Lib and I drove to Warrnambool yesterday (Sunday) to attend Pat McKenzie's 70th birthday. It was great to share the occasion with Pat and Carmel and their children and grandchildren. Others there from our Greta football days were Brent and Lynne Everall, Biil and Jackie O'Brien and Kay Pink. After a gathering at the Warrnambool Golf Club in the afternoon we went round to Pat + Carmel's and kicked on with a barbie and much good cheer and reminiscing. When Pat and Carmel came to Wangaratta in 1978 I had lived there two years but did not feel in any way at home there. Pat joined the Dep't of Ag as a dairy inspector and we had offices next door to each other. Pat talked me into playing footy at Greta when he took up the assistant coach job there. He was a superb full back with a great country footy history. I was single in those days and had dinner at Pat and Carmel's house one night a week most weeks. Their friendship greatly changed my life and the next few years were highly social thanks to playing footy again and mixing with many good friends of my age group. They had three young kids and baby Peter no 4 arrived while they were in Wang. Pat later quit the Dep't of Ag and joined the ambulance service where he worked till his recent retirement. Many thanks to Pat and Carmel for what you did for me all those years ago and for the great day we had yesterday. It was wonderful to see the kids grown up with families, and all such decent good people.
On the way home we visited the Terang cemetery where my great great grandparents are buried. Charles Henry Brown died in 1906. He had changed his name- he was really Karl Bruhn, a German sailor from Hamburg who went to sea when he was 14 and on his seventh voyage round the oceans of the world, often to Melbourne, jumped ship and disappeared into the Victorian countryside. He married Emma Parker who came out from England with her family as a young girl in the 1850's. Meredith has copy of a newspaper cutting in which three men including Karl Bruhn were "wanted" for absconding. He must have got this sorted out with official permit as the marriage certificate in 1860 names Charles Brown. He developed a successful maize threshing business and moved around the Western District and was respected in business. Emma Parker's family farmed somewhere out from Geelong and she died in 1929 aged 87. They had six kids that reached adulthood and two that did not. Their daughter Anne Elizabeth Francis, known as Francis, married Robert Williams my grandfather's father. He was a baker in Terang, (as was his father I think and his son my grandfather). They had 8 boys. There's a sad story there that Meredith told me, perhaps I'll write about that next time.
Meredith and her husband Roger had Charles and Emma's grave restored in the last few years.
Meredith and her husband Roger had Charles and Emma's grave restored in the last few years.
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