Father, Mother and the three children, Lyell, Frank and Winn, moved from Ballarat to Adelaide in November 1916. Two more boys, Tom and Bill, were born there. For about two years, Father rented a house in Barton Terrace, North Adelaide. After investigating the quality of the primary schools in various suburbs he decided that the best primary school was at Rose Park. After looking at houses near that school, the family bought the house at 42 Alexandra Avenue, Rose Park. Father called it ‘Iramoo’, after the Aboriginal name for the plains where Melbourne now stands. The name was first used by John Batman on 6 June, 1835, when he ‘bought’ Melbourne from the local Aboriginal tribes. When I was at Thebarton Technical High School (see below) I made an appropriate copper name-plate, which was put on that house. Some years after I moved to Canberra I placed it on the front of our holiday house at Dalmeny, on the South Coast of New South Wales.

Alexandra Avenue was one of the very few streets in Adelaide that consisted of two roads, one on either side of a wide strip of lawn containing two rows of elms. There was also a row of oak trees on each footpath. It was close to the Victoria Park Racecourse, which was situated in the parklands that surround the city of Adelaide. Some years later, as the children grew up, we used to join the local children to play football on the lawn, and I played cricket and learned to play tennis on the open spaces and public tennis courts near the Racecourse. The house itself was five houses down the street from the Rose Park Primary School. There were two tram-lines within easy walking distance and the house itself was only about a five kilometre walk from North Terrace and the Museum, Art Gallery, University, Botanic and Zoological Gardens and the Royal Adelaide Hospital.

On the verandah, from the left: Winn, Tom, Lyell, Mother, Bill, Frank.

The house was relatively large. There was a lane at the back, which provided access to a garage, and reasonably large lawns at both back and front. Around the back lawn there were several quite productive fruit trees: grapevines, two fig-trees, and apricot, peach, lemon and orange trees. Father was no gardener, but I became interested in the garden from the time that I undertook first-year Botany at the university. In the early 1930s, Father had a second storey built on the house (Figure 1.1); this was a large single room with fly-wire around three sides, accessed by stairs at the back. The four boys slept there and, at the side of the stairs, there was a series of shelves that I used for my collection of fossils.