Lorne Victoria Australia

Keith Dunstan, for many years a journalist with the Herald Sun passed away in 2013. He wrote many humorous books observing the quirkiness of the world and people around him. In his autobiography, “No Brains At All”, he recounted his memories of a family holiday in Lorne in 1939.

It talks of the grandeur of Erskine House and also talks of something which is in the consciousness of all who live in or visit Lorne today – bushfire. For his holiday in Lorne was in 1939; the year of Black Friday. Keith writes:

“There was one last glorious summer holiday in 1939 before I went to boarding school, the last of an era. Every year, dad booked the entire family into Erskine House, a large, gracious guesthouse at Lorne, which had been there since the 1880’s. We stayed there from immediately after Christmas until the first week of February, although dad sometimes returned to the city and came down at weekends. Erskine House had its own gate right on the surf beach, its own grass tennis courts, bowling greens, croquet lawns, ballroom, billiard room and even its own 9 hole golf course. There were both ancient areas and modern.

The expedition to Lorne was always a grand affair.

In the early days we went in an Essex sedan. Several suitcases would be strapped to both running boards, others lashed on the luggage carrier at the rear. By 1939 our travelling had been refined. Dad sent a Herald and Weekly Times van on ahead. This was loaded not only with luggage, but also with enough whisky, gin, vermouth and beer to last a month. There was also ice. It was tricky trying to find ice for a whisky out in the bungalows so dad also carted ice to Lorne in large insulated boxes. This way he was able to entertain in style. The drama and magic of Lorne was the Great Ocean Road, which started at Anglesea and twisted, turned its way along steep cliffs to Apollo Bay and on to Peterborough. It was completed in the depression years around 1936 to become one of the most spectacular coastal roads on earth. In the 1930’s it was narrow and required very careful driving.

At Erskine House we were always a large community of several hundred. All meals were provided, breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus morning and afternoon tea, in the dining room. Bells called us to meals. The week’s program included tournaments for bowls, tennis, golf, croquet and table tennis, complete with a treasure hunt and a sand castle competition for the children.

Another important event was the Erskine House photograph, which took place at least once every summer. The entire complement of guests gathered on the lawn in front of the verandah at 11.00 am. Carefully, the photographer arranged us in appropriate rows. The camera was on a wooden tripod, with a black cloth shade for the photographer’s head, and it had an extraordinary lens that operated by a clockwork motor. The lens moved in a 45 degree arc so that it could produce a panorama of the guests. My cousin George Farmer and I always made sure that we were positioned in the left hand corner of the group. Then, as soon as the lens started whirring, we sprinted around the back and got into position on the right hand side of the group. Somewhere in the family archives there is still a picture of the Lorne gathering that curiously depicts twin boys on either side of the group.

Erskine House Group Photo

There were other holidays at Erskine House after 1939, but never again was it the same. There was no formal dressing for dinner, and the balls, the tournaments, the elaborate weekly program were all gone. After the war, the crowd that could afford to holiday at Erskine House went elsewhere. For the Tooraker’s it became the fashion to have a second house at Sorrento or Portsea, so that the people who drank and supped with each other all the working year continued to drink and sup together through the summer break, not having to meet anyone else.

Of course, Victorian holidays should never be in January. Schools should take their recess in late February or March when the weather is mild, soft, dry and sublime. In January it takes on all sorts of ingenious variations, both hot and cold, designed to torture campers. In January 1971, we had a week of rain, with southerly winds blowing straight from the Antarctic. A friend looked at our little house, watched me trying to prepare a barbecue under an umbrella in the near blizzard and commented, “Boy, what a dump”.