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Chapter 1

Learning to Fly

The winter of 1914 was dry – too dry. By October, soaring temperatures and desiccating winds had turned the great inland wheat and wool producing country of central and Western Victoria into a howling wasteland. Thousands of sheep and cattle perished where they stood, while others had to be moved north in search of fresh country. ‘Failure in everything sums up the position here. No crops, no grass, and very shortly there will be no stock,’ wrote a reporter from Kaarimba, just north of Shepparton on the Goulburn River. ‘The misery of it is indescribable,’ wrote another.1

As unemployment rose and the grinding desolation of the worst drought in almost half a century took hold, Australia mobilised for war. Thousands of fit and strong men rushed to enlist. Many left the land reluctantly, compelled by the lack of paid work. Many more were drawn by the patriotic call to defend the Empire as well as the promise of adventure and good wages.

In Rochester, a small farming community on the railway line between Bendigo and the Murray River port of Echuca, George and Myrtle Parr were optimistic. They hoped to find some salvation for their property, ‘Pine Grove’, with their remaining flock and a small crop of wheat, sown early on well-worked fallow. As the drought deepened, the Parrs were forced to lay off their farm hands. Like so many others on the land that year, they turned to family. They were fortunate to already have Myrtle’s nephew staying with them. Ten-year-old Hubert had come for a short stay in the summer school holidays to experience life on the farm. After he settled in, Hubert was delighted to learn that instead of returning home to Melton, a village fifty kilometres from Melbourne, he would remain with his aunt and uncle until the end of the year. Better still, he did not have to go to school.2

Hubert soon became indispensable. Energetic and eager to learn, he rode bareback, hunted rabbits, ploughed the fields and led a horse for days drawing buckets of water from a deep well. With no workers to run errands, Uncle George taught Hubert to drive a coach-and-four. Once he could bring the horses under command, George sent him out on a thirty-kilometre trip to Echuca to collect a group of shearers. When Hubert arrived alone, the men were somewhat concerned by their youthful driver and decided it best to take the reins for the return trip.3 By the end of his year at ‘Pine Grove’, Hubert showed independence and trustworthiness beyond his years. He returned to his parents in Melton in the baking summer of 1914.

* * *

Adolphus ‘Dolph’ Opperman was a drifter. He believed in hard work, enterprise and chance. A complex man – both restless and lackadaisical – he was also endowed with rude health and unflagging vitality, traits he would pass on to his first-born son. Dolph’s wife, Bertha May, brought her own virtues to the union. She could sew, play the piano and sing. She appears also to have possessed forbearance beyond measure.

Before Hubert Ferdinand Opperman had turned three, Dolph had decided to move his young family from Rochester to Greenbushes in Western Australia to try his luck at mining tin. They arrived too late. The price for the metal had already collapsed. Dolph found a job as a timber worker and they stayed long enough for Bertha to have another child, Winifred Myrtle, before moving back to Victoria. In 1910, Bertha gave birth to twins, Alex and Bertha. Perhaps to ease the financial and domestic burden, the Oppermans decided to send seven-year-old Hubert to stay with his paternal grandmother, Wilhelmina, in the small town of Baillieston in central Victoria.

Calm, strict and practical, Grandma Wil lived in a log cabin, hewn from the local bush and lined with hessian and paper. Her fortitude and endurance were legend. She had raised a large family in an isolated bush town and liked to tell a story about how she pinned a brown snake with a flat iron. She looked after Hubert like one of her own. She impressed upon her grandson the virtue of industry, thrift and consistency. He went to school and to church and did his share of the chores. Even in her sixties, she was not a woman to trifle with. When she learned that the teacher at the local school had humiliated her grandson in front of the class, she was not amused. Following a spirited dressing down from Wil, neither was the teacher. Hubert knew nothing of the exchange.4

Hubert learned that his father’s wanderlust was in the blood. Gold had lured his grandfather Otto Opperman to South Australia from Clausthal, a tiny mining town amidst the spruce woods and granite tors of the Harz Mountains in central Germany. He disembarked in 1853 when he was sixteen, accompanied by two older brothers, and headed for the Victorian goldfields.

Born in Adelaide, Wilhelmina’s German-born family had also been drawn east by the rush for gold. She married Otto in 1864, when she was sixteen and he twenty-six. They moved to Coy’s Diggings (later to become Baillieston) and Otto searched the hills for his fortune. Wil began having children. She gave birth to fourteen; three died in infancy. Many wondered how the Oppermans managed their growing brood. Family lore held that Otto knew the location of a secret seam of gold that he used as a private bank. He died of tuberculosis when he was fifty-six. In her mid-forties, Wil was left to finish raising the family alone and made ends meet by running the local post office. Her children grew up and dispersed across the country. Dolph made his way to Rochester, where he met his future wife, Bertha May Reddie, the Australian-born daughter of a respected local family.

After the sojourn to Western Australia and then Melbourne, Dolph decided to try his hand at running a small business, undeterred by a lack of training or experience. He taught himself butchery, borrowed heavily, and took over an existing business on the main street of Benalla, a thriving town on the overland route between Melbourne and Sydney. His advertising slogan, ‘Opperman’s Butchery. Have you seen it. Go to it’, was forthright enough, but within six months the business was going backwards.5 Dolph offered a timber cutting service in order to keep the business afloat. He also started buying and selling cattle, hoping to generate short-term profits. The system proved fraught and involved Dolph in complex financial deals, always borrowing to pay other debts. Rising stock prices, a slowing economy, and increasing debt finally scuttled the business. When Dolph defaulted on his payments in mid-1913, the business’s original owner, Alexander Nicholson, repossessed the shop.

Relations between the two men soured. In an apparently spiteful act, Dolph kept the keys to the shop’s safe and cash register, forcing Nicholson to pursue him through local court for their return. Without them, he explained, he would have to send the safe and register to Melbourne in order for new locks to be installed. Two weeks later, with the matter still unresolved, Dolph was ordered to pay for the cost of having the items re-keyed.6

The Oppermans’ troubles were not yet over. Creditors pursued Dolph to the Benalla Insolvency Court seeking hundreds of pounds in unpaid accounts. As Dolph attempted to explain his complex network of transactions and loans, the magistrate grew frustrated at his halting and obtuse justifications. He ordered Dolph ‘not to hesitate’ when giving evidence lest he ‘would deal with him’. When accused of not being ‘very frank’ with the court, Dolph stated that he had dealt fairly with his creditors ‘until near the finish’. Bankrupt and humiliated, the Oppermans left Benalla for Melton, a village west of Melbourne, where Dolph worked for wages at the Simpson butchery.7 How much Hubert knew of these difficulties is unclear.

A regular job provided the family with some stability and opportunity for the children to make friends. With few possessions of his own, Hubert looked in dismay at the broken toys discarded by wealthier families. The children who wheeled about on new bicycles, he looked upon with quiet envy. When Dolph arrived home one day with a bike, Hubert wanted nothing more than to learn to ride. Yet, his father forbade him from touching it.

Instead, Hubert coaxed a local boy into teaching him. Together they spent a day trying to tame the unpredictable machine. The adult bicycle was too large. Perched high on the saddle he could just touch the pedals but not the ground. He needed help to stay upright. He crashed often. Then, it happened. Seemingly in defiance of the laws of nature, the bicycle wobbled forward and he remained upright. He pushed harder on the pedals. Suddenly it yielded to his command and responded to the subtle shifts of weight. He moved his gaze to where he wanted to go, miraculously sending the machine in the right direction. By day’s end, Hubert’s world had been transformed, unhitched from earthly concerns. As he later recalled, he had ‘discovered the secret of eternal happiness’.8 The bicycle and the wonders it contained gripping him in an embrace that lasted a lifetime. From now on, Hubert rode borrowed bicycles until his father finally gave in to his pleading. Once his proficiency at the wheel had been established, he started using Dolph’s bike to deliver meat for the butchery on Saturday mornings. The more he rode, the more he surrendered to its joy.

Sometime in early 1914, with money still tight, the Oppermans sent Hubert to stay with Bertha’s sister Myrtle and her husband George at ‘Pine Grove’. His visit, at first, may well have been simply intended to give their eldest boy a taste of farming life. But the decision to extend his stay was mutually advantageous. His labour helped the Parrs survive the drought and Bertha and Dolph had one less mouth to feed.

Nothing assuaged Dolph’s urge to move on. Routine and responsibility bored him. In 1915, he leapt at an opportunity to manage a general store at Ten Mile, an isolated town near Jamieson in the Victorian Alps. Bertha packed up the family – again.

Dolph worked as the local everyman, butchering meat, manning the counter and making soft drink on the weekends. He likely dabbled in a bit of prospecting on the side. Now back from Pine Grove – and far more capable than when he left – Hubert was expected to pull his weight. Each Saturday he rode a loaded packhorse through steep country along the Goulburn River to deliver provisions to the hopeful men who still dug the hills for gold. He developed an easy rapport with working men. ‘They were rough types,’ Hubert remembered, ‘but kindly.’9

Materially the Opperman children may have been poor, but they were warm and well-fed. Their emotional needs received less attention. As a child Hubert suspected that his father often forgot all about him. Dolph and Bertha were not unloving, he believed, but there were ‘no great demonstrations of affection’. In turn, Hubert’s regular absences from his family may have contributed to this lack of intimacy or closeness. His devotion to his father, however, was unconditional. Hubert loved to watch him work. He gazed in awe at his understated and efficient physicality.10 He liked listening to his father’s yarns, which he spun with flair and a ‘ready sense of the comic’ around the dinner table. Hubert forgave his self-absorption and his lack of interest in ‘family responsibilities’. Bertha’s dedicated mothering and her tireless efforts in relocating the family home, by contrast, made only the barest of impressions on Hubert’s young mind.

Dolph made regular trips to Melbourne to get supplies for the store. After every visit, Hubert overheard his father’s stories about the war and the need for more men. The restless urges stirred again. It was not the first time that Dolph had wanted to fight for his country. Caught up in the first rush to war, he tried to enlist in 1914. He exceeded most of the artificially high standards set by the military doctors, except for one – his teeth. Like most of his generation, he wore dentures after having most of his teeth removed in his twenties. That this otherwise vigorous young man was rejected for service stands as a testament to the extraordinary physical qualities of the first Australian Imperial Force’s early enlistments.

Dolph never got over his rejection and it seemed inevitable that he would try again. The recruitment posters, the bands and the girls offering kisses to men who signed up, drew him like a magnet. A relaxation of the physical requirements meant that Dolph finally got his wish. His German heritage raised concerns, but investigations soon revealed him to be a ‘loyal subject’.11 He professed no loyalty to Germany, spoke no German, and his father had lived in Australia longer than many of British stock. From this time onwards, the family appear to have anglicised their surname; the removal of the last ‘n’ a subtle but symbolic gesture of allegiance.

Dolph completed his training at Broadmeadows in Melbourne and in August 1916 sailed for the Western Front. Bertha moved the family to Ballendella, near Rochester. Although she received sixty percent of Dolph’s pay, it wasn’t enough. She took a job teaching sewing at the local school. To further ease the burden, Hubert, now twelve, would finish his schooling under the watchful eye of Grandma Wil, who had given up her log cabin to live with her unmarried children, Herbert and Edith, in Melbourne.

Twenty-six-year-old Herbert Opperman was a very different character to his brother. He either lacked Dolph’s unquenchable need for adventure or had worked hard to suppress it. Duty, he found, came in a variety of forms. He chose not to enlist and devoted himself to caring for their ageing mother. Although a more domesticated man, when his blood was up, Herb showed the same steely resolve that ran through the family veins.

In September 1915, the Department of Defence received a report that Herbert’s nephew, Carl Opperman, had been experimenting in wireless telegraphy. Suspicion instantly fell over the rest of the Opperman clan, particularly those over military age who had not enlisted. Local police were directed to call at his residence in Glen Iris to ask about his nationality and parentage. Edith happened to be the only one at home at the time, but answered all the officer’s questions and endured his inference that they probably didn’t ‘take much interest in the war.’ The constable also queried why they kept the front gate locked. Incensed, Herb wrote immediately to the Commissioner of Police expressing his displeasure at the presumption of the family’s disloyalty. He explained that Carl was, in fact, studying telegraphy by correspondence in order to qualify for a position in the Naval Department. As for the front gate:

I’m sure I do not know what significance he attached to that, considering that we have a garden, and there are always cows and horses wandering around looking for a chance to get in; if he had gone to the side gate, the most convenient one, and the gate most used, he would have found that one unlocked.12

The suspicion and side-ways glances lasted as long as the war. In July 1918 Herb felt compelled to formally take an oath attesting to the fact that his ‘sympathies [were] with the British Empire – most decidedly.’13

Hubert attended Armadale State School. Each day he walked to the tram along Spring Road, then walked or ran at the other end to school. A picture from 1917 shows him dressed as a court jester for a school production, his adult features already unmistakable in the adolescent child, his ears already protruding from under his hat.

As an adolescent, Hubert had energy to burn. He was a member of the football, cricket and cross-country running teams. When classmate Frank Smith brought his bike to school, Hubert was the only one able to ride the heavy, gearless machine all the way up the steep hill from Toorak railway station to Kooyong Road. His friends stood in open-mouthed wonder. News of the epic feat soon made the rounds at school.14 During a game of playground football one of his schoolmates started calling him ‘Oppy’. It stuck. In 1917, with anti-German feeling still high, the nickname had the added benefit of removing all vestiges of his foreign heritage. This is not how his mates remembered it, of course. Opperman only became Oppy ‘because it was much shorter.’15

Still captivated by bicycles, he started borrowing his uncle’s Red Bird bicycle without asking. One weekend, while being ‘dinked’ on the handlebars by a school friend who did the pedalling, Hubert’s foot swung into the front wheels. Caught between the spokes and the front forks, his foot acted like a brake. They crashed and buckled the wheel. Unable to conceal the damage, to himself and the bike, Hubert was forced to confess. He received a ‘ticking off’ and paid for the necessary repairs. The crash had one enduring legacy. In every long-distance ride he attempted, the first signs of fatigue would show up in his permanently weakened right foot.16

After he turned fourteen, Hubert reached merit level and suddenly became a disruptive influence at school. When the schoolmaster caught Hubert hurling a medicine ball about the classroom, he banished him to a separate room for the remainder of the term. Was it a combination of youthful exuberance, hormones, and the realisation that attendance was now optional? Or was a deeper inheritance beginning to emerge?

As the war ground to its end news about Dolph was infrequent and brief. Last report was that he had been the victim of a gas attack that left him seriously ill, but alive. Herb and Wil did not know when – or if – he would return to Australia. It was left to them to help Hubert negotiate the next phase of his life.

With his school-leaving certificate in hand, they encouraged him to take the public service exam. Uncle Herb had held a steady job with the Postmaster-General’s Department since he was twelve. Grandma Wil had also worked as a postmistress. The pay was only adequate, but barring any serious breach, it brought a salary for life. A job as a telegraph delivery boy might be just the ticket for an exuberant lad looking for a respectable, steady career path. Hubert had hitherto shown little interest in book learning, but he studied hard in preparation for the competitive test. Some 1200 people sat the exam at the same time. The family were overjoyed when he gained one of the much sought after positions.

In his short life, Hubert had already been exposed to a range of environments and people outside the experience of his urban-dwelling peers. He had come to understand the contrasting personalities in his own family; the dominant and destabilising influence of his charismatic father, the unquestioning loyalty of his mother, and the heroic stoicism of his grandmother. Yet, for all their differences, the Oppermans were a family united by a faith in perseverance and a rejection of fatalism.

Of course, Hubert’s grandmother and uncle wanted him to find more than just a good job. In the boy, they already saw the shadow of the man. The physical and temperamental similarities to his father were obvious. They worried that without direction and application, Hubert’s talents might fail to find a productive outlet. What Herb and Wil really wanted was for the young man in their charge to find the certainty and stability that, up to now, he had been denied.

_________

1 The Farmer and Settler, 13 October 1914.

2 Hubert Opperman, Pedals, Politics and People (Sydney: Haldane Publishing, 1977), p. 10; Hubert Opperman, Interview with Mel Pratt, 1975, NLA.

3 Opperman, Interview with Mel Pratt.

4 Hubert Opperman, Interview with Adam Ashforth, 1983–4, NLA; Opperman, Pedals, pp. 13–16.

5 The North Eastern Ensign, 3 May 1912.

6 Benalla Standard, 18 July 1913.

7 Benalla Standard, 25 July 1913.

8 Opperman, Pedals, pp. 11–12.

9 Opperman, Interview with Mel Pratt.

10 Opperman, Pedals, p. 11.

11 Service Record, NAA: B2455, OPPERMANN ADOLPHUS SAMUEL FERDINAND.

12 Opperman to Chief Commissioner of Police, 29 September 1915,NAA: MP16/1, 1915/3/1307.

13 Opperman, Oath to the Commissioner, 22 July 1918, NAA: MP16/1, 1915/3/1307.

14 Opperman, Pedals, p.17.

15 Sporting Globe, 24 January 1940.

16 Opperman, Pedals, p. 17.