Many years ago, my intellectual uncle, Cyril Pearl kindly found me an intact copy of Nathaniel Pidgeon’s journal of his experiences as the first city Missionary in Sydney in 1850 or thereabouts. Uncle Cyril was greatly taken by Nathaniel’s graphic descriptions of that pagan rum-sodden citizenry. Somewhere amongst these oozy woozy recollections of the past, I have interpolated a potted history of the Reverend Nathaniel Pidgeon and a couple of examples of his quite unequivocal prose.
Grandpa White’s family speak, not for themselves unfortunately but only through the errant dark and inexact tunnels of my fading memories. There is no point in expecting either sequence or chronological order in these effusions. If I am over-repetitious, it is because I lack a concentrated mind and was at any moment only seeking the immediacy of past feeling fingers.
None of the faces of memory are recollected now, or seem even meaningful. Such experiences as these shadows cast upon me are the purpose for these remembrances of things past and of no great consequence at all.
Most of the reminiscences of Paddington have been written spasmodically over a period of twenty years. True and what is a dream, I cannot tell, now. All the names mentioned are, or were, realities in the social scene. No offence to any was, or is, intended and I do not think that I have libelled or contemned any identifiable person. Some of the old ancient thinking of Paddington may be revived in the memories of old-timers, who may waste a little more of their time in ploughing through its content. Most people wish to identify themselves to their children and in a hesitant and long delayed way, I have attempted to give them some background of at least one side of their parent’s past. I included an extract from my Pidgeon history to help the rather overwhelming emphasis on the White family, who in my own case rightly deserve remembrance and honour. It is sixty years and a little since I began school at Glenmore Road. Memory has now no alluvial offerings – recollections have been submerged under current problems and there is no more to say, Perhaps one day while I stay at 290 Glenmore Road, something of no consequence will surface. –It will please me.
Now after all these years it seems to be very much a sentimental waste of time. An excursion backwards into nostalgic stations which have neither reality or purpose in the present age.
The unfolding tapes of memory sound off as the bones and vapourising odours of an age of smelling salts and the drifting fumes of alcoholic memories.
Paddy you seemed so much bigger in the old days.
[W.E. Pidgeon c.1975]