The Gatekeeper

• 3 • 499

Bendigo Street, Richmond was a quiet street except at the hour when the Heinz soup factory set the workers free. The red brick factory of three storeys stood at number 22, detached from its neighbours in a large square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.

The former tenant of the factory, a piano manufacturer, closed for business in 1935 and the building was sold that same year to the Heinz soup company. Musty from having been long enclosed, and littered with old useless vats and machines, the building was again sold in 1955, to a consortium of newspaper publishers, radio stations and theatre companies. A chimney stood in the centre of the factory grounds and for 50 years it belched smoke, soot and ash over the neighbourhood. Of no architectural significance its only appeal was that from the very top, and on a clear day, the recently built GTV transmitter tower could be seen atop Mount Dandenong 35Km to the East, providing a line-of-sight path for a microwave link.

Jago Street, which defined the northern boundary, led to a side entrance and the gatehouse where Bert had spent most of his working life as the gatekeeper, all the other Heinz workers having long since gone. He witnessed the steady stream of celebrities, the toing and froing of the early days of television from 1956 onwards. Bert was everyone’s friend, with a welcoming smile to help us start a long and tedious day. For some strange reason he took a liking to me and often invited me to visit his house nearby for lunch, where he lived with his wife Mary, on the pretext of adjusting his new TV set.

They lived in a modest weatherboard cottage, a short walk from the television station. The living room had that cozy lived-in feeling, yet there was an air of sadness amid the warmth and hospitality. A shiny new Astor SJ 17inch TV sat in one corner and a fireplace with a mantelpiece above, in another. Mary would prepare a nourishing meal of crumbed fish, mashed potatoes and vegetables. The table was set with her finest cutlery and crockery, and the meal was brought to the table where the three of us sat. They did not eat, but just sat there quietly watching me as I enjoyed the meal. Afterwards I would check-over their TV, adjust the fine-tuning, set the brightness and contrast and generally make a fuss over nothing, as the set was in perfect order.

On a subsequent visit I noticed that on the mantelpiece there was one solitary framed photograph, of a young man in military uniform, he would have been around my age at the time. Bert and Mary would always accompany me to their front gate and see me off on the short walk back to the studio, to the mayhem and chaos of the afternoon rehearsal for the Tarax Happy Show.