Stella Eva Robens

Thirteen Years at 196 Keppel Street

Thomas Robens died at Cross Street, Baulkham Hills, in November 1928, and the household broke up. His widow went back to Bathurst, the city she had been married in fifty-seven years before; the National Advocate noted in May 1929 that Mrs Robens “has returned to Bathurst to reside”.² Stella went with her, and so did Ida, and the 1930 roll records all three at 196 Keppel Street.³

The address carries an echo. Archibald Joseph Jeffries — Stella’s grandfather, the blind saddler of George Street — had died at 169 Keppel Street in 1903. Whether 196 and 169 are the same building renumbered has not been checked, and it would be worth checking.⁴

For the others the Bathurst years were short. Her mother and Ida appear at Keppel Street on the rolls of 1930 and 1932, then vanish from the 1934 one; the Castle Hill rolls pick them up at Railway Street, Baulkham Hills. Stella did not go with them.⁵⁶

She is at 196 Keppel Street on every Bathurst roll sighted — 1930, 1932, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937 and again in 1943. Thirteen years at a single address, the last decade of it on her own. Her brother William Wesley was in the same city the whole time, at 191 Lort Street, a saddler until 1936 and a carter after it.³⁵

The Tweed, and Janelle Flats

After the war she left the Central West for the Queensland border. The 1949 Tweed roll enrols her at the Memorial Hall camping ground, Tweed Heads — an address unusual to find on a roll at all, and one that suggests a life held lightly rather than a settled house.⁷

She then took a flat at “Janelle Flats”, Dutton Street, Coolangatta. The rolls of 1954 and 1959 both find her there at home duties: at least five years in the one flat.⁸⁹

Janelle Flats, and Ivy’s Last Journey

Janelle Flats matters beyond Stella’s own story. Her niece Patricia Mary Gage — the daughter of her youngest sister, Ivy — was living there too.¹⁰

On the night of Friday 17 February 1955, Ivy set out hitch-hiking north from New South Wales to visit, as the press had it, her daughter and her sister. Because both women were at the same Coolangatta address, that was one destination and not two. Ivy was killed at Spring Flats, eighteen miles north of Gundagai, when a semi-trailer collided with a truck and a car. She never arrived.¹⁰

The 1954 roll, which puts Stella at Janelle Flats less than a year before, is the document that fixes where Ivy was going.⁸¹⁰

Two Tenancies at Summer Hill

She came back to Sydney between 1959 and 1963, and did not rejoin the family in the western suburbs. The rolls give two Summer Hill addresses in succession: 85 Prospect Road on the 1963 Ashfield roll, then 139 Smith Street on the 1968 one. She was seventy-three at the first and seventy-eight at the second.¹¹¹²

That second entry produced an error worth recording, because it is the kind anyone would make. The 1968 roll reads “Summer Hill, Parkes, New South Wales”, and an earlier draft of this account read Parkes as the country town and placed her four hundred kilometres inland, near a brother. Parkes was the federal division that then covered Sydney’s inner west. She was at Smith Street, Summer Hill; the brothers at the town of Parkes were Harold and Norman.¹²

Earlier family research adds Oatley about 1963 and Greenacre by about 1972. The Oatley date cannot stand as given, since the 1963 roll has her at Summer Hill, and Greenacre has not been sighted on any roll.

The Last of the Twelve

Stella died at Concord West on 12 July 1989, aged ninety-nine.¹³

She had outlived every one of her eleven brothers and sisters. Only Archibald, the eldest, came anywhere near her span — he died at ninety-nine himself in 1972, and she survived him by seventeen years. The first and the ninth of Thomas and Mary Rebecca Jane’s children lived a hundred and ninety-eight years between them.