8. Mount Barker

You can come and see the baby
Any day you like to call
It’s lying with its Mammy in its wee white shawl
It looks so neat and swanky
Like a dumpling in a hanky
And we’re going to call it…..

Eilean was born in Mt Barker when I was four. Dad had a job as a wood machinist with a builder called Ducket. Our house was a step up from a mill house, one of several built by Mr Ducket for his workers. Mt Barker being bigger than Nyamup, boasted a hospital, a school and a station. When Mum was in hospital for the birth of my sister,  a beautiful old couple called Mr and Mrs Mills took care of me. ( my Scottish parents never easily called people by their first names.) I rode on the handlebars of my father’s bike to the Mills’ house. Once there, I remember deliberately screaming, not because I disliked being with them, but because I wanted to go to work with Dad. The poor man would look distraught as he left me sobbing, but as soon as he was out of sight, I happily accepted the situation and forgot about him. I am still amazed at my attempt of manipulation at such a young age.

One day the other children in the street. invited me on a walk to collect wildflowers. I was the youngest and so proud to be included. We gathered big armfuls of bright red and green kangaroo paws, blue enamel orchids, yellow donkey orchids, and even the prized spider orchids were thick on the ground that year. Suddenly I was being thoroughly told off by Margaret Greg, the oldest of the children. If you pulled the flowers up by the roots they wouldn’t grow next year, she told me crossly. And so I received my first lesson in conservation, delivered by the daughter of the local builders’ union representative, in a style perhaps learned from her father.  

Jock Greg was fellow Scot, and a staunch unionist. He constantly argued for better conditions and wages for the workers. Once when Mum cut through the bush from our house to the building works, the old outside dunny was on fire. Jock had got sick of asking for the smelly, fly-attracting, as he called it, shithouse, to be replaced by a more hygienic facility, and had put a match to it. It was probably a sign of how scarce labour was after the war that he kept his job.

As the first, and for a while, the only child, I was certainly not spoiled, but I was indulged. I know I wasn’t spoiled by comparing myself with the boy next door whose mother gave into his every scream. My mother was not so silly. One of our treats was to lick the bowl after our mothers had made a cake. My mother would thriftily scrape out all she could with her wooden spoon and leave the rest for us. Even as a four year old it struck me as ridiculous that my little friend’s mother would leave a quarter of the cake in the bowl for us to feast upon. It was too much of a good thing, as my granny was fond of saying. I know I was indulged because I wished for, and received a beautiful Hornsby train set for my fourth Christmas. Trains featured large in my life at this time.

Mt Barker had a station, with a railway line that ran to Albany on the southern coast. From the moment they first saw Albany, Mum and Dad dreamed of living there. It was more like Scotland than any other place they had seen in Australia with its rugged coast, its wild beaches and its islands. We went on day trips on the train and explored Albany by bus. We all loved Middleton Beach with its little jetty, and picnic tables on the terraced hillside, and its squeaky, fine, white sand. I came home from these trips with my little handbag full of shells. Back home in Mt Barker, I could still hear the sea by holding a shell to my ear.

 

On a visit Middleton beach one day we met a family who had been on the Mooltan with us. From them we learned that land was being opened up on the outskirts of Albany. Before long my father announced that he had bought a block of land with the last fifty pounds of their savings. Mary hit the roof. In later years I couldn’t imagine him making such an important decision without first consulting Mary, but I guess he learned. Mary was fearful about spending the last of their savings, but also disappointed because she knew we could have had a block looking over the harbour for the same price.

Soon Dad was going to Albany more frequently taking his bike and his tool bag on the train, cycling to our half acre of bush. There was no other house within cooee. Dad had the promise of a job  with a builder, Phil Jewell, if they moved to Albany. Phil helped them in many ways including letting my father demolish an old house for the materials he needed to start his own. Pre-war shortages in building materials still prevailed and everything was recycled including nails that Dad straightened and reused.

One day John came back to Mt Barker and announced that the house was ready to move into. The move was a day I will never forget. All our furniture was loaded onto the back of one of Ducket’s small trucks. At the very back was the lounge where Mum with baby Eilean, and I, precariously perched, clinging on so as not the fall down as we jolted over the unsealed road blurring below us. I still wonder now why Dad sat in the small front cab with the driver instead of Mum with the baby in her arms. Dad was usually the most considerate of men but the Australian culture meant women and children in the back and  presumably Dad had to tell Phil where to go. The trees swished by and disappeared behind us at a sickening pace as we lurched along the road looking out the back. I sat rigid and terrified for the whole journey.

We eventually turned off the main road and down an overgrown bush track. Only a few vehicles had been to our block flattening the scrub in their path. My mother took one look at the house and let out a wail.

“I thought you said it was ready,” she cried.

This was to be the first stage of the house; two rooms at the back, one for living and one for sleeping which would later become the laundry and a sleep-out. Right now it was a wooden floor on stumps, a roof and little else. My mother was assured the rest would happen quickly but this didn’t appease her as she battled to make some sort of a meal on a primus burner, heat a bottle for the baby and wash the dishes in a basin. That night the four of us slept on a double mattress on the floor covered with a big green mosquito net. The next day was Christmas Day. The last straw for my mother was finding the leg of pork she had cooked for our Christmas dinner, “blown by the bloody blow flies”. She sat down and howled.

 

Clearing the block in Albany.