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
