My father was forced to sell his fruit block at Irymple by the co-operative packing company because he accused the controlling committee of corruption.
He suspected that they were selling his fruit as four crown but paying him for three crown, a lesser quality. Dad got his youngest brother to get a job in the packing shed to spy for him and he was able to confirm Dad’s suspicions.
Dad confronted the controlling committee with his accusation but he didn’t think it through properly.
The law made it compulsory for growers to sell their dried fruit through the co-operative packing company so they were able to soon get rid of him.
They simply said “sorry Son, we have not been able to sell your fruit at all this year.”
This happened in 1939, just before the beginning of the second world war.
He first procured some 88 acres of uncleared land at Gol Gol NSW and then joined the Australian Air Force where he served until the end of the war in 1945.
While we were going through the period of being forced to sell or go broke by the packing company I remember things getting tough. First dad seemed always to be running out of petrol in his big Desoto car then the phone was cut off then the Electrical supply company put a coin meter in the house where you had to put a shilling in the meter to get electricity. Sometimes halfway through the evening meal the power would go off and we would have to search in the dark for a shilling to feed the meter.
It was while dad was struggling to financially survive that brother Donald started to have severe pains in his legs and was diagnosed with osteomyelitis.
When dad sold, the new owner a young Italian man, let us live in the permanent mans house until we found somewhere else to live.
The thing I remember most about this house is being kept awake by Donald’s moaning from the pains in his legs.
During the period of WW2 we first lived in a rented house in 13th street Mildura and we all attended the Mildura central state primary school which was grossly overcrowded with about 50 kids to a class. Classes seemed to me to be disorganised and I couldn’t see how anyone could learn anything except how to survive in a crowd.
The kids to us seemed to be mostly rough and aggressive and 13th street where we lived was considered one of the roughest streets in Mildura.
One of dad’s sisters, Jessie, was married to Charlie Simons who lived about four doors from us. Uncle Charlie owned two blocks of land, one contained their house and the other was Charlie’s wood yard. Charlie made his living by going out bush and collecting dead trees and fallen limbs, bringing them back to his vacant block of land and sawing them into blocks 600mm long or 300mm long if you were willing to pay a bit more. He delivered the wood to houses throughout Mildura.
His wood saw was the most dangerous thing I had ever seen.
The saw blade was about 1.5 metres in diameter mounted on a rough wooden bench and was driven by an old truck with one back wheel supported off the ground on a rough stack of old timber. A long leather belt ran around the truck wheel and around a pulley attached to the axel of the saw blade. There was no guard over the saw blade as would be compulsory today. He had to man handle these dead tree trunks or limbs onto a sliding bench and push them through the saw blade.
It amuses me greatly when I see stories on TV about pioneering families when they cut wood for their fire they always show them splitting sawn blocks of wood. Pioneers did not have sawn blocks of wood only city dwellers could get them from someone like Charlie Simons, Pioneers and farming families had to chop up dead trees they would scavenge from the bush the best way they could and that was hard work.
Charlie and Jessie had only one child, a son called Ray, who was about one year older than I and I used to play with him at his place quite a lot. There were several old broken down trucks on the vacant block that Charlie kept for spare parts that were fun to play in.
Dad was home on leave and the battery in the old ute was flat so he asked me to go to borrow a crank handle from Uncle Charlie. I took my Billy Goat cart that I had made out of an old wooden fruit box and some old pram wheels I found at the dump. Cousin Ray decided to come back with me and on the way he was threatened by two bullies from school. These bullies were two years older and probably twice my weight so realising that he had no hope of coping with both of them I, using the crank handle as a weapon, kept one of them at bay while Ray dealt with the other. They abandoned their attempt to beat up Ray.
On Monday morning while walking to school this large kid from my class knocked me to the ground and beat me up while the two older bullies, smiling, looked on. Apparently there was some code amongst the school bullies that made it unethical to beat up a boy from a class below yours so they got this kid who was mentally challenged and was in grade two for the third year to do it for them.
This incident was the catalyst for dad to find a better place for us to live. He found a weatherboard house on Deakin Avenue near 15th street which was set amongst vineyards and next to the local Yugoslav Hall. Mr. Vidavitch, our landlord was a Yugoslav and he and his wife were some of the nicest people I have ever met. They allowed us to keep our two cows and 30 chooks on a vacant block of land next door.
We then attended the Mildura South State Primary School which was basically a two class room country school about two miles further out from Mildura than where we lived. The head master (now called the Principal) was a nice fatherly roll model called Mr. Howard who puffed on a pipe and had a slight speech impediment. When he had trouble getting a word out his eyes would roll back showing nothing but the whites so we affectionately called him Poofter Loon (nothing to do with being homosexual).
By this time I was in grade three (year three) which was in the junior room which housed grades one to four and was taught by two female teachers. Grades five to eight were in the senior room which Mr. Howard taught. Those who wanted to go to secondary (High) school left primary school after completing grade 6 and those who wanted to do nursing or join the police force or enter an apprenticeship stayed at primary school until they completed grade eight after which they received a “merit certificate”.
I wish I could remember the name of my teacher at this school because I believe that she changed the direction of my life.
On my first day the teacher said “we will now do arithmetic, everyone write how you work out 5 times 14”. So I wrote down 14 five times and added them.
The teacher said “ have you not started to learn the multiplication tables”.
“What are they” was my reply.
She turned to the back cover of my exercise book and showing me the tables said “you have to learn these”.
She took my book and discussed it with the other teacher and then with Mr. Howard and they took me to the Head Master’s office.
I’m thinking “this only happens when you are going to get punished” but he was very kind and asked me a lot about the work we did and didn’t do at the Mildura central primary school.
At the end of the school day, which was 4.0 O’clock in my day, my teacher called me up and said I am giving you this letter to take to your mother to ask if you can stay behind until 5.0 O’clock from now until you catch up with your work, will you do that for me?.
I’m thinking “I am being punished but big time”.
This lovely kind and caring teacher gave one hour of her time every school day for the next three months to give me special tutoring.
I would walk home alone after 5.0 O’clock feeling humiliated and hoping not to see any other kids on the way because I had suffered a bit of humiliation from kids teasing me about being so dumb that I had to have special lessons. I was comforted by my mother’s counselling who said ignore the teasers, the teacher must know that you are smart enough to succeed or she would not put all that extra work into you.
After the midyear exams, about three months later, I was sitting on a school bench in the school yard waiting to be called in to receive my report card and some kids were teasing me about failing my exams. I’m thinking “how do they know”.
One of them put his hand in my shirt pocket and appeared to pull out a rusty nail, which he must have had in his hand, and started chanting ha ha rusty nail makes you fail and all the other kids joined in rusty nail makes you fail.
That must have been the most humiliating moment of my short life.
Then I was called in and handed my report card.
The teacher said “we are very proud of you Kevin ( as I was called then), you have done very well and you are now second to top of your class. Only one girl got higher marks than you so you are top of the boys.” That moment must have given me the greatest boost in self esteem I had ever had.
The greatest redemption was when I went outside the cheerleader of the boys said “give us a look at your report”.
He snatched it from my hand looked at it, dropped it on the ground and walked away with his followers following him saying “what did he get, what did he get ?” but getting no answer.
That was when I became a student and at the end of year exams and every exam thereafter at primary school I topped my class.
This proved to me that the quality of teaching is of prime importance.
The supreme bully of the school, in my age group, a kid called Rex Tyson, had so far not bothered me but after that incident he befriended me and I had no more problems with bullies until high school.
My big brother Ian who was as unusually big for his age as I was small normally had no problems with bullies but one day at school I saw him take on a bully who was threatening a smaller kid and I admired him for that.
The following weekend Ian and I were standing on a culvert through which a main irrigation channel ran watching the water when the bully from school with a mate came along on a horse and cart. These carts at that time were used a lot by fruit growers because of the shortage of petrol during the war and were modernised to the extent that the old wagon wheels had been replaced with four truck wheels with pneumatic tyres. These guys pulled up next to us on the culvert and we were trapped between the cart and the balustrade.
They came at us, one from each end and both started attacking Ian so I jumped on the back of one of them and clung on like a monkey so he had to leave off punching Ian to get rid of me which he soon did. So I scrambled under the cart to the other side and started to let the air out from one of the tyres.
The one doing the punching shouted stop him, stop him and because he was too big to scramble under the cart he had to run around so I scrambled back to the other side and started to let the air out of another tyre.
After doing this about four times Ian was slogging it out and I thought getting a bit tired so I slapped the horse on the rump and shouted “get up” and the horse took off with the two guys racing after it.
I did quite well at school sport considering that I was small and skinny for my age, Mum used to say “we will have to make a jockey out of you”. Dad said “he is not growing, take him to the doctor”. The doctor said “I‘ll take out his tonsils and see if that helps”. I did eventually grow to be five feet nine inches tall. (175 cm)
Mr Howard encouraged me in athletics and I was good at running sports and cricket. I did play Australian Rules football because every kid had to but I was usually put on the wings where the ball might never venture.
Living on the outskirts of a town as our house was at fifteen street, there was no garbage collection and no sewerage. The food scraps were given to the dogs and chooks but the hard rubbish like cans and bottles were thrown into a pile until the pile got too big and then we had the tedious job of loading it onto the ute and taking it to the dump. Paper and cardboard was burnt in an incinerator.
On the farms the toilets were what we called the ‘long drop’ which was a hole in the ground about two metres deep with a toilet built over. The seat was a wide bench with a hole cut in the middle, over which you sat, and the better ones had a hinged lid over the hole to keep out the flies.
These dunnies were relatively clean, non-smelly and the hole lasted for about two years.
At the fifteen street house the toilet was constructed in the back yard in the same way but instead of a deep hole there was a can of about fifty litres capacity and council men came around once a week , took away the full can and replaced it with an empty one. These toilets had to be built on a back lane with a trap door on the back so the council dunny-can man could get the cans.
They were horrible very smelly things and your clothes would smell for an hour or more after using them. Rich people had septic tanks which is as good as sewerage with the advantage that the effluent soaked into the ground keeping the garden green over some of the yard.
Mum was from a family of eight girls and one boy and they all lived in Woomelang, a mid Victorian farming district. All of mum’s siblings had small families of 2 or 3 children except aunt Myrtle who had only one. These aunts felt sorry for mum who had eight children and used to take some of us for school holidays.
A group of us, with 12 year old Lorna in charge, would be packed off on the train twice a year each to stay with a different aunt.
My favourite place to stay was with Aunt Myrtle and Uncle Will Barker who lived in the town of Woomelang.
I was good at making things out of any scrap material I could find but was frustrated because dad or my oldest brother, Colin, would not let me use their tools.
Uncle Will had a very well setup hobby workshop with a lot of beautiful and well kept tools and he noticed that I was very interested in watching him repair and make things.
I was 10 years old when he asked me if I would like to make something.
He got an old wooden box and said “I will show you how to make a dolls house out of this.”
Using a hand drill and a keyhole saw he cut a hole in one side for a window, made some rebated strips of timber with a rebating plane out of which he made a window complete with glass. “We have to go in for dinner now” he said “but tomorrow when I am at work, if you are very careful, you can use these tools and make another window on the other side”.
I was in my element, I cut the hole, cut the glass and made an identical window complete with glass and mitred corners in the window frame. When he came home he looked at my work and laughed and I’m thinking “I didn’t think it was that bad”. Eventually I realized he was laughing because, as he said, it was as good as the window he had made.
He gave me a key to his workshop and said that I can use it whenever I like.
Aunt Myrtle said that I was very privileged because I was the only other person on earth that is allowed in his workshop. I finished the dolls house complete with a hinged door and gable roof.
From then I usually got a tool for birthday and Christmas presents and eventually had my own tool box.
Uncle Will was the curator of the local Town Hall which he had to prepare for functions and the ‘Moving Picture Man’ was coming to town.
He took me with him to the hall and I watched while he prepared the gas drum.
The hall was lighted by gas lights but the gas was from a home made contraption consisting of a 44 gallon drum (common on farms) which had a car tyre valve welded into the side and a pressure gauge on the top. He poured a few gallons of petrol into the drum, tightened the bung and proceeded to pump pressure into the drum with a car tyre pump. When the pressure gauge showed the correct pressure he turned on a gas valve on the top of the drum, went inside and proceeded to light the gas lamps.
The ‘Moving Picture Man’ arrived in a truck which had a power generator mounted on the back, ran electric cables up to the projection room and lugged his two projectors up the narrow stairs.
Uncle Will arranged for me to watch the movies from the projection room, to see how it was done, and for a while after that it was my ambition to be a country ‘Moving Picture Man’ when I grew up.
Sometimes I would stay at mum’s brother’s farm at Woomelang where I was able to do a lot of horse riding; other times I stayed at grandma Duthie’s place in Woomelang where I learnt how to start the generator each evening to provide electricity for the house lighting and how to test the battery acid.
Farms at Woomelang at that time still used horse teams to do much of the work but many of them also had a Bulldog tractor and the Duthie farm was no exception.
Bulldog tractors I think were made in England but they were like something communist Russia would manufacture for their peasant farmers. The early ones had a one cylinder diesel engine which had a great flywheel (about 1.2 m in diameter and made of cast iron) on the side of the tractor spinning around at about 1000 revs per minute with no guard over it.
If you walked into it you would be killed.
To start the engine you had to heat an iron ball, which was part of the cylinder head, with a blow lamp. When the ball was red hot you turned on the fuel tap and spun the flywheel by hand until it fired and then run to the controls and adjust the fuel throttle to get the correct speed. Sometimes the engine would start running backwards and you would have to stop it and try again. Duthie’s tractor had pneumatic (rubber ) tyres and with a one cylinder engine thumping away the whole tractor would bounce like a basket ball in the hands of an international player.
On Friday January 12th. 1945, my cousin Ron Duthie and I were in the field harrowing with the tractor when a car pulled up at the fence. The driver was a reporter from the Melbourne Argus news-paper. He asked if he could take a photo of Ron showing me how to drive the tractor for a story he was doing on how farmers were coping with the shortage of manpower caused by the war.
Ron was 15 and I was 12 years old.
He posed us with me at the steering wheel and Ron standing behind me pointing ahead but said “ you will have to turn the engine off, I can’t take your photo while you are bouncing around like that.”
Ron said “if we turn off the engine we can’t start it again because we don’t have any matches to light the blow lamp”. The reporter said that he had matches but it took about an hour to get the damn thing started because it was either too hot or not hot enough and it kept starting running backwards.
Our photo was published in the paper (page 7 ).and a couple of weeks later we were the cover photo, in colour, on the farmers’ monthly magazine.
Published in the Melbourne Argus on January 12, 1945
Uncle Cyril Duthie used to keep some bags of wheat for domestic use and he had a little wheat grinder, some-thing like a large coffee grinder, driven by a little petrol engine with which he ground wheat into flour for cooking. Aunt Beat made fresh bread every morning and bread left over from the previous day was used for toast at breakfast.
In Mildura, irrigation channels criss-crossed the vineyards. There were main channels, medium sized channels and small channels and asparagus grew wild along their banks. In the season if we got up early enough to beat others we could pick a feed of asparagus for breakfast.
Our cat got rickets and mum said “Kevin, could you hit the cat on the head? She is suffering so much and there is no one else to do it.”
I hated to even see someone else do this sort of thing.
Hunting rabbits was different where you had to stalk them against the wind so they couldn’t smell you coming, be very quite and move with great stealth, and then have the skill to shoot them cleanly through the head, otherwise the meat would be ruined.
To kill the family pet that you had loved since a kitten was not something I wanted to do but being the oldest male available, it was my duty.
I wanted this to be totally a one shot success.
I put the cat down near the wood heap and got the axe.
Taking up the stance of a golfer I carefully lined up the back of the axe with the cat’s head.
I swung as hard as I could and closed my eyes just before the axe made contact, dropped the axe and without looking ran behind the garage and cried for a while.
Then I had to come out, dig a hole and bury it.
I was twelve years old but boys brought up on a farm have to do this sort of thing and if other boys heard how I hated to do it they would call me a girl and so would the girls.
Donald was having trouble with his osteomyelitis and had quite a few operations where they cut his leg open, drilled holes in his bones through which they tried to treat the infection. Penicillin was not available yet.
Dad was stationed at the Laverton Air Force Base and was able to come home on leave quite often and at the end of 1943, when home, he saw that the doctors in Mildura were not getting any closer to curing Donald’s osteomyelitis.
In fact he had deteriorated quite a bit and could walk only on crutches.
Dad decided that Donald would have to go to Melbourne for treatment.
He found us a house in Point Lonsdale and in January 1944 seven of us piled into the 1927 Austin 20 Ute with Mum, Donald and Dad in the front. Keith, Jean, Ian and myself in a cane lounge set up in the back . We drove to Point Lonsdale which took three days, over-knighting at Woomelang and Ballarat.
Collin was in the AIF fighting the japs on the Kakoda trail, Lorna, was working at the Telephone Exchange and Joan was working at the packing sheds where they were dehydrating food for the armed forces.
For reasons I could not understand I hated Donald. He suffered a lot of pain, he missed a lot of school and the fun of being a healthy child. Although I understood all of that and felt sorry for him but could not stop myself from hating him. From time to time I tried to be kind and helpful but it wouldn’t last. He used to taunt and tease me but that might have been because he knew I did not like him.
We settled in the house in Point Lonsdale and enrolled at the local school.
Point Lonsdale which guards the entrance to Port Philip Bay was heavily fortified and the actual point where the lighthouse is was fenced off with entangled barbed wire and occupied by the army.
The local shop keeper warned us that there were large naval guns established inside the point that went off occasionally when they practiced and we thought “yeah’ OK big deal we are not afraid of guns, we’re from the country”.
Getting ready for bed one night there was a horrendous explosion and a great flash of light, the house shook, windows rattled and dishes rattled in the cupboards.
I thought “it must be an air raid”.
My cousin Ken who was staying with us became hysterical, running on the spot and screaming “it came in the window, it came in the window” Then another explosion.
My mum says “it must be the big guns” and we all settled down to wait for the rest of the explosions.
The one and only teacher at the Point Lonsdale primary school didn’t like me and proceeded to systematically demoralise me.
We were studying industries of Australia and when we came to dried fruit she showed me a picture of a drying rack in her book and said “is that what drying racks look like in Mildura?”.
I replied “yes but they have a roof on them”.
She said “don’t be stupid, how could the sun dry the grapes if the drying racks were roofed”?
She didn’t give me a chance to explain that if they were not roofed when it rained the fruit would get wet and rot and that if there was no roof only the top layer of about ten layers would get the sun anyway and the fruit is air dried not sun dried. If you drive around Mildura today you will see drying racks that have no roof but that is because they are no longer used and are dilapidated, the roof has been removed for use elsewhere or just blown off. Most grape growers have changed to growing fresh or wine grapes and most, if not all, who still grow dried grapes have them dried in dehydrators at the packing sheds.
Another time during a drawing lesson, we used to lift the top of our desk and use it for a black board, she said “now to draw a circle you sit well back and stretch your arm out straight and swing your arm like it’s the arm of a compass” which I did and drew a pretty good circle. When she looked at my circle she said “you used a compass, I told the class you were not to use a compass”.
“No I did not” I said. “Don’t lie, you must have used a compass”.
“I haven’t got a compass” I replied.
She searched my desk and my bag for a compass and finding none, presumably because she had lost face, was really bitchy to me for the rest of our time there.
Throughout my life I have encountered people like her, Ignorant but arrogant thinking they know it all and consequently never learning another thing for the rest of their life.
Lorna (now 18 years old) came to visit and one hot night sitting on the beach that faced into Port Philip bay the search lights positioned on Point Nepean were sweeping the beach but after passing over us it stopped, swung back and focused on Lorna. I thought “the soldier operating that searchlight must think my sister is pretty”.
The authorities used to keep us informed to a certain extent about what was happening by putting notices in the local shop window and one day two large ships appeared outside the heads and the notice informed us that the ships were a troop ship and a cargo ship which contained the troops’ equipment, the troop ship would be passing through the heads to visit Melbourne but the cargo ship would anchor outside the bay. We were used to the guns practicing in a regulated manner but late that night they were firing in a frantic and haphazard way.
The next morning the cargo ship had gone.
The police came around to our school and showed us pictures of hand grenades, shells, land mines and belts of machine gun bullets and said “if you see any of these things on the beach do not go near them and run and tell a policeman”. A few days later Ian and I were around at the beach that faced the open Southern Ocean ( we called the open beach) and I found washed up half of a burnt seat from a fighter plane (confirmed by my father ) and Ian found a German officers sword with lots of gold braid attached which probably helped it to float. We never found out what happened that night, not even after 30 years when a lot of classified information was released. Years later Ian donated the sword to the RSL, I think in Toowoomba.
Donald, Ian and I shared a large bedroom in Point Lonsdale and Donald slept in a box window across which a curtain could be drawn to give him some privacy. On the day he was to go to hospital for his, we hoped last, operation I left for school but rushed back into the room because I had forgotten something. Donald pulled back his curtain and said “goodbye, I won’t be seeing you again”. I was a bit ashamed because I had forgotten to say goodbye before heading off to school and hadn’t thought about what he actually said and just replied “goodbye” and ran off to school. He often said that if he had to have another operation he would die.
A few days later I was walking passed the bus stop in Point Lonsdale when a bus pulled up and to my great surprise Dad got off. (He wasn’t due for leave) He put his arm around me and I heard him make a funny noise then he turned away and blew his nose. We walked home together with dad holding me close which was a bit unusual in public. When he greeted Mum they hugged and cried uncontrolled so I was hugging them and crying too and saying “what’s wrong Dad”. He said “we lost our Donny”.
During the operation they decided the leg could not be saved so they amputated. Penicillin had just become available for civilians and although they used it on Donald he died while still under the anaesthetic. He was 16 years old.
We hastily packed up that day and caught the train back to Mildura leaving the ute in Point Lonsdale for dad to drive home at a later time. Our family occupied an entire railway compartment where we huddled together all night with mum frequently crying on dad’s shoulder.
I went back to the Mildura South Primary school where I was in the 6th grade in Mr. Howard’s room and he must have known our story because, although he said nothing, he was exceptionally kind and helpful.
Donald’s death, to my surprise. affected me deeply but the greatest trauma for me was the effect it had on my parents.
There had to be a restructuring of our family jobs and by now I was considered old enough to be promoted to minding the cows and chopping the mornings wood. Ian had to chop the bulk wood a job considered too dangerous for little kids. Morning’s wood was usually pine if you could get it or fine to medium sized sticks that were used by mum to start the kitchen fire at the crack of dawn each morning. I still had to look after the chooks but Jean helped by feeding them in the evenings when I minded the cows. Living on two quarter acre blocks there was no room for grazing so I had to scavenge for fodder on the sides of the road and on the vineyard headlands when the vines were bare. The cows were not permitted in the vineyards when there were leaves on the vines because they would eat them. Every morning before going to school I had to take the two Jersey cows along the road and tether them in an area where there was hopefully enough grass to keep them going until I came home from school.
Tethering was by means of a substantial chain that was permanently fixed around their horns and they learnt to walk with their head to the side so they wouldn’t stand on the long length of chain that dragged behind. I had to take with me two substantial steel pegs (old car axles were good) and an axe so I could drive the pegs into the ground to which the cow’s chain was tethered making sure that they could not reach the road. When I came home from school I would have to change into old clothes and release the cows and mind them along the sides of the road so they could graze until dusk, then I took them home for Mum to milk. Sometimes when the ground was soft they would pull their pegs out and I would have to spend hours after school searching the district for them.
After milking about five litres of fresh milk was kept for drinking and the rest was immediately run through the separator. The milk was poured into a stainless steel bowl on the top. The separator handle, which was highly geared, turned at first with a great deal of effort until you built up the revolutions of the handle to about 4 revs per second when a bell would stop ringing indicating that the correct revolutions have been reached. You then turned on the milk which ran down through the works of the separator and cream would run out of one spout and skim milk out of the other.
It was also my job to clean the cow yard of cow shit and cows make a hell of a lot of shit.
During the war (and for some time after) food, clothing and petrol were rationed. Everyone had to have ration tickets that were allocated by the government and when you bought any of these items you had to hand over some ration tickets. Every item was priced with the cost and how many ration tickets you had to surrender to buy it.
Mum used to sell home made butter to close friends and neighbours which according to the law made her a ‘Black Marketeer’ which was punishable by a jail sentence. You wouldn’t find a more law abiding, quite, kind little woman than my mum but the law would have classified her with Al Capone.
Everyone during that period over the age of 14 had to carry an identity card.
In those days nothing was made for teenagers. As a teenager you looked ridiculous in clothes made for children and you looked like a child trying to be grown up if you wore adult clothes.
During WW2 there was an Air Force fighter training base at the air strip just out of Mildura about 6 kilos from our place and we witnessed many practise dog fights and saw a few crashes. There is a war cemetery at Mildura with about fifty 18 to 20 year old men in it who were killed just training.
We used to ride our bikes to the Air Force waste dump where they dumped parts of planes that were not reusable and we found a lot of pieces of duralium (an aluminium alloy used in the construction of planes ) and perspex that was useful for making things.
Mum received a telegram from dad “Be at the Air Force base 11.00 AM the next morning, Stop, I will be there.”.
Keith, Jean, Ian and I had to have a bath and dress in our best clothes.
We got a taxi which was an outlandishly extravagant thing for us to do and had to stand about fifteen metres back while we watched Dad repair the brakes of a twin engine bomber. When he finished he was permitted to approach us, give us all a big hug and mum a big kiss and then marched over to the Head Quarters.
The taxi driver had to wait for over an hour but when he dropped us off at home, as mum opened her purse, he said “there will be no charge for that”.
.
Colin was ‘called up’ as conscription was called then into the AIF and sent to Darwin arriving just before the first Japanese air raid. He sent us photos of the destruction and some souvenirs from the post office which had been totally destroyed killing the post office family and the telephonist. Censorship of soldiers’ letters must not have been in place then because later Colin’s letters were seriously censored with several lines cut out. With these souvenirs was an earphone that the telephonist was wearing when she was killed. I wanted to build a crystal set (a primitive radio) and the only component I lacked and could not afford to buy was an earphone. So looking at this souvenirs I gave some thought to the poor girl who was wearing it when the Japanese killed her and decided that she would not mind if I put it to good use. My crystal set worked and I was able to listen to the Mildura radio station 3MA in bed at night.
Father (grandfather McPhee) also owned a vineyard which was across the other side of 16th street. His house was built on a rise in the land and the road of 16th street was cut through the rise. The drive to his house and to his vineyard were also cut through this hill and crossed 16th street at right angles. Father was very strict about we kids being careful crossing 16th street because of the cuttings cars could not see a person coming out of the drive.
On the eve of January 5th 1946 Father was walking his horse along his drive and across 16th street when three young hoons going too fast in a sports car avoided the horse and killed Father. The driver of the car was Rex Tyson’s big brother.
I said to mum “I will still be friends with Rex Tyson because he can’t help what his big brother did.”
But I never saw him again, the family disappeared from Mildura.
I made my own bike out of parts that my older brothers discarded and it was a Heath Robinson machine. My father called it a BSA, (Bits Stuck Anywhere). At first it was difficult for me to ride because it was too big. I had to sit on the cross bar so I could reach the pedals. I had a lot of trouble with the pedals because the ball bearings were so worn that some would drop out and the ones left would jamb against each other. It’s very difficult riding a bike when the pedals do not rotate
After a dance had been held at the Yugoslav Hall, next to our cow yard, I would often find a few coins in the hall yard no doubt dropped by young Yugoslav men skylarking and perhaps fighting. After rain, was the best time to look because the rain would wash the sand off any coins that had been covered. One day after rain I found twelve shillings ($1.20) which was just enough to buy new pedals for my bike.
He suspected that they were selling his fruit as four crown but paying him for three crown, a lesser quality. Dad got his youngest brother to get a job in the packing shed to spy for him and he was able to confirm Dad’s suspicions.
Dad confronted the controlling committee with his accusation but he didn’t think it through properly.
The law made it compulsory for growers to sell their dried fruit through the co-operative packing company so they were able to soon get rid of him.
They simply said “sorry Son, we have not been able to sell your fruit at all this year.”
This happened in 1939, just before the beginning of the second world war.
He first procured some 88 acres of uncleared land at Gol Gol NSW and then joined the Australian Air Force where he served until the end of the war in 1945.
While we were going through the period of being forced to sell or go broke by the packing company I remember things getting tough. First dad seemed always to be running out of petrol in his big Desoto car then the phone was cut off then the Electrical supply company put a coin meter in the house where you had to put a shilling in the meter to get electricity. Sometimes halfway through the evening meal the power would go off and we would have to search in the dark for a shilling to feed the meter.
It was while dad was struggling to financially survive that brother Donald started to have severe pains in his legs and was diagnosed with osteomyelitis.
When dad sold, the new owner a young Italian man, let us live in the permanent mans house until we found somewhere else to live.
The thing I remember most about this house is being kept awake by Donald’s moaning from the pains in his legs.
During the period of WW2 we first lived in a rented house in 13th street Mildura and we all attended the Mildura central state primary school which was grossly overcrowded with about 50 kids to a class. Classes seemed to me to be disorganised and I couldn’t see how anyone could learn anything except how to survive in a crowd.
The kids to us seemed to be mostly rough and aggressive and 13th street where we lived was considered one of the roughest streets in Mildura.
One of dad’s sisters, Jessie, was married to Charlie Simons who lived about four doors from us. Uncle Charlie owned two blocks of land, one contained their house and the other was Charlie’s wood yard. Charlie made his living by going out bush and collecting dead trees and fallen limbs, bringing them back to his vacant block of land and sawing them into blocks 600mm long or 300mm long if you were willing to pay a bit more. He delivered the wood to houses throughout Mildura.
His wood saw was the most dangerous thing I had ever seen.
The saw blade was about 1.5 metres in diameter mounted on a rough wooden bench and was driven by an old truck with one back wheel supported off the ground on a rough stack of old timber. A long leather belt ran around the truck wheel and around a pulley attached to the axel of the saw blade. There was no guard over the saw blade as would be compulsory today. He had to man handle these dead tree trunks or limbs onto a sliding bench and push them through the saw blade.
It amuses me greatly when I see stories on TV about pioneering families when they cut wood for their fire they always show them splitting sawn blocks of wood. Pioneers did not have sawn blocks of wood only city dwellers could get them from someone like Charlie Simons, Pioneers and farming families had to chop up dead trees they would scavenge from the bush the best way they could and that was hard work.
Charlie and Jessie had only one child, a son called Ray, who was about one year older than I and I used to play with him at his place quite a lot. There were several old broken down trucks on the vacant block that Charlie kept for spare parts that were fun to play in.
Dad was home on leave and the battery in the old ute was flat so he asked me to go to borrow a crank handle from Uncle Charlie. I took my Billy Goat cart that I had made out of an old wooden fruit box and some old pram wheels I found at the dump. Cousin Ray decided to come back with me and on the way he was threatened by two bullies from school. These bullies were two years older and probably twice my weight so realising that he had no hope of coping with both of them I, using the crank handle as a weapon, kept one of them at bay while Ray dealt with the other. They abandoned their attempt to beat up Ray.
On Monday morning while walking to school this large kid from my class knocked me to the ground and beat me up while the two older bullies, smiling, looked on. Apparently there was some code amongst the school bullies that made it unethical to beat up a boy from a class below yours so they got this kid who was mentally challenged and was in grade two for the third year to do it for them.
This incident was the catalyst for dad to find a better place for us to live. He found a weatherboard house on Deakin Avenue near 15th street which was set amongst vineyards and next to the local Yugoslav Hall. Mr. Vidavitch, our landlord was a Yugoslav and he and his wife were some of the nicest people I have ever met. They allowed us to keep our two cows and 30 chooks on a vacant block of land next door.
We then attended the Mildura South State Primary School which was basically a two class room country school about two miles further out from Mildura than where we lived. The head master (now called the Principal) was a nice fatherly roll model called Mr. Howard who puffed on a pipe and had a slight speech impediment. When he had trouble getting a word out his eyes would roll back showing nothing but the whites so we affectionately called him Poofter Loon (nothing to do with being homosexual).
By this time I was in grade three (year three) which was in the junior room which housed grades one to four and was taught by two female teachers. Grades five to eight were in the senior room which Mr. Howard taught. Those who wanted to go to secondary (High) school left primary school after completing grade 6 and those who wanted to do nursing or join the police force or enter an apprenticeship stayed at primary school until they completed grade eight after which they received a “merit certificate”.
I wish I could remember the name of my teacher at this school because I believe that she changed the direction of my life.
On my first day the teacher said “we will now do arithmetic, everyone write how you work out 5 times 14”. So I wrote down 14 five times and added them.
The teacher said “ have you not started to learn the multiplication tables”.
“What are they” was my reply.
She turned to the back cover of my exercise book and showing me the tables said “you have to learn these”.
She took my book and discussed it with the other teacher and then with Mr. Howard and they took me to the Head Master’s office.
I’m thinking “this only happens when you are going to get punished” but he was very kind and asked me a lot about the work we did and didn’t do at the Mildura central primary school.
At the end of the school day, which was 4.0 O’clock in my day, my teacher called me up and said I am giving you this letter to take to your mother to ask if you can stay behind until 5.0 O’clock from now until you catch up with your work, will you do that for me?.
I’m thinking “I am being punished but big time”.
This lovely kind and caring teacher gave one hour of her time every school day for the next three months to give me special tutoring.
I would walk home alone after 5.0 O’clock feeling humiliated and hoping not to see any other kids on the way because I had suffered a bit of humiliation from kids teasing me about being so dumb that I had to have special lessons. I was comforted by my mother’s counselling who said ignore the teasers, the teacher must know that you are smart enough to succeed or she would not put all that extra work into you.
After the midyear exams, about three months later, I was sitting on a school bench in the school yard waiting to be called in to receive my report card and some kids were teasing me about failing my exams. I’m thinking “how do they know”.
One of them put his hand in my shirt pocket and appeared to pull out a rusty nail, which he must have had in his hand, and started chanting ha ha rusty nail makes you fail and all the other kids joined in rusty nail makes you fail.
That must have been the most humiliating moment of my short life.
Then I was called in and handed my report card.
The teacher said “we are very proud of you Kevin ( as I was called then), you have done very well and you are now second to top of your class. Only one girl got higher marks than you so you are top of the boys.” That moment must have given me the greatest boost in self esteem I had ever had.
The greatest redemption was when I went outside the cheerleader of the boys said “give us a look at your report”.
He snatched it from my hand looked at it, dropped it on the ground and walked away with his followers following him saying “what did he get, what did he get ?” but getting no answer.
That was when I became a student and at the end of year exams and every exam thereafter at primary school I topped my class.
This proved to me that the quality of teaching is of prime importance.
The supreme bully of the school, in my age group, a kid called Rex Tyson, had so far not bothered me but after that incident he befriended me and I had no more problems with bullies until high school.
My big brother Ian who was as unusually big for his age as I was small normally had no problems with bullies but one day at school I saw him take on a bully who was threatening a smaller kid and I admired him for that.
The following weekend Ian and I were standing on a culvert through which a main irrigation channel ran watching the water when the bully from school with a mate came along on a horse and cart. These carts at that time were used a lot by fruit growers because of the shortage of petrol during the war and were modernised to the extent that the old wagon wheels had been replaced with four truck wheels with pneumatic tyres. These guys pulled up next to us on the culvert and we were trapped between the cart and the balustrade.
They came at us, one from each end and both started attacking Ian so I jumped on the back of one of them and clung on like a monkey so he had to leave off punching Ian to get rid of me which he soon did. So I scrambled under the cart to the other side and started to let the air out from one of the tyres.
The one doing the punching shouted stop him, stop him and because he was too big to scramble under the cart he had to run around so I scrambled back to the other side and started to let the air out of another tyre.
After doing this about four times Ian was slogging it out and I thought getting a bit tired so I slapped the horse on the rump and shouted “get up” and the horse took off with the two guys racing after it.
I did quite well at school sport considering that I was small and skinny for my age, Mum used to say “we will have to make a jockey out of you”. Dad said “he is not growing, take him to the doctor”. The doctor said “I‘ll take out his tonsils and see if that helps”. I did eventually grow to be five feet nine inches tall. (175 cm)
Mr Howard encouraged me in athletics and I was good at running sports and cricket. I did play Australian Rules football because every kid had to but I was usually put on the wings where the ball might never venture.
Living on the outskirts of a town as our house was at fifteen street, there was no garbage collection and no sewerage. The food scraps were given to the dogs and chooks but the hard rubbish like cans and bottles were thrown into a pile until the pile got too big and then we had the tedious job of loading it onto the ute and taking it to the dump. Paper and cardboard was burnt in an incinerator.
On the farms the toilets were what we called the ‘long drop’ which was a hole in the ground about two metres deep with a toilet built over. The seat was a wide bench with a hole cut in the middle, over which you sat, and the better ones had a hinged lid over the hole to keep out the flies.
These dunnies were relatively clean, non-smelly and the hole lasted for about two years.
At the fifteen street house the toilet was constructed in the back yard in the same way but instead of a deep hole there was a can of about fifty litres capacity and council men came around once a week , took away the full can and replaced it with an empty one. These toilets had to be built on a back lane with a trap door on the back so the council dunny-can man could get the cans.
They were horrible very smelly things and your clothes would smell for an hour or more after using them. Rich people had septic tanks which is as good as sewerage with the advantage that the effluent soaked into the ground keeping the garden green over some of the yard.
Mum was from a family of eight girls and one boy and they all lived in Woomelang, a mid Victorian farming district. All of mum’s siblings had small families of 2 or 3 children except aunt Myrtle who had only one. These aunts felt sorry for mum who had eight children and used to take some of us for school holidays.
A group of us, with 12 year old Lorna in charge, would be packed off on the train twice a year each to stay with a different aunt.
My favourite place to stay was with Aunt Myrtle and Uncle Will Barker who lived in the town of Woomelang.
I was good at making things out of any scrap material I could find but was frustrated because dad or my oldest brother, Colin, would not let me use their tools.
Uncle Will had a very well setup hobby workshop with a lot of beautiful and well kept tools and he noticed that I was very interested in watching him repair and make things.
I was 10 years old when he asked me if I would like to make something.
He got an old wooden box and said “I will show you how to make a dolls house out of this.”
Using a hand drill and a keyhole saw he cut a hole in one side for a window, made some rebated strips of timber with a rebating plane out of which he made a window complete with glass. “We have to go in for dinner now” he said “but tomorrow when I am at work, if you are very careful, you can use these tools and make another window on the other side”.
I was in my element, I cut the hole, cut the glass and made an identical window complete with glass and mitred corners in the window frame. When he came home he looked at my work and laughed and I’m thinking “I didn’t think it was that bad”. Eventually I realized he was laughing because, as he said, it was as good as the window he had made.
He gave me a key to his workshop and said that I can use it whenever I like.
Aunt Myrtle said that I was very privileged because I was the only other person on earth that is allowed in his workshop. I finished the dolls house complete with a hinged door and gable roof.
From then I usually got a tool for birthday and Christmas presents and eventually had my own tool box.
Uncle Will was the curator of the local Town Hall which he had to prepare for functions and the ‘Moving Picture Man’ was coming to town.
He took me with him to the hall and I watched while he prepared the gas drum.
The hall was lighted by gas lights but the gas was from a home made contraption consisting of a 44 gallon drum (common on farms) which had a car tyre valve welded into the side and a pressure gauge on the top. He poured a few gallons of petrol into the drum, tightened the bung and proceeded to pump pressure into the drum with a car tyre pump. When the pressure gauge showed the correct pressure he turned on a gas valve on the top of the drum, went inside and proceeded to light the gas lamps.
The ‘Moving Picture Man’ arrived in a truck which had a power generator mounted on the back, ran electric cables up to the projection room and lugged his two projectors up the narrow stairs.
Uncle Will arranged for me to watch the movies from the projection room, to see how it was done, and for a while after that it was my ambition to be a country ‘Moving Picture Man’ when I grew up.
Sometimes I would stay at mum’s brother’s farm at Woomelang where I was able to do a lot of horse riding; other times I stayed at grandma Duthie’s place in Woomelang where I learnt how to start the generator each evening to provide electricity for the house lighting and how to test the battery acid.
Farms at Woomelang at that time still used horse teams to do much of the work but many of them also had a Bulldog tractor and the Duthie farm was no exception.
Bulldog tractors I think were made in England but they were like something communist Russia would manufacture for their peasant farmers. The early ones had a one cylinder diesel engine which had a great flywheel (about 1.2 m in diameter and made of cast iron) on the side of the tractor spinning around at about 1000 revs per minute with no guard over it.
If you walked into it you would be killed.
To start the engine you had to heat an iron ball, which was part of the cylinder head, with a blow lamp. When the ball was red hot you turned on the fuel tap and spun the flywheel by hand until it fired and then run to the controls and adjust the fuel throttle to get the correct speed. Sometimes the engine would start running backwards and you would have to stop it and try again. Duthie’s tractor had pneumatic (rubber ) tyres and with a one cylinder engine thumping away the whole tractor would bounce like a basket ball in the hands of an international player.
On Friday January 12th. 1945, my cousin Ron Duthie and I were in the field harrowing with the tractor when a car pulled up at the fence. The driver was a reporter from the Melbourne Argus news-paper. He asked if he could take a photo of Ron showing me how to drive the tractor for a story he was doing on how farmers were coping with the shortage of manpower caused by the war.
Ron was 15 and I was 12 years old.
He posed us with me at the steering wheel and Ron standing behind me pointing ahead but said “ you will have to turn the engine off, I can’t take your photo while you are bouncing around like that.”
Ron said “if we turn off the engine we can’t start it again because we don’t have any matches to light the blow lamp”. The reporter said that he had matches but it took about an hour to get the damn thing started because it was either too hot or not hot enough and it kept starting running backwards.
Our photo was published in the paper (page 7 ).and a couple of weeks later we were the cover photo, in colour, on the farmers’ monthly magazine.
Published in the Melbourne Argus on January 12, 1945
Uncle Cyril Duthie used to keep some bags of wheat for domestic use and he had a little wheat grinder, some-thing like a large coffee grinder, driven by a little petrol engine with which he ground wheat into flour for cooking. Aunt Beat made fresh bread every morning and bread left over from the previous day was used for toast at breakfast.
***
In Mildura, irrigation channels criss-crossed the vineyards. There were main channels, medium sized channels and small channels and asparagus grew wild along their banks. In the season if we got up early enough to beat others we could pick a feed of asparagus for breakfast.
Our cat got rickets and mum said “Kevin, could you hit the cat on the head? She is suffering so much and there is no one else to do it.”
I hated to even see someone else do this sort of thing.
Hunting rabbits was different where you had to stalk them against the wind so they couldn’t smell you coming, be very quite and move with great stealth, and then have the skill to shoot them cleanly through the head, otherwise the meat would be ruined.
To kill the family pet that you had loved since a kitten was not something I wanted to do but being the oldest male available, it was my duty.
I wanted this to be totally a one shot success.
I put the cat down near the wood heap and got the axe.
Taking up the stance of a golfer I carefully lined up the back of the axe with the cat’s head.
I swung as hard as I could and closed my eyes just before the axe made contact, dropped the axe and without looking ran behind the garage and cried for a while.
Then I had to come out, dig a hole and bury it.
I was twelve years old but boys brought up on a farm have to do this sort of thing and if other boys heard how I hated to do it they would call me a girl and so would the girls.
Donald was having trouble with his osteomyelitis and had quite a few operations where they cut his leg open, drilled holes in his bones through which they tried to treat the infection. Penicillin was not available yet.
Dad was stationed at the Laverton Air Force Base and was able to come home on leave quite often and at the end of 1943, when home, he saw that the doctors in Mildura were not getting any closer to curing Donald’s osteomyelitis.
In fact he had deteriorated quite a bit and could walk only on crutches.
Dad decided that Donald would have to go to Melbourne for treatment.
He found us a house in Point Lonsdale and in January 1944 seven of us piled into the 1927 Austin 20 Ute with Mum, Donald and Dad in the front. Keith, Jean, Ian and myself in a cane lounge set up in the back . We drove to Point Lonsdale which took three days, over-knighting at Woomelang and Ballarat.
Collin was in the AIF fighting the japs on the Kakoda trail, Lorna, was working at the Telephone Exchange and Joan was working at the packing sheds where they were dehydrating food for the armed forces.
For reasons I could not understand I hated Donald. He suffered a lot of pain, he missed a lot of school and the fun of being a healthy child. Although I understood all of that and felt sorry for him but could not stop myself from hating him. From time to time I tried to be kind and helpful but it wouldn’t last. He used to taunt and tease me but that might have been because he knew I did not like him.
We settled in the house in Point Lonsdale and enrolled at the local school.
Point Lonsdale which guards the entrance to Port Philip Bay was heavily fortified and the actual point where the lighthouse is was fenced off with entangled barbed wire and occupied by the army.
The local shop keeper warned us that there were large naval guns established inside the point that went off occasionally when they practiced and we thought “yeah’ OK big deal we are not afraid of guns, we’re from the country”.
Getting ready for bed one night there was a horrendous explosion and a great flash of light, the house shook, windows rattled and dishes rattled in the cupboards.
I thought “it must be an air raid”.
My cousin Ken who was staying with us became hysterical, running on the spot and screaming “it came in the window, it came in the window” Then another explosion.
My mum says “it must be the big guns” and we all settled down to wait for the rest of the explosions.
The one and only teacher at the Point Lonsdale primary school didn’t like me and proceeded to systematically demoralise me.
We were studying industries of Australia and when we came to dried fruit she showed me a picture of a drying rack in her book and said “is that what drying racks look like in Mildura?”.
I replied “yes but they have a roof on them”.
She said “don’t be stupid, how could the sun dry the grapes if the drying racks were roofed”?
She didn’t give me a chance to explain that if they were not roofed when it rained the fruit would get wet and rot and that if there was no roof only the top layer of about ten layers would get the sun anyway and the fruit is air dried not sun dried. If you drive around Mildura today you will see drying racks that have no roof but that is because they are no longer used and are dilapidated, the roof has been removed for use elsewhere or just blown off. Most grape growers have changed to growing fresh or wine grapes and most, if not all, who still grow dried grapes have them dried in dehydrators at the packing sheds.
Another time during a drawing lesson, we used to lift the top of our desk and use it for a black board, she said “now to draw a circle you sit well back and stretch your arm out straight and swing your arm like it’s the arm of a compass” which I did and drew a pretty good circle. When she looked at my circle she said “you used a compass, I told the class you were not to use a compass”.
“No I did not” I said. “Don’t lie, you must have used a compass”.
“I haven’t got a compass” I replied.
She searched my desk and my bag for a compass and finding none, presumably because she had lost face, was really bitchy to me for the rest of our time there.
Throughout my life I have encountered people like her, Ignorant but arrogant thinking they know it all and consequently never learning another thing for the rest of their life.
Lorna (now 18 years old) came to visit and one hot night sitting on the beach that faced into Port Philip bay the search lights positioned on Point Nepean were sweeping the beach but after passing over us it stopped, swung back and focused on Lorna. I thought “the soldier operating that searchlight must think my sister is pretty”.
The authorities used to keep us informed to a certain extent about what was happening by putting notices in the local shop window and one day two large ships appeared outside the heads and the notice informed us that the ships were a troop ship and a cargo ship which contained the troops’ equipment, the troop ship would be passing through the heads to visit Melbourne but the cargo ship would anchor outside the bay. We were used to the guns practicing in a regulated manner but late that night they were firing in a frantic and haphazard way.
The next morning the cargo ship had gone.
The police came around to our school and showed us pictures of hand grenades, shells, land mines and belts of machine gun bullets and said “if you see any of these things on the beach do not go near them and run and tell a policeman”. A few days later Ian and I were around at the beach that faced the open Southern Ocean ( we called the open beach) and I found washed up half of a burnt seat from a fighter plane (confirmed by my father ) and Ian found a German officers sword with lots of gold braid attached which probably helped it to float. We never found out what happened that night, not even after 30 years when a lot of classified information was released. Years later Ian donated the sword to the RSL, I think in Toowoomba.
Donald, Ian and I shared a large bedroom in Point Lonsdale and Donald slept in a box window across which a curtain could be drawn to give him some privacy. On the day he was to go to hospital for his, we hoped last, operation I left for school but rushed back into the room because I had forgotten something. Donald pulled back his curtain and said “goodbye, I won’t be seeing you again”. I was a bit ashamed because I had forgotten to say goodbye before heading off to school and hadn’t thought about what he actually said and just replied “goodbye” and ran off to school. He often said that if he had to have another operation he would die.
A few days later I was walking passed the bus stop in Point Lonsdale when a bus pulled up and to my great surprise Dad got off. (He wasn’t due for leave) He put his arm around me and I heard him make a funny noise then he turned away and blew his nose. We walked home together with dad holding me close which was a bit unusual in public. When he greeted Mum they hugged and cried uncontrolled so I was hugging them and crying too and saying “what’s wrong Dad”. He said “we lost our Donny”.
During the operation they decided the leg could not be saved so they amputated. Penicillin had just become available for civilians and although they used it on Donald he died while still under the anaesthetic. He was 16 years old.
We hastily packed up that day and caught the train back to Mildura leaving the ute in Point Lonsdale for dad to drive home at a later time. Our family occupied an entire railway compartment where we huddled together all night with mum frequently crying on dad’s shoulder.
I went back to the Mildura South Primary school where I was in the 6th grade in Mr. Howard’s room and he must have known our story because, although he said nothing, he was exceptionally kind and helpful.
Donald’s death, to my surprise. affected me deeply but the greatest trauma for me was the effect it had on my parents.
There had to be a restructuring of our family jobs and by now I was considered old enough to be promoted to minding the cows and chopping the mornings wood. Ian had to chop the bulk wood a job considered too dangerous for little kids. Morning’s wood was usually pine if you could get it or fine to medium sized sticks that were used by mum to start the kitchen fire at the crack of dawn each morning. I still had to look after the chooks but Jean helped by feeding them in the evenings when I minded the cows. Living on two quarter acre blocks there was no room for grazing so I had to scavenge for fodder on the sides of the road and on the vineyard headlands when the vines were bare. The cows were not permitted in the vineyards when there were leaves on the vines because they would eat them. Every morning before going to school I had to take the two Jersey cows along the road and tether them in an area where there was hopefully enough grass to keep them going until I came home from school.
Tethering was by means of a substantial chain that was permanently fixed around their horns and they learnt to walk with their head to the side so they wouldn’t stand on the long length of chain that dragged behind. I had to take with me two substantial steel pegs (old car axles were good) and an axe so I could drive the pegs into the ground to which the cow’s chain was tethered making sure that they could not reach the road. When I came home from school I would have to change into old clothes and release the cows and mind them along the sides of the road so they could graze until dusk, then I took them home for Mum to milk. Sometimes when the ground was soft they would pull their pegs out and I would have to spend hours after school searching the district for them.
After milking about five litres of fresh milk was kept for drinking and the rest was immediately run through the separator. The milk was poured into a stainless steel bowl on the top. The separator handle, which was highly geared, turned at first with a great deal of effort until you built up the revolutions of the handle to about 4 revs per second when a bell would stop ringing indicating that the correct revolutions have been reached. You then turned on the milk which ran down through the works of the separator and cream would run out of one spout and skim milk out of the other.
It was also my job to clean the cow yard of cow shit and cows make a hell of a lot of shit.
During the war (and for some time after) food, clothing and petrol were rationed. Everyone had to have ration tickets that were allocated by the government and when you bought any of these items you had to hand over some ration tickets. Every item was priced with the cost and how many ration tickets you had to surrender to buy it.
Mum used to sell home made butter to close friends and neighbours which according to the law made her a ‘Black Marketeer’ which was punishable by a jail sentence. You wouldn’t find a more law abiding, quite, kind little woman than my mum but the law would have classified her with Al Capone.
Everyone during that period over the age of 14 had to carry an identity card.
In those days nothing was made for teenagers. As a teenager you looked ridiculous in clothes made for children and you looked like a child trying to be grown up if you wore adult clothes.
During WW2 there was an Air Force fighter training base at the air strip just out of Mildura about 6 kilos from our place and we witnessed many practise dog fights and saw a few crashes. There is a war cemetery at Mildura with about fifty 18 to 20 year old men in it who were killed just training.
We used to ride our bikes to the Air Force waste dump where they dumped parts of planes that were not reusable and we found a lot of pieces of duralium (an aluminium alloy used in the construction of planes ) and perspex that was useful for making things.
At first
they had only a Tiger Moth bi-plane (WW1 vintage) and about two Wirraways for
training these young men to fly and to dogfight. After about a year they got some Kittyhawks,
a great improvement and much more exciting to watch. Then we saw a new plane called the Boomerang
which was designed and built in Australia hopefully to be a match for the
Japanese Zero.
My two
older sisters, Lorna and Joan who were 18 and 16 years at the time, used to
volunteer to serve at the Air Force Canteen one or two nights a week and they
got to know many of these young pilots.
Quite often
when one of their pilot friends had a week end on leave they would stay at our
place. As an eight to twelve year old
boy I worshipped these young heroes who would answer all of my eager questions
about the planes they flew.
I learned
that the Boomerang was not a success because they sometimes flipped onto their
back when landing. As I understood it
this was caused by a too powerful radial engine which generated so much toque
that at slow speeds the plane was twisted around the engine.
Then we got
some Spitfires. How exciting were they,
so beautiful to watch and so much faster and more manoeuvrable. I still think that the Spitfire is one of the
most beautiful things that mankind has ever produced. I think that it was the ultimate design for
it’s time. It is a good example of the ‘Beauty
of Functional Form.’
There are
four Spitfires that I know of still in the bottom of Lake Victoria not far from Mildura.
One of
these pilots told me that they used to practice by flying low over the water
and shoot up their own shadow on the
water. On calm days it was difficult to
judge your exact height above the smooth water and some unfortunate young men
“went in” as they put it.
Keith, Jean, Ian and I had to have a bath and dress in our best clothes.
We got a taxi which was an outlandishly extravagant thing for us to do and had to stand about fifteen metres back while we watched Dad repair the brakes of a twin engine bomber. When he finished he was permitted to approach us, give us all a big hug and mum a big kiss and then marched over to the Head Quarters.
The taxi driver had to wait for over an hour but when he dropped us off at home, as mum opened her purse, he said “there will be no charge for that”.
.
Colin was ‘called up’ as conscription was called then into the AIF and sent to Darwin arriving just before the first Japanese air raid. He sent us photos of the destruction and some souvenirs from the post office which had been totally destroyed killing the post office family and the telephonist. Censorship of soldiers’ letters must not have been in place then because later Colin’s letters were seriously censored with several lines cut out. With these souvenirs was an earphone that the telephonist was wearing when she was killed. I wanted to build a crystal set (a primitive radio) and the only component I lacked and could not afford to buy was an earphone. So looking at this souvenirs I gave some thought to the poor girl who was wearing it when the Japanese killed her and decided that she would not mind if I put it to good use. My crystal set worked and I was able to listen to the Mildura radio station 3MA in bed at night.
Father (grandfather McPhee) also owned a vineyard which was across the other side of 16th street. His house was built on a rise in the land and the road of 16th street was cut through the rise. The drive to his house and to his vineyard were also cut through this hill and crossed 16th street at right angles. Father was very strict about we kids being careful crossing 16th street because of the cuttings cars could not see a person coming out of the drive.
On the eve of January 5th 1946 Father was walking his horse along his drive and across 16th street when three young hoons going too fast in a sports car avoided the horse and killed Father. The driver of the car was Rex Tyson’s big brother.
I said to mum “I will still be friends with Rex Tyson because he can’t help what his big brother did.”
But I never saw him again, the family disappeared from Mildura.
I made my own bike out of parts that my older brothers discarded and it was a Heath Robinson machine. My father called it a BSA, (Bits Stuck Anywhere). At first it was difficult for me to ride because it was too big. I had to sit on the cross bar so I could reach the pedals. I had a lot of trouble with the pedals because the ball bearings were so worn that some would drop out and the ones left would jamb against each other. It’s very difficult riding a bike when the pedals do not rotate
After a dance had been held at the Yugoslav Hall, next to our cow yard, I would often find a few coins in the hall yard no doubt dropped by young Yugoslav men skylarking and perhaps fighting. After rain, was the best time to look because the rain would wash the sand off any coins that had been covered. One day after rain I found twelve shillings ($1.20) which was just enough to buy new pedals for my bike.
No comments:
Post a Comment