The Owen Line

Muriel Isobel Robens

1910–1998

She married the market gardener from the next road over — and it is her house that kept this family’s photographs.

Studio wedding portrait: a fair-haired man in a dark three-piece morning suit with a white bow tie and a sprig of wattle at the lapel, standing beside a bride in a bias-cut satin gown under a long lace-edged veil, holding a cascade bouquet of flowers and maidenhair fern. — Llewellyn and Muriel Owen on their wedding day, 1935

Born: 1910 · registered Marrickville, as “Muriel I.”
Died: 23 May 1998 · City of Ryde
Married: Llewellyn Owen, market gardener of Waterloo Road (m. Ryde, 1935)
Lived: 88 years

Muriel Isobel Robens was born in 1910 and registered in the Marrickville district under 5785/1910 — the fourth of Archibald and Ada’s five children, and, like three of her four siblings, an inner-west registration.¹ The birth districts of the five — Marrickville, Newtown, Marrickville, Marrickville, Ryde — date the household’s move north to somewhere between her own birth and Lilian’s in 1914, and Muriel made the crossing as a small child.¹ She grew up above the shop; the 1933 and 1935 electoral rolls still have her at Cox’s Road, North Ryde, at “home duties” beside her father the storekeeper.³

In 1935 she married Llewellyn Owen, the marriage registered at Ryde under 11048/1935.⁴ He was a market gardener whose family had worked a patch of Waterloo Road, North Ryde, since the 1920s — the next road over from the Robens store — and he was some fifteen years her senior, a man of forty to her twenty-five.⁵⁸ The Owens were an Orange family: Llewellyn had been born there in 1895, son of David Lloyd Owen and Alice Owen, and a photograph the family still keeps shows the cottage they lived in at Lucknow, on the goldfield east of the town, in 1899.⁵⁶

From the marriage until the middle 1960s Muriel lived on the Waterloo Road garden, at the house the rolls call “Silvergate”.⁸ The couple then moved a few streets to 5 Christine Avenue, North Ryde, where Llewellyn — the garden given up — took a clerk’s job at the North Ryde post office, the office her own father had once held the Crown’s contract for.¹⁰ He died in 1970; Muriel kept the Christine Avenue house alone for the twenty-eight years left to her, and died in the City of Ryde on 23 May 1998, aged eighty-eight.¹¹¹² The Owen house is the keeper of this family’s photographs — the wedding, the sisters, the Christmas tables, the moving-in days — more of them than any other branch has left.¹³

Two young girls stand close together on a verandah — the elder in a buttoned coat with a wide lace collar, the younger in a plain pinafore and boots. — Muriel, left, with her sister Pearl — the real-photo postcard the family ties to Dulwich Hill Public School

Cox’s Road

The fourth of five

Muriel came between Pearl, four years above her, and Lilian, four below — the quiet middle of the second half of the family. Little of her childhood survives beyond the Dulwich Hill postcard and her place in the photographs of the c. 1900 generation.²

Of the daughters at home on Cox’s Road she is the one the 1933 roll catches: “Robens, Muriel Isobel … home duties”, between her mother and her father the storekeeper.³ Two years later the 1935 roll still has her there, under her father’s roof, months before the wedding that would take her a few hundred yards down the road.³

Orange · Lucknow

The Owen family

Llewellyn Owen was born at Orange in 1895, registered under 35344/1895, the son of David Lloyd Owen and Alice Owen — a Welsh name carried, as such names often were, by a family on a goldfield.⁵ The Owens were at Lucknow, the mining village just east of Orange; the family still holds a photograph of their cottage there, a slab-and-iron place on a bare, cut-about hillside, captioned in an old hand “My home Lucknow 1899”.⁶

David Lloyd Owen died in 1928, aged sixty-five; his widow Alice lived until 1950, and for years shared the Waterloo Road ground with the young couple.⁶⁸ Their headstone remembers a third Owen too — “the infant son of the above”, a child lost and unnamed on the stone.⁶ By 1926 Llewellyn himself was on the Sands Directory at “Waterloo rd”, a market gardener where the North Ryde gardens ran up against the Eastwood orchards.⁸

Cabinet-card studio portrait of a moustached man standing with one hand on his hip beside a seated older woman in a dark high-necked Victorian dress and a flowered bonnet. — David Lloyd Owen and Alice Owen, in a cabinet portrait from a Summer Street studio at Orange — the family’s caption names them

A small slab-and-corrugated-iron cottage with a brick chimney and a skillion verandah, on a bare, eroded hillside with post-and-rail fencing; two children stand by the chimney. — “My home Lucknow 1899” — the Owen cottage on the goldfield east of Orange, where Llewellyn spent his early childhood

Ryde, 1935

The market gardener down the road

The two North Ryde smallholdings all but touched: Archibald Robens held the post office and store on Cox’s Road, and the Owen garden lay on Waterloo Road, a few minutes’ walk away. Muriel married the gardener.⁴⁸

The wedding photographs are the fullest the collection holds for any of the sisters — a studio portrait of the couple, Llewellyn in a dark morning suit with a sprig of wattle at the lapel, Muriel in a bias-cut satin gown under a long lace-edged veil; and an outdoor frame with her youngest sister Lilian, then about twenty-one, standing up for her as bridesmaid.⁷

Outdoor photograph of a bride in a full-length gown and long veil holding a large cascade bouquet, beside a young woman in a light tiered dress and a soft hat holding a fern-and-flower posy, garden shrubbery behind. — Muriel on her wedding day, with her sister Lilian Alice Maude Robens as bridesmaid

“Silvergate”, Waterloo Road

Thirty years on the garden

For close on thirty years the rolls keep Muriel and Llewellyn at the one address — “Silvergate”, later “Silver Gate”, and at last plainly numbered 76–78 Waterloo Road, North Ryde.⁸ His trade shifts from “salesman” in 1936 to “farmer” by 1943 and stays there; hers is “home duties” throughout.⁸ Alice Owen, widowed since 1928, is on the same stretch of road in 1936 and 1943, and gone from the roll after her death in 1950.⁶⁸

One entry in the birth register belongs to these years and is harder to read than the rest. In 1938 a child of Llewellyn and Muriel Owen was registered at Ryde, stillborn.⁹ No other birth appears for them, on any roll or in any index; so far as the record runs, it was their only child.

Hand-tinted close-up of an elderly white-haired woman in round glasses and a dark dress with a check collar, with a younger fair-haired woman in a dark dress and a deep crocheted lace collar behind her. — Muriel with her mother, Ada Ellen Robens, in a hand-tinted portrait — one of the last photographs of Ada, who died in 1949

5 Christine Avenue

The move, and the widow’s years

Some time between the 1963 roll and the 1968 one the Owens left the garden. The removalist’s van in one family snapshot is drawn up at 5 Christine Avenue, North Ryde, a brick-veneer house a few streets from the old ground.¹⁰ Llewellyn, near seventy, gave up market gardening and is entered on the 1968 roll as a “postal clerk” — at the North Ryde post office his father-in-law had run a generation before.¹⁰

Llewellyn Owen died on 8 March 1970, aged seventy-four, and was buried at Macquarie Park in the A J Hare Lawn section, under a stone that calls him “husb of Muriel”.¹¹ Muriel kept the house. The rolls of 1972, 1977 and 1980 list her there alone, and she stayed until she died in the City of Ryde on 23 May 1998, eighty-eight years old.¹² She was buried the same day, in Llewellyn’s plot — Row 9, plot 43 — not, as this history once had it, in the Methodist section with her mother and father.¹²

Street snapshot: a large furniture-removal pantechnicon with part-legible lettering parked in front of a brick, tile-roofed house with canvas awnings and a low front fence, a 1950s car in the foreground. — Moving day at 5 Christine Avenue, North Ryde — a Sydney furniture remover’s pantechnicon at the kerb

Interior snapshot of a bedroom with a waterfall-front Art Deco dressing table and tallboy; a man in a white short-sleeved shirt and glasses sits at the right. — Llewellyn Owen in the Christine Avenue house — one of the few later photographs of him

The sisters

“Moo”

In the family she was Moo. The four Robens sisters — Ethel, Pearl, Muriel and Lilian — kept close all their lives, and it is at the Owen house that the camera most often finds them: three of them outside a brick house at Ryde in the 1940s, and the whole connection round a Christmas table about 1962, Muriel and Llewellyn among them with her brother the minister in his collar at the end of the row.¹³

That the Owen branch leaves the largest cache of photographs is partly chance and partly Muriel: the boxes came down through her house, and it is her wedding, her sisters and her mother that they hold.

Three older women outside a brick house — one in glasses and a light floral dress, one in front in white, one at right in a dark dress with a lace collar. — Ethel, Pearl and Muriel Robens outside a house at Ryde — three of the four sisters

A dozen people crowded around a laden table indoors at Christmas, a Santa figure and a mantel clock on the sideboard behind; an older man in a clerical collar and dark-framed glasses sits among them at right. — The family Christmas of about 1962 — Muriel and Llewellyn Owen among her sisters Pearl and Ethel, her brother Rev. Alfred Robens at right in his clerical collar

The Record

Sources & References

1
Birth registration

NSW BDM birth register 1910, ref. 5785/1910, Marrickville district — Muriel I. Robens, father Archibald T., mother Ada E. The index gives the forename first and the initial second; “Isobel Muriel”, the order of her later death and cemetery records, is not the one the birth entry or the 1933 electoral roll uses. See also Chapter Three, reference 16.
2
The Dulwich Hill postcard

Private family collection, identified by JK — a real-photo postcard of Muriel as a girl of about four with her sister Pearl, the family’s note connecting it to Dulwich Hill Public School, about 1913. The same card is reproduced on Pearl’s page.
3
Electoral rolls, Cox’s Road, 1933 and 1935

Commonwealth Electoral Rolls, Subdivision of Ryde. 1933 (Division of Martin), entries 3536–3538 — Robens, Ada Ellen, home duties; Robens, Archibald Thomas, storekeeper; Robens, Muriel Isobel, Cox’s road, North Ryde, home duties. 1935 (Division of Parramatta), entry 3762 — Robens, Muriel Isobel, Cox’s road, North Ryde, home duties, immediately below her father the storekeeper. The 1935 roll was compiled before the marriage.
4
Marriage registration, 1935

NSW BDM marriage register 1935, ref. 11048/1935, Ryde district — Muriel I. Robens and Llewellyn Owen. One of the five descendant marriages listed at Chapter Three, reference 15.
5
Llewellyn Owen — birth and parents

NSW BDM birth register 1895, ref. 35344/1895, Orange district — Llewellyn Owen, father David L. Owen, mother Alice Owen.
6
David Lloyd Owen and Alice Owen

Headstone photographed in the family collection: “In loving memory of David Lloyd Owen, died 21st May 1928, aged 65. Also Alice Owen, wife of the above, [died] 24th October 1950, aged 80”, with a further line for “the infant son of the above”. The cemetery is not identified on the photograph. Two cabinet-card portraits from W. Bursle’s studio in Summer Street, Orange — the couple alone, and the couple with a young boy the family names, tentatively, as Llewellyn — place the family at Orange in the 1890s, and a third photograph carries the caption “My home Lucknow 1899”.
7
The wedding photographs

Private family collection, identified by JK — a studio portrait of Llewellyn and Muriel Owen on their wedding day, and an outdoor frame of the bride with her sister Lilian as bridesmaid. Dated to the 1935 marriage by dress.
8
The Owen market garden — Waterloo Road, North Ryde

Sands Sydney Directory 1926, alphabetical section — “Owen Llewellyn, Waterloo rd, Eastwood”. Commonwealth Electoral Rolls, Subdivision of Ryde then North Ryde: 1936, entries 3345–3349 — Owen, Alice, Waterloo road, North Ryde, home duties; Owen, Llewellyn, Waterloo road, North Ryde, salesman; Owen, Muriel Isobel, “Silvergate”, Waterloo road, North Ryde, home duties. 1943 — Owen, Llewellyn, “Silver Gate”, Waterloo road, farmer; Owen, Muriel Isobel, same address, home duties; Owen, Alice, Waterloo road, still on the roll. 1954 (entries 5839–5840) and 1958 (entries 3092–3093) — the couple at “Silver Gate”, Llewellyn “farmer”. 1963 — the same household at “76/78 Waterloo road”.
9
The stillborn child, 1938

NSW BDM birth register 1938, ref. 24237/1938, Ryde district — Owen, stillborn; father Llewellyn, mother Muriel Isobel. No living child of the marriage appears on any electoral roll (1936–1980) or in any index.
10
The move to 5 Christine Avenue

Commonwealth Electoral Rolls, Subdivision of North Ryde: 1968, entries 6736–6737 — Owen, Llewellyn, 5 Christine avenue, postal clerk; Owen, Muriel Isobel, 5 Christine avenue, home duties. 1972, 1977 (entry 3961) and 1980 (entry 4396) — Owen, Muriel Isobel, 5 Christine Avenue, alone. A family snapshot shows a Sydney furniture remover’s pantechnicon at the house on moving day. The North Ryde post office is the one Archibald Thomas Robens held the Postmaster-General’s contract for from 1935 (Chapter Three, reference 8).
11
Death of Llewellyn Owen, 1970

Macquarie Park Cemetery, “A J Hare Lawn” section (General Lawn), Row 9 — Llewellyn Owen, died 8 March 1970, aged 74; headstone inscription “husb of Muriel”.
12
Death and burial of Muriel Owen, 1998

Death in the City of Ryde, 23 May 1998, aged 88. Macquarie Park Cemetery transcript (transcriber Peter Olsen) — interred 23 May 1998, “A J Hare Lwn”, Row 9, plot 0043: the same plot as Llewellyn. Chapter Three’s reference 11 formerly listed her in the Methodist Section D, Row 3 plot with her parents; that was an error, corrected there.
13
Family photographs, later years

Private family collection, identified by JK — Muriel with her mother Ada Ellen Robens (hand-tinted, mid-1940s); the sisters Ethel, Pearl and Muriel outside a brick house at Ryde; a Christmas gathering of about 1962 with Muriel and Llewellyn Owen, her sisters, and her brother Rev. Alfred Robens (also reproduced in Chapter Three); Llewellyn Owen in the Christine Avenue house late in life; and views of the Waterloo Road and Christine Avenue houses. The bulk of the surviving Robens family photographs descend through this household.