Photograph taken by Vicki Heneker in September 2017
Dad’s old house at Hawker, at one stage about 8 people lived in this place, corrugated iron….no verandahs, (not sure if they ever existed). Walking down a driveway next door I peeked through a small dirty window, and could make out a fairly long room, full of old junk furniture and bits and pieces. How I would have loved to go in there. I presume, perhaps wrongly, that it might have been divided off at one stage, when it was the family home. I also think of how hot a corrugated iron dwelling would have been in the middle of a hot Hawker summer, no air conditioner, no fan?
This is the house in Elder Street, Hawker, South Australia in which my dad and his brothers and sisters grew up in, before they moved to Port Augusta. Visiting it in 2017, after many years, I was shocked to see how small it was, and how I hadn’t remember it that way. I had last seen it when I was a teenager, and dad was with me. It apparently was used as a second hand shop at one time, (according to the cafe owner a few houses away, and the inside seems to have a fair bit of junk in it. It was also last used as a gem shop she told me.
Elder Terrace is now a fairly busy area, with the Hawker Hotel on one corner, a busy cafe, and many travellers with caravans and 4WDs parked along the street, often taking time on the lawns of the AW ‘Blue Burt’ Memorial Park, the Hawker Playground and under trees, and seats to drink their cold liquids and eat some lunch. Further north but in walking distance is the Old Hawker Railway Station where the original Ghan train passed through Hawker until 1956.
Heneker - a Pioneering family from Kent to South Australia 
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