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Bill Marks
William Henry Marks 1916-
The Fall of the Dice, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1991.
South to Sillytown: Tales of Battlers and Larrikins, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1997.
After telling his own life story in The Fall of the Dice, Bill Marks draws upon the same rich well of experience and an astonishingly keen memory to paint vivid word pictures of life between the wars in South Fremantle and Hamilton Hill, dubbed Sillytown by its early residents. Horse trainers, urgers, con-men and no-hopers rub shoulders with housewives, workers and honest battlers in this collection; following in the great Australian tradition of the master storyteller. 153 p. : ill., map ; 21 cm. 140415/0916R / 171021
Nandi Chinna:
Bill Marks and his family moved from South Beach to Hamilton Hill in 1928. Bill’s father Percy Marks was a horse trainer and built the large house on the corner of Davilak Ave and Rockingham Road, with stables out the back to keep his horses. Percy’s brother Sol Marks built and ran the Randwick stables, which is now heritage listed and still exists as a functioning stable today. Bill recalls that in 1928 although only three miles from Fremantle (4.82 km), Hamilton Hill was considered to be out in the bush. The locals christened the area ‘Silly Town’, which was ‘a world away from the crowded rollicking life of South Fremantle’. Clontarf Hill History, Friends of Clontarf Hill, 2015.
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 22 January, 2023 and hosted at freotopia.org/authors/marksbill.html (it was last updated on 26 October, 2023), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.