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.
I previously worked as a Library Technician at the State Library of South Australia and then Noarlunga Library Services. I was lucky enough to work at the State Library in the Archives department, which is now a separate entity and housed at a suburban site. I've always loved English and Australian history, and began my Heneker family history in about 1980, before the advent of the internet, and now o with so many digitised records online there is a treasure chest of information out there, and it just keeps growing. One of the most wonderful treasures we have here in Australia is the Trove website, the free digitised newspapers of nearly every place in Australia, provided for free by the National Library of Australia. This has opened up so much day to day information for people searching for further information about their ancestors. I chose to write a blog as a way for me to put down a lot of information I had that wasn't necessarily easy to slot into a "family tree" as such. And I wanted to record some of the stories of the Heneker clan, and especially James Heneker (1826-1917) who arrived in South Australia as a 12 year old boy with his family. Like most of us in the genealogy community I have become obsessed and this is a never ending story. The community of bloggers, and also Facebook specialist pages has allowed me and many of us to learn from each other, and to use some of the many amazing tools that are out there now for us to use and enhance our research. My one wish?? dad Neville Laurence Heneker 1929 - 1987, this is for you, for all the things you told me, and the stories you related, often when we were up north in the Flinders Ranges, at Beltana, Hawker, Blinman and many other amazing places. I wish you were here, so I could share all this new information that has come to light. And of course for you Pa (Laurence Douglas Heneker), your stories were incredible and watching you sleep out under the stars at Arkaroola with a rock for your pillow is an image I will never forget. Oh if only we had digital cameras back then...I think of you both every time I write my words and read my books. I love you both.
Heneker - a Pioneering family from Kent to South Australia 
2 thoughts on “Hawker and the old Heneker home”
GeniAus
Good to see you are still around and researching. I look forward to your future posts.
heneker52
Thanks so much GeniAus, I really appreciate the feedback. Got bogged down with my Jewish side in East End London, but will definitely be doing more research esp hopefully further back in the UK.Darn, they all had the same names, even with a surname like Heneker, which I initially thought wasn’t too common, I now see hundreds and more, on digitised records…but I guess that’s what keeps us plodding on, and loving it. Regards to you.