Mollie's Bar and Diner

With Cocktails, Shows, Drama, Campery, Inherent Queerness and Outdoor Sheltered Terrace. On August the 2nd 1927 Mary Catherine Cunningham was born. Mollie as we know her spent the first 16 years growing up in Flowerdale with her two sisters Cath & Carmel and her brother Kevin. In 1944 towards the end of the Second World War Mollie started her teaching studies as a student teacher, too young to att

end teachers college until her formal training began in 1946. It was here at teachers college that she developed a friendship with Rita, a friendship that has stood for 61 years. Mollie met her future husband Leo Driscoll, as a result of Leo’s sister inviting Mollie to help celebrate his 21st birthday in 1948. Marie & Mollie were boarding at the Mackin’s, in Ballarat, a time Mollie still has fond memories of. After finishing teaching in 1953 Mollie Cunningham married Leo Driscoll in St. By the end of 1957 the title mum was well entrenched with the birth of the first 3 children, Jacinta was the first in 1955. By the end of 1967 the Driscoll family had grown in number to 12 children, with Sean arriving in August of the same year. The next decade would be joyful, challenging and at times sad. Leo and Mollie welcomed their fifteenth and final child Paul, born in October 1970. It was April 1972 when wife/mum/Mollie farewelled her husband and our father as Dad has passed away.

1975 was busy as Mollie Driscoll and her fifteen children moved from St. Arnaud to Bendigo. Healthy children don’t just miraculously appear (not 15 of them); they have been watched and looked after from the start. It has been calculated that until Mollie’s children were all 18 it equated to 300,000 meals prepared and provided by Mollie. Just so you understand, if you owned and opened a 60-seat restaurant today serving lunch and dinner, you would be booked out for seven years. As children, summer holidays were spent with our aunties and uncles at their farms in Strath Creek, Flowerdale and at the pub in Molesworth. Those summer holidays and some Friday nights saw the offering of treats. Those treats, so welcomed and appreciated often included a choice of a steak sandwich, fish & chips or even pizza. Budding suitors to my sisters often knew this “little secret” about the treats to get in good with the eight Driscoll boys.