Jack Johnson is the author of When The Clock Strikes, a fascinating account of growing up in Dandenong, his years tending to the city’s pipes and drains as a plumber and bringing up a family with wife Frances in their beloved home in Macpherson Street.
POLICEMEN still dressed in the old-style London Bobby uniforms and either walked or rode old black pushbikes.
The word police, written in a metal stencil, was fixed beneath the bar of the bike.
In wet weather they wore long black oilskin overcoats, a forerunner of today’s Driza-Bone type of overcoat, topped with a large shoulder cape, and high top shiny black helmets.
All being big men, they were to us kids an awe inspiring sight, not unlike Star Wars’ Darth Vader, and with their commanding voices, they had that same presence.
They were all friends of mum and dad and when we saw them in the street they greeted each of us with, “G’day young Johnson”.
The Dandenong Police Station had stables and a loft because at that time mounted constables still rode horses. They did not have many motorbikes until after the war. The horses were kept in the stables or in and around the police house and jail.
Or they were kept in the paddock that went from Langhorne Street, down Wilson and around the corner into Pultney Street.
When we were kids the Pultney Street ends of both Wilson and Power streets were not yet used as roads and both were still large disused clay pits.
When we walked down the banks of the Wilson Street clay pit and looked through the post and wire fence into the paddock where the police horses were kept, we admired the horse of the last mounted policeman in Dandenong.
It was a fine chestnut thoroughbred. We watched the smartly uniformed officer ride out to the surrounding districts and stood in awe as the horse buck-jumped around the paddock after being let out of the stables.
There was a huge poplar tree in the Wilson/Pultney Street corner of this paddock and one day when we were coming home through the park we got caught in a sudden, violent storm.
We sheltered under one of the giant oak trees in the park.
We got the bejeebers frightened out of us when a bolt of lightning exploded this poplar tree from top to bottom. My brother Nipper was standing on the side of the tree closest to the lightning and said it bloody near blinded him.
A bit later on we had our first ride on a full-sized horse when we rode bareback round that paddock on a magnificent jet black thoroughbred mare.
She had been retired after motorbikes replaced those magnificent horses.
At the Pultney Street end of Wilson Street was the Dandenong Park which was first fenced in 1860.
The gates were added to the park in 1876 to create an entrance in the picket fence, on the angled corner where Foster Street met the Princes Highway.
When we were small kids, the park was fully fenced and we entered from Pultney Street through a wooden turnstile gate opposite the clay pit at the end of Wilson Street.
We walked along the gravel path through the centre of the park until it angled left across the bridge over the open brick drain and led to the heavy wooden front gate on the Foster Street and Highway corner.
The gate had cross braces and pickets that matched the fence and huge cast-iron and wire spring closers, to keep wandering livestock out.
It was so heavy it took a great effort from us to even open it and many times, if we were slow getting through it, we got whacked as it swung shut.
My brother Nipper reckoned it was the biggest bastard of a gate in town.
