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NOW Malcolm Turnbull has become Prime Minister, chalk one up for the good folks of Cessnock.
Mr Turnbull might live in Potts Point and represent the wealthy electorate of Wentworth, but his father, Bruce, was a ‘‘self-made Cessnock boy’’ who started his working life as an electrician at the county council before moving to Sydney and becoming a prominent hotel broker.
And as Mr Turnbull told the Newcastle Herald on a visit to Medowie in August, his grandfather was a schoolteacher whose postings included a stint in Cessnock as headmaster.
Mr Turnbull’s links with the Hunter have been told often enough but Monday afternoon’s confirmation of his challenge to Prime Minister Tony Abbott is reason enough to recount the tale.
The tragedy in the Turnbull family lies with the death of his father in a light plane crash at Gloucester on November 11, 1982.
In 2008, Newcastle insurance broker Reg Mawhinney recalled the day he had to ring Mr Turnbull to break the news about his father’s accident.
Mr Turnbull’s parents separated when he was nine, and he stayed in Sydney with his father.
His mother, writer Carol Lansbury, who died in 1991, was an actor, writer and academic and a cousin of British actor Angela Lansbury.
His father bought a property between Aberdeen and Scone in 1981, when Mr Turnbull was about 27.
Interviewed for Australian Story in 2009, Mr Turnbull recalled how his father had been killed the year after he bought the Aberdeen property, which Mr Turnbull and his wife, Lucy, now own.
‘‘This place was very important to me, because it was his,’’ Mr Turnbull said. ‘‘It hadn’t been his for very long, but I felt it was his. I buried him here in the garden ...’’
The Herald’s coverage of the crash described Mr Turnbull and another passenger, Desmond Curran, as two ‘‘well-known Hunter Valley hotel brokers’’.
They were killed along with the pilot, William Ford, of Cessnock, and Denis Parkinson, of Wallsend, when the plane ‘‘broke up’’ in the sky above Gloucester and crashed into a park opposite the town bowling club.
