Macedon House: the old and new history of a Gisborne ruin

June 12, 2018July 15, 2018freshlyworded 1 Comment

Drive down the steep and winding Melbourne Road into Gisborne, the pretty rural town north of Melbourne, and you will see the old faded orange wreck emerging over the rise, behind the tall trees.

Standing empty and neglected, covered in graffiti and surrounded by ugly temporary fencing, its terracotta chimneys cracked like teeth, the single story building still retains an aura of once being a grand Victorian home.

I drive past this crumbling old wreck almost every day, but only recently discovered its fascinating history after reading an article in The Age newspaper.

It’s called Macedon House and has stood at the entrance to Gisborne for more than 170 years, just 13 years after Gisborne was established as a sheep grazing town.

The article in The Age described how Macedon House was one of two heritage buildings in Victoria (the other Valetta House in East Melbourne) where the owners have been ordered to carry out urgent repairs or face heavy fines.

“Those lucky enough to own heritage assets have a responsibility to maintain them — and we’ll ensure they do,” said Victorian planning minister Richard Wynne.

Built in 1847, the single storey, rendered, bluestone building with a hardwood-framed roof covered by original shingles (now beneath a corrugated iron roof) was originally called Mount Macedon Hotel. It is according to the Victorian Heritage Council “a rare surviving example of an early Victorian hotel”.

The hotel was built by Thomas and Elizabeth Gordon to “service the needs of district squatters”, those pioneering farmers in the early days of the colony of Victoria. The hotel served them mutton, salted fish and damper (a type of crudely made white bread) plus of course, brandy and beer, according to the Gisborne Gazette.

However, when gold was discovered on the Victorian goldfields in 1851, the hotel lost much of its trade as thousands rushed past it in search of their fortune.

By 1867 (after Thomas Gordon had died suddenly in 1855) Mount Macedon Hotel was no longer licensed. It was then known as Macedon House and became a family home for the Gardiners until 1878, when Elizabeth Gordon returned to live there, caring for her six children, and orphaned niece and nephew.

From 1887 onwards it was a boarding house for many decades, as well as serving as consulting rooms for a dentist and as a school where one of Elizabeth’s daughters taught.

It was a family home again from 1960, before being classified by the National Trust in 1974. Later it served as a reception centre, various restaurants, rooms for the neighbouring Gisborne Bowling Club (who bought it for $190,000 in 1995) and as a Montessori school.

A cash cow

Various media reports suggest Macedon House has been vacant since 2004, with its condition gradually worsening due to vandalism and neglect.

The reason for this appears to relate to long-held but never realised plans to develop the large property into a retirement village.

Instead progressive owners have elected to sell and take the profits, as its land value has soared (along with all property in Gisborne), and leave the development risk to someone else.

Having bought Macedon House for $190,000 in 1995, the Gisborne Bowling Club made a tidy profit when they sold it for $250,000 in 1998 to Mainpoint, the family company of Eduard “Ted” Sent.

Dutch-born Sent was in 1998 chief executive of Primelife Corporation, a publicly listed company that at its height controlled $1.6 billion portfolio of retirement villages and aged care facilities.

Presumable Ted Sent planned to turn Macedon House into another retirement asset of Primelife Corporation, before he departed as CEO in 2002. (Primelife collapsed in 2006).

In 2014, Melbourne developer Brian Forshaw – a long time friend and business partner of Ted Sent – acquired Macedon House for $770,000.

In 2015, plans were drawn up for “Macedon House Retirement Village” with about 40 homes spread out across the 2.1 hectare site.

Then, last year, two caveats were placed on the title which suggest that Brian Forshaw had struck deals to sell Macedon House.

The first in January was with a company called Nuline Consulting, ultimately owned by Grace Sent (Ted Sent’s wife) and then later in September with wealthy Melbourne doctor and developer Gary Braude for a reputed $1.21 million.

However neither of these deals appear to have been completed , and with the state government demanding urgent repairs to Macedon House, approved plans for a retirement village have been abandoned.

Brian Forshaw recently put the old wreck back on the market asking $1.39 million with real estate advertising describes Macedon House as a “dilapidated heritage hotel”.

More recently its been listed as a mortgagee sale through Kennedy & Hunt Real Estate with an auction date set for August 4.

In their description, Kennedy & Hunt Real Estate, who are local Gisborne agents, highlight Macedon House’s rich history and importance and include a few beautiful old photos dating back to 1899 of the building in its prime, against the backdrop of farmland and the pointy top of Mt Macedon.

Let’s hope who ever buys it this time round will restore it to its former glory and pay homage to 170-plus years of Macedon House’s colourful history.

macedon house in its prime

The lucky lives of Judy and Alex Resofsky

June 7, 2018May 11, 2022freshlyworded 4 Comments

Throughout her life Judy Resofsky considered herself lucky. No doubt, her husband Alex did too.

Judy and Alex arrived in Australia in 1949 when they were in their early twenties, having both survived the horrors of Hungarian ghetto life and the notorious Auschwitz Concentration camp in Poland, to which many Hungarian Jews were deported in 1944.

At her funeral last month in Melbourne, Judy and Alex’s daughter Kathy Janovic told mourners the incredible story of how her mother had escaped the gas chambers.

On the day, she and others were to be murdered, the gas chambers had miraculously malfunctioned and she was spared.

Later, when the concentration camps were being evacuated and demolished, as the Russians advanced across Europe, Judy was one of thousands of emaciated Jews sent on a death march from Praust (Pruszcz Gdański) in North Western Poland.

At one stage during this horrendous ordeal, she and other women were resting in a barn when Russian soldiers entered and started to rape the women. Judy jumped out of a window and landed close to a Jewish Russian soldier, who saved her.

This was just another example of her mother’s good luck, her daughter Kathy said in a loving tribute to her warm, kind and generous parents.

One of eight children, born in Nyirbator in Hungary on July 5, 1926 to Adolph and Berta Winkler, and their first born, Judy was the only of her family to survive the mass extermination of European Jews by the Nazis.

Her husband Alex Resofsky, who also recently passed away, was born in the Hungarian town of Myrathasa two years before Judy in 1924.

The second child of Moritz and Leake Resofksy, Alex and his eldest sister Margaret were the only ones in their family to survive the holocaust.

After the family had been rounded up in the Sirna Pusata Ghetto, they were deported to Auschwitz. Alex’s mother and siblings did not survive the selection process and were murdered by the Nazis.

Alex passed through three more concentration camps – including the notorious Gross-Rosen and Buchenwald camp networks – before being liberated at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945.

He was part of the Bricha underground movement that helped smuggle Jewish holocaust survivors out of Eastern Europe into what is today Israel.

In 1949 he sailed to Australia with his sister and future wife, Judy.

Here they lived for the next 69 years, making a life for themselves in Melbourne’s flourishing Jewish immigrant garment trade (supplying David Jones with mens knitwear) and where they had three children and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

By all accounts – I sadly never met them – Alex and Judy were much-loved and treasured members of Melbourne’s close-knit Jewish community,and were actively involved in the important work of the Jewish Holocaust Centre.

A report from the JHC in September 2017 includes a picture of Judy and Alex along with their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. There are 24 people in the photo.

Alex and Judy with their family, taken in September 2017 (Credit: Jewish Holocaust Centre)

The JHC report notes that through the generosity of the Resofsky’s, the centre was able to put its vast and important collection online, and that they did so in loving memory of their parents, Mor and Lenke Resofsky; Jeno and Berta Frisch; Adolf and Berta Winkler and all their siblings.

I only recently came across the incredible survival of the Resofskys while researching a story I was writing for The Australian Financial Review. It was about a shopping mall they owned near Geelong, and which their children recently sold.

It would have been a great privilege to have met Alex and Judy and heard their story of survival against the odds, and about their successful and happy lives in Melbourne.

Deepest sympathies to their family and friends.

Unbearable and uplifting: The illogical pleasure of reading A Little Life By Hanya Yanagihara

June 2, 2018August 10, 2022freshlyworded Leave a comment

hanya-yanagihara-a-little-life It must say something about the impact Hanya Yanagihara’s novel “A Little Life” has on its readers, that random strangers came up to me, while I was reading it, to offer their praise.

“You should persevere with it, it’s an amazing book,” said one bloke as he got off the train, when I was only about fifty pages in.

Then, a few weeks later: “It’s so good. I’ve only got 20 minutes left to read on my Kindle and I don’t want it to end,” enthused a mother with two children as our train pulled into Melbourne.

After finishing it myself, and being equally affected by its power, I perused the internet for reviews and comments.

Quickly I realised those random strangers and I were not alone.

Almost anyone who has read Yanagihara’s 720 page epic, about four close male friends – one of whom is a survivor of horrific sexual abuse – making their way in New York after college has been similarly jolted.

Jon Michaud’s review in the New Yorker gave a succinct summary of its principal effect: “Yanagihara’s novel can drive you mad, consume you and take over your life.”

“I will genuinely never recover from reading A Little Life,” wrote another fan on Twitter.

When I finished reading A Little Life, I felt that sense of nostalgia, sadness and loss that comes with experiencing all great works of art be it a book, movie or piece of music.

It was as if I had been taken on an exhilarating ride – one of pain and suffering, but also of great joy and love – and then it had all come to an end and the characters had exited the stage, leave me and my world view irrevocably altered.

To summarise briefly the plot , four close college friends Jude St Francis, JB, Willem and Malcolm find themselves living in New York and trying to make their way as lawyer, artist, actor and architect respectively. All are bright and brilliant in their own way.

The book chronicles their steps up the professional ladder, the shifting dynamics of their friendship, their on and off romantic relationships, their shifting social circles and the changes they undergo from unsure twenty something’s to fifty-year-old successful men. All set against the backdrop of a modern, but timeless New York.

While this may hardly sound like the plot for a the “Great American Novel” what sets the book apart is Yanagihara’s ability to get inside the head of someone who has survived appalling sexual abuse in their childhood and how they learn to cope with its scars as adults.

This she does through the devastating brilliant character of Jude St Francis, whose childhood as an orphan raised by monks is so unimaginable cruel and painful that it is something of a miracle he survived at all.

Not only that but Jude suffers from a chronic pain and debilitating back spasms – due to an automobile attack he endured aged 15 – that leave him writhing on the floor in agony.

But he has learnt to cope, both with the sense of shame he feels about the past, the memories of these events which haunt him and his pain. This coping mechanism is to cut himself with razors, behaviour which shocks his friends and family, but which he is unable to stop even as he runs out of space on his arms, and finds himself cutting through “tough, webby scar tissue”.

Despite his tragic upbringing (which Yanagihara reveals in long flashbacks) Jude does more than just survive, he becomes a success.

Blessed with a brilliant legal and mathematical mind, he ends up becoming a top litigator at a major Manhattan corporate law firm even as his physical pain worsens and the mental scars refuse to heal.

Whilst those closest to him – his best friend and later lover Willem and his adopted parents Harold and Julia – try to heal his deep emotional wounds, and his faithful doctor Andy, treats his weeping sores, failing legs and other bodily injuries, it is only Jude himself who can keep the demons and ghosts of his past a bay, or give in and let them consume him.

And this almost biblical journey of Jude’s- into and out of the light – is what drives the narrative of Yanagihara’s opus, and gives it is remarkable power.

Ultimately, the message of Yanagihara’s devastating book, I think, is our inability to escape the events that shaped us as children, but also that we can as adults transcend those events, even if those moments remain fleeting.