SYDNEYSIDE WITH JANET PARR Choirboys have a holiday

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33442, 25 January 1974, Page 5

SYDNEYSIDE WITH JANET PARR Choirboys have a holiday

In St Matthew’s Church at Windsor, 50 choirboys were singing like angels although they were not looking quite as angelic as choirboys usually do. Shorts I and open-necked shirts I had. this once, heen preI scribed instead of the I orthodox cassock and | surplice. I It is the ruff, I am now i convinced, that turns an j ordinary boy into an object who delights elderly ladies and confounds his family. ( It was different, apparently, last year at Bathurst (when 150 church choirboys itook over a school for their I i residential course, wore 11 their cassocks as working I gear, and topped them off I with surplices—and ruffs, of I course—for the service they I sang at the end in Bathurst I Cathedral. Things were a lot less forI mal at Camp Yarramundi, I some miles down the road I from Windsor at Richmond. I Early morning and early I evening, they sang and I worked together. In between, they went horseback riding, 1 canoed, swam, ate, kicked a

iball about, and, being basiI cally conformist, played jokes on one another and the camp leaders. It only goes to show that there are more things going on in school holidays than one ever really knows. But here they were, ail 50 of them, on Sunday morning singing away in St Matthew’s Anglican Church at Windsor. Windsor has another St Matthew’s church which is Roman Catholic. The Anglican St Matthew’s is another Francis Greenway church, a piece of urban and urbane elegance rising from grass studded with tombstones. Governor Lachlan Macquarie chose the site himself and laid the foundation stone. Building, by convict labour and with handmade bricks, began in 1817, which makes the church a little older than Francis Greenway’s St James’s Church in Sydney, and about 20 years older than Windsor’s other St Matthew’s Church. The first settlers arrived in the Windsor area in 1794, which makes it one of Australia’s oldest towns. But it is old country round there. MACQUARIE COUNTRY It is Macquarie country—outside Richmond, a sign announces that it is “a Macquarie town”—and Greenway country. Greenway went on to design the Court House in Windsor and “Hobartville” in Richmond, the former home of William Cox jun., a son of the man who built the road over the Blue Mountains. Today, suburban-type villas are beginning to spread on their larger than suburban-sized blocks, for at 35 miles or so from Sydney and served by road and rail

it is commuter country. The Richmond R.A.A.F. " base, which has had planes of one kind or another flying from [it since 1915, and Hawkesbury Agricultural College, | founded in 1891, sprawl 'across . a fair amount of I countryside. I And I suppose with our (new national consciousness | and all that it is “all-Austra-I liana.” Unconscious Austra- ; liana. Three miles down the 'road from Windsor, they are making a very much more I conscious effort at getting it all together. To quote its own literature, the AustraI liana Pioneer Village at Wilberforce provides “an insight | into Australia’s forgotten I past and ... a. lasting monument dedicated to our I pioneer ancestors.” The village has some pretty old things to show. Rose Cottage, which probably sparked off the project, is Australia’s oldest timber structure. The house was occupied by members of the Rose family continuously from 1798 to 1963. That makes it the oldest house continuously occupied by one family in Australia. On July 4, 1793, a girl was born to the Rose family and is believed to have been the first child born to a free settler in Australia. WILBERFORCE VILLAGE Tidy and furnished —streamers, punchbowl, and paper cups of jelly set out for a party in the par-, lour—the Rose Cottage now rubs shoulders with a bank (1826), a minute wooden police station, cottages lined with cement bags and filled with lumpy beds, massive wardrobes and chests of drawers, tea caddies with patriotic portraits, treadle sewing machines, and mangles. An old saddler’s shop full of harness and a smell of leather, a barber’s shop where teeth could be removed along with the whiskers, are across the road. Nearby is the blacksmith’s shop—bellows and forge and cooling trough—of George and William Atkins, who in 1870 invented and patented the Atkins single-furrow mould plough and plied their trade in the village of Wilberforce itself. Most of the old buildings have come to Wilberforce from elsewhere to gather along the dirt streets in curiously realistic fashion. There is the bark smokehouse, the charming little St Philip’s Church, the old public school from Marsden Park, and the woolshed where sheep are sheared for the edification of the tourist. There are billy tea and damper, and “cockie’s joy” to spread on it, bullock team with “bullocky,” and a 1921 fire engine. “Bushrangers” shoot twice a day on Sundays, but the cartridges are only blanks. The old Oxburgh Inn will not pull you anything but a soft drink, and in the little old store (a souvenir shop) you can buy leather disco jewellery.

L True, there is a modern . hotel-motel fronting the road L beside the entrance and i across the grass paddocks. •; “Funland” takes care of the ■ kids. Among the willows. I the barbecues, and the picnic f shelters amplifiers relay pop along with “Click go the : Shears” and “Botany Bay.” > The most surprising thing • about the village is that in • only a few years it has man- “ aged to span almost two ; centuries of Australian liv- : ing. Outside, time moves 1 more slowly, recording its > events as they happen, in ■ pen and ink or on marble ■ and greenstone. In St Mat-, t thew’s (Anglican) at Windi sor, a large plaque stands as a memorial to Samuel Mar- : sden. put there in 1938 by his descendants in Britain, • Australia, and New Zealand, i Fixed to it is a large piece ' of greenstone. ; For that occasion, the Bis- ’ hop of Aotearoa was ■ present—with a Maori choir.