Martha (Alice) Robens

Two Roods at Narrabeen

In 1926 Alice and her sister Ida bought adjoining blocks of land at Narrabeen, on the northern beaches. The Land Registry records each of them holding one rood — a quarter of an acre — Alice at Lot 29 and Ida at Lot 30, both in Section 5 of Deposited Plan 1818, Parish of Manly Cove, off Albert Street.³

Two unmarried women, one in her fifties and one in her forties, buying a quarter-acre each, side by side. What they intended is not known. No house has been traced on either block, and neither sister is ever recorded living at Narrabeen. A wider claim has attached itself to this land — that the sisters kept a house called “Glenroy” at Manly and later had it moved to the Narrabeen block. Half of that is now independently confirmed and half is not: “Glenroy”, Sydney Road, Manly, was certainly the family’s home, named twice over in their brother Norman’s war service papers and again in the notice of his wounding. That the house was ever moved to Narrabeen has no support at all, and is not carried here.³

A Household of Sisters

The earliest household the rolls give her is 8 O’Connell Street, Parramatta, shared with Ida.⁴ The year usually attached to it is 1930, and that cannot be right: the Bathurst roll of 1930 — dated on its own face — has Ida at 196 Keppel Street with their widowed mother and their sister Stella. Both cannot be true, and the Parramatta copy carries no year at all. The household is real; the date is not established, and probably belongs somewhere between 1930 and 1936.⁴⁵

By 1936 the sisters were at Baulkham Hills, the district their parents had settled in. Alice was at Cross Street — the street in which her father had died eight years before — with Ida and their mother a short walk away at Railway Street.⁶ The arrangement held. In 1943 Alice was still at Cross Street, and Ida was sharing Railway Street with Rhoda instead; their mother had died the year before, and is simply absent from the page.⁷ By 1946 Alice and Ida had gone together to 338 Pittwater Road, Brookvale.⁸

In 1954 the household moved once more, to 28 Sheffield Street, Merrylands — the home of their married sister Vera, who had held it since at least 1930. The roll lists Alice and Rhoda there together, so whatever the arrangement was, it took in two sisters and not one.⁹

It is usually told as Vera taking her ageing sisters in. Vera’s husband died that March, and the roll cannot be dated within the year, so it reads at least as well the other way — two sisters going to a woman newly widowed after thirty-three years. Either way, by the end of 1954 three of the twelve were under one roof.⁹

The Christmas Ducks

Against all those addresses, one piece of family memory survives about these households, and it is worth more than any of them.

Which of the sisters’ several houses this describes has not been pinned down, and the recollection itself leaves the address blank. A shared household with no electricity connected would fit most of them. What it fixes is the shape of the thing: Alice and her sisters keeping one house between them, the wider family arriving each December, and Ivy coming down the coast with the dinner over her shoulder.¹⁰

That habit of hitch-hiking is the one that killed Ivy. In February 1955 she set out north on the same kind of journey and was killed on the road near Gundagai. Alice outlived her by seven years.

The Death Notice

Alice died on 26 August 1962, aged eighty-eight, the death registered at Burwood under 25014/1962.¹¹ The Herald carried the notice the next morning, and it names the survivors: Archie, Rhoda, Will and Violet.¹² Four names, out of twelve children. She was buried at Rookwood.¹³

The date is worth stating plainly, because it has been given wrongly. A summary record of the Ancestry kind offers only “June 1962”, and that imprecise reading had found its way into this account and stood here until the registration itself was checked.¹¹

A family photograph dated in the family to 1962 or 1963 shows Archie and Will in a garden with four of their sisters — Stella, Alice, Rhoda and Violet. If that identification holds, the year is settled by this death: Alice was gone by the end of August 1962, so the gathering belongs to the first eight months of that year. The photograph is reproduced with Stella’s account below.