Title on an outside toilet door? Not a conscious comment.
The door opens and (in camera) a fade to black
Fade up from black to the entrance sign from
Historic cottages
Bog standard timber
Main Street, probably Sunday
Humes factory supplied the Snowy scheme
with huge steel pipes
disrupting traffic on narrow roads
The factory closed after the Scheme finished
Outside of Khancoban
Power Station being built
The town grew with Snowy workers
Local beauty
Fred Snr pretends to be a tourist fishing
In winter, school sport for some was skiing
A few parents would take us a few periods early
an hour’s drive to the mountains nearby.
We had a key to the closed road
kept snow-plowed for access
The home made ski rack still secure.
We usually had our barbecue lunch
Jill Findlay, from my form
Mostly learners
Bad slapstick
Some attempt at timed runs
I liked that mountain country
But I had to jump to turn
because I didn’t have proper boots or ski clamps
I did have a photographer’s eye
Just a pair of work boots with a groove cut in the heel
The kids usually skied ahead and
were picked up by a parent
Guthega Dam or
Maybe Tooma Dam
Lots of accommodation options
the pub added motel rooms
Modern motels
Caravan Park
High voltage powerlines
Water pressure tank
Let there be plastic trendy lampshades, …
complete with dead moths for as long as I remember
Water – very essential
A mix of old houses
And pretty bad new
A friend of my sister had a pool
Ambulance service
and a hospital
The opening of the Corryong airport, terminal building
First commercial flight?
Snowy scheme passengers?
Water trucks to keep the dust down
NSW airlines
Seating for the speeches
(Sir) William Hudson
Vic MLA Tom Mitchell
Jill Branagan (Harden) gets a sightseeing ride
Fred Snr and brother Phillip watch on
Fred Snr watches aerobatics
Then parachute jumps
Mt Mittamatite (now Mitta Mitta )background
In camera dissolve
To brother Phillip flapping cardboard wings
which surprisingly didn’t work
Corryong High School, new main building
The side road at the school
The dazzling night life
And an early animation experiment
The Snowy Mountains Scheme changed Corryong in the few years we lived there. My brother Phillip and I had taken the school bus everyday to the Corryong High School after sixth grade at the Jingellic Public School in NSW. The Walwa Butter Factory where we lived and my father worked, was closing, and instead of taking the offer of a job at the Towong Butter factory, he decided to make a career change into radio and TV repair. I think we bought the old verandah fronted house with its back to the hill and pine plantation.
I had already started the school camera club, and we’d been allowed to use a storage area under the front steps of the new administration block (rebuilt after a fire). I don’t remember when making movies became a priority, but given the weekly movie theatre visits and my father being a projectionist it was probably a natural step.
I don’t have a lot of Corryong films from this time. I do have a lot of stills. One fictional attempt is the House with a Secret but it was never finished and is really just an incomplete reel of black and white and will have its own page. This was planned as document of the town, and the script was full of Fitzpatrick travelogue ‘and so we say farewell to the majestic Kosciusko mountains” which was really all I knew about travel films. We didn’t have TV until the first transmissions of Albury Channel ABN came to us via a repeater. (Do you remember James Fitzpatrick? and the Peter Sellers parody written by Frank Muir and Denis Norden.
The corner TV was one my father repaired and brought home, with no cabinet.
He put in the corner shelf, and the TV sat with it’s valves exposed and a separate speaker until we left the house.
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