Historical information
Fred looks back; Report: Linley Hartley, Picture: Ron Grant
Teaching himself German again after 70 years is just one of the many tasks Fred Golgerth, of Greensborough, has undertaken and succeeded in during his lifetime.
As the two year old tenth child of a German descendent, Fred learnt to speak German from an Aunt.
But World War 1 was raging. Fred’s older brother had gone to Europe with the Australian forces, changing his name … to ….. to sound less German.
“I used to get my bottom slapped for speaking German at home,” Fred said.
Even his name was changed from Otto to the more anglicised Frederick.
Fred claims his involvement with Eltham started two years before he was born!
His sister, two years older than him, was a babe in arms when his parents bought a piece of grazing property in Mount Pleasant Rd.
“It was about 24 acres on a spur of Mt Pleasant,” Fred said.
“My parents bought it from Mr and Mrs Hughes. There was a two-room mud hut in wattle and daub that we lived in from time to time.
“My parents had a dairy farm and dairy in West Coburg, and they bought the Mt Pleasant land to put the dry stock on.
“At one stage my mother got very ill and my older sister took my younger sister and myself to Eltham for four or five months. I went down to Eltham Primary School then.”
That wasn’t the only time Fred stayed in Eltham. His sister, Wilhemina, known as Willa, married Jim Watson who had the Eltham hotel for some years from the end of World War 1.
Pillar to post living was the way Fred described his youth, when he stayed with one married sister after another.
“After a while Will and Jim lived in the big house at the top of Pitt St, next to the Council depot, and the hotel was managed by Fitzsimmons who had a big place near the river down there on Fitzsimons Lane.
There was no bridge in Fitzsimons Lane but we used to cross the river at a ford, rolling up our trouser legs so they wouldn’t get wet, and carrying our shoes. I’d o down to visit some friends I had in Templestowe. And sometimes Jim Watson took his horse drawn lorry across the ford on his way to the brewery, instead of going don through Heidelberg.”
“The bridge across the Yarra in Fitzsimons was not built until 1961.”
Fred Golgerth, was only a teenager when he was rolled off his pushbike under a car on the bend between Mt Pleasant Rd and the Diamond Creek bridge.
He was hospitalised in the little hospital on the east side of Eltham village that served the district in those days. He still carries the scars of the burns he received from the exhaust pipe and recent x-rays have revealed several broken vertebrae. At the time of the accident he was treated for a dislocated neck and was in plaster from his hip to the base of his head for about seven months.
But nothing daunted Fred. Bouncing back he began work as an apprentice to a motor mechanic in Bell St, Preston, a man who is still living (at 90) in Queensland and who still communicates with Fred frequently.
“He was like a father to me,” Fred declared.
He was a marine engineer as well, so I …. that as well as blacksmithing. They taught us properly then.”
After finishing his apprenticeship, Fred bought himself a 30 hundredweight Fargo truck and began his own contract carting business, doing most of the work for a firm called Carnegie’s and a subsidiary of that, Howard Radio.
It was in the office Fred met his wife.
“He taught me to drive the truck giving me lessons in my lunch hours up the Bourke St and Flinders St extension,” she said.
“After work I’d have a driving lesson and all the girls from the Howard Radio would pile in the back to get a lift to Richmond Station.”
In the 1939 bushfires, the Mt Pleasant Rd property was burnt out and the hut raised.
Two years later, Fred and Dorothy were married. Fred paid £7.15.0 ($15.50) for the suit in which he was married.
Dorothy had pulled out of the Women’s Air Training Corps to be married. Others with whom she trained went to Darwin and were in a convoy that was bombed.
Fred went into the garage business in Brighton and continued his cartage business for a while. His company was employed to do all Brown Gouge’s motor repairs and factory maintenance. Because Fred had a certificate to do steam repair work he often got jobs maintaining industrial boilers.
While he was in Brighton, Fred bought an eight-seater 1925 Silver Ghost Rolls Royce from Sir Keith Murdoch. When the couple moved to Rosanna in about 1943, it became a delivery van for the dairy they operated.
“I thought I’d like to get back into a dairy business” Fred said.
“We used to deliver the milk in the Rolls.
“But it was hard work. We couldn’t get the labour and we’d drive to the farm and pick up the milk cans, take them back to the dairy, cool the milk, bottle it and deliver it.
The inspectors would come regularly and the walls for bacteria.”
Fred was exhausted. The couple gave up the dairy and moved to Eltham to live on the old property where a weatherboard house had now been built.
It wasn’t a big house and the glassed in Rolls Royce limousine became the daytime nursery for the Golgerth’s second daughter.
We’d put her in there to sleep during the day.”
“Dorothy Golgerth was known to drive the Rolls at breakneck speed along Mt Pleasant Rd.
Fred took some time off work then began driving a little local bus run by the Lyon Brothers before taking a maintenance job at the Athenaeum Club in the city.
He’d ride an old Harley-Davidson to the station and travel into the city by train. Later, when the family moved to Pryor St. (their house stood where McEwans car park is now) Fred could walk to and from the station.
“There was no resident doctor in the early days of Eltham,” Fred said.
“Dr Cordner used to come from Greensborough to a room in the old house next to the old grocery shop on the corner of York St and Main Rd, Eltham (the grocery shop is now the Eltham Feed and Grain Store).
The Golgerths lived in Eltham until “Dollar Day” – the day decimal currency became official. They eventually moved to Greensborough, when they have lived since.
Fred has had his share of interesting jobs since then, retiring at 65 seven years ago when he was working in the engineering department at Larundel.
Recently, two of his older sisters and a brother died, within a month. They were all in their 80s.
They all had a profound influence on Fred, especially during his youth.
His sharp wit and amusing anecdotes are the richer for his having been the youngest of a family that made the best of every circumstance.
And now, as he enjoys his retirement, he is concentrating on relearning the language of his infancy; teaching himself German from tapes and a ‘teach yourself’ manual.
He is fiercely proud of his German ancestry and treasures the diary, written in German in Gothic script, kept by his grandparents during their journey to Australia.
Physical description
Thick paper card, cream colour, printed single side, double folded
Digital file only, scanned from album in private collection
Inscriptions & markings
On the inside in blue pen:
"To Sadie, Wal
Margaret & Elizabeth
with
lots & lots of love & best wishes
from
Mother"
