2. Memoirs - and History of my Environment.

On a flight from Alice Springs to Adelaide I was seated next to a young woman and to start a conversation I said “have you been on holidays”, “Yes” she said.  “And where are you from”.  “You wouldn’t know it”, “Try me, I know the outback pretty well”, she said “A little bush place called Werrimull”,
I was born there.

Yes, I was born in a little bush hospital in a little bush town called Werrimull in 1932.  The fourth son of Horace Argyle Augustus (called Son) McPhee and Pearl (nee Duthie).   Werrimull is about 80 kilometres West of Mildura and our family lived on a wheat and sheep farm at Meringur another 20 kilometres  West  which is in the Mallee desert of Victoria not far from the South Australian border.
My father would drop my mother off at the hospital to have her baby and say “good luck, I will pick you up in two weeks”.  I was named Kevin Andrew McPhee.

Meringur was a little town built around a town square with the railway station at the South end and the town hall at the North end with shops and houses along the East and West sides and a one room school somewhere.  The centre of the square was planted with native mallee trees.  Next to the town hall is a tree called the Hanging Tree.  The house on my dad’s farm was within easy walking distance (about 200 metres) from the town.  All that is left of the town now is the town hall and the Hanging Tree.   The school, the Post Office and the railway station, all timber framed buildings, were once moved to other places but have since been brought back and are now displayed in an historic park at Meringur but not on their original sites.  When I last visited, all that is left of our house are the stumps and the bricks of the chimney laying spread along the ground.  The poles that were the structure of the barn and stables are still standing at odd angles.  Pieces of broken crockery were scattered in an area between the house and barn and I wondered how much of my mother’s precious crockery was broken by me.

In January 2001 I took my eldest son Anthony and his family to see Meringur and we found my older brothers and sisters names in the school roll book, we had left Meringur before I had reached school age.

****

My mother gave birth to a girl, Jean, and a boy, Keith after me.  With my three older brothers and two older sisters there were eight kids in the family.
My earliest memories are mainly of being cared for by my older sisters, of being led by the hand to the shops or to the town dam for a swim.  The keeper of the general store was called Mr Hart who used to give me a boiled lolly whenever we went to buy something so I called him Mr Sweet Hart.  Mum and dad loved us all very much and they would blow raspberries on our bare tummy and wiz us around to make us laugh.
Houses had no electricity or piped water. We used kerosene lamps for lighting and wood fires for cooking and heating.  To get water at our place you had to go out to the rain water tank.
In the early 1900s the Australian government found that people who drank only rain water, because of the lack of iodine, used to get goitre and in severe cases brain development would be incomplete and they would grow up to be cretins.  We had to use iodised salt.
What they did not know then was that rainwater has no fluoride and as a consequence we all had bad teeth.
As with most farms in the hot areas of Australia, we had a bough shed out the back of the house where most living and eating was done in the summer.  Bough sheds were a structure of several posts of bush poles, in our case twelve, set into the ground usually chosen with a fork at the top into which beams of bush poles were laid around the perimeter.  A system of rafters also of bush poles was positioned to form the roof frame and all junctions were lashed together with eight gauge galvanized fencing wire.  A layer of wire netting (chicken wire) was stretched over the top of the rafters.  Truck loads of leafy boughs were cut from the mallee scrub and laid on the chicken wire to a depth of about 30 to 40 cm similar to the old thatching method.  The finished structure was a well insulated roof with no walls, similar to a modern pool gazebo.
Bush flies were a constant problem.  They used to annoy the hell out of me and Lorna (my eldest sister) told me how Great Uncle Frederick Skipworth, who stayed with us occasionally, taught me at the age of 3 how to kill them on my face.  I would be seen sitting on the dirt floor of the bough shed with streaks of crushed flies down my dirty face.  I am still good at catching flies but I no longer crush them on my face.

Food, like butter, milk and meat was kept reasonably cool in a cool safe (Coolgardie safe).  It was called a safe even though it was made of a light timber frame and covered with flywire (insect screen) with a flywire hinged door which made the contents safe from flies.  On the top of the safe was a galvanized steel tray about 50 mm deep which was filled with water.  The flywire sides and door were covered with hessian and strips of flannel material (wicks we called them) were laid in the water and hung over the hessian sides.  The water would soak through the wicks and keep the Hessian sides wet.  The safe was kept on the back verandah where it would get a breeze and the water evaporating off the Hessian would cool the contents of the safe.  The modern evaporative air conditioners work on the same principle.

History will tell you that Ford released the first coupe utility (ute) about 1934 and Holden in 1951 but home made utilities were used on nearly every farm since around 1920.  They were made by cutting the back of the body of a six seat car just behind the back of the front seats.  These old cars were constructed on a steel chassis so the body of the car contributed nothing to the structure.  After cutting the back half of the body away a timber tray with timber sides and drop down tailgate was constructed on the chassis.  Some, as was our 1927 Austin 20, were converted professionally by coach builders.

Sometime around 1936 dad’s sister Isabelle, whom we called Aunt Blue, and her husband, Andrew, took me when they drove from Mildura to Adelaide, a two day drive on dirt roads.  At the end of the first day we camped in a little railway station somewhere and I remember Uncle Andrew saying, “Now’ we have to be very quiet because if the station master hears us he will get the police who will put us in gaol because no one is allowed to camp at a railway station”.
In Adelaide we stayed in a house on Park Terrace now called Greenhill Road.  There may have been a clan gathering or highland games in Adelaide because everyone seemed to be there.

We had been for a days outing down the coast South of Adelaide and were returning after dark in the old 1927 ute.  Dad was driving and Mother (grand mother) and Father (grand father) were in the front with him.  The back was full of various relatives and I was snuggled in the lap of an aunt enjoying the security, warmth and softness of her.  The position I had with my head very comfortably cushioned between her breasts enabled me to see the road ahead through the rear window of the cabin. The lights of the ute seemed to drive a tunnel through the solid blackness through which we were travelling, there were no street lights then.  We started to descend a long hill, which might have been Tapleys Hill,. Dad had put the ute in a low gear and the old motor was back firing a lot.
The motor caught fire.
The brakes, being only on the back wheels, were not adequate to stop the ute on this hill.
Father grabbed a wheat bag that he was sitting on to prevent the springs of the seat from sticking into his bum, got out onto the running board to try to put the fire out with the bag.
The bonnet on these old cars lift on each side.
He folded the bonnet up, flames shot out brilliant against the black night.
He flung himself back to avoid the brilliant red, yellow and orange flames and fell off onto the road.
With all the women screaming dad wrestled the ute to a stop and beat the flames out with a bag.
Dad shouts “someone run back and see if Father is alright”.
Someone started to run back, we all looked back as Father appeared out of the dark, running after us.
He was alright except for gravel rash on his hands, arms and a badly scratched cheek.  Later the skin over his left cheek bone formed a scab which never healed for the rest of his life.
I saw all this through the rear window and even now if travelling in the country down a hill at night
I get a deep-seated feeling of impending doom.

          Father and Mother      Dad’s parents     

                             
                                
   

                              Meringur Town Hall.

  Me on the right swatting a fly. 

 From right - Colin, Mum with Joan & Lorna.  second from left.  Great Uncle Fred Skipworth, Under the Bough Shed at Meringur

                         Grace at Dad’s old farm,  Meringur 2005  - Remains of the Barn

                           Memorial to McPhee  - Son & Pearl  1926-1936.

Remains of animal pens at Meringur Farm. Grand Children Grace & Hugo

DAD'S FAMILY

Dad's parens were Donald McPhee  (Donald 2 ) and Hanora (Nee Skipworth)

The family consisted of :-

    Flora

    Horris Argyle Augustus (Called Son)

    Mel

    Glen

    Gordon

    Bernard

    Jessie

    Jean

    Isabel (Aunt Blue)

    Joice

The order in age is not necisarialy correct except that I know that Flora was the eldest and Son was the second born and Joice was the youngest.