1. Introduction

MEMOIRS OF ANDREW McPHEE

THE STORY OF 

an

ACTIVE LIFE

and a

RELAXED RETIREMENT

NOT POVERTY

I WAS  BORN INTO A FAMILY THAT HAD NO MONEY

BUT WE WERE NOT POOR

MY MOTHER MADE ALL OF OUR CLOTHES ON HER SINGER SEWING MACHINE

WHEN OUR SHOES WORE OUT OUR FATHER REPAIRED THEM

MY MOTHER MADE OUR DAILY BREAD,

MILKED HER COWS FOR MILK AND CREAM  AND MADE THE BUTTER FOR OUR BREAD

MY FATHER GREW FRUIT AND VEGITABLES AND SHEEP

MY MOTHER MADE JAM TO PUT ON THE BREAD AND CHUTNEY FROM THE FRUIT

 TO PUT  ON THE ROAST LAMB

IF WE WANTED SOMETHING WE WOULD MAKE OR BUILD IT

AND WE LOVED EACH OTHER

THE TEN OF US I BELIEVE LIVED BETTER THAN MOST

WITH NO MONEY 

It has been said that if you have to write your own memoirs it is because you are not interesting enough for someone else to write about you and so is not worth doing.

But I wish that my great grandfather, my grandfather and my father had recorded something of their lives for me.  So I am doing this for my children and grandchildren who probably won’t be interested until they are my age.

I also believe that young historians and anthropologists are getting it wrong almost to the extent that they think mankind had television, TV and cars in the stone-age, except that they were made of stone.
And they change history to be politically correct.

I read that if you want to write a book you should follow the rules of political correctness otherwise you won’t get it published.  I thought the arts were supposed to be to prevent society from becoming stagnant, to make people think, to challenge accepted ways so we can progress.  How can we progress if we are virtually forbidden to not conform to the current political correctness??.
Just as well I don’t intend to try to get these memoirs published.
.
In a book called ‘The Year 1000’ by Robert Lacy and Danny Danziger, which is about life in England in the year 1000, an excellent read, but there is an example of applying to-days lifestyle to the past.
On the subject of bread and the fact that people on farms lived too far from villages to shop every day and they did not have cars,
I quote

“Country people must have regularly eaten bread that was a week or more old, softening the crust by dipping it into the gruel-like pottage of grain and vegetables which was the plain but healthy staple of the Englishman’s diet.”

Country people in Australia, who were from England, I know, baked their own bread every morning and they would have brought that habit from England.
This may be a small point but anthropologists are supposed to be scientifically trained to get it right and it shows how they just do not know.
I ask, ‘how much else have they got wrong?’.
I recently saw in an Australian history book a picture of a ‘dipping tin’.  The book said that it was used for drying apricots which is quite wrong, they were used primarily for picking grapes which were then dipped into a liquid before laying them on the drying racks.  I know, I have done it, unlike the writer of this history book who got his research wrong.
Although dip tins were used for other things including burning dried cow dung to keep mosquitoes away, drying apricots was not one of them.
That is why, in my little world, I have gone to the trouble of describing in detail things like the cool safe so that my grand children will know the facts of how it was.

And it is a great pity that the Australian Greenies are not interested in the environment because there needs to be such a political movement that are serious about a sustainable future.  It is obvious that the Greenies have a hidden agenda and although there may be a few members that are genuine mostly the movement will only take on an issue if it will at the same time destroy one of our industries.  Any environmental issue that will not be detrimental to our economy they do not bother with.
The main one in Australia is the salting of the Murray Basin.
The green movement have not been interested, until the issue was taken up by others, and have not instigated any awareness programs of this problem although it has been going on for fifty years.  The solving of this problem will benefit our economy so they are not interested.
Their most annoying irresponsible agenda that they follow is, if they have evidence of some activity, say farming causing environmental damage, they say “It must be stopped” and never a sensible approach like “A sustainable method must be found.”
The other bit of evidence that proves that they are not credible is that in about 1975 they put forward a group of scientists that had supposedly calculated that global warming due to human activity would in fifty years time increase the planet’s base temperature by two degrees which would result in a rise in sea level by two metres.  It is now over forty years since that prediction and there has been no measurable increase in sea level and less than one degree centigrade increase in temperature.
The damage done by this irresponsible behaviour is that now it is difficult to get anyone to take global warming seriously and it is a serious problem.  We must stop polluting the atmosphere and we must recycle everything including our sewerage (for fertilizer) otherwise we, the human race, has no future.

The section on aboriginal housing has been separated and written in some detail because the story seems to repeat itself about every thirty years without making any progress.  I met someone recently, a doctor, whose aunt was involved in attempts to improve the living conditions of aboriginals in Oodnadatta in 1930 and there have been reports in the news lately that another attempt is going to be made.
There is to be another conference on aboriginal housing in Alice Springs in November 2007.

I am a descendant of a Donald McPhee who came from Scotland in 1855 and settled in Strathalbyn in the Adelaide hills where he had a farm.  He married Jessie Cameron on  9th. July 1856 and they had five children.  My grandfather, also called Donald, was the only son and there were two girls younger and two older than him.  According to Cameron’s family tree he was from Inverness, born in 1832, one hundred years before I was born.
I believe that there must have been a serious argument between my grand father (Donald 2) and my great grandfather (Donald 1) because being the only son surely, he would have inherited the farm.  The Strathalbyn tannery was next to Donald one’s farm so I suspect that Donald two got a job there instead of working the farm because he later went to live in Mount Gambier where he was manager of the Mount Gambier Tannery.
He lived in a boarding house in Mount Gambier that was owned by people called Skipworth and he married one of their daughters whose name was Hanorah Louisa Skipworth (my paternal grandmother).
My father, Horace Argyle Augustus (Skipworth traditional names) McPhee was their eldest son and they called him Son for short.

Augustus Frederick Skipworth and his wife, Maria (nee Johnson) and their family came from England in 1840 (married in Skendleby, England on Jan7 1828).
They grew wheat on the Salisbury plains, near Adelaide until 1865 when they moved to Green Plains on York Peninsula where they were the first to grow wheat on York Peninsular in South Australia.
The only surviving daughter of these Skipworths, Eliza, married Philip Barbary and because farming land had become scarce on York Peninsula, Eliza and Philip did a mammoth cross country trek to central Victoria to a place called Cronomby Tank, later named Woomerlang where they pioneered wheat farming.  They had to pay tax amounting to about 20% of every thing they had when they crossed the border into Victoria.
My father when a young man met my mother, Miriam Pearl Duthie (called Pearl) while visiting an uncle in Woomerlang.
These places are mentioned in later chapters.

I now live on the beach at Oak Beach where I have good friends, two little dogs, Jessie (who Heather, my late wife, gave to me) and Louis, a precocious little Maltese, and a loving partner, Jill McIlwraith, who has revitalised my life and her little dog, a miniature Schnauzer.

Sometimes after a high tide pipis get stranded on the beach and while I am walking the dogs in the early morning I pick them up and return them to the sea.  That’s probably the most constructive thing I do now.
I also pick up remnants of shells (bottles) that I have given the name of ‘Australus Inebrius Discardus’

When people say to me “you are sooo lucky living here” I say “ it is not luck, it is planning.”

  

Donald McPhee - Donald I.  His Wife Jessie and My Grandfather, Donald McPhee – Donald II.

  My Great Aunts Jessie Paddick and May Coad whom I stayed with in Adelaide in the 1950’s,

Jessie was a daughter of Flora above and May Coad was the wife of Flora’s son.  From the eldest: Flora, Jessie, Donald, and Mary.  Later another girl was born and named Isobel, married Duncan John Fraser.

Dad's parents, Donald II

It has recently come to my notice that there was a Christina McPhee who came to live in Strathalbyn in 1837 one year after South Australia was declared a colony in 1836. She came with her husband, Donald McClean and eleven children aboard the Navarino. Donald McClean was born September 1779 at Fort William, near Kilmallie, Scotland. He had bought eighty acres of land at Strathalbyn before leaving Scotland. He is believed to be the first person to grow wheat in South Australia.
Donald and Christina were married at Argyle in 1810.
I strongly suspect that Christina was Donald McPhee’s (my great grand father) aunt because the ages work out. She probably wrote to Donald McPhee and said “Come out here nephew, you can buy land for a song, the government is encouraging farmers to settle South Australia.”
I have no proof of this yet but it seems likely.

Donald McLean died October 10th. 1855.

Dip tins used for displaying fig jam at the Mildura Farmers’ Market