My Parent's Story
My parents were married in 1919 and had nine children. The first child survived but the second and third child died within a few hours of birth. As I have written before, my mother was very religious so when their deaths were imminent they were christened and named Mary and Joseph. My father was not so religious but he and a priest took one of the babies to give it a Christian burial but besides carrying the coffin they carried a bottle of rum. The baby was buried and after the service dad and the priest drank the rum and came home in such a state that they never remembered where the little boy’s grave was, only that it was in the Catholic portion. (PP If it was in the cemetery then would they not have found the turned over soil?)
The other baby was buried in a little grave on the property Rocky Glen which was mother’s family property. It had iron railings and a huge bed of arum lilies. There was also a larger grave there but I don’t remember who was buried there. This was quite a common practice in those days.
My mother’s family home was situated four miles from Gulf Creek -then a flourishing town then and the reason was a Copper Mine. The town had four hotels and wine gooeys; shops of all kinds and a school. There were a lot of Chinese working the mine beside other nationalities. This mine closed down in the 1930s, not because the copper was finished but because it was found to be too hard and expensive to get at. I think that there have been a few tentative investigations as to the feasibility of trying to open up again. Today there are just a few old homes left in the town.
My mother and her brothers and sisters (13 of them) were all reared at Rocky Glen. The first few children were born in a bark hut but as the finances became available they built a very nice big home. It had verandahs on all three sides and there always seemed to be carnations and honeysuckle growing in the garden. The nectarine, peach, apricot and plum trees always seemed to have ripe fruit in them – I suppose because we spent only summer school holidays out there had a lot to do with that.
The front verandah was lined with beds and even though it was the front of the house, everyone came in the back way, even important visitors.
The young adult uncles who worked the property would come in for a big heavy midday lunch that my old maiden aunt would cook. They would then go and lie on the beds in the shade and sleep. My sister and I would be paid to keep the flies off while they slept. At about two o’clock they would put their socks and boots on and go out to the horses and ride away until dark. It was exciting when we would see Uncle Ray ride up with a sheep up on the front of the saddle with him and we would be allowed to go down to the yards to watch him kill. They would do this common task in a few minutes and I always marvelled at the way the skin would be punched off with the closed fist. The flap of skin would be held up in one hand and of course by this time the carcass would be held by the hind legs and raised on a hoist. Once skinned, the skin was thrown over a fence to dry and the carcass was hauled up higher, gutted and the entrails thrown into a bucket. The carcass was then raised higher to keep it away from marauders of the night (dogs and foxes) and by this time it was dark and the butcher had a bath ready at the homestead. The water for the bath tub was boiled in the copper and carried to the bathroom on the end of the verandah. The bathroom always smelt of Lux soap.
The next morning at dawn, the by now set carcass had bled out and stiffened and was taken to the gauzed in meat house. In the meat house there were a couple of very wide, round, solid wood blocks strong enough to hold any weight. There was no refrigeration in those days, only drip safes so I would imagine there would be a lot of meat fed to the dogs. The meat would have to be cooked in joints and eaten cold with hot vegetables. I think the dogs got a lot of flaps as the household got sick of mutton of any kind, especially the cheaper cuts.
Once when I stayed out there my father was putting in a dam on the neighbouring property – it was called tank sinking or dam sinking. The team consisted of a couple of draught horses and a scoop. The scoop was a huge cast iron scoop about five feet wide and this had a type of hinged handle that could be moved forwards and backwards. The horses would be hitched up to this machine and then the scoop was pushed into the ground and eventually a hole was scooped out and formed into a dam for storing water. Sometimes when the dry season was on, the existing dam had to be scooped out and cleared of silt. Quite often the scoop would yield a torrent of muddy water and also some catfish or fresh water fish. The farmers would put a few fish in the dams from the creeks. These were for private eating – these fish did taste a bit muddy but if they weren’t too fat they were a good change of diet.
Dad scooped out a sugar bag of these fish on one such day when he was cleaning out a dam. After he finished his days’ work he saddled up his horse and rode over to grandmas with the fish – lovely.
I just mentioned a sugar bag. When they shopped in the old days they usually shipped flour and sugar by the bag. Tea was sold by the case which held 14 tins. The cases were always lined with heavy foil and the tea tins were nice looking tins with a round lid and in the middle there were nearly always embossed pictures of beautiful girls from India picking fresh tea buds. The tinned fruit came in cases, especially sliced peaches, and it was a bonus to get the half peaches instead of the sliced. The juice from these tins was drunk to the last drop. Dates were dried and came in big packs and the dried fruit came by the pound - I often sneaked into the pantry for a handful of fruit.
A big luxury in those days was bought biscuits -they were a work of art. They would be a plain biscuit but the top of the tops were really beautiful. Hard lolly type flowers, flat icing with messages written on them; some had jam with icing flowers on top of that and there were some with hundreds and thousands on them. Does anyone remember the fairy cakes? I wonder how they kept them so fresh. Some had jam inside and the other had pink and some had white icing on them. Grandma bought them.
When we went to school we used to have to carry lunch from home, usually doorstop jam or tomato or boiled egg. I loved and still do love squashy tomato sandwiches and can still remember the school port smell of all these flavours mixed in together.
There were lots of us kids and I suppose we were poor and I remember we had to take our lunch to school as we always had plenty of food but we also had plenty for anyone that came to our home. Mum was always cooking scones and cakes and tarts but we never had any cash I don’t think. One family of kids - there were about the same amount in the family as we had, were allowed to go to the shop and book up to their father’s account 3 pence worth of broken biscuits, the same I spoke of before. You could buy these biscuits because there were accidents on our bad roads and rough rail carriage and so they couldn’t be sold because of being broken. I suppose they would get about a pound of these biscuits every day. We envied that family because they were allowed to buy broken biscuits, but sometimes we could swap for fruit from our orchard and if they felt good they would give us what was left to share between us.
This family and our family were the best friends you could have – they seemed to have a kid where ever we did and as each girl and boy came along were good friends. As I said, we were Catholic and they were more strict than we were, speaking for myself, if not my brothers and sisters. My particular friend used to laugh a lot and sometimes we would make her laugh until she wet her pants, but she and the whole family had personality plus.
When we first moved into the home that was built about 55 years ago it was on a river flat and there were Chinese gardeners living there. They weren’t very happy about people building a house on what they thought was their land and they were alright when dad was there but when mum was home without dad, Old Georgy Wye would walk round the house at night calling out in Chinese and carrying a big knife.
It was a three acre block of land and the land was river loam and we always had beautiful vegetables. Dad finally came to some arrangement with Old Georgy – he could leave his hut on the ground but he was to garden for us and share the vegetables. I don’t know how long he worked for us but I know that was that arrangement. He had an opium pipe that he used to smoke and up to the last few years the opium poppy bloomed in the garden. We didn’t know what was but I personally though it was a pretty but a rather useless flower as the petals didn’t stay on the big bulby thing that they were growing from. I once asked dad “What is that poppy for?” and he said “That’s an opium poppy” but there was no interest from either us. As a matter of fact I realized that is what it was that grew wild in our garden after I saw it on colour TV in a documentary last week.
After Georgy Wye we had an Indian working in the garden under the same terms but he lived in the shed. Dad burned the Chinaman’s hut down so probably they did not part on the best of terms.
The Indian was named Mahomed – he was tall with a long beard and turban. He also used to smoke a pipe but he was a nice old man and sometimes we were allowed to watch him smoke his pipe. It had water bubbling through it and was something to see. He used to sing in a high quivery voice. I only just happened to go past his door once and I think he was on his knees praying so it was probably his evening prayer.
Sometimes Mahomed would give us pieces of Johnny Cake – a very thin white type of bread, it wasn’t particularly nice that I could remember but was something to talk about. Later a beautiful young Indian girl came to live in town in a little house. Mum said she was his daughter out from India so we lost our Indian as he joined with his daughter.
The next man in the garden was a retired farm labourer. He was a good gardener and he would eat with us and I think he used to drink. I don’t think mum liked him much. I know he was fussy about the jam he ate so mum used to put cheap plum jam in another tin and he would eat it.
The next one was Pierre. His mother I think was French and she came from Sydney and brought Pierre to live in Barraba. I think he was a bit soft in the head – he was a Police pimp when he lived in Sydney and whether things got too hot for him there they came to our quiet town. He loved kids and did odd jobs in the flower garden. Sometimes when mum gave him fruit and vegetables he would make her a present of a beautiful bouquet that his mother would send down. He loved his mother, and my little brother, when asked what he was going to be when he grew up he said “I am going to stay home and mind you mum just like Pierre looks after his mother”. My little brother had a funny bone sticking out at the back of his shoulders we used to joke saying that’s where Jimmy wings should be growing, he’s our little angel. We didn’t know how close we were because Jimmy died of tetanus at the age of ten and a half. He was a good little fellow and was an altar boy and trudged through the early morning frost to answer the mass. (Jimmy was gored by a bull and developed tetanus PP)
Talking about drip safes earlier reminds me of when my mother went away for a few days. My sister, a girlfriend and myself were the cooks. We could all cook very well as there was always plenty to do. Dad always had mum working for him and we always had a full table. On this spring day we served the vegetables and meat and we always served sweets or pudding as it was called in those days. So one of us girls went out to the little sort of greenhouse out the back where the dry safe was kept. We knew that there were more stewed peaches and junket and custard but what we didn’t know was that a big green frog thought that the peaches looked like a lovely place to rest. So after a discussion between the three cooks we decided sweets would still be on the menu, so the frog was swiftly evicted and the men had sweets. Dad said “Aren’t you girls having pudding?” we smiled nicely and declined but we nearly exploded with mirth whilst washing up. Years later we told dad and he just said we were a couple of larrikins – that was a great expression in those days.
I loved my father – he had a beautiful singing voice and used to put us on his knee and swing us up and down and sing songs until another child got big enough to push us off. He had a wonderful sense of humour – he would go out to work with his mate or mum on Sunday afternoons in his rubber tyred sulky with runny butter and enough bread and fresh and cooked food to do until Friday.
On Saturday mornings he would go ‘up the street’. In those days the shops were open on Saturday afternoons and the half-holiday was Wednesday and that’swhen all the girls washed their hair. The pubs would close at 6 pm and mum never had to get tea on Saturdays because dad would come home a few sheets to the wind. In the summer we had saveloys and tomato sauce, sometimes with salad. They were a pretty new invention but even in those days they were called saveloys.
In the winter time the Saturday tea would be hot pies – beautiful meaty and juicy ones with mashed potatoes, peas and gravy. We would also be given a bag of boiled lollies and dad’s favourite – red butterballs and sometimes big coconuts or peanuts. I’ll never forget those nights with the open fire; sometime we got balloons to blow up and chase around the room.
One winter’s day we came back from the river; there were so many of us we didn’t need friends but we always had at least one each. Mum used to feed us all, there were probably eight of us but when we got home we could hear music and wonder of wonder we had a wireless. It was a big shiny brown piece of furniture with a small dial. I don’t think up to that time I even knew about wirelesses. It never occurred to me that we would have such a wonderful thing in our house. After that, on Sunday nights we used to hurry through tea, wash up and get a cushion as there wouldn’t have been enough comfortable chairs to go round, and we would settle down by the open fire and we would listen to the Lux theatre, a Sunday night play. Some nights it was Mrs O’BBs, Martin’s Corner and Amateur Hour, Jack Davey and Mo McCackie – life was good.
Sunday was always for us Catholics up early – mum and the younger children went to first mass and the bigger girls got up and cooked brunch and did the rooms and then mum and the younger ones sat down and served breakfast. We washed up and finished the work and peeled the vegetables. This enabled the ones that went to late mass to buy the papers, talk to friends and dawdle home. This process was carried out all the year with late and early mass rotating. This way dad was not so put out about mum going to mass. He was a bit like his mother and didn’t like tykes and thought that the priest got their money too easy. I think now that dad was probably more put out by the fact that he wanted mum to stay in bed with him.
My sister that was two years older than me was a saintly little girl. She had a head of black hair bobbed short and the shine of her head always looked like a halo. She was always ‘good little Eddie’ as she never seemed to do anything wrong. As she got older she was a fantastic skipper- she could do all sorts of skips but when she did Salt & Pepper we would start to say “Flip, flop” and then she would throw away the rope and run away and cry. She had what today is called a beautiful bust and with no bra it did jump up and down. We always knew we could get her out of skipping competitions by embarrassing her.
I must have been a terrible kid but apparently I looked like an angel. I had long blonde ringlets that my older sister insisted that I have whilst holding me between her legs in a grip that I could not get out of. She would grit her teeth and hang on while I struggled and swore bullock driver’s language at her. I had a lot of good teachers - as I said before, my father always had teamsters around especially when the big wagon and all the draught horses were home. The men used to congregate probably to do repairs and fix harnesses, so I really knew the expressions and where to use them; all the hidings in world never stopped me. (Makes me feel better – must be genetic PP)
It was my job to get the wood and chips in for the kitchen and lounge room fire. I had to do this after school, but can’t turn a game or marbles, hopscotch or rounders down just to get the chips in. I forgot once too often and my favourite and oldest brother Jack, who by this time had his own fruit run selling door to door on a cart and horse, had to make the fire early in the morning. He tried so often to make the fire with wet wood so one morning at an unearthly hour I was pulled out of bed by the back of my pyjamas and carried by the neck and dropped in the middle of the wood heap in the frost. I had never seen frost before or after like the frost I was standing in. I couldn’t believe that this could happen to me - I likened myself to a sloth that morning crawling around trying to find something to offer my brother to get the fire going. After school my mate Vera and I got to work with the axe and Tommy Hawk and cut eight boxes full of pine. I didn’t have to chop the wood, I was probably too small but we were never without chips again while it was my job to do so.
When I was ten it was my job to watch the breakfast while mum milked the cow. I had to stir the porridge, turn the chops in the biggest frying pan I have ever seen, make the toast by the fire coals and set the table. Mum fried the eggs and served the meals. The job suited me because I hated the cold and never seemed to be warm. All I worried about when I was a kid was that the world would burn all the wood and I would be cold. I didn’t know about heaters or coal.
My younger sister didn’t have to do much till she grew older but she always told mum everything that we did wrong.
The crockery suffered at our house. Twice the scrubbed pine dresser was pulled over when one of us wasn’t tall enough to get something down and climbed up using the dresser for leverage. The whole lot toppled on whoever was unlucky enough and happened to be standing there. On one such Saturday morning dad said “I’ll fix I so that they won’t break the next lot” and so on his Saturday excursion he went shopping and came home that night with a large box. In the box were aluminium butter dishes, aluminium jam dishes, aluminium salt and pepper shakers, aluminium milk jugs and an aluminium sugar basin, all with little lids with red knobs. Dad handed them over and we excitedly set to work filling all the dishes. Edna climbed on a chair to get the sugar caddy from the mantel piece over the stove, she jumped to the floor at the same time the new beautiful shiny sugar basin fell to the floor and was crushed to death. We all stopped in dead shock then dad laughed until we thought he might burst, we all laughed after that but we never got a new sugar basin.
My eldest sister was a good knitter and she was always walking around knitting with a ball of wool under her arm. Mum couldn’t knit so mum did the work while Eileen knitted for the babies.
One Christmas, the toys were all in a wardrobe and just a few nights before Santa was to come, mum and dad were out, and we bigger kids had a game with the toys, bounced the balls and wound the tops and put them away before we were caught.
On Sunday we used to play Rounders and dad was bowler and mum backstop for both teams. Our bat was a thick piece of pine cut like a cricket bat, we could all make these bats with a few strokes of the Tommy Hawk – the Rounders game was open to all comers as they arrived from across the road and from up the flat. Man, woman and child they came. It was family days in those days and no clubs or sports to take the adults away from us.
The river was our playground. We were all very aware of what would happen to us if we went down there if it had been raining. The waterholes sometimes changed course and made it too deep in places we perhaps had been ten days before. Usually our big brother Jack was the hole tester because he could swim like a fish. I could never learn to dive off the low bank and I only ever learned to paddle but we were like fish, always in the water. We had a special hole called the Pumphouse where a building sat by the high bank and a big mysterious piece of machinery was housed. I can’t remember whether it ever did anything but, it looked very efficient. Next to it was a big cement culvert where the town’s rainwater came out. This part was always deep and I was never game to go over there.
One day the river came up or as they say ‘the river came down’ and the milkman Albert was caught in the midstream crossing. Soon there were men everywhere on the bank shouting instructions. The horse and cart started to float off with Albert standing on the seat; the little metal pint and quart pots floated off and the big milk drums started to go. Dad and Mr McAndle, a neighbour, and other men threw ropes and he was rescued. It was quite a good excuse to go up home and have a cuppa and scones.
The river always had little carp there that we caught in the August school holidays. The sun was nice and we would go to the river for a picnic. The water was too cold to swim in but always one of us would tuck our dresses in our bloomers and pick a bunch of yellow primroses.
Often the frosts in Barraba would stay beside the house till 1 o’clock in the day, we always managed to grow beautiful violets on that side of the house, possible plants from old Mr Jones’s old home by this time being demolished. The florist would ring mum for violets for special wreaths for funerals. This was a source of pocket money for mum and she also had her chooks. She loved those birds and used to talk to them and when they were clucky she would put her hand under them and take the eggs out from underneath them. I was always frightened of them, but they provided mum with a lot of little things that she would not have had otherwise.
My mother had a wonderful sense of morals and we got those from her as we got our sense of humour from dad. She didn’t have much humour left in her after the youngest baby was born – her ninth child. I wouldn’t be feeling very funny either. When the baby was about six weeks old dad took mum on her first ‘holiday’. My aunty and her sister and my elder sisters were all in the pantry crying when the train went at 7 pm. I didn’t know why they were crying but I joined them too and it was twelve months before we saw our mother again. She had had a nervous breakdown and dad had taken her and the baby to Morisset in Cessnock. My cousin took the baby over and reared him and we had housekeepers and aunties and cousins come over at different times to look after us.
One of our uncles worked on a property in the country with a family of six children and a very clever wife. They took two of us for quite a while. I know we were taught in a school in a specially set-up school room. My uncle was a very sick man and they must have found it hard to take us, but we were treated the same as the others and I think we were even given a new dress each. You don’t realise what people have done until you go back down memory lane. Thanks Uncle Bert and Aunty Ida.
Not long after these years there came the war. The boys wore a rough style of uniform – the rough wool that made into pants and tunic must have given the boys prickly heat because the material was rough.
At this time the price of rabbit skins shot to the top of the market, £1.00 a pound was terrific money for rabbiters. Dad was rabbiting by this time and on Saturday mornings the skin buyer was the best bloke in town because that was where the money was at. To avoid paying tax the men would sell skins and get their receipts in the names of the most unlikely people; our local priest, Parliamentarians, the Postmaster, the Station Master – even the Pope, called Mr Pope, had receipts made out to him. These skins were to make hats for the boys.
My favourite brother Jack went to war but only to New Guinea where he was an Ambulance bearer. I still remember the soldiers cake tins stitched into unbleached calico cloth. The tins could be bought for 1/6 and were called Soldier Cake tins because the mothers, wives and girlfriends sent fruit cakes to the boys in them. These were about 9 pence and were pumped out of factories by the thousand because of the hard travelling these parcels would be doing. They were wrapped in unbleached calico and then the names were written in different coloured inks. My sister once spent her coupons on precious ‘butter’ and spent hours making shortbread biscuits for her boyfriend who was a Prisoner of War in Germany. I wonder how they travelled?
I didn’t have a boyfriend at this time so my brother got a parcel from me nearly every two weeks. Boot polish, books, the local newspaper, sweets if we could ever get them. Our sweets were 100s and 1000s, condensed milk and tablets of jelly, not in the crystal sugar form but a rather tough jelly that had taken this form when the war started.
When I was working in the shop I spoke of before (where) McKenzies we were always sorry for the mothers and fathers who came shopping for Christmas presents for their children. If we were lucky we would get about four or five Cyclops wheel toys and these would probably come into stock about June or July. We had a notebook with names down, first in, first served. The rest of the toys like stick horses and rockers and anything that should have been made of timber was made out of compressed sawdust that was terribly fragile. The outsides of these toys had a thin coating of paint but if you rubbed the toy with your fingers the sawdust would flake in your hands. They disintegrated even before they left the shop – towards the end of the war we were able to buy solid wooden toys, blocks, pull along trains, pull along ducks and other animals and the peg in the block type with a little wooden hammer provided. I imagine they were made in convalescent hospitals because a lot of our boys were coming home crippled and being rehabilitated.
Before the war in the late 1930s the Saturday night dances were not always popular with mothers. They said good girls don’t go to Saturday night dances - it sounded like a dirty word to me as you realise the 6pm closing didn’t stop drinking. I don’t think women drank much but the men always had a flash in their pupils or a demijohn or other vessels holding alcohol, in the sulky or back of cars. This mode of social drinking went on till the late 50s. When the boys started to go to the war especially overseas the Saturday night dances turned into Farewell dances with speeches and everyone brought a plate and provided supper. The kids were even brought - I have seen little bodies lying head to toe wrapped in big blankets asleep on the long seats that lined the supper room wall. Sometimes these dances were called Welcome Home dances, same rules applying.
One woman would come to the dances every time and make some excuse for not bringing a plate. She was always beautifully dressed and a good dressmaker but wouldn’t cook. It made the other not so well dressed women’s blood boil because she generally had a good supper and managed to pop a little extra left over to take home to her husband who didn’t dance. Every one watched to see if she had bought anything for supper and it got to be a big joke after a while.
The material shortage as fairly extensive we had jackets made out of men’s flannels, the type the shearers today still use today to shear in.
One evening frock I had made was white mosquito net dyed black and it had some silver sequins sewn on the skirt. The sequins I found in the back of a draw in the shop and were something left over from the 1930s. The frock for your information was terrible because the black dye was very dull and the under skirt was not suitable. I wore it once.
When or if you have ever heard the song ‘their either too young or too old’ it was terribly true. When a dance was held you either danced with frail old men and held them up or danced with the middle aged men with the poddy tummy which stuck into you. If you could get a boy of 16 up and on the floor he was so shy and stumbly and held on with wet hands and looked at his feet and took big wide steps.
After this you really only had girlfriends to dance with and to me this was no fun so I took the job on as usherette at the local theatre. The pay on Saturdays was 2/6 a night and on Tuesday nights I got in for free because the boss and his wife could manage on their own on a quiet night.
I would go to the dance from the pictures on Saturday nights in the months of July and August because at best you might get a dance with a man. This was the time the teams of shearers arrived to shear all the sheep on the properties in the district but I found these men were pretty much what we had at home. So now I don’t like dances at all and suffer if I have to go out socially even though I can dance enough not to disgrace myself.
At this time petrol was very short and coupons were scarce. The new invention was a charcoal burner which was a big baggy contraption that fitted over the top of the car. Dad started a new venture by producing charcoal and he made a kiln, then burnt the wood to a certain degree and then extinguished the fire but the charcoal contraption didn’t work very well as I only saw it on two or three cars.
(5830)
The other baby was buried in a little grave on the property Rocky Glen which was mother’s family property. It had iron railings and a huge bed of arum lilies. There was also a larger grave there but I don’t remember who was buried there. This was quite a common practice in those days.
My mother’s family home was situated four miles from Gulf Creek -then a flourishing town then and the reason was a Copper Mine. The town had four hotels and wine gooeys; shops of all kinds and a school. There were a lot of Chinese working the mine beside other nationalities. This mine closed down in the 1930s, not because the copper was finished but because it was found to be too hard and expensive to get at. I think that there have been a few tentative investigations as to the feasibility of trying to open up again. Today there are just a few old homes left in the town.
My mother and her brothers and sisters (13 of them) were all reared at Rocky Glen. The first few children were born in a bark hut but as the finances became available they built a very nice big home. It had verandahs on all three sides and there always seemed to be carnations and honeysuckle growing in the garden. The nectarine, peach, apricot and plum trees always seemed to have ripe fruit in them – I suppose because we spent only summer school holidays out there had a lot to do with that.
The front verandah was lined with beds and even though it was the front of the house, everyone came in the back way, even important visitors.
The young adult uncles who worked the property would come in for a big heavy midday lunch that my old maiden aunt would cook. They would then go and lie on the beds in the shade and sleep. My sister and I would be paid to keep the flies off while they slept. At about two o’clock they would put their socks and boots on and go out to the horses and ride away until dark. It was exciting when we would see Uncle Ray ride up with a sheep up on the front of the saddle with him and we would be allowed to go down to the yards to watch him kill. They would do this common task in a few minutes and I always marvelled at the way the skin would be punched off with the closed fist. The flap of skin would be held up in one hand and of course by this time the carcass would be held by the hind legs and raised on a hoist. Once skinned, the skin was thrown over a fence to dry and the carcass was hauled up higher, gutted and the entrails thrown into a bucket. The carcass was then raised higher to keep it away from marauders of the night (dogs and foxes) and by this time it was dark and the butcher had a bath ready at the homestead. The water for the bath tub was boiled in the copper and carried to the bathroom on the end of the verandah. The bathroom always smelt of Lux soap.
The next morning at dawn, the by now set carcass had bled out and stiffened and was taken to the gauzed in meat house. In the meat house there were a couple of very wide, round, solid wood blocks strong enough to hold any weight. There was no refrigeration in those days, only drip safes so I would imagine there would be a lot of meat fed to the dogs. The meat would have to be cooked in joints and eaten cold with hot vegetables. I think the dogs got a lot of flaps as the household got sick of mutton of any kind, especially the cheaper cuts.
Once when I stayed out there my father was putting in a dam on the neighbouring property – it was called tank sinking or dam sinking. The team consisted of a couple of draught horses and a scoop. The scoop was a huge cast iron scoop about five feet wide and this had a type of hinged handle that could be moved forwards and backwards. The horses would be hitched up to this machine and then the scoop was pushed into the ground and eventually a hole was scooped out and formed into a dam for storing water. Sometimes when the dry season was on, the existing dam had to be scooped out and cleared of silt. Quite often the scoop would yield a torrent of muddy water and also some catfish or fresh water fish. The farmers would put a few fish in the dams from the creeks. These were for private eating – these fish did taste a bit muddy but if they weren’t too fat they were a good change of diet.
Dad scooped out a sugar bag of these fish on one such day when he was cleaning out a dam. After he finished his days’ work he saddled up his horse and rode over to grandmas with the fish – lovely.
I just mentioned a sugar bag. When they shopped in the old days they usually shipped flour and sugar by the bag. Tea was sold by the case which held 14 tins. The cases were always lined with heavy foil and the tea tins were nice looking tins with a round lid and in the middle there were nearly always embossed pictures of beautiful girls from India picking fresh tea buds. The tinned fruit came in cases, especially sliced peaches, and it was a bonus to get the half peaches instead of the sliced. The juice from these tins was drunk to the last drop. Dates were dried and came in big packs and the dried fruit came by the pound - I often sneaked into the pantry for a handful of fruit.
A big luxury in those days was bought biscuits -they were a work of art. They would be a plain biscuit but the top of the tops were really beautiful. Hard lolly type flowers, flat icing with messages written on them; some had jam with icing flowers on top of that and there were some with hundreds and thousands on them. Does anyone remember the fairy cakes? I wonder how they kept them so fresh. Some had jam inside and the other had pink and some had white icing on them. Grandma bought them.
When we went to school we used to have to carry lunch from home, usually doorstop jam or tomato or boiled egg. I loved and still do love squashy tomato sandwiches and can still remember the school port smell of all these flavours mixed in together.
There were lots of us kids and I suppose we were poor and I remember we had to take our lunch to school as we always had plenty of food but we also had plenty for anyone that came to our home. Mum was always cooking scones and cakes and tarts but we never had any cash I don’t think. One family of kids - there were about the same amount in the family as we had, were allowed to go to the shop and book up to their father’s account 3 pence worth of broken biscuits, the same I spoke of before. You could buy these biscuits because there were accidents on our bad roads and rough rail carriage and so they couldn’t be sold because of being broken. I suppose they would get about a pound of these biscuits every day. We envied that family because they were allowed to buy broken biscuits, but sometimes we could swap for fruit from our orchard and if they felt good they would give us what was left to share between us.
This family and our family were the best friends you could have – they seemed to have a kid where ever we did and as each girl and boy came along were good friends. As I said, we were Catholic and they were more strict than we were, speaking for myself, if not my brothers and sisters. My particular friend used to laugh a lot and sometimes we would make her laugh until she wet her pants, but she and the whole family had personality plus.
When we first moved into the home that was built about 55 years ago it was on a river flat and there were Chinese gardeners living there. They weren’t very happy about people building a house on what they thought was their land and they were alright when dad was there but when mum was home without dad, Old Georgy Wye would walk round the house at night calling out in Chinese and carrying a big knife.
It was a three acre block of land and the land was river loam and we always had beautiful vegetables. Dad finally came to some arrangement with Old Georgy – he could leave his hut on the ground but he was to garden for us and share the vegetables. I don’t know how long he worked for us but I know that was that arrangement. He had an opium pipe that he used to smoke and up to the last few years the opium poppy bloomed in the garden. We didn’t know what was but I personally though it was a pretty but a rather useless flower as the petals didn’t stay on the big bulby thing that they were growing from. I once asked dad “What is that poppy for?” and he said “That’s an opium poppy” but there was no interest from either us. As a matter of fact I realized that is what it was that grew wild in our garden after I saw it on colour TV in a documentary last week.
After Georgy Wye we had an Indian working in the garden under the same terms but he lived in the shed. Dad burned the Chinaman’s hut down so probably they did not part on the best of terms.
The Indian was named Mahomed – he was tall with a long beard and turban. He also used to smoke a pipe but he was a nice old man and sometimes we were allowed to watch him smoke his pipe. It had water bubbling through it and was something to see. He used to sing in a high quivery voice. I only just happened to go past his door once and I think he was on his knees praying so it was probably his evening prayer.
Sometimes Mahomed would give us pieces of Johnny Cake – a very thin white type of bread, it wasn’t particularly nice that I could remember but was something to talk about. Later a beautiful young Indian girl came to live in town in a little house. Mum said she was his daughter out from India so we lost our Indian as he joined with his daughter.
The next man in the garden was a retired farm labourer. He was a good gardener and he would eat with us and I think he used to drink. I don’t think mum liked him much. I know he was fussy about the jam he ate so mum used to put cheap plum jam in another tin and he would eat it.
The next one was Pierre. His mother I think was French and she came from Sydney and brought Pierre to live in Barraba. I think he was a bit soft in the head – he was a Police pimp when he lived in Sydney and whether things got too hot for him there they came to our quiet town. He loved kids and did odd jobs in the flower garden. Sometimes when mum gave him fruit and vegetables he would make her a present of a beautiful bouquet that his mother would send down. He loved his mother, and my little brother, when asked what he was going to be when he grew up he said “I am going to stay home and mind you mum just like Pierre looks after his mother”. My little brother had a funny bone sticking out at the back of his shoulders we used to joke saying that’s where Jimmy wings should be growing, he’s our little angel. We didn’t know how close we were because Jimmy died of tetanus at the age of ten and a half. He was a good little fellow and was an altar boy and trudged through the early morning frost to answer the mass. (Jimmy was gored by a bull and developed tetanus PP)
Talking about drip safes earlier reminds me of when my mother went away for a few days. My sister, a girlfriend and myself were the cooks. We could all cook very well as there was always plenty to do. Dad always had mum working for him and we always had a full table. On this spring day we served the vegetables and meat and we always served sweets or pudding as it was called in those days. So one of us girls went out to the little sort of greenhouse out the back where the dry safe was kept. We knew that there were more stewed peaches and junket and custard but what we didn’t know was that a big green frog thought that the peaches looked like a lovely place to rest. So after a discussion between the three cooks we decided sweets would still be on the menu, so the frog was swiftly evicted and the men had sweets. Dad said “Aren’t you girls having pudding?” we smiled nicely and declined but we nearly exploded with mirth whilst washing up. Years later we told dad and he just said we were a couple of larrikins – that was a great expression in those days.
I loved my father – he had a beautiful singing voice and used to put us on his knee and swing us up and down and sing songs until another child got big enough to push us off. He had a wonderful sense of humour – he would go out to work with his mate or mum on Sunday afternoons in his rubber tyred sulky with runny butter and enough bread and fresh and cooked food to do until Friday.
On Saturday mornings he would go ‘up the street’. In those days the shops were open on Saturday afternoons and the half-holiday was Wednesday and that’swhen all the girls washed their hair. The pubs would close at 6 pm and mum never had to get tea on Saturdays because dad would come home a few sheets to the wind. In the summer we had saveloys and tomato sauce, sometimes with salad. They were a pretty new invention but even in those days they were called saveloys.
In the winter time the Saturday tea would be hot pies – beautiful meaty and juicy ones with mashed potatoes, peas and gravy. We would also be given a bag of boiled lollies and dad’s favourite – red butterballs and sometimes big coconuts or peanuts. I’ll never forget those nights with the open fire; sometime we got balloons to blow up and chase around the room.
One winter’s day we came back from the river; there were so many of us we didn’t need friends but we always had at least one each. Mum used to feed us all, there were probably eight of us but when we got home we could hear music and wonder of wonder we had a wireless. It was a big shiny brown piece of furniture with a small dial. I don’t think up to that time I even knew about wirelesses. It never occurred to me that we would have such a wonderful thing in our house. After that, on Sunday nights we used to hurry through tea, wash up and get a cushion as there wouldn’t have been enough comfortable chairs to go round, and we would settle down by the open fire and we would listen to the Lux theatre, a Sunday night play. Some nights it was Mrs O’BBs, Martin’s Corner and Amateur Hour, Jack Davey and Mo McCackie – life was good.
Sunday was always for us Catholics up early – mum and the younger children went to first mass and the bigger girls got up and cooked brunch and did the rooms and then mum and the younger ones sat down and served breakfast. We washed up and finished the work and peeled the vegetables. This enabled the ones that went to late mass to buy the papers, talk to friends and dawdle home. This process was carried out all the year with late and early mass rotating. This way dad was not so put out about mum going to mass. He was a bit like his mother and didn’t like tykes and thought that the priest got their money too easy. I think now that dad was probably more put out by the fact that he wanted mum to stay in bed with him.
My sister that was two years older than me was a saintly little girl. She had a head of black hair bobbed short and the shine of her head always looked like a halo. She was always ‘good little Eddie’ as she never seemed to do anything wrong. As she got older she was a fantastic skipper- she could do all sorts of skips but when she did Salt & Pepper we would start to say “Flip, flop” and then she would throw away the rope and run away and cry. She had what today is called a beautiful bust and with no bra it did jump up and down. We always knew we could get her out of skipping competitions by embarrassing her.
I must have been a terrible kid but apparently I looked like an angel. I had long blonde ringlets that my older sister insisted that I have whilst holding me between her legs in a grip that I could not get out of. She would grit her teeth and hang on while I struggled and swore bullock driver’s language at her. I had a lot of good teachers - as I said before, my father always had teamsters around especially when the big wagon and all the draught horses were home. The men used to congregate probably to do repairs and fix harnesses, so I really knew the expressions and where to use them; all the hidings in world never stopped me. (Makes me feel better – must be genetic PP)
It was my job to get the wood and chips in for the kitchen and lounge room fire. I had to do this after school, but can’t turn a game or marbles, hopscotch or rounders down just to get the chips in. I forgot once too often and my favourite and oldest brother Jack, who by this time had his own fruit run selling door to door on a cart and horse, had to make the fire early in the morning. He tried so often to make the fire with wet wood so one morning at an unearthly hour I was pulled out of bed by the back of my pyjamas and carried by the neck and dropped in the middle of the wood heap in the frost. I had never seen frost before or after like the frost I was standing in. I couldn’t believe that this could happen to me - I likened myself to a sloth that morning crawling around trying to find something to offer my brother to get the fire going. After school my mate Vera and I got to work with the axe and Tommy Hawk and cut eight boxes full of pine. I didn’t have to chop the wood, I was probably too small but we were never without chips again while it was my job to do so.
When I was ten it was my job to watch the breakfast while mum milked the cow. I had to stir the porridge, turn the chops in the biggest frying pan I have ever seen, make the toast by the fire coals and set the table. Mum fried the eggs and served the meals. The job suited me because I hated the cold and never seemed to be warm. All I worried about when I was a kid was that the world would burn all the wood and I would be cold. I didn’t know about heaters or coal.
My younger sister didn’t have to do much till she grew older but she always told mum everything that we did wrong.
The crockery suffered at our house. Twice the scrubbed pine dresser was pulled over when one of us wasn’t tall enough to get something down and climbed up using the dresser for leverage. The whole lot toppled on whoever was unlucky enough and happened to be standing there. On one such Saturday morning dad said “I’ll fix I so that they won’t break the next lot” and so on his Saturday excursion he went shopping and came home that night with a large box. In the box were aluminium butter dishes, aluminium jam dishes, aluminium salt and pepper shakers, aluminium milk jugs and an aluminium sugar basin, all with little lids with red knobs. Dad handed them over and we excitedly set to work filling all the dishes. Edna climbed on a chair to get the sugar caddy from the mantel piece over the stove, she jumped to the floor at the same time the new beautiful shiny sugar basin fell to the floor and was crushed to death. We all stopped in dead shock then dad laughed until we thought he might burst, we all laughed after that but we never got a new sugar basin.
My eldest sister was a good knitter and she was always walking around knitting with a ball of wool under her arm. Mum couldn’t knit so mum did the work while Eileen knitted for the babies.
One Christmas, the toys were all in a wardrobe and just a few nights before Santa was to come, mum and dad were out, and we bigger kids had a game with the toys, bounced the balls and wound the tops and put them away before we were caught.
On Sunday we used to play Rounders and dad was bowler and mum backstop for both teams. Our bat was a thick piece of pine cut like a cricket bat, we could all make these bats with a few strokes of the Tommy Hawk – the Rounders game was open to all comers as they arrived from across the road and from up the flat. Man, woman and child they came. It was family days in those days and no clubs or sports to take the adults away from us.
The river was our playground. We were all very aware of what would happen to us if we went down there if it had been raining. The waterholes sometimes changed course and made it too deep in places we perhaps had been ten days before. Usually our big brother Jack was the hole tester because he could swim like a fish. I could never learn to dive off the low bank and I only ever learned to paddle but we were like fish, always in the water. We had a special hole called the Pumphouse where a building sat by the high bank and a big mysterious piece of machinery was housed. I can’t remember whether it ever did anything but, it looked very efficient. Next to it was a big cement culvert where the town’s rainwater came out. This part was always deep and I was never game to go over there.
One day the river came up or as they say ‘the river came down’ and the milkman Albert was caught in the midstream crossing. Soon there were men everywhere on the bank shouting instructions. The horse and cart started to float off with Albert standing on the seat; the little metal pint and quart pots floated off and the big milk drums started to go. Dad and Mr McAndle, a neighbour, and other men threw ropes and he was rescued. It was quite a good excuse to go up home and have a cuppa and scones.
The river always had little carp there that we caught in the August school holidays. The sun was nice and we would go to the river for a picnic. The water was too cold to swim in but always one of us would tuck our dresses in our bloomers and pick a bunch of yellow primroses.
Often the frosts in Barraba would stay beside the house till 1 o’clock in the day, we always managed to grow beautiful violets on that side of the house, possible plants from old Mr Jones’s old home by this time being demolished. The florist would ring mum for violets for special wreaths for funerals. This was a source of pocket money for mum and she also had her chooks. She loved those birds and used to talk to them and when they were clucky she would put her hand under them and take the eggs out from underneath them. I was always frightened of them, but they provided mum with a lot of little things that she would not have had otherwise.
My mother had a wonderful sense of morals and we got those from her as we got our sense of humour from dad. She didn’t have much humour left in her after the youngest baby was born – her ninth child. I wouldn’t be feeling very funny either. When the baby was about six weeks old dad took mum on her first ‘holiday’. My aunty and her sister and my elder sisters were all in the pantry crying when the train went at 7 pm. I didn’t know why they were crying but I joined them too and it was twelve months before we saw our mother again. She had had a nervous breakdown and dad had taken her and the baby to Morisset in Cessnock. My cousin took the baby over and reared him and we had housekeepers and aunties and cousins come over at different times to look after us.
One of our uncles worked on a property in the country with a family of six children and a very clever wife. They took two of us for quite a while. I know we were taught in a school in a specially set-up school room. My uncle was a very sick man and they must have found it hard to take us, but we were treated the same as the others and I think we were even given a new dress each. You don’t realise what people have done until you go back down memory lane. Thanks Uncle Bert and Aunty Ida.
Not long after these years there came the war. The boys wore a rough style of uniform – the rough wool that made into pants and tunic must have given the boys prickly heat because the material was rough.
At this time the price of rabbit skins shot to the top of the market, £1.00 a pound was terrific money for rabbiters. Dad was rabbiting by this time and on Saturday mornings the skin buyer was the best bloke in town because that was where the money was at. To avoid paying tax the men would sell skins and get their receipts in the names of the most unlikely people; our local priest, Parliamentarians, the Postmaster, the Station Master – even the Pope, called Mr Pope, had receipts made out to him. These skins were to make hats for the boys.
My favourite brother Jack went to war but only to New Guinea where he was an Ambulance bearer. I still remember the soldiers cake tins stitched into unbleached calico cloth. The tins could be bought for 1/6 and were called Soldier Cake tins because the mothers, wives and girlfriends sent fruit cakes to the boys in them. These were about 9 pence and were pumped out of factories by the thousand because of the hard travelling these parcels would be doing. They were wrapped in unbleached calico and then the names were written in different coloured inks. My sister once spent her coupons on precious ‘butter’ and spent hours making shortbread biscuits for her boyfriend who was a Prisoner of War in Germany. I wonder how they travelled?
I didn’t have a boyfriend at this time so my brother got a parcel from me nearly every two weeks. Boot polish, books, the local newspaper, sweets if we could ever get them. Our sweets were 100s and 1000s, condensed milk and tablets of jelly, not in the crystal sugar form but a rather tough jelly that had taken this form when the war started.
When I was working in the shop I spoke of before (where) McKenzies we were always sorry for the mothers and fathers who came shopping for Christmas presents for their children. If we were lucky we would get about four or five Cyclops wheel toys and these would probably come into stock about June or July. We had a notebook with names down, first in, first served. The rest of the toys like stick horses and rockers and anything that should have been made of timber was made out of compressed sawdust that was terribly fragile. The outsides of these toys had a thin coating of paint but if you rubbed the toy with your fingers the sawdust would flake in your hands. They disintegrated even before they left the shop – towards the end of the war we were able to buy solid wooden toys, blocks, pull along trains, pull along ducks and other animals and the peg in the block type with a little wooden hammer provided. I imagine they were made in convalescent hospitals because a lot of our boys were coming home crippled and being rehabilitated.
Before the war in the late 1930s the Saturday night dances were not always popular with mothers. They said good girls don’t go to Saturday night dances - it sounded like a dirty word to me as you realise the 6pm closing didn’t stop drinking. I don’t think women drank much but the men always had a flash in their pupils or a demijohn or other vessels holding alcohol, in the sulky or back of cars. This mode of social drinking went on till the late 50s. When the boys started to go to the war especially overseas the Saturday night dances turned into Farewell dances with speeches and everyone brought a plate and provided supper. The kids were even brought - I have seen little bodies lying head to toe wrapped in big blankets asleep on the long seats that lined the supper room wall. Sometimes these dances were called Welcome Home dances, same rules applying.
One woman would come to the dances every time and make some excuse for not bringing a plate. She was always beautifully dressed and a good dressmaker but wouldn’t cook. It made the other not so well dressed women’s blood boil because she generally had a good supper and managed to pop a little extra left over to take home to her husband who didn’t dance. Every one watched to see if she had bought anything for supper and it got to be a big joke after a while.
The material shortage as fairly extensive we had jackets made out of men’s flannels, the type the shearers today still use today to shear in.
One evening frock I had made was white mosquito net dyed black and it had some silver sequins sewn on the skirt. The sequins I found in the back of a draw in the shop and were something left over from the 1930s. The frock for your information was terrible because the black dye was very dull and the under skirt was not suitable. I wore it once.
When or if you have ever heard the song ‘their either too young or too old’ it was terribly true. When a dance was held you either danced with frail old men and held them up or danced with the middle aged men with the poddy tummy which stuck into you. If you could get a boy of 16 up and on the floor he was so shy and stumbly and held on with wet hands and looked at his feet and took big wide steps.
After this you really only had girlfriends to dance with and to me this was no fun so I took the job on as usherette at the local theatre. The pay on Saturdays was 2/6 a night and on Tuesday nights I got in for free because the boss and his wife could manage on their own on a quiet night.
I would go to the dance from the pictures on Saturday nights in the months of July and August because at best you might get a dance with a man. This was the time the teams of shearers arrived to shear all the sheep on the properties in the district but I found these men were pretty much what we had at home. So now I don’t like dances at all and suffer if I have to go out socially even though I can dance enough not to disgrace myself.
At this time petrol was very short and coupons were scarce. The new invention was a charcoal burner which was a big baggy contraption that fitted over the top of the car. Dad started a new venture by producing charcoal and he made a kiln, then burnt the wood to a certain degree and then extinguished the fire but the charcoal contraption didn’t work very well as I only saw it on two or three cars.
(5830)