Aubrey Douglas Robens

Seven Months, and No Medal

He embarked on 18 February 1902 and was back on 11 August, discharged the same day — under seven months, most of it at sea, the peace signed while he was in transit.³ It qualified him as a military pensioner for the rest of his life, a pension he was still drawing seventy years later.

One line on his service slip would matter half a century on: “No Record of any Medals been issued.”³

A Portmanteau at Kalgoorlie

He did not go home to Sydney. He crossed the continent and took his saddler’s trade to the Eastern Goldfields. Between 15 August and 18 September 1908, at Menzies, the camp of the journalist Thomas Brierley was broken into while its owner was away.⁴

Brierley came back, found the place stripped, and gave the police a description of what was missing. He also told them who he suspected. Detective Dungey and Plainclothes-Constable Purdue found the man in Kalgoorlie — and the list of what he was carrying is the most vivid inventory in this whole history.

Three Charges, and £25

He came back from Kalgoorlie under escort. On 2 October he was arraigned at the Menzies Police Court before Mr F. J. West, J.P., on a charge of unlawful possession, and remanded to the 15th so the police could gather witnesses.⁵

The criminal register of the Kalgoorlie Circuit Court records what he actually faced: not one charge but three — burglary, stealing in a dwelling, and receiving. He was committed on 15 October, came up on 28 November, and pleaded not guilty.⁶

He was not convicted there. The register hands him on: “Remanded to Criminal Sessions at Perth. On Bail to appear and surrender for trial in one recognizance of £25.” It is signed by S. H. Parker, Chief Justice.⁶ What the Perth sessions did with him is not yet known — it is the largest hole left in his story.

Nomans, Coolgardie Street, Bridgetown

Whatever happened at Perth, he left the goldfields behind. On 29 January 1916 he married Lily Elizabeth Knapp at St Alban’s Church, Highgate Hill, under registration 261.⁷ The East Perth roll for that year has the couple at 9 Coolgardie Street, Aubrey a labourer, Lily at home duties.⁸

But he is on a second roll the same year, a hundred and thirty miles south — the Subdivision of Williams, entered alone as a farm hand, care of Cardnell Bros. at Nomans, near Narrogin. He is there again in 1917.⁹ It is a small entry with a long reach: every account has him metropolitan from 1908 and only turning to the land after his bankruptcy, but his tie to the Narrogin district — where he would eventually farm, and where he and Lily are buried — begins in the year he married.

From there the couple move about the state in a way no previous account records. In 1922 both are at Stewart’s Coffee Palace, Bridgetown, in the south-west timber country — a temperance boarding house, Aubrey a labourer.¹⁰ Other records place him at Kondinin in 1925 and Gosnells in 1936–37.¹¹ In between, in the years after the wedding, he played football for East Perth and built the reputation the newspapers would still be trading on three decades later.¹²

The Deed of Assignment

Through the 1920s he ran a shippon — a stable workshop — on Central Avenue in Perth, serving the cartage and equestrian trade at exactly the moment the motor car was killing it.¹³ The pressures before the Depression finished it. His creditors met on 3 July 1929 at Abbott & Abbott, Commercial Bank Chambers, 42 St George’s Terrace, and resolved that he execute a deed of assignment; John Duncan Whyte of Howard Street was appointed trustee, with an advisory committee drawn from Charlie Carter Limited, All British Motors and Aladdin Industries.¹⁴

He signed on 9 July. When the notice ran in the Commonwealth Gazette nine days later he is no longer a Perth tradesman but “Aubrey Douglas Robens, of Burngup, farmer.”¹⁴ The collapse and the move happened in the same breath. He broke ground on a wheat-belt block at Burngup and worked it through the worst of the Depression, the administration still running behind him into 1930.¹⁵

Two Addresses

The 1931 East Perth roll records something none of the family accounts mention. Aubrey is at 152 Stirling Street; Lily is at 148 Edward Street. Same roll, same suburb, different houses.¹⁶

What lies behind it is not known. It falls between the bankruptcy and the Burngup years, and may be no more than the arithmetic of a marriage stretched between a failed city business and a wheat block four hundred kilometres away. By 1943 they are together again at 172 Brisbane Street, North Perth — a house the City of Perth rate book shows was owned not by them but by the Parkerville Children’s Home.¹⁷

Old-Time Footballer, Age 65

By the 1940s they were sharing premises on Iolanthe Street, Bassendean — premises bought by their neighbours, Lorenz Alexander Lee and his wife. On 18 July 1948, after a disagreement earlier that morning, the two men met at the corner of Broadway and Ida Street. Aubrey, by his own account, had left the house to get away from the squabble and was walking to the railway station when Lee jumped from his utility and swung at him.

Lee told it differently. He said he stepped from the utility and asked, “What’s the idea of upsetting my wife?” — and that Robens flung his arms about, hit him in the mouth, grabbed him round the neck and threw him to the ground.¹⁸

Robens said he had only closed with Lee to stop being hit, and had pushed him into the utility. He also told the court what Lee said next, from the floorboards: “You’re too strong for me, you ——. I’ll get you when we get home.”¹⁸

His counsel’s cross-examination gave the case its headline, and the family its phrase for him. Asked whether he had once been a pretty tough guy, Aubrey agreed — and added that it was thirty years ago.¹⁹ Magistrate Bateman found him the aggressor, cautioned him, and ordered him to pay £9/15/- costs; the counter-charge against Lee was dismissed. Lee had a strained neck and back. Robens went to a doctor with broken ribs and shock. He was sixty-five.

The Medal

After Bassendean they went back to the country for good — to a farm at Highbury, in the Narrogin district, the same country he had laboured in as a young married man in 1916. In February 1952 a Narrogin paper marked their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary.²⁰ He joined the Narrogin sub-branch of the RSL.

On Saturday 20 February 1954 he sat down and wrote to Base Records in his own hand. The letter is four lines long. He signs himself by rank, gives his service number and — fifty-two years on — his troop and company, and adds a postscript that reads like a man producing his credentials.

The reply came on 18 March. No medals for the South African war were held by the office; all unclaimed medals had been returned to the War Office in London many years before. Application must now be directed to the Medal Board, War Office, London.²¹

So the door was not quite shut — he was simply pointed at another one, on the other side of the world. Whether he ever wrote to London the file does not say.

His Sister’s Last Visit

Later that year his youngest sister Ivy — who had tried to reach him on foot in 1932 and been turned back by police at Port Augusta — finally crossed the continent to the Highbury farm. They had not seen one another since he sailed for South Africa half a century before.²²

She set out east again afterwards. On the night of 18 February 1955 she was killed on the Hume Highway at Spring Flats, north of Gundagai, still travelling.

Menora, and Narrogin

Lily Elizabeth Robens died on 24 September 1962 in the Williams district, aged seventy-nine, and was buried at Narrogin Cemetery.²³ Aubrey outlived her by eleven years.

At the end he was living at the War Veterans’ Home at Menora, in Perth — an electoral roll of his last years records him there under no occupation, the pension from seven months in 1902 still carrying him.²⁴ He died at Perth on 22 August 1973, aged eighty-nine, registration 3155/73.²⁵

He was brought back to Narrogin and buried in the Anglican section, beside Lily — in the district where, fifty-seven years earlier, he had turned up as a farm hand for Cardnell Bros.²⁶