Plans for future new bridge at Grafton

One of these days, my native town of Grafton in Australia will have a new bridge over the Clarence River. The northern area, which includes the major town of Grafton, will have the following layout:

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The southern area, which includes my childhood town of South Grafton, will have the following layout:

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Details of plans for the future bridge can be found in a website of the Roads & Maritime authority. Random remarks about Grafton's old bridge over the Clarence River can be found elsewhere in my Antipodes blog.

The vast extent to which Pound Street is to be modified will certainly change the area where we Skyvington kids grew up, in the company of local friends such as Jimmy Kemmis and Anne Fisher. It might be said that a central zone of the city of Grafton will be transformed into a highway, running alongside Market Square and the clocktower, then through Jacaranda Avenue. To my mind, the old town will find it difficult to survive such an onslaught of road traffic.

Trivial family data that remains a mystery

Apparently my father "Bill" Skyvington, as a teenager in Grafton, had made friends with a well-known family, named Clunies-Ross. It was only recently that I acquired a little information on this friendship, from my father's sister Yvonne Tarrant, but I've never been able to obtain any confirmation whatsoever. My father himself never seems to have mentioned this friendship to any member of my generation. So, one might say that this alleged friendship is such a flimsy tale that I ended up looking upon it as an empty family legend, which somebody (not my father) had invented. Furthermore this friendship legend was trivial, unimportant. But I'll repeat the tale briefly here in my blog, in the vague hope that readers might offer me a little factual data.

Clunies-Ross history and facts

Click here to meet up with historical facts concerning the so-called King of the Cocos Islands. More recent information deals with a descendant of the family who was in charge of scientific research in Australia, and there is even an aged descendant of the family living today in Western Australia. But nowhere in this mass of data is there any mention of members of the Clunies-Ross family who might have become my father's friends.

Story of a phantom vessel in South Grafton, the Induna

On the banks of the Clarence River in South Grafton, rusty remnants of the iron hull of an old vessel, the Induna, are still visible today.

When I was a child, we could clearly observe the perfectly visible form of the celebrated ship that used to transport train elements across the Clarence River before the construction of the bridge in 1932. Click here to read this story, which even includes a vague mention of Winston Churchill.

There seems to be no doubt whatsoever that the vessel, after being towed from Sydney to the Clarence River by the tug Heroic, in late 1924, steamed upriver to Grafton under the command of a certain Captain T. Clunies-Ross. According to our family legend, the captain's family settled down in Grafton, and my father "Bill" Skyvington (born in 1917) made friends with the Clunies-Ross children. That's all I know: certainly not much of a story...

Old school photos

On chilly winter evenings, my dog Fitzroy loves to sit down in front of the computer (not surprisingly, he’s a Macintosh addict) and browse through old school photos of his master.

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In case you didn’t recognize us, that’s Fitzroy’s head in the lower left-hand corner of the screen, and me in the upper right-hand corner of the school photo.

My childhood Eden

As a boy on the rural outskirts of South Grafton, I lived just a stone’s throw away from a pristine paradise: Susan Island, a luxuriant rain-forest Garden of Eden in the middle of the broad and fast-flowing Clarence River.

I was reminded of my childhood Eden by this image displayed by the wonderful Gallica website of the Bibliothèque nationale de France:

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Susan Island was the ancient home place of a gigantic colony of fruit bats, whose daily excursions (from where to where, I never knew, nor for what reasons?) filled the twilight sky over Waterview with a dark moving cloud. The zoologist Richard Dawkins would have been enchanted—as was I—by this mass movement in the sky.

The Big River flowed just a few hundred yards behind our house in Waterview. Here’s a photo of a family fishing excursion in 1951:

That’s Don on the left, I’m in the middle, Dad’s in the background and Anne and Susan are on the right. I think we were aware that we were being photographed, because we’ve more-or-less struck up poses. We used earthworms as bait. Don and Anne, with bamboo rods, fished for slender Southern Garfish [Hyporhamphus melanochir], which were full of bones but very tasty.

Dad and I, using hand-held lines, were hoping to catch a big Spangled Perch [Leiopotherapon unicolor].

You can see Susan Island—the sleeping ground of the fruit bats—in the background of the fishing photo. But we local residents rarely went there (even though it was easy to find rowing boats), because our island paradise was in fact cursed by a terrible event that had occurred in its vicinity (on the Grafton side) just before Christmas 1943: the drowning of 13 kids who were Cub members of the local Boy Scouts. Not long after this tragedy, I myself would become an active member of this youth organization, and I would never think twice about my drowned forebears. That’s the terrible thing about explicit historical tales. They persuade the living that they belong to the past, and that nothing of their likes will ever reoccur. For me, as a child, the Cubs were drowned… and that’s all I knew about this ancient affair, which ended up irritating me, like a constantly reoccurring news film (without images).

Of the 13 victims, 9 were buried side by side in the South Grafton cemetery.

Today, we have images of their ugly concrete and tiled graves.

Meanwhile, we never see pictures of the tombs of their 4 comrades in Grafton. So much the better. It’s all so sadly desolate, like the memorial on the banks of the Clarence in Grafton, erected through the efforts of a sympathetic police constable named Alan Dahl, mayor of Grafton: a family friend who once taught me the elements of photography.

There’s a recent article on this tragedy in The Daily Examiner [display].

Today, jolted into a state of reminiscences and meditation by the French image of fruit bats, I simply wish to list, once again, in alphabetical order—in the admirable Israeli style that consists of naming out loud their hallowed victims—the drowned Cubs of December 1943. [A precise name is enough, as it were. In Jewish mysticism, a name is often considered to be no less significant than the entity it designates. Many Jews refer to God, for example, as ha Shem : "the name".] In fact, half-a-dozen surnames are those of young siblings or cousins of the victims who went to school with me in South Grafton.

• Graeme John Corbett (8), son of John Corbett of 32 Bent Street, South Grafton.

• William Robert Dillon (8), son of Frederick R. Dillon of 104 Ryan Street, South Grafton. William was the only son.

• Cecil George Lambert (8), son of George Lambert of 90 Hoof Street, Grafton. Cecil’s father was on active service.

• Raymond Arthur Morris (8), son of Keith Morris of 127 Ryan Street, South Grafton.

• Brian Leonard Munns (9), son of Leonard Munns of 43 Bright Street, Street, South Grafton. Brian’s father was the Deputy Mayor of South Grafton.

• Keith James Rennie (8), son of William Rennie of 130 Hoof Street, Grafton. Keith’s father was a munitions worker.

• Robert Alexander Rennie (10), brother of the above-mentioned victim.

• Edmund James Retchford (8), son of George Retchford of 16 Mary Street, Grafton. Edmund was their only child.

• Alvin Adrian Leo Spicer (10), son of Bert Spicer of 193 Ryan Street, South Grafton. When the tragedy occurred, Alvin’s father was apparently on his way home from the AWC in the Northern Territory.

• Richard John Steinhour (8), son of George Henry Steinhour and Lillian Margaret of 29 Abbott Street, South Grafton. Richard’s father was a returned digger of World War II.

• Dale William Thorsborne (10), son of William August Thorsborne and Iris Sylvia Doris of 106 Ryan Street, South Grafton. Dale was the only child.

• Allan Crawford Tobin (9), son of Raymond Tobin of 27 Abbott Street, South Grafton. His father was on active service in New Guinea. Allan had joined the cubs on 8 October 1943.

• Robert Walter Wilkes (10), son of Reginald Wilkes of Kelly Street, South Grafton.

There’s no point in mentioning the names of the older fellows who were supposed to be taking care of the Cubs. Meanwhile, the paradise of Susan Island continues to raise its ominous head above the mighty waters of the Clarence. And the squeals of the fruit bats are the music of Eden.

The tragic outing of the Cubs, although totally elucidated, remains in my mind as a kind of mysterious Big River Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Anglican diocese of Grafton

In the mid-1950s, when I was a teenager in Grafton and an active member of the Anglican community attached to Christ Church Cathedral, I would never have imagined that, one day, from my home in the mountains of south-east France, I would be reading the following solemn statement published by an archdeacon of the Grafton diocese:

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Click here to see a shocking page of their website, against a background of jacaranda blossoms, on which the diocese includes a link to a 31-page document, created in 2004, bearing the sad title: Protocol for Dealing with Complaints of Sexual Abuse.

I made allusions to Grafton’s unpleasant history in this domain in my blog post of 16 June 2013 entitled In the shadow of Grafton's cathedral [display].

Today, I have no desire to wade through the sordid tales and events that have been unfolding in Sydney’s ongoing Royal Commission into child abuse. But, for readers who might like to follow up these stories, I include here a list of links to relevant Australian media accounts.

• Anglican Church official Pat Comben quizzed in Royal Commission over response to child sex abuse at North Coast Children's Home [link]

• Cleric quits over abuse handling [link]

• Abuse claim priest has quit [link]

• Anglican directory of clergy a 'stud book' [link]

• Brutal assaults at a NSW orphanage [link]

• Church to audit child sex abuse settlement [link]

• Church dissent over abuse approach [link]

• Abuse diocese puts community first [link]

• Smiling bishop Keith Slater failed victims of sex abuse in their hour of need [link]

• I'm not sure I'm still a Christian, Anglican priest Pat Comben says [link]

• Bishop ignored child sex charges [link]

One of the articles contains the following sentence:

The protestant community in Grafton seems close. One could well imagine the conversations at the "dinner parties with a bit of red wine" that Pat Comben, former diocesan registrar, touched on in his evidence to the commission.

That allusion annoys me in the sense that it gives the impression that Grafton Anglicans were in the habit, in a mildly inebriated state, of passing around fragments of sordid information at private dinner parties. That vision of events is far removed from my memories of Arthur Edward Warr, Dean of Christ Church Cathedral, dropping around for weekly chess evenings with my paternal grandfather, with tea and biscuits served up by my grandmother. But I have to admit that, as a boy in Grafton over half a century ago, I had no contacts whatsoever with what might have been thought of as the upper-crust Anglican community of the city.

These days, as a confirmed atheist who looks upon all present-day religions with the utmost disgust, I'm quite delighted to observe that an organization such as the Anglican Church appears to be coming apart at the seams... but I'm immensely sickened by the case of those countless kids who were handled as sexual objects by vile males who were supposed to be the children's guardians.

POST SCRIPTUM: Many former residents of Grafton are aware, I believe, that their “city” has been going slowly down the drain, in countless ways, over several decades. Today, as a symbol of that civic and economic decay, the local mayor and his councillors don’t even talk of Grafton any more. They ramble on stupidly as if they were living in a vague place known as “the Valley”. Be that as it may, I have the impression that the reputation of Grafton is likely to suffer indelibly as a consequence of the ongoing Royal Commission. We can no doubt think of those links in the above blog post as nails in Grafton’s coffin.

In the shadow of Grafton's cathedral

In the middle of the 1950s, the Anglican cathedral of Grafton (my birthplace in Australia) was a focal point in my young existence.

A charming legend evoked a link between one of my maternal ancestors and Christ Church Cathedral. Here's a studio photo of my great-great-grandmother Eliza Dancey [1821-1904] and her daughter, my great-grandmother, Mary Eliza Cranston [1858-1926]:

[Click to enlarge]

They had left their native Bailieborough in Ireland (County Cavan) in the 1870s. In Australia, Mary Cranston married Isaac Kennedy [1844-1934] in 1881, at a Protestant church in South Grafton. Meanwhile, Mary's young brother William Cranston [1862-1934] had become a bricklayer in Grafton and, in 1883, he was working on the construction of the front wall of the new Anglican cathedral. The bricklaying was watched with interest by two little girls, Bella Greenaway (14) and her sister May (6), who were waiting to meet their father, George Greenaway [1843-1915], captain of the coastal ship First Favourite, about to tie up at the wharf at the end of Oliver Street, after a voyage up from Sydney. The smaller child had with her a tiny porcelain doll. In the course of their conversation with 21-year-old William Cranston, the bricklayer was invited to place the china doll in a recess, high up in the wall... as a kind of offering to the emerging cathedral.

Over half-a-century later, in 1937, Cranston's brickwork was demolished, and replaced by a new western wall in which the tiny porcelain doll was given a central setting, where it can still be seen today. [Some of my data concerning this story comes from an article by Don Peck in the newsletter #116 of the Clarence River Historical Society, dated 27 July 2010. I have taken the liberty of slightly modifying certain dates, to render the account plausible.]

When I was out in Australia in 2006, I took a photo of a plaque containing the list of the cathedral's bishops:

One of these men, Kenneth Clements, had become my friend for a short while in 1956, just before I left Grafton to become a science student at the University of Sydney. As for the bishops who followed Clements, I had lost contact with the Grafton scene, and I knew nothing about these men... until reading about some of them in the national press. So, the stuff I'm about to relate comes purely from web pages that you can easily find by means of Google.

In particular, there was the case of Donald Shearman, the bishop of Christ Church Cathedral for a dozen years, from 1973 until 1985. As far as I know, Shearman's bishopric raised no problems (no pun intended) in Grafton. It was only later that facts were published [article] concerning the churchman's alleged misconduct involving a 14-year-old girl in a church hostel in Forbes, back in the 1950s. In 2004, Shearman was actually defrocked by the Anglican church, which was an event of a kind that had never occurred previously in the ecclesiastic history of Australia.

On the fringe of this affair, the Anglican archbishop of Brisbane, Peter Hollingworth, apparently went out of his way to protect Shearman, advising him "to keep a low profile" [article]. By the time Hollingworth's cover-up role had been revealed, he had been appointed by prime minister John Howard to be the Governor-General of Australia and, for his old school in Melbourne (Scotch College), Hollingworth was hailed as a hero [article].

In 2001, moreover, he had been named a Companion of the Order of Australia. But, no sooner had Hollingworth started his job as the queen's representative in Australia than criticisms were aired publicly about his alleged protection of pedophiles during the 1990s, when he was Archbishop of Brisbane. Finally, in May 2003, Hollingworth resigned as Governor-General. In 2005, the woman at the heart of the Shearman affair, Beth Heinrich, spoke publicly for the first time about her relationship with the bishop [article].

Grafton's Anglican cathedral was in the news once again, a month ago, because of sad tales of sexual abuse of children. Having neglected to follow up allegations concerning the North Coast Childrens Home in Lismore, the bishop Keith Slater was obliged to resign [article].

In spite of these nasty associations, Christ Church Cathedral evokes several positive personal memories. Back in the mid 1950s, when I still imagined myself naively as some kind of a Christian (a situation that came to an abrupt end a year or so later, when I settled down in Sydney), I used to don regularly the red and white outfit of a so-called server officiating within the church.

Above all, the cathedral contains a lovely stained-glass window in memory of my paternal grandmother Kathleen Pickering [1889-1964].

[Click to enlarge]

Home-made candied ginger

In my childhood recollections, candied ginger is a Proustian madeleine. [If you don't know what I mean, look up the last pair of words in Google.] This delicious foodstuff is associated, in my memories, with Xmas celebrations in the house of my paternal grandparents in Oliver Street, Grafton.

Anne, Don and me at our grandparents' home in Oliver Street

Often, when I drop in at an organic-foods store in St-Marcellin, I buy a bag of candied ginger... and I generally end up eating it all before I get home. You see, I really seem to be addicted to candied ginger. Recently, my Choranche neighbor Tineke gave me a jar of fine candied ginger in syrup from the Netherlands. Recipes on the Internet suggest that it's quite easy to prepare. So, I gave it a try. First, you peel the ginger roots and chop them into pieces.

From that point on, it's basically just a matter of boiling the pieces, three or four times, in a sugar syrup. Here's the end result:

My home-made candied ginger is delicious... but there won't be much of it left by the time this blog post is published. The chunks are soft and tasty, but they're slightly stringy, which simply indicates that the raw ginger rhizomes (roots) that I purchased in a local fruit and vegetables store were not quite as fresh as I would have hoped. If the rhizomes had been younger (as seems to be the case for the abopve-mentioned Dutch product), there would have been no stringiness whatsoever, and the boiling operations would have rendered the chunks quite transparent.

Incidentally, when I drained the ginger chunks, I set aside the precious syrup in which they had been cooked. I then used this syrup to flavor chilled Perrier, obtaining a liquid madeleine from my childhood in South Grafton: ginger ale.

Maybe the ideal way of obtaining fresh ginger rhizomes would be to actually grow the plant here in my vegetable garden at Gamone. For me, though, there's a problem. Experts state that the ideal constant temperature for ginger plants is around 25 degrees Centigrade. That more-or-less rules out Gamone... unless, of course, I were to install a small greenhouse. And, to heat it in winter, I could use a solar panel. Now, that sounds like a pretty complex project aimed at resurrecting my madeleine. Maybe I should choose the relatively simple strategy adopted by Marcel Proust, and write a book on the subject.

End of an Australian automobile era

As a boy in Grafton, I grew up in the shade of the celebrated Ford motor company, founded in Detroit (Michigan) in 1903 by the legendary industrialist Henry Ford [1863-1947].

In Australia, the Englishman Charles Bennett, a bike-rider of the penny-farthing era [see], had become a New South Wales champion cyclist in 1883, and he went on to create the highly successful Speedwell brand of bikes [see]. But times were changing due to the arrival of the automobile. Charles Bennett moved into this field, starting up an Australia-wide automobile affair whose branch in Grafton was known as the City Motor Garage and Engineering Company. Around 1920, in Sydney, my London-born grandfather Ernest Skyvington [1891-1985] met up with Bennett, who persuaded his young compatriot to take over Bennett's Grafton business.

That soon became the dominant preoccupation of my grandfather. And, throughout the years that followed, the latest model of the Ford automobile became a standard feature in family photos.

On the left, that's my wonderful grandmother Kath Pickering [1889-1964]. The little boy is my father Bill Skyvington [1917-1978], and the little girl is his young sister, my aunt Yvonne Tarrant, who celebrated her 94th birthday in Taree a few weeks ago.

As soon as he acquired land, enabling him to become a beef grazier, my father (a mechanic in his father's business) was so faithful to the Ford story that he chose V8 as his cattle brand. Click here to see my blog post on this subject.

I learned yesterday that Ford has decided to abandon Geelong.

Why not? After all, these days, nobody rides a Speedwell bike. In any case, another fragment of my childhood Australia is crumbling away.

An eye for an eye

As a child in South Grafton, I was expected to admire a gushy poem penned by a young American Catholic fellow named Joyce Kilmer, killed in 1918 by a sniper's bullet on the Western Front in France.

I would imagine that countless English-speaking people of my generation can recite most of this poem by heart:

Trees

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

The US musician Oscar Rasbach [1888-1975] wrote music for Kilmer's celebrated poem, and our local radio station 2GF in Grafton used to play constantly the version sung by the Austrian-Jewish tenor Richard Tauber [1891-1948]... whose Teutonic accent irritated me almost as much as the syrupy sentiments of the song.

The only aspect of Kilmer's poem with which I agreed was that it had been written by a sentimental fool. I was accustomed to wandering around on my father's bush property, which provided me with ample visions of trees. Not one of them, however, gave me the impression that it might be pressing its hungry mouth against the "sweet flowing breast" of the dry ground. If I observed lots of "leafy arms", they did in fact seem to be lifted most often in a plea for rain, but I never imagined for an instant that God might be playing a role in this meteorological affair. True enough, certain trees wore nests in their "hair", and the birds who had built them were generally either raucous crows, screeching parrots or savage magpies. There may have been robins in the bush, but I don't remember them. And the idea that snow might ever lay upon the "bosom" of one of our eucalyptus trees was frankly unthinkable. (I was 21 years old when I came in contact with snow for the first time in my life, in France.)

The final line of Kilmer's poem annoyed me most of all, with its silly idea that God might "make" trees. We all knew that Australian gum trees proliferated everywhere with no need for any kind of divine intervention. Indeed, the only domain in which my father would have surely appreciated a helping hand from God was ring-barking, designed to clear land so that our cattle would have sufficient grass to eat.

I realize retrospectively today that one of the advantages of growing up in rural Australia was that I soon developed a healthy respect for the power of Nature, which was often brutal, with no apparent concern for the welfare of us humans. The harsh Australian environment is not the sort of place in which a clear-thinking dweller would invent the quaint notion of a benevolent Creator. I've always considered that the Christian divinity is basically a humanistic Mediterranean concept: the intellectual reflection of a setting distinguished by harmony, where Nature is regulated by pleasant seasons. No authentic Australian (such as our Aborigines, above all) would have ever been inclined to invent the gentleman who delivered the Sermon on the Mount.

Once, as a boy, I asked my father why he never went to church (as had become my habit). I have never forgotten his marvelous reply: "Billy, you probably won't understand what I have to say. My cathedral is my bush paddock." In fact, not only did I end up understanding my father's metaphor, but I finally got around to adopting a similar attitude. At the age of 14, I came upon a little book on pantheism, in my grandparents' library, and I was so impressed by this primitive philosophy (which sees the natural world—in a similar spirit to that of our Aborigines—as a vast assembly of autonomous divinities) that I dared to reveal my enthusiasm explicitly to Dean Warr of Christ Church Cathedral... who was not exactly impressed by my revelation. Fortunately, my emerging fascination for mathematics and physics soon dissuaded me from delving more deeply into the archaic metaphysics of pantheism. Meanwhile, my encounter with the mildly sacrilegious book Life of Jesus by Ernest Renan took the wind out of my slack and flapping Christian sails forever.

These days, the terms "creationism" and "intelligent design" designate the variety of religious faith that exploits the splendors of the natural world as proof that a Supreme Designer must have been at work in the beginning. There again, it's difficult for an Australian to be a creationist, because almost everything in the Antipodes seems to have been designed differently (if at all) from what you find in the Mediterranean world. If God thought that jumping was a good mode of locomotion for our kangaroos, why didn't he design jumping creatures for the Northern Hemisphere? If he thought that waddling in an upright position would enable Antarctic penguins to move around easily on ice, why didn't he use the same principle for Arctic creatures? Either the Supreme Designer worked in an experimental fashion, and often got things wrong, or else there was a team of several senior designers who didn't necessarily adopt the same principles.

Adepts of creationism and intelligent design apparently find it difficult to believe that an organ as complex as the human eye could have emerged from Darwinian evolution. They raise doubts concerning the feasibility and evolutionary benefits of the intermediary stage that is often designated as "half an eye". In his Climbing Mount Improbable, Richard Dawkins devoted an entire 54-page chapter to the fascinating subject of the evolution of various kinds of eyes, which have emerged independently from scratch at least 40 times in the history of the animal world. In The Greatest Show on Earth, Dawkins returned to the question of eyes, and insisted upon the fact that our human eye provides a case study in "unintelligent design". In a recent issue of the UK's Daily Mail, there's an extraordinary collection of fine photos [access] of eyes of all kinds.

Let me conclude this rambling post by a lovely photo of a pair of astonishing eyes: those of a baby Madagascan lemur born recently in a French zoo.

Blogs are written by fools like me,
But only an adult lemur couple can make a baby lemur.

My words don't have the same poetic impact as those of Joyce Kilmer. What's more, they're not entirely true from a clinical viewpoint, since they neglect the theme of what we used to call "test-tube babies".

Bridges that let boats through

As a boy, I used to ride my bike across the two-tiered bridge (road/rail traffic) over the Clarence River between South Grafton and Grafton. So, I often watched the heavy span of our bridge being raised to allow a river boat through.

This mechanical spectacle impressed me greatly, because it involved a degree of tremendous power that had no common measure with the other everyday events of my life. I was incapable of fathoming the means by which this gigantic segment of steel could be raised laboriously—in a litany of metallic creaks, clangs and groans—into a vertical position. The only mechanical engineering devices that measured up to the power of the massive bridge span were steam locomotives, which were a familiar sight at the South Grafton railway station.

After a trip to Brisbane or Sydney in a train drawn by such a locomotive, your hair and clothes were sprinkled with specks of coal dust, and the passenger's grimy body exuded a smoky smell. Having arrived at your destination (often dazed after a night with little sleep), your first wish was to get under a shower and change into clean clothes. I remember the first arrival of a diesel locomotive at South Grafton, around 1952. For the entire community, it was an exciting event. The railroad department invited people aboard for a free return trip across the Clarence River, to the little-used station at Grafton. An aspect of the new train that impressed me immensely was a dispenser of chilled water in paper cups.

My grandfather Ernest Skyvington [1891-1985] started Grafton's Ford dealership in 1925.

At that date, the bridge over the Clarence did not yet exist. So, vehicles were transported across the river by a steam ferry.

At the South Grafton end of the crossing,  in 1881, my Irish great-great-grandfather Michael O'Keefe [1831-1910] had purchased the Steam Ferry Hotel.

After his death, it was inherited by his son-in-law James Walker. Renamed Walker's Hotel, and rebuilt after a fire, it became South Grafton's best-known hotel, and still stands today.

Meanwhile, train carriages were floated across the Clarence River on a ferry, the Swallow.

The bridge that we know today was opened in 1932. So, one of its earliest users would have been my father, Bill Skyvington [1917-1978], riding his bicycle across to the dairy farm of the family of his future wife, Kathleen Walker [1918-2003], in Waterview, on the outskirts of South Grafton. In those days, there wasn't much vehicular traffic between the northern and southern banks of the Clarence.

This lack of heavy traffic was just as well, since automobiles were likely to drift over the central line when turning around the bridge's two nasty corners, one at each extremity, designed to allow the presence on the lower level of the bridge of a relatively straight railway line. At the Grafton end of the bridge, in Kent Street (where we lived in the '50s), there are two massive concrete viaducts leading up to the bridge: one for road traffic and the other for trains.

That's to say, the low railway viaduct (in the background of the above photo) was aligned with, and at the same level as, the main central segment of the bridge. Motorists, on the other hand, had to turn a corner at the top right-hand point of the higher-level vehicle viaduct (in the foreground of the photo) where it joined up with the main linear segment of the bridge. Here's a view of the southern corner, taken from the level of the railway line and pedestrian crossing:

And here's a view from the southern bank at a time when the Clarence was flooded:

In the following view, looking back towards the bank at South Grafton, you can see that the archaic structure is covered in rust:

The following two photos (which I found on the Internet), apparently taken through the front windscreen of a truck (equipped with a heavy steel protective grid, seen in the lower half of each photo), reveal that the Grafton Bridge is totally obsolete and indeed dangerous with respect to modern road traffic:

Here's an aerial view of this same South Grafton end of the bridge:

The following amateur videos illustrate the unique setting of the bridge:

At the end of this first video, click to view the same author's second video (labeled XPT2), which includes the experience of crossing the bridge in a motor vehicle. Then there's this train-driver's vision of the bridge:

It was recently announced that plans are under way for a second bridge at Grafton. But the existing 80-year-old bridge (whose moveable span ceased to function long ago) will remain in service.

I was reminded of our antiquated bridge across the Clarence when I saw this photo of the fabulous suspension bridge that was opened in Bordeaux a fortnight ago.

The big three-masted barque that was present at the opening ceremony is the Belem, launched in 1896.

POST SCRIPTUM: As if our dear old bendy bridge didn't have enough problems already with its traffic saturation, blocked lift-span and rusty metal, The Daily Examiner revealed an additional ailment here.

Hang-gliding pioneer from Grafton nominated for world's highest award

The FAI [Fédération Aéronautique Internationale], whose head office is in Switzerland, governs world records in all kinds of air sports and astronautical achievements.

They have recently announced on their website [click here] that John Dickenson has been nominated as a potential recipient of their distinguished 2012 FAI Gold Air Medal.

There has been considerable discussion on my blog concerning this man whose pioneering efforts in hang gliding were conducted on the Clarence River alongside my native town, Grafton, in 1963. The test pilot was a local man, Rod Fuller. To access this material, use the search box up in the left-hand corner with the term dickenson.