Category: Calling Australia Home

It was time to move from the farm and strike out on our own with our meagre possessions. John’s treasure was his accordion and Mary’s was her sewing machine. My father got a job in the Nyamup mill, so he no longer had the twenty-mile pushbike ride from West Manjimup to Pemberton everyday. Here they were given a small home of their own. This was a luxury, albeit a very basic one. Mary enjoyed making the tiny weatherboard house into a home. Using cochineal she died some of the sheets she had brought from Scotland and made curtains. She put her grandmother’s big black teapot on the mantelpiece.

 

Dad and me, Nyamup 1950

They bought a few second hand bits of furniture, but when Walter, a Yugoslavian mill worker wandered through the front door, drawn by the music of John’s accordion the only seat he could be offered was a packing case. Walter (pronounced Volter) was typical of many of the mill workers – a post-war refugee thrown into an alien world. A young lonely man without family or friends, he made toys, including a beautifully crafted rocking horse, for the children of the tiny town.

A week after arriving in Nyamup, Mary and John were invited to a social gathering one evening. I believe I was left asleep while they enjoyed their first real night out since they arrived in Australia. At the end of the evening they walked out of the hall and realised they had no idea how to find their way back to their house. Each tiny weatherboard dwelling was identical to the next.

We’ll not be able to find our house. They’re all the same, said Mary to another woman.

Don’t you worry about that, said the woman. Yours is the house with the red lights.

Mary went straight home and tore down the curtains.

The summer heat was oppressive for the new comers. The only relief came from sitting in the Wilgarup River, or the wee burn,as they called it. To their horror they came out with their soft, white Scottish bodies dangling with leaches.

Most shopping was done once a fortnight in Manjimup, and it was hard keeping any fresh food. Blow flies were the bane of everyone’s life. There was no refrigeration, just meat safes and the occasional ice chest, which was a luxury my parents didn’t have. If throwing tantrums could scare away blow flies, our little home would have been free of them, but the buzzing creature blithely ignored Mary’s ranting, and proceeded to deposit their squirming offspring on any morsel as soon as her back was turned. She would look on in disbelief as the locals washed the maggots off a joint of meat and calmly continue to carve it.

When we were children my mother never bought a rabbit from a butcher shop after seeing what happened at the farm. Rabbits were pests. A cow could break a leg by stumbling into a rabbit warren, and they ate valuable pasture. My uncle would trap the rabbits and sell the skins for felt. The carcasses were left on a nail for the truck from Diamond Meats to pick up. Sometimes they would hang on that nail for days, and Mum said they would be crawling with maggots before the Diamond truck would arrive.

Bread was delivered to Nyamup a couple of times a week. Our usual order was an upright loaf. However one day the baker had run out of uprights and left a poppy seed loaf. My mother took one look at the loaf and took off up the road after him. The poor baker then had a hard time explaining that he wasn’t taking advantage of a new chum. He had run out of bread and he thought she’d like a nice poppy seed loaf, and: No! Those little black things are not baked maggots. They really are seeds.

The Timber Train in Nyamup

Mum, tell us the one about the marron.

There was so much to get used to in this new Australian life – and so much to be frighted of. One night, Mary and John sat in the farmhouse alone, the sky darkening with a brewing storm. On other nights, the birdcalls rose to a crescendo before a sudden and deep hush descended. This night there were no birds. The rain thundered on the tin roof of the farmhouse so hard that Mary, eyes wide with fear, had to yell at John to be heard. Why would anyone be knocking on a night like this? They were miles from nowhere. John pulled back the bolt on the top half of the stable door that led from the kitchen to the veranda and he said his heart leapt. The dripping apparition before him lifted its hood slightly. It was a man wearing a hessian sack slit up the side to form a crude cape. His face was in darkness but a muscular arm shot forward and thrust another hessian sack at John, saying: Something for your dinner.

John grasped the bag, trying to find words but the man touched his hand to the sack on his head. He turned and left without the couple having a clue who he was. My father then realised whatever was in the bag was alive and kicking. He dropped it in fright. The couple watched in horror as a beast, such as they had never seen, slowly crawled from the sack, throwing macabre shadows on the hessian walls. In the dim light of the kerosene lamp, Mary screamed and stood on a wooden chair. They’re playing tricks on us, John. Bloody Australians! They think it’s funny to torment the new chums.,

John kept his eye on the slow-moving beast, while he reached for the packing case that served as a spare chair for visitors, and brought it down, the open side over the big black crawly thing, trapping it.

I’m away to check the bairn. Mary sidled around the crate keeping a frightened eye on it. Get rid of that thing, John, she said.

And what do you suggest I do with it, woman?

It then dawned on my Mother that my father was out of his depth. She remembered Doug’s sister, Jean and grabbed the phone on the wall, winding the handle six times. She had seldom ever used a telephone and nervously asked to be connected to the Littles’ house.

That’d be Bryn Morgan. That was nice of him, said Jean. You can cook that for your supper. Just boil the stock pot with a good cupful of salt, pick him up and pop him in for ten minutes.”

That was good enough for Mary. Good food could never be wasted, but John shook his head in disbelief as they boiled a great pot of water on the stove. He then hurriedly threw a towel over the monstrous marron and bundled it in alive. He remembered shuddering about the barbarity of what he had just done. He also remembered the pleasure of this new taste.

In 1949 Mary and John were New Australians and as such, considered oddities. For a start, the way they talked was different, with their broad Scottish accent. Much of their speech contained a Glaswegian dialect that they soon learned not to use if they wanted to be understood. They had to learn the many Australian ways of speech including the confusing slang. Mary would go into the drapery store and ask for Kibry grips, and be right scunnered to find the shopkeeper look at her as if she were talking Japanese. Eventually, she would find what the locals called hairpins and point to them. Almost every task no matter how simple was different and often difficult. Wood was burnt for cooking and heating instead of coal. When Mum complained to someone that she couldn’t get the fire to start, it was suggested that her wood may be green. She replied indignantly: No, it’s brown – the same as yours.

One escape from reality for Mary was through the love of reading, but even this simple pleasure was difficult. The oil lamps were too dim to read or write by until she eventually braved the long walk to Manjimup and bought a Tilly lamp. Mary was looking forward to reading the work of Australia’s famous writer, Patrick White. His reputation had spread to Scotland. However, when inquiring at the small local library, about the author, who was to go on and win the Nobel Prize for literature, she was told indignantly by the librarian that she didn’t stock books by the likes of him and had no intention of ever doing so. At this stage so much of the Australian culture seemed to challenge.

John found work in a timber mill in Pemberton twenty miles away. He set out early each morning on his bike. Mary left alone for much of the day, tried to help around the farm. Uncle Doug would go off to the paddocks to clear the great trees and prepare the land for growing potatoes. Aunty

 

 Clearing Land to Grow Potatoes

Helen suffered much in the nine months of her pregnancy sick and needed help. Mary learned to milk a cow, tend the vegetable garden and collect the eggs. She overcame her fear of the hens, to do as she was told and feel under the broody birds. She complained one day that one of the hens hadn’t laid an egg all week. My father went out to the shed and lifting up the stiff bundle of feathers declared it had been dead for days. I don’t think we’ll ever make a farmer out of you, Doug had said. But Mary had no intentions of staying on the farm.                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

 

                                                              

I have been a stranger in a strange land.

Exodus 2.22

I’m not sure how we found our way to the farm in Manjimup. Partly by train from Fremantle to Bunbury, a journey held up by a fallen tree on the line. I can only imagine what that trip must have been like for the couple, with a young child, straight off the ship from the UK.  Thrown into the deep end of Australian country life, our only support for would come from Doug’s sister and family. My parents could contact Jean by winding the handle of the big black phone on the wall and asking the operator to connect them. This was a high-tech contrast to the rest of the farm, which at that time, remained in the nineteenth century.                                           

The train to Bunbury stopped by a fallen tree

The farm was part of the war-settlement scheme. Originally from South Australia, my uncle came from a sheep farming family. Now he needed to learn the dairy business. Sheep couldn’t survive in the soggy country of the south-west. We used to say it rained for nine months of the year and the rain dripped off the trees for the other three. Hence the importance of the dairy-farming course in Harvey which coincided with our arrival in Australia.                                                                                               

It was four miles to Manjimup along the dusty Graphite Road. Mary walked there and back to buy supplies such as flour and sugar. She was always terrified and never got used to seeing dingos cross the road, or worse still large dugites and tiger snakes. She was always grateful for a lift from Mrs Randall, an elderly neighbour with an old Buick, even though the passenger door was wired up and she had to climb in through the window.

 

I loved the farm in Manjimup, especially the house. I believe it was built over a hundred years ago by Mrs Randall’s parents. In one of the paddocks was a pretty little graveyard surrounded by a white picket fence. The graves of Mr and Mrs Ralston were shaded by several flowering fruit trees. To me it was was a beautiful and sacred place, but my uncle had no time to tend it, and it fell into disrepair. I believe the family have now moved the graves to the town cemetery. I can’t remember whether it was Mrs Randall (Daisy) or her sister Mrs Simpson who was a wonderful artist. The family came from a genteel background in England. Mrs Simpson’s husband “Tiny” (he was a very large man) was a remittance man. A remittance man was typically a younger son, often with a problem, (in other words he didn’t quite fit into the rigid society of upper-class Victorian England) who was paid an allowance by his wealthy family to go and make his fortune in the colonies. Stories of Tiny included his love of gambling and his lack of interest in farming. The feats of both him and his wife are legendary in the district. They both made trips on horseback to Bunbury, more than one hundred miles and once Tiny was said to have walked the distance taking a broken plough on his back to be mended. 

 

              Dad  and me at Warwick Hill Farm   

Mum’s memories were of being invited to have afternoon tea. It was Limoges china, silverware and serviettes while trying to ignore the evidence that the mice had been at the cake, she once said. It was also said that Mrs Simpson never had to wash any of Tiny’s socks. When they were dirty they were thrown out because his family back in England kept him in such copious supply. I remember my father coming back to the farm exhausted and blackened after fighting a fire at the Simpson’s place and shaking his head with disbelief because Tiny had been sitting back in his chair on the veranda watching the proceedings, and at one stage asking for an opinion about a local horse race. Was this my memory or a story that has been told so many times I can’t tell the difference? I do have memories, from a later date of the Simpson’s house on a hill not far from Doug and Helen’ farm, and how Mrs Simpson used to tip the ashes from her stove onto the paddocks, setting fire to them and threatening the whole area at least once a year.

Growing Potatoes at Warwick Hill

The farm was called Warwick Hill and the house was a rambling weatherboard structure with verandas on one side and a pergola on the other. Gnarled trunks of wisterias strangled the veranda posts, and in summer the whole structure was a glorious purple shower. At the back was an old stable door in two parts. In the centre of the house was an enormous lounge room with a massive fireplace, which in winter was kept blazing, fed by great lumps of Jarrah. The floor was polished jarrah and French doors on both sides led to the verandas. On one end was a row of bedrooms. In contrast to the magnificent lounge room, the bedrooms were basic. The only other furniture besides the wrought iron beds were packing cases, sometimes one atop another to form a rough dresser. The walls were Hessian, and my mother remembered the time  they caught alight from the oil lamp in the room where I slept.

On the other end of the house was the large kitchen that also served as the dining area, and tacked on the end of the kitchen, like an afterthought were the laundry and bathroom. When we first came to Australia the house had a bathroom with a bath that had to be filled with a bucket of water warmed by the kettle. With a few minor changes, it remained that way throughout my childhood. It was all very different from what you see in houses today. The cast iron bath sat on the concrete floor. Later a stand that held a forty-four-gallon drum full of water was added. This was heated to scalding by the slow combustion stove in the kitchen, which was alight night and day, fed by the plentiful supply of wood from the clearings. The towels were hung on nails beside the pedestal which held the basin. A couple of packing cases were used to put such things as hairbrushes on. I don’t ever remember brushing my teeth in those days.

The laundry was a simple affair half open to the elements and contained a copper set into a brick fireplace and a grey cement trough on a stand. I don’t think we even had a wringer. That was done by hand. Years later next to the laundry was the inside toilet which replaced the original dunny that was down the back path – such luxury. It was flushed by pulling a chain that released the water from the small cement tank above. The best thing was that we could use tissue paper instead of newspaper. The tissue paper was normally used for wrapping apples for market. It came in green squares and wads of it were skewered on a hook made of a bent piece of wire.

At the back of the farmhouse, the path led past the old fruit packing shed and pig-sty. These weathered wooden buildings were grey with age and green with moss. My parents yearned for the clean and new after the grime of Glasgow. But these structures hewn with axes from the local Jarrah trees whispered past tales and I listened with rapt attention. The vegetable patch was on one side, and the prolific passionfruit vine on the other, then continuing on down the path was a large space shaded huge old oak trees which grew in the middle. The house was reputed to be one hundred years old when I was a child so I’m guessing the several large oaks were just as old – probably planted by the Ralstons to remind them of home.

Mum milking a cow

Down one side of the clearing stretched the bull paddock. Uncle Doug always kept his one bull close to the house so that he could keep an eye on the creature. On the other side was a long line of joined sheds which once were stables, but now had an assortment of uses. My favourite was the feed shed with forty-four-gallon drums of bran and pollen and other grain for the chooks, pigs and cows. The smell of pollen, especially when it is mixed into a mash with warm water for the chooks was irresistible to me. Several times I had to taste it, but like coffee, the smell was always better and I spat it out. Another shed was for gardening and paddock tools: spades, hoes, mattocks and great crosscut saws. Spare parts and mechanical tools were kept in another, and in another, we gutted and skinned rabbits and hung the salted skins up to dry. One of the sheds served as a tack room for all the bridles and saddles and other gear for Jack and Diamond the two great Clydesdales that pulled the plough and harrows on the farm long after tractors were the norm. Occasionally they would also be hitched to the great dray that stood in the clearing and used to bring in the bales of hay. The hay shed delighted all of us kids. We jumped and rolled around in it, scaring the chooks that were trying to find a secret place to nest until we were chased out by Aunty Helen who warned we would be covered in flea bites. Beyond the hay shed was the new pig-sty, and a little further on, the cowshed and dairy.                                                                                                          The plough-horses: Jack and Diamond

In the front of the house, like a constant reminder of more genteel days was a neglected tennis court. Doug and Helen, keen tennis players, always had plans to restore it to its former glory but there was never enough money, and there was an active tennis club within walking distance down the Graphite Road.

The Tennis Courts

As much as I loved the farm, my mother hated it. Part of that was perhaps the fact that they felt like intruders in someone else’s home but she found every part of the life too strange to bear. Once a week the minister visited the outlying farms but Mum and Dad found his views and sermons old-fashioned and stifling. When New Year came my parent’s brought in a bottle of wine. Hogmanay was the biggest and most celebrated event on the Scottish calendar. but my uncle looked upon any form of alcohol with horror and was even aghast that my parents may have been seen buying it. New Year’s Eve that year would have been very different to the festive occasion that Mary and John were used to in Scotland.

Better to die on your feet than to live forever on your knees.

Inscription on the Spanish Civil War Memorial, Customs House, Strathclyde.

During the first part of the 20^th century, the world was in political and economic turmoil. Between the birth of my mother in 1918 and the onset of the Second World War in 1938 was a particularly dark period of history. The devastation of the Great War was still raw in people’s minds, but once again Europe seemed to teeter between peace and war, fascism and communism, democracy and dictatorship, hope and despair. Political unrest was particularly evident in Glasgow where conditions for working class people were amongst the worst in Europe. The heavy industry of Glasgow was hit hard by the depression and during this time a quarter of the workforce was out of a job. The population of Scotland fell as people like my grandfather emigrated to places like Canada, America and Australia to find work.

My grandmother Christina had taken part in the rent strike of 1915 which stopped the landlords from profiteering during the Great War. The success of this strike was held up as a shining example of the power of working-class solidarity for years to come. Ours has always been a very politically aware and opinionated family, and my mother’s formative years were spent in politically tumultuous times. She and her young socialist friends did such things as go from door to door asking for donations of food for the Spanish people caught up in the civil war. The reception they got was often abusive from the mainly conservative Scots who labelled them communists.

Mum’s older brother Peter like many of his peers was determined to be part of the fight against fascism. He found an illegal passage to Spain aboard what was known as a potato boat. These boats smuggled food and young men to the war in Spain. When Peter failed to arrive home in the evening my grandfather smelled a rat and eventually tracked down his son. Threatening the captain with prosecution he hauled the unthankful lad home. Perhaps Peter never forgave his father for this interference in his life, but William would have seen his son for the starry-eyed idealist that he was, and not have wanted for Peter the horrors that he himself had experienced in the Indian Uprising, or the Siege of Ladysmith in the Boer War. Many idealistic young men and women from all over the world travelled to Spain to join the Loyalists fighting against the right-wing forces of General Franco.  These volunteers were known as the International Brigade.  During this war, over 700,000 people, mainly Spanish civilians were killed. Fifty-three young people from Glasgow were among the dead. Franco supported by troops from Germany and Italy was eventually successful and Spain became a Fascist country.                                                      

William Wilson    

 As I noted in the previous blog, Peter was to go on to become the secretary to the fiery young socialist James Maxton. James Maxton was one of the leading figures of the Independent Labour Party in Glasgow and elected to parliament in 1922 where he was highly regarded, even by the people with opposing views including Churchill. Like many of his colleagues in the ILP, Maxton was a pacifist and had campaigned against Britain’s involvement in the First World War and against the introduction of conscription. Maxton was imprisoned in 1916 for delivering pro-strike speeches at a demonstration to oppose the Munitions Act which was passed during this time to prevent workers, disenchanted with the war, from leaving their jobs. Maxton served in the parliament until his death in 1946 and devoted much of his political life to alleviating poverty within the city of Glasgow.