Susanna Freymark
Ross Johnston describes himself as a bush kid from Mallanganee.
Now aged almost 87, he was back revisiting his childhood home with friends and family last month.
“I consider myself a mountain man, not of the sea or of the wide western plains. I was born in the Casino Memorial Hospital in 1939, the youngest of three boys. My parents had a small Hereford cattle property that they named Porta Downs, on Little Creek which flowed into the mighty Clarence River, to the west of the little timber village of Mallanganee,” Ross wrote in an academic paper titled My bush landscapes: an historian’s profile.
“Our farm was part of a closer settlement area, opened up by the New South Wales government in the early 1900s. My father ‘selected’ our allotment in1909, when Sandilands Station, one of the original pastoral leases granted mid-nineteenth century to ‘open up’ the upper Clarence River basin, wassubdivided.”
Theo Johnston and Edith Thomas raised three boys – Ross was the youngest – at a time when Mallanganee was at its peak.
Ross went to Mallanganee Public School and remembers principal Richie Torrens who was there in 1945–1950.
The original timber hotel dominated the main street, there was a ‘department store’ owned by the Hewetsons and it even had a drapery section, Ross said.
There was a butcher shop, two schools (public and Catholic), the convent, bank, the pie shop and even a billiards shop.
“Paddy Howard was the cream carrier,” Ross said.
“The Memorial Hall had dances and balls, we did the Gypsy Tap.”
Ross used to go to the convent in Mallanganee for piano lesson, he admitted he wasn’t very good.
He wrote about his time at high school.
“I was a student at Casino High School. Weekdays I had to board in town, nearly 40 miles from home. I still remember how happy I was on Friday afternoons when I caught Vinnie Farrell’s old orange and white Reo bus to return to Mallanganee. The bus chugged its way up the Richmond Range under which Mallanganee lay on the western side. At times the bus would conk out, and we would have to walk the rest of the journey. From the top of the Range, at the tick-gate, a glorious vista opened up before us, over the head-waters of Little Creek, to the left, humble Mount Misery (no-one ever told us what the ‘misery’ was), across the broad expanse of the Upper Clarence basin, and there, way beyond, the faint blue lines of the Great Dividing Range (as we called it), rows of various ranges.”
Ross’s niece Tracey and nephew Craig went to Mallanganee School too.
Their father was Val Crozier Johnston who for a time ran the Bonalbo Hotel. Val was also mayor of Kyogle in the 90s. He died in 2003.
Their mother had a shop in Casino called The Happy Place that sold clothes.
“We’re happy to be here and revisit our own memories,” Tracey said.
Ross lives at Tomewin now (Border Ranges).
He’s proud to be a bush kid from Mallanganee. And he plans to visit again soon.