s - that was a lovely building too.
The only other visitor I remember apart from Mag was a Mrs Hishon, who was my mother’s best friend. She was really great, and she used to say, ‘Oh Grace, you’re just like your mother, you’re just like your mother...’

There was one room, and it had a big glass case in it, full of jugs, glasses, sugar bowls, all these beautiful things. One of the nuns used to now and again take them out and wash them and put them back, on a Saturday. I’d always go in and say, ‘Can I pass you the jugs?’ And they’d say, ‘You won’t break them, will you? You can pass the things one at a time if you don’t drop them!’ I think that’s where I got my love of antique glass and other old things.

I also think of the children who never had anybody. A lot of them did have relations, but nobody came to visit. In some cases they were put in the orphanage because their mother had died, and their father just couldn’t work and look after a family as well, so that was that. Sometimes too, their relations would come and take them home when they were old enough to be useful.

Most of the girls would be about fifteen or sixteen, before they went out to work. They never sent them out too early because they’d have to learn a bit about how to work before they went. Some of them went to do domestic work in the toffs’ houses.

Like me, a lot of the girls had brothers at St. Joseph’s. In January we always had a picnic in the Ballarat Gardens. We girls would go by steamer across Lake Wendouree, and the boys from St. Joseph’s used to come in a big charabanc. We’d all run around mad finding our brothers!

We all wore the same thing. There was a big workroom and the nuns used to make the dresses. The Summer ones were just ordinary check dresses, and in Winter we had pinafores, and they were all made there, at Nazareth House. But if you had relations, like I did, they could buy you a dress, and you could wear that on Sundays.

Baths were the bane of my life! We had one once a week, and by the time I got in, it would be cold! We had to wear a great big slip in the bath, for modesty, and it was wet when you put it on. It was like a surplice; it had no sleeves in it, and it went over your head and hung down on your arms, this wet cold thing! First in line used to jump into the bath scalding hot, and come out looking like a beetroot.; A few of you would use the same bath water, and after a while they’d clean it out and start all over again. I used to go with the first lot; and we were certainly made to scrub ourselves!

During World War I the pneumonic ‘flu was bad, people died with it. The doctors came in to Nazareth House in droves, and we had to bathe our throats with Condy’s crystals, and none of us got the ‘flu. We had to all line up, and I used to think it was best to go first and get it over with.

There were old people at Nazareth House, too. They had a wing to themselves, and a veranda they could sit out on, and I used to have one special one, and I’d go and sit at her feet. She was Irish, and she used to talk to me. I don’t remember a thing we said to each other, but I used to gaze up at her because she sat in a rocking chair on the veranda and smoked a pipe, and I used to sit and watch her - I thought this was wonderful!

I was skinny in those days, I wouldn’t eat anything much. If I didn’t like what they put in front of me I put it onto the next kid’s plate, and they’d eat it! When you got out of school you got a thick piece of bread with jam on it. In the Summer when the fruit was ripe, the orchardists used to bring in fruit ‘for the poor little orphans’! The country people also used to bring in bags of onions and potatoes, which were tipped into deep bins outside the kitchen. If no-one was looking, we’d dip in and take an onion, duck outside, get the skin off it somehow, and eat it! Kate Middleton, who was head in the kitchen, said to me one day, ‘Are you taking my onions?’ And I said ‘yes’, and she just laughed.

Once on a cold Winter’s day, I took an onion going into school. We had fires in the classroom, you weren’t freezing, and I threw my onion into the fire to roast it. Of course it wasn’t long and the smell was wafting out everywhere, and the nun was cross and wanting to know who put the onion in the fire. In the finish someone yelled out that I did it, and I had to own up! So I missed out on my onion!

Mag was so pretty – she was lovely. As a young person her hair was nothing but just curls all over the place – they used to fall down all over her forehead – real curly little bits everywhere. She had the Irish face and was really pretty. I used to look at her and think, I’ve never seen anyone who looked anything like Mag, when she was young. She had blue eyes like me, and like Gerard, too

I remember when Mag brought Ernie, (her future husband), to meet me. She asked the nuns if she could take me out, and when we got outside the gate this man was there, and she said, ‘This is Ernie – Ernie Davie’, and he smiled and talked to me, and was very nice to me. And Mag was saying, ‘Do you like him?’ and I said, ‘I hate his boots!’ They were a funny colour - they weren’t black and they weren’t brown – the colour was called ox-blood.

One day, it was in May, 1924, I got the biggest shock of my life. One of the nuns came to me one Saturday, and I was with all of my mates one minute, and the next minute I was gone. She took me into the bathroom for a hot bath, and that is when she told me I was leaving – I never saw any of the kids again. She said, ‘You’re leaving here today; you’re going to Geelong to live with Mag and Ernie.’ I was just gone from all my mates – I couldn’t tell them, or say goodbye.

After I was bathed and dressed she took me to Auntie Kate and Auntie Mag, my mother’s two sisters, who were waiting in the parlour, and they took me on the train to Geelong.

When we got to Mag & Ernie’s house, Mag put the light on in a bedroom, and I thought it was the most beautiful room I’d ever seen She said, ‘This is your bedroom’ It had a beautiful new bed in it, all nickel. When I saw it I thought I’d never seen a nicer bed and a nicer room in my life. Ernie was a painter and decorator, and he had wall-papered the room especially for me – it was beautiful. Ernie said, ‘You’ll be happy here – you’ll miss the children, but you’ll be happy.’… ”

Conclusion
Grace remained with Ernie and Mag until her own marriage, growing up as an older sister to Ernie and Mag’s four children, Ernest, Phillip, Mary and Evelyn, much as Mag had been an older sister to her.

Grace married Gerald Ryan at St Mary’s in Geelong in February 1940, and had four children of her own, Gerald, Margaret, Brenda and Patrick.

She remembered her time in Nazareth House with great warmth and affection, and despite prolonged periods of separation, Mag Gerard and Grace maintained close, loving relationships with each other throughout their lives.

© Brenda Ryan, June 2008

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