HIL Cleary has only one strong memory of his maternal grandfather while he was alive, and it is not a happy one.
Cleary reckons it was Christmas 1963, when he was 11, at his grandmother’s house in Heller Street in Brunswick.
He remembers his sense of bewilderment at seeing this emaciated man, staggering drunkenly to the dishevelled bungalow in the backyard that was his bedroom away from the main house.
A few years later – after his grandfather, Ted Dorian, had died at the age of 49 – when Cleary was a teenager and old enough to understand, his mother Lorna explained how her father had been traumatised by his experiences as a prisoner of war in Austria during World War Two, suffering hallucinations and turning to the bottle to ease the pain.
By contrast, Cleary’s memories of his grandmother, Ted’s wife Gladys, are far more positive.
She was a “warrior woman”, Cleary says, who assumed the role of carer to her four younger siblings after her mother died when Gladys was 14; gave birth to the first of her two children at the age of 15 years and seven months; and spent her entire adult life working as a spinner at Miller’s Ropeworks in Brunswick, saving enough to own three properties until her death from cancer at 60
Cleary – whose illustrious career encompasses champion footballer, federal Member of Parliament and campaigner against violence towards women – has spent much of the last decade investigating the lives of Gladys, Ted and four other Brunswick men who went off to the war for what he hopes will become a four-part documentary.
Its working title is ‘Gladys and the Brunswick Boys’, and it explores how the impact of the war scarred the lives of those four men and their families.
Of the five Brunswick men, only Billy Ottaway lived to an old age.
Ted’s brother Roy was also a prisoner of war who escaped and was later killed in action in Papua New Guinea aged 33 in 1943; his best mate Michael ‘Peggy’ Parlon, also succumbed to alcoholism and died at 46. John O’Brien, a winner of a Distinguished Conduct Medal at the Battle of El Alamein at just 19, was dead by 44.
Cleary’s documentary would tell the story of each man before, during and after the war, when he says they were abandoned by the Department of Veteran’s Affairs despite suffering what is now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
And it would also honour Gladys Dorian, who raised her two children alone as Ted descended into alcoholism but never gave up fighting for compensation for him.
“It’s an astounding story … these young men go off to war to fight the Nazis and they came back severely damaged and only one of them makes old bones,” says Cleary.
“There’s adventure, there’s heroism, there’s tragedy. There’s love and romance, there’s [prison] escapes. It’s got it all.
“The other thing is that they all come from in and around Barry Street, so it’s a street in Brunswick that’s a slice of Brunswick’s life that is profoundly impacted by the war.”
Seeing the documentary to completion is now a personal quest for Cleary.
“I’ve got a four-part series just sitting there waiting. If I can find funding, I can turn it into a serious documentary. Worst case scenario, I’ll just do it myself and put it on YouTube.”
Started with a photo
THE starting point for Cleary was a faded photograph he came across in 1994 from his mother’s collection of a group of men in army uniforms which had been taken half a century earlier outside the prisoner of war camp at Leisach, near Lienz, in southern Austria.
Cleary tracked down Billy Ottaway, by now aged in his 70s, and he helped identify the men in the photo, including Ted Dorian, Parlon and himself.
The photo intrigued Cleary and after he left Parliament and then published his memoir, Cleary Independent, in 1998, he began researching the stories in depth.
He soon discovered all five men grew up in the same tough Brunswick neighbourhood and made the decision to join the war together over a few beers at the Union Hotel in 1939. Parlon, the oldest of them, was 30 at the time, while O’Brien was just 18.
Cleary said the opportunity to fight in a foreign war offered a way out of Brunswick.
“I don’t think they were caught up in jingoistic nationalism, I think it was an adventure.
“Their whole future was they would have lived in Barry Street and worked at Hoffman Bricks, and got buried at Fawkner cemetery.
“But instead, they spent four years at war, they fought in the Middle East, they fought in Egypt, they fought in Greece, they spent years in a POW camp … you know, they saw the world in ways that my Mum and Dad didn’t and most people in that generation didn’t.”
In 2016, Cleary first visited the site of the POW camp in Austria where his grandfather had been detained after being captured in Greece. Returning in 2019, he located the exact spot where the group photo had been taken and that gave him the inkling the story could become a documentary.
He has since also visited Crete, Greece and Slovenia and has accumulated a wealth of documents and interviews in the course of his research. He has also shot footage and recorded voiceover narrations but needs a producer to help him get the project onto screens.
Cleary says hundreds of men from Brunswick served in World War Two and there would have been very few families in the area who were not touched by the conflict and its aftermath.
His grandfather did not walk his mother down the aisle when she was married at St Ambrose in Sydney Road because he was too unwell from the grog to do so.
“Mum was about five [when he went off to war], didn’t see him for five years. When he came back, didn’t know him. And then he descended into alcoholism.
“She left home when she married at 18, so from ‘45 to ‘51, after he comes back she has six teenage years living with him hallucinating in the house, and alcoholic and drinking methylated spirits.”
When Cleary speaks of his grandmother, who died in 1978, it is with affection and it is clear she had a large impact on his own life.
“She was a powerhouse. She gets pregnant at 15 to Teddy Dorian, the bloke across the road, ends up marrying him and has my mother in the middle of the Depression aged 15 years and seven months.
“And she ends up owning three houses because she just worked like a navvy at Miller’s Ropeworks and saved – didn’t drink, but smoked like a chimney – and had her own kind of independent life and her husband comes back and lives in the bungalow and she fights Veterans Affairs for him for years to get a proper pension.”
‘Abandoned’ by Veterans Affairs
“The treatment of these men by Veterans Affairs was absolutely scandalous, and people need to know that they were treated appallingly,” Cleary adds.
“They were condemned as being people without strong character. I think there was a line about personality deficiencies.
“I think the class factors come to play. If they’d been from well-to-do families on the other side of town, they’d have been looked after. But they weren’t. They didn’t have connection to the corridors of power.”
After the war, Gladys took up with a new boyfriend even though she remained married to Ted, who she allowed to live in the bungalow behind her house. Unable to find gainful employment, he was a harmless alcoholic who mainly kept to himself, drinking in a vacant block in Phoenix Street with his mates.
Despite his deficiencies, Gladys did what she could to help Ted until his death in 1964.
“He had become a hopeless person,” Cleary says.
“I suspect she felt a loyalty to him, and respect for him and his struggles.”
Despite the stories of his two grandparents running through the narrative, Cleary does not want his project to be portrayed as a family history.
“It’s not some genealogical pursuit, and it’s not about war heroics either. It’s a social history, but of course, the backdrop is war. But it’s a slice of Brunswick.
“This was a tough time in Australia’s and Brunswick’s history but it produced these really distinctive characters. There are these hard men who succumb to the trials and tribulations of war … And yet in amongst it, there’s Gladys Dorian, like a warrior woman who sort of transcends it all.”
