He bought a fruit block in Irymple (a satellite town of Mildura) which was well established with a mixture of vineyards and fruit trees, a large house and a separate manager’s house. A man called Cyril Muller lived in the manager’s house, he was not called the manager but called the permanent man. The main produce of this farm (called a fruit block) was dried sultanas, currants and raisins. As well we grew apricots, peaches, and oranges and mum of course kept her two cows to provide the family with milk, cream and butter. Outside the back door grew a large mulberry tree which provided us with more fat juicy mulberries than the ten of us could eat. We loved to eat them covered in a thick layer of rich thick cream from the ice chest.
On the farm at Meringur the coolest drink you could get was from the water bag which hung from a verandah rafter but now we were living near civilisation, we could have an ice chest (refrigerators of course didn’t exist). This was made of wood like a cupboard and lined with galvanized iron or zinc, about the size of a bar frig with a compartment on the top to hold a block of ice. The ice was delivered by the ice man in blocks about 80cm long, 20cm thick and 30 cm wide in an insulated van twice a week, if you could afford it. Our ice chest could take only half of one of these blocks, so the iceman would cut a block by chipping a line across the top and it would break cleanly along that line. We kids would hang around until he took the ice inside and scoop up the chips of ice from the back of his van, this was one of our greatest treats on a hot summer’s day. Every reasonably sized town like Mildura had an ice factory which made the ice blocks. We also had electricity and a telephone in this house.
Ice Chest (Ice Box In American)
Lorna and Joan (my two older sisters) were and still are inseparable and they shared a double bed in a large bedroom. In 1937 I was sick with a high fever and was put in the same room as Lorna and Joan in a cot so they could look after me. During one night I stood up in my cot shouting “look there’s a kangaroo jumping across the room” There is no kangaroo, go back to sleep. “Yes there is look he is going behind the dressing table”. I could see this kangaroo and got out to look behind the dressing table then saw that there was no space for it to fit so decided that I must have been seeing things and got back into the cot.
Then I shouted “look there is a man under your bed”.
That got their attention.
They leapt up looking under the bed while I’m saying he’s got a torch and it’s making your bed glow all red.
Mum got me to the doctor first thing in the morning and I think it was scarlet fever but that experience taught me that when you have hallucinations, to you those images are absolutely real.
I was still about five years old when I pricked the palm of my hand on a boxthorn bush which has thorns about fifty millimetres long. The wound become infected with what mum feared was a staphylococcal infection. She had treated it with methylated spirits and iodine but the vicious pussy boil-looking lump continued to grow and the veins up my arm were turning bright red. Dad and Colin were away and mum decided the boil had to be lanced so the infection could be treated but I would kick and scream and not let anyone touch it even though mum explained that when the red lines up my arm reached my heart I would die. After she tried with the help of Lorna and Joan but failed I can remember being disappointed that they had not succeeded.
Then an uncle called in and mum got him to hold me steady while she lanced the boil and bathed my hand in hot water and disinfectant. I was so relieved that they had succeeded in doing it and wondered why I was so determined to not let anyone lance the boil when I really agreed that it had to be done. I dutifully bathed my hand three times a day and watched the red lines retreat down my arm. (There was no penicillin then and people did die from staph infections).
When the apricots were ripe dad would call on all the women of our extended family to help with making jam, jars of preserves but mostly for cutting the apricots in half for drying. All the aunts and older girl cousins would sit along each side of long trestle tables in the packing shed and with a sharp knife neatly cut the apricot around the stone and place the halves, cut side up, on wooden trays of about one metre square. Some of the males of the family would all be busily picking the apricots and bringing them to the cutting tables and taking away the buckets of stones while others would take the full trays to the drying yard. The trays would be stacked to a height of about 1.5 metres on a pallet with spacing blocks between them to allow air circulation between the trays then covered with a Hessian box. Hessian boxes were made of a light flimsy timber frame with Hessian stretched over five of the 6 sides and painted with white wash. A bowl of sulphur was placed under the bottom tray and ignited so the apricots were smoked with sulphur fumes to prevent fungal attack. When the apricots were dry I thought they looked like a tray of ears.
Sulphur played an important role in the family’s health care. If there was an outbreak of colds or flu in the house mum would burn a bowl of sulphur in the house to kill the germs, (so she said) and if one of us had an infected cut, a boil or splinter she would give us a desert spoonful of a mixture of sulphur and treacle to eat.
Grape picking was done by employed pickers who were paid about one shilling for each dip tin of grapes they picked and good pickers made better than average money. The Victorian State Government used to run free pickers’ trains from Melbourne to Mildura every picking season
A dip tin is a square galvanized metal bucket, with a wire handle, about 30 x 40 x 20 cm deep and full of holes about 9mm in diameter and 10 mm apart. The dip tins of grapes were carted by a trailer to the drying racks where the whole trailer load was lifted on a frame by a home made crane and dipped into a solution, sometimes hot, before being spread on the wire netting of the drying racks. The drying racks had rows of wire netting ( chicken wire ) supported on cross rails of hardwood and the spacings between were adjustable so that you could widen the space above the layer you were loading with grapes. The sides were covered with a curtain of hessian which was kept rolled up unless it rained in which case it would be all hands on deck to roll down the hessian to keep the grapes from getting wet. When the grapes were of a certain dryness they would be shaken off the racks onto hessian on the ground under the racks and raked out onto more hessian along side the racks on which was called the drying green for a final drying off. Every evening the grapes would be covered by picking up the sides of the hessian tipping them into a central continuous pile and throwing the hessian over it. Every morning the hessian would be spread out and the grapes raked out to a thin layer. Some time during the 1940’s the co-op packing shed installed dehydration equipment and growers could pay to have the final drying done by them rather than doing all of the work of spreading it on the drying green. When the grapes were dry they were put into flat wooden sweat boxes which measured about 1.5 m long x 1.0 m wide and 20 cm deep and stacked ready to be transported to the co-op packing shed from where they were sold.
My grandfather’s ( Donald McPhee) block was on 16th street but his back boundary was adjacent to our side boundary and it was quite close to visit by walking through the vineyards. He was called ‘Father’ and his wife Hanora (nee Skipworth) was called ‘Mother’ by everyone including his grandchildren and great grandchildren. They grew mostly oranges.
They had a rainwater tank but that water was used only for making tea, for cooking and drinking. Water for washing and bathing had to be got from a well which was outside of the back door. The bathroom and laundry were in a leanto at the back near the well but males washed their face and hands and the men shaved in an enamel bowl which stood on a wooden fruit box outside against the bathroom wall. Only the women used the inside of the bathroom except when you actually had a bath. To have a wash you first had to throw a bucket tied to a rope down the well to get water which was a tricky operation because the bucket if not thrown correctly would float and not fill with water and you had to haul it up and try again. To have a bath you had to haul several buckets of water up from the well, pour it into the copper, get some wood and light a fire under it. When the water was hot you carefully transferred the hot water inside to the bath by bucket A bath might take about 10 buckets. The women of the family had a porcelain wash basin and pitcher of water in their bedroom.
I became aware of panic and a sense of urgent preparation and discovered that Father’s packing shed had collapsed and it was all hands over to their place to help.
Father’s packing shed (barn) was constructed with rammed earth walls and was two stories high. The weather had been unusually wet and there was a small leak in the roof over part of the back wall which went undetected. When the mud wall got saturated it collapsed into a heap of mud bringing the first floor structure down on top of everything on the ground floor.
That is why I think that people who build using rammed earth without adding at least 9 percent cement (just for the sake of being purist) are being stupid.
I had my favourite orange trees in our own and in Father’s orange grove. After sampling every tree over the years I found some trees produced tastier oranges than the rest and I would stand under these trees and eat oranges until I could eat no more.
I was a year late starting school. In those days if you did not start school at the beginning of the year you could not start until the next year.
The night before I was to start school, Cyril Muller had dinner at our place and he broke the glass lid of the sugar basin. After dinner my father was repairing a leather school bag for me that used to belong to one of my older brothers and he dropped a rivet on the floor. I crawled under the table to retrieve it and cut my left knee to the bone on part of the broken sugar basin lid. The wound took about three months to heal properly.
Many of the families of the neighbouring properties were migrants from Italy, Greece and Yugoslavia and most of my playmates were from those families. When I was about six once and only once I delivered a message to an Italian family who gave me a glass of watered down homemade wine for my trouble. My mother, a teetotal Methodist, made such a fuss that I was never offered wine again.
Outside the Kitchen window was a large camphor tree which provided a shady play area for us. Mum used to hang a small calico bag of crushed camphor leaves around our necks which she believed would ward off colds.
When I was a naughty 5 year old my mother would lock me in the bathroom but to add to her frustration there was a voluptuous 14 to 16 year old Yugoslav girl who used to like playing with me and tickling me under the camphor tree. She sometimes rescued me through the bathroom window.
At that age whenever I found myself in a comfortable place like in the sun in the bottom of a dry concrete irrigation channel I would fall asleep and be woken by a brother or sister saying “there you are, the whole family is out searching for you”.
I started my formal education at the Irymple state primary school and on my first day at morning break, lunch time and afternoon break I sought a brother or sister in the playground and asked “ do we go home now?”.
Everyone in the family had jobs to do every day and as you grew up you graduated to a more responsible job.
Colin (my oldest brother) was considered a man by now and helped dad with the fruit and Lorna at the age of 14 had a job operating the switch board at the Irymple Telephone Exchange. When you made a phone call you turned a handle on the phone and the switch board girl, Lorna in this case, would say “what number please” and she had to plug you into the number you wanted.
At the ages of five to eight my job was to feed and water the chooks and collect the eggs. Ian’s (Ian was my immediate senior) job was to take the cows out to pasture after morning milking and bring them in for milking in the late afternoon and running the milk through the separator to make cream. Donald’s job was to cut the fire wood for the Kitchen stove and during winter for the living room fire. Anyone could be roped in to help with other jobs and I hated it when mum asked me to help churn the butter.
Butter was made by placing sour cream that was about 4 to 6 days old in a large bowl, add salt and churn for what seemed like hours with a wooden paddle occasionally draining off the buttermilk. Eventually the cream turns into butter and you weighted it into one pound lots and patted it into rectangular blocks with wooden butter pats (rectangular paddles).
I was always keen to make or repair things but frustrated by not being allowed to have tools which were very precious to my dad in those days. Lorna remembers me often, scowling, sitting in the naughty corner where I had been banished for losing my temper because of trying to do something that was beyond my skill at that age. Or was it? If only I had the tools.
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