Hoddle Street never had much aesthetically. Apart from Alma Gahan and the bamboos in Sharkey’s place there was nothing of such stuff as men’s dreams are made on.
Bamboos and palms are good for young Robinson Crusoes and Fridays in the fun and games of tropical islands but children cannot be aloft all the time and finally we would wearily settle for the asphalt comfort of footpaths and gutter.
Out of this scruffy little street you could at any drop of the hat rake out the three rough diamonds set cluster-wise in the hollows. Billy Stoddard, Billy Gallagher and Cyril McCaffery. Anytime was trouble time when all were allowed out to play. The asphalt jungle was beset with terrors, catapults, pea-shooters and the garbage missile to say nothing of an occasional air-rifle loaded with spud-shot. Fearsome it was!
Yet, in dinkum retrospect I suppose Hoddle Street was the best around. An abundance of children could play happily along its buggy less fairway. A short, pleasant fairway which any amateur with a No 7 iron, would have sliced from Glenmore Road to Goodhope Street in one.
We would play for hours at cricket, tip-cat, hop-scotch, marbles, tops and all that was fun without expense. The only traffic apart from the residents was the evening lamp-lighter and the occasional perve, who we could smell a mile off.
Our back lane ran into Hoddle Street, so we were sort of part-owners of it anyway – inversely we were part of it. Years later when I looked over the deed of 290, I found that our ground was a section of an 1833 grant of eight acres to one Robert Hoddle.
Mr Hoddle was quite something in the way of being a surveyor. He charted the Bell’s Line of Road over the Blue Mountains, he surveyed the sites of Berrima, Goulburn, Brisbane and Melbourne where he finally settled.
Surveyor-General of NSW T.L. Mitchell snobbishly fobbed him off as a character who couldn’t spell and who should have stuck to his links and chains. With a name like Hoddle who would want to take an interest in high-falutin’ English anyway? After a mis-spelt life he died in Melbourne on 24 October 1881 leaving a crumby £500,000 behind.
[W.E. Pidgeon]