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