In this video Ayneslie recalls her time working first as an usherette, then in the ticketing office and finally in the booking office at the new Wests Theatre in Hindley Street Adelaide, which opened in 1939. She was earning about £3.0.0 a week for her work there.

Wests Theatre closed in 1977 and later became the Grainger Studio of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, continuing its entertainment links.

Ayneslie, (or Anne to her friends) was one of the few women living in Henley and Grange during this time to join the Australian Women’s Army Service (AWAS) in response to the threat faced by Australia during World War II.  She was deployed to various locations in the Northern Territory, including Alice Springs, Adelaide River, and Darwin, from November 1942 to May 1945. 

Ayneslie was a trained singer, and while in the AWAS, she became the lead singer in “Wheels Within Wheels”, a concert held for service personnel in Alice Springs where she sang to 7,000 service men and women over 5 nights. She was also the first person to sing on the first radio station in Darwin, 5DR and was the lead singer in many concerts entertaining troops in Adelaide River, Larrimah and Darwin.

Ayneslie appreciated serving and being able to do her part when necessary. She reached the rank of signalwoman and was discharged in February 1946.

The Henley and Grange Historical Society had the privilege of capturing Ayneslie’s war time recollections in April 2024 thanks to the acquisition of new video recording equipment and editing hardware and sotware funded through the City of Charles Sturt and a MaC grant from the History Trust of South Australia. Joined by her daughter Julie, Ayneslie (now 101 years old) graciously welcomed society members into her home, sharing memories of her upbringing in Grange and her later experiences in the AWAS. This collaborative effort has resulted in the creation of a series of videos to honor Ayneslie’s remarkable life.

Other installments of Ayneslie’s life in Grange will be added soon!

I’ll just talk a little bit more about the sand dunes because if you visit the area from Grange or you can go back further down to Tennyson, you actually see the old sand dunes are still there. They’ve now heritage listed and the ups and downs of the sand dunes can be seen. And there are areas where the sand is blown back to what they call blowouts.

But if you go through the Grange area on Seaview Road, Seaview Road has got undulating, and that undulation ceased at where the Star of the Sea Convent is present because that’s the point where they finished the tram line. The tram line from the city went all the way down Henley Beach Road onto Seaview Road and then on this flat area down as far as the Star of the Sea Convent.

Now I’ll leave the Henley south area and go down to West Beach beyond the River Torrens outlet.

There were only three or four houses immediately south of the Torrens and then proper sand dunes existed. They were ups and down big sand hills, box thorn bushes, and on the seaside, right on the foreshore, there were a continuous row of shacks. The shacks went virtually from the Torrens Outlet all the way through to where the caravan park is and beyond almost to Glenelg North.

There were two or three houses in West Beach, in Rockingham Street there were two well built houses with a tennis court in between, owned by Hills and Lodges. They were prominent people at the time, had property in the city, but other than that, there was the landowner, Old Man Gray, we used to call him.

Now Gray was a famous name right through that all the West Beach area, right back as far as Tapley’s Hill Road. And they had property. I think its name was ‘Frogmore’ on the corner of Tapley’s Hill Road and where, Sir Donald Bradman Drive now exists.

Right at that corner that was Frogmore was an old house built there, but Gray’s owned all the land through there. Old Man Gray lived on top of the sand dunes. You had this house and if you were trespassed to go trapping rabbits, you’d hear this voice.

“Get off of my property“. He’d yell out the top of his voice. So off we’d go and hide behind the bushes. But it was a great area for trapping rabbits.

In about 1955, I guess around that time, West Beach became development as a new suburb. And to develop that, they smashed all that, took all the sand away. Part of the sand was taken by ACI for glass manufacturer, and I believe a lot of this sand was also taken to fill in the hot or damp spots from the Adelaide airport. The Adelaide airport was all flood land and was not suitable for building.

That’s why the western suburbs were very fortunate because all the golf courses of Adelaide were built on the so called red sand dunes. Red sand dunes extended from Glenelg Golf Course through Kooyonga Golf Course and then actually around Kooyonga on the Henley Beach Road. The Henley Beach Road takes a big S bend through there. And that S bend is to get the road around the sand dunes. So, there’s the Kooyonga, built on the sand dunes, then going further to the north, there’s Royal Adelaide Golf Course and then the Grange Golf Course. All built on land, which is no good for anything. No good for farming with swamp land, boxthorn bush, snakes and rabbits.

(Video recorded on Monday April 24, 2023)

Note: The transcript above was created using AssemblyAI to convert the video into text then manually corrected. 

After the the Second World War there was no building material available and the houses were all old bungalow houses built around the 1910 the Henley South area was not wanted very much. In fact, I’ve got an advertisement from ‘The Advertiser’ in 1918 advertising land for sale on the Esplanade to Henley Beach South for five guineas to live on the Esplanade but land there on Military Road was four pound five shillings per block.

Military Road is not a flat road. It’s the ups and downs deviation. It’s really what I’d describe as tortuous pathway and that tortuous pathway can be seen very clearly between from Grange Road through to the Torrens Outlet. Military Road bends and twists around where the Congregational Church is present, and the Church of England.

The owners of the houses from the Henley Beach Road through to the Torrens Outlet were in fact quite prominent. People mainly lived in the city and this is their beachside summer residence. There’s some names that spring to mind as Sir Walter Duncan, who was president of Legislative Council of South Australia. There was Carl Laubman of Laubman and Pank. They owned a house that’s still in existence just between Lexington Road and Military Road.

H.C.(Slinger) Nitschke was a state cricketer whose family owned a lot of property six or seven houses from the Henley Beach Road in the southerly direction for probably seven or eight blocks of land. In fact they owned the block of land on the corner of Henley Beach Road, Seaview Road and the Esplanade and that block of land was compulsory acquired by the state government. It was going to be left open to car parking for the future but was sold off for money.

(Video recorded on April 24, 2023)

Note: The transcript above was created using AssemblyAI to convert the video into text then manually corrected. 

I’ll talk a little bit more about the man-made creek. The man-made creek was created so the dairy farm cattle always had drinking water. The level of the existing water table was only about 3 feet (1m) down.

And now this leads back to why Captain White was able to build this bird sanctuary. Jerusalem didn’t require a tremendous amount of excavation because the water table was not very far down. And so by excavating, say, 4 or 5 feet (1.5 m) of sand, he then had 2 or 3 feet (0.75m) of water in this big ponding basin. And there were reeds and snakes and everything that kids loved, a couple of little islands. All the local kids that were around all had a little fort on the Jerusalem area.

Getting back to the Housing Trust development, which occurred around 1957, the vacant land extended from Hazel Terrace all the way to Tapley’s Hill Road. Now, because this man made creek was existing right through this middle of this area, the Housing Trust in their wisdom and their engineers, thought it was not wise to build too close to an old waterway, so they created great big open spaces. And the open spaces still exist. The area where the tennis courts at Henley South are, that’s where Jerusalem was.

And the dairy was there. And then the roads that they built through there were named after battleships of the Second World War – Lexington, Hobart, Halsey to name a few. So the interesting thing is behind the Henley South Tennis Club, there’s an open space which is probably 70 or 80 meters wide, which really runs between Fletcher Road and Kinkaid Road. But that area is that’s where the creek ran, and that can be traced all the way back to Fulham. And so there is this big open space all the way to Fulham, and it’s just a beautiful area now.

The viaduct was the way the tram could get from the city through Lockleys down to the beach, and it had to go through this floodplain. So, they built this viaduct. The viaduct was a man-made wooden structure, probably half to three quarters of a mile long, that’s say, 600 meters long and in the middle, it was probably six or 8ft off the ground. That’s 2 meters off the ground. And there were boxthorn bushes around there and lots of rabbits around the bend in the viaduct. The viaduct closely follows the pathway of HMAS Australia Road.

(Video recorded on April 24, 2023)

Note: The transcript above was created using AssemblyAI to convert the video into text then manually corrected. 

I’ll go back to the Henley Primary School days. There were very few children in Henley Primary school, in fact I think only we had about ten boys and perhaps nine girls in my class.

But they weren’t locals, they were from the market gardens. There were the Maranoffs, the Minifs, the Manchesters, the Vladkoffs, a few others, all Bulgarians. But the Bulgarians, they were market gardeners and the market gardens extended from east of the Burnley Street intersection where the S bend is into Henley Beach – it was the start of the viaduct.

I used to go up to Mickey Maranoff’s place after school occasionally.  My mother would say, if you’re going up to Mickey Maranoffs to play, take a string bag with you Merv, she’d say. So, I’d take the string bag and get out to the Maranoffs there and there’d be glass houses full of tomatoes and watermelons everywhere.

Jimmy Maranoff, would say, “Would you like a watermelon, Merv”? I’ve got I’ve got a string bag here. So, I put the watermelon in the string bag got it filled up with tomatoes and Mother would be very happy with you when I came home.

(Video recorded on April 24, 2023)

Notes:

1. The transcript above was created using AssemblyAI to convert the video into text then manually corrected. 
2. Spelling of Bulgarian surnames above may be incorrect (editor)

Now, in about 1947, the Esplanade roadway was created.

The vision of the South Australian government was to have a coastal pathway from Marino Rocks all the way through to Outer Harbour, but that was pushed aside by other thoughts about which is the best way to develop the Esplanade. 

Once the roadway was built, the next problem was created. Big storms and so to protect the roadway they had to build a sea wall and the sea wall was built in about 1948 and it hadn’t been up very long and it was smashed by one of the big storms. In 1947 1948 the Barcoo was washed up down at Glenelg, which was a Navy frigate. The sea wall was effective, but it had to have reinforcements beyond on the land side and they built a metal slope, which is still in existence and can still be seen there all the way along from Henley Beach Rd down to the Torrens Outlet.  In some of those storms, the waves were so great that the houses used to vibrate with the thump of the wave hitting the wall and the spray from the off the sea wall was so great it actually filled two tanks at my parents’ house with salt water overnight just with buckets and buckets of sea water coming over the house. It was impossible, virtually impossible, to drive along the sea front through these great sheets of spray.

After that in 1957 they put great big boulders rocks based on the seaside of the sea wall and that led to the turnaround of sand reaccumulating on the beaches. For having those beautiful sand dunes before the roadway was built, they all got washed away with storms and the sea walls so that the sea wall created the problem of rapid movement of sand in high water storms.

After that, and over the years they developed Coast Park and the Esplanade has changed quite dramatically to the locals and from having a fairly poor roadway we’ve now got a beautiful roadway, nice pathway for bikes and pedestrians on the seaside and a few areas where residents can and visitors can sit down and enjoy the views.

(Video recorded on Monday April 24, 2023)

Note: The transcript above was created using AssemblyAI to convert the video into text then manually corrected. 

Leaving the Esplanade, I will now track back to going eastwards back as far as the houses extended.

The houses stopped at Hazel Terrace. There were no houses between Hazel Terrace and Tapley’s Hill Rd, except for few market gardens around the eastern boundary of the city. Henley High School was not in existence and this area was frequently flooded. There was a man-made creek which extended from around Fulham all the way down to a dairy which extended which existed alongside the Henley Primary School.

The Henley Primary School’s history is quite interesting. The Henley Primary School was built in Henley South, but no one lived in Henley South other than 2, 3 rows of houses on the Esplanade, Military Road and East Terrace and Hazel Terrace, but there were very few people living there. Henley Primary School was built there because it was the only available dry land above flood marks, so the area used to flood, and Henley High School used to flood, and was built on reclaimed land.

In about 1957, the Housing Trust decided that the brought the dairy out. The dairy is quite interesting because it had a historical landmark there, so called Jerusalem after Captain White, who developed the Jerusalem area and by excavation by horse and cart and buggies they created man-made swamps which was a wildlife sanctuary for many native birds.  

(Video recorded on April 24, 2023)

Note: The transcript above was created using AssemblyAI to convert the video into text then manually corrected. 

I’ll just go back and talk a little bit more about the open spaces where the dairy used to be. There were around 250 milking cows in the dairy, but beyond existing Burnley Street, that was about the eastern boundary of the dairy but the open space used to extend further back.

And I can remember quite a few other lads would go up there to what we call the ‘licky root farm‘. The licky root farm was liquorice root.

Now, liquorice root that we love is in liquorice all sorts. Liquorice was a plant that probably grew about 18 inches that’s say 20-30 cm. But below that, below the ground, the liquorice root would go down and either run out horizontally or go vertically and we used to try and find what were the horizontal ones, running roots, we’d call those ‘runners’, and the vertical ones would call those ‘walkers’. The kids would love to find a ‘runner ‘rather than the ‘walker’, because if you find a ‘walker’ to get much liquorice root, you’d be digging down 3 feet (nearly a metre) the hole rather than just skimming across the surface of the land to get the ‘walkers’ out.

What did we do with the liquorice root?  

Well, I can remember Mr Morrow (unsure of name – editor), who was headmaster of Henley Primary School, he used to sell liquorice root. He’d come up with a sugar bag full of liquorice root and sell say, lengths of about six inches. That’s 15cm long and be about as thick as your little finger.

And you would wash it and then  just chew it, like just chew liquorice root and they gave this beautiful liquorice flavour.

(Video recorded on April 24, 2023)

Note: The transcript above was created using AssemblyAI to convert the video into text then manually corrected. 

I’ll get away from the liquorice root farm now.

One of the tradesmen of the day was a fellow by the name of Ray Burton.

Ray Burton must be one of the first motorised milkies. And my younger brother and I, both my brothers actually, we each worked with Ray Burton, delivering milk at different stages. But not only was Ray Burton a milkie, he was a real entrepreneur. His father bought him a block of land down at West Beach, and I remember digging the sand out to put his foundations in his house, which is at the corner of Stanhope Street and Military Road. That house still exists, so I helped put those foundations in.

But on the eastern side of Military Road, Ray Burton had land and he had a big freezer, and they used to store the milk in there. The milk from the South Australian Farmers Union was delivered by big lorries at 4 O’Clock in the morning, to Ray Burton’s depot, West Beach. Not only did he store milk there, but he then set up an ice round. But he was better than that, as the market gardeners, mainly Bulgarians, had no other service delivered, so he became the bread delivery, the paper round, the milk round, and the ice round. And so we delivered all these things through those back blocks of West Beach on dirt tracks.

Well, I guess around 1960, (I’m not quite sure what year the drive-in opened), but the West Beach drive-in opened up at the corner of Military Road and West Beach Road on the northeastern corner. Well, Ray Burton being an entrepreneur, thought he should deliver the Sunday Mail and Sunday Advertiser on the Saturday night. I can remember selling the Sunday Mail and the Sunday Advertiser on a Saturday night. And the cars would be queued up there, 200 or 300 cars queuing up to get into the drive-in, and so we used to walk up and down the parked cars, saying “got your mail, got your news, get your mail, get you…….”  and they would say, “got any females?” All those things.

Other things Ray Burton did at Christmas time, he delivered poultry as he had a yard there. He must have had 400 – 500 chickens. He said to my brother, who was still delivering, look young Dougie, you can stay home and pluck fowls.

Doug plucked fowls till he smelled like a fowl. It was worst job he could ever imagine. Plucking fowls!

(Video recorded on April 24, 2023)

Note: The transcript above was created using AssemblyAI to convert the video into text then manually corrected.