ALAN was born in Roseville on the 1st of July 1930. He spent the first three years of his life there, before the Cook household moved to Sunnycliffs in Victoria. Though he was only young at the time, Alan re-called the family’s arrival there:
There was a great aunt…and she lived with her son, I think it was, around Red Cliffs. She met us off the train in a horse and jinker and took us to this block house, which was pure sand all around, natural belah trees, and an odd pine tree, and there was this house stuck out in this area with no garden at all…I wondered where I was going to, actually
Being a boy with three older sisters, Alan was usually left to his own devices. He said that he was “allowed to do whatever, providing it wasn’t too outrageous. We spent heaps of time as boys riding our pushbikes out into the bush – long as we turned up at night was the main thing,
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He may have been the son of lineman Charles Ben-jamin and Amy Louisa (née Ford) Bennell of Alphington. Joan’s mother, on the other hand, was apparently a solid woman with a “roun-dish face” and short brown hair. She had come alone to Australia from Reading, England aboard the ship Moreton Bay in 1922. Alfred and Gladys were married by 1924, by which time they were residing at Block 268 in Red Cliffs, where Joan was raised. “I can always remember,” ex-plained Alan, “being dragged along [with the Bennells] to the Royal Socie-ty of St George, I think it was, for these evenings; they were the most bor-ing times you could have.” There were also two brothers in the Bennell family: elder brother Roy, a fighter pilot in the war; and younger brother Ronald, a truck driver who died in July 1949 when, as a passenger, he was involved in a collision outside of Sealake,