Tess and Ken Lemmon

Ninety years ago this year, local man Ken Lemmon took a series of photos from Kilbreda’s tower. Over the years, including this week, I have recreated these shots and present them here as a before and after series which I hope you will find interesting. Most importantly, the view over Mentone station is set to change dramatically with the work to put Mentone station underground and erect a four-storey carpark on Balcombe Road, which will obscure the view of our iconic tower from the Highway and Swanston Street forever.

Ken Lemmon attended school at St Patrick’s, Mentone with my grandmother from about 1917 until the early 1920s. He is the smiling boy shown in the front centre of a photo of St Patrick’s students in 1919.

His sister Tess was a student here from 1923-29. Having lived just about all of her 90 odd years in the same house in Childers Street, Mentone, Tess was a wealth of local knowledge and I visited her regularly and very much miss being able to dash across to ask her a question. She was an excellent pianist and was known to many in St Patrick’s parish and in the wider community. Acknowledgements are given to Tess in a number of local histories, including our own history ‘A View from the Tower’ and Leo Gamble’s history of Mentone. She also took part in a City of Kingston centenary of Federation project in 2001, for which she was interviewed about her early memories in Mentone, which were then included in various articles accessible on Kingston’s History pages.

Tess appears in a photo taken in 1928 at the front right. Incidentally, the girl next to her is my great-aunt Rosie and the girl behind Rosie was a former colleague of mine Sr Mercedes or Madge Brown as she was then.

Damian Smith

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