1. Introduction

MEMOIRS OF ANDREW McPHEE

THE STORY OF 

an

ACTIVE LIFE

and a

RELAXED RETIREMENT

NOT POVERTY

I WAS  BORN INTO A FAMILY THAT HAD NO MONEY

BUT WE WERE NOT POOR

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

WHEN OUR SHOES WORE OUT OUR FATHER REPAIRED THEM

MY MOTHER MADE OUR DAILY BREAD,

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

MY FATHER GREW FRUIT AND VEGITABLES AND SHEEP

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

 TO PUT  ON THE ROAST LAMB

IF WE WANTED SOMETHING WE WOULD MAKE OR BUILD IT

AND WE LOVED EACH OTHER

THE TEN OF US I BELIEVE LIVED BETTER THAN MOST

WITH NO MONEY 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

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

Dad's parents, Donald II

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

Donald McLean died October 10th. 1855.

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

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.

3. Irymple

We left Meringur in 1936, my father surviving the depression had insufficient reserves of cash or courage to survive the drought that followed.
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.

4. The War Years

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.

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.

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.

5. High School

I started high school in 1946.  The same year the school got a new principal.  Mr. Stockdale I liked immediately because at the first school assembly he announced that there were too many petty rules in this school and he was going to remove most of them.  However, he said, “if you do not behave responsibly then I will reinstate each of these petty and restrictive rules as necessary”.  Having a comparatively free life at school was up to us.

Before long a group of four bullies started to pick on me, probably because bullies are basically cowards and being one of the smallest kids in first year I became their target.  They would follow me around insulting and taunting me trying to get me to start a fight.  I am not a pacifist.  If I had had the ability to flatten the four of them I would have done it with a great deal of glee, but it’s stupid to start a fight you can’t win.  They started to wait for me on the road to school and I managed to dodge through them on my bike but when they tried to knock me off with sticks and throw sticks through the spokes of my wheels I thought it was time to do something about It.  Dad was still in the air force so I spoke to Mum who saw the principal who put some sort of order on the four boys and they were never seen together again.  Schools don’t seem to be able to do that these days.  After that, whenever I saw one of them they would turn and walk in the other direction.

My career in cricket was squashed at high school.  Cricket matches used to run over two weeks.  They first put me in the C grade team and the first week of the match I would do so well for the second half of the match they put me in A grade which would be a big disaster.  A thirteen year old skinny little boy facing up to an agressive18 year old bowler I would be so nervous, with knees knocking, wouldn’t see the ball which would just bounce off my bat at any angle until some one caught me out.  Then it was back to C grade where I was apparently so outstanding they put me back to A grade.  I really belonged in B grade but was never placed there.  So I decided to try tennis which I played until I was 72 years old.

We had a most excellent maths teacher at high school who was very good at explaining concepts.  Once I understand the concept of anything the rest is easy for me and I got 100% in maths exams a couple of times.  With science and chemistry, although I liked the subjects, I did not do so well, because I believe those teachers did not clearly explain concepts.
Although I enjoyed high school and found the work interesting I seemed to be working with a great deal of distractive pressure which at the time I thought must be caused by the onset of puberty.  Years later I found it was more to do with the death of my brother Donald.

Although the public health system knew about the deficiency of iodine in rain water and therefore encouraged country people to use iodised salt, they did not yet know how the deficiency of fluoride caused unhealthy teeth.  My teeth were not strong and by the age of fifteen many of my top teeth were broken and decaying and I had to have them removed.  It was a horrible experience especially for a fifteen year old.  In those days the anaesthetic was laughing gas which certainly didn’t make me laugh but made me unconscious with the most awful sense of spinning, seeing flashing lights and made me feel very sick.
The worst, especially for a fifteen year old, was that I had to go without these top teeth for three months while my gums healed.  During an age when I should have been developing my best smile and laughing a lot I was careful not to smile.
Mum used to say “why not have all of your teeth out and get all false teeth, they are a lot less trouble than real teeth.

Later when my wife, Heather, was pregnant, before fluoride was added to the water supply,  I made sure she took the correct amount of fluoride and as the boys grew up I calculated the amount of fluoride each required and added it to their milk.  They all have beautiful strong teeth.    

After dad was discharges from the Air Force, when I was thirteen, he immediately started to clear the Gol Gol block of land where he had installed a ‘pickers’ hut’ on the bank of the creek in which he and Colin stayed about four nights a week and Ian and I spent most weekends and school holidays with them.  We were pulling out ‘river flat box trees’ with a hand tree puller, building fences, digging a well for the irrigation pump and a trench for the main pipeline.
It was dad’s intention to grow wine grapes and peaches as the main produce but to survive while awaiting these plants to reach maturity he would grow rock melons, water melons, pumpkins and cucumbers.

Irrigating by furrows in the ground (not sprinklers) requires the channels and furrows to be carefully planned with a gradual slope so that the water would run slowly from the start to the finish and soak into the ground ideally so that there was no water left over at the end of each furrow.  Dad got a surveyor to give him levels of the ground so he could plan the course of the channels and furrows and eventually the direction of the rows of grape vines.  For a while after that I wanted to be a surveyor.
Green peas were also grown which not only gave a cash crop but at the end of the season the pea bushes were ‘disced’ into the ground which added nitrogen to the soil.

Dad got cuttings from wine grape vines of friends and planted them in specially prepared soil until they sprouted roots and shoots.  While this was happening he, Colin and Ian built rows of trellis (fences) along which the vines would be planted.  I helped at weekends by patrolling the watering of the melons and cucumbers.  When the vine cuttings were ready for planting the entire family, including Lorna, Joan and Jean helped plant thousands of these young vines.

Growing rock melons, cucumbers and peas entailed rough ploughing and then discing the ground to break it up into loose friable soil and then carefully ploughing the watering furrows in equally spaced and straight lines.  Planting the seeds, which was done by hand, watering and regularly tending the young shoots by tedious hand weeding.  When the melons started to grow, before watering, we had to walk along every row and lift out and place on high ground any melon that had fallen into a watering furrow otherwise the water would make it rot.  All of this happened over an area of some three to four hectares of land.
Watering meant patrolling the fields to ensure that the water was flowing suitably along each furrow and soaking in, if it was flowing too fast you would shovel small banks into the furrow to slow it, if it had reached the end of the rows and every furrow had had sufficient water you would stop the water supply to these rows and start it on others.  All this work was done out in the sun where the temperature was around fifty and sixty degrees Celsius.

When the melons started to ripen picking was a back breaking job.
Melons didn’t all ripen at once so you have to choose the ones ready, which is a skill in itself, pick them with secateurs leaving about fifteen millimetres of stem, place then carefully into boxes which were loaded onto a trailer hauled by a tractor and taken to the packing shed.
At the packing shed they were sorted into sizes of sixteen to the case (small), twelve to the case (ideal size) and ten to the case (large).  Eight to the case were too large for the market so we ate them ourselves or sometimes sold them from the back of the ute in the streets of Mildura to get some pocket money.
Picking and packing had to be done to a tight schedule.  We would start picking at daylight and have to have our load ready for the transport truck to pick up by four PM  so that they would be in the Melbourne market by four AM next morning.

The next day would be a watering day.

One fateful day, after the transport truck had taken our load of rockmelons, dad said to me “we have twelve cases of over large rockmelons today, do you want to come with me to Mildura and we will sell them to a wholesaler?”.
We pulled up in front of the wholesaler’s shed, he came out and dad said “how much will you give me for these rock melons?”.
The wholesaler examined them and said sixteen shillings ($1.60) a case”  which dad accepted.
I thought that was a fair price compared to what we got in Melbourne.
Dad saw another farmer and started to chat and I was bored out of my mind, so I leaned on the ute, dad was a compulsive chatter and I’m often hanging around while he chats.

A retail green grocer pulled up alongside our ute and asked the wholesaler “got any good rockies?”.
“Yes, right here” he said pointing to them still in our ute.
“How much?”.
“Thirty two shillings a case” the wholesaler replied.  The green grocer took them from our ute.

All that work over such a long time and we got sixteen shillings a case and the wholesaler got sixteen shillings a case clear profit, the same as we got, and he didn’t even touch them plus we had to pay for those cases.


“Farming is definitely not for me” I thought.


When at Gol Gol, mum would sometimes say to me “we haven’t any meat for dinner, could you go out and shoot a couple of rabbits?.”
A policeman from Mildura, who was involved in youth work, asked me one day if I would take a 14 year old boy from Melbourne shooting with me.  The lad had been in trouble with the law in Melbourne and the police had sent him to Mildura to get some experience of country life.  I took him to the North side of the Gol Gol swamp where there were usually plenty of rabbits.  He was excited by the bush and I let him have a few shots at some rabbits, which he hoped he had missed.  He was basically a kind person and didn’t really want to hurt them.

The North side of the swamp was edged with sand dunes.  It was a beautiful calm sunny day but it had been windy for a few days before.  On top of one of these sand dunes I found the swirling wind had blown a neat circular hole and in this hole were two human skeletons.
When I showed them to him he was beside himself with excitement.  One skeleton was lying on its side, curled up in a foetal position, and the other smaller skeleton was hugging it’s back like two spoons together.
Later I took dad out to see them and he said that the smaller skeleton was a woman, “you can tell by the pelvis” he said.  When we touched one of the ribs it crumbled to white dust so they must have been thousands of years old.  The whole thing was so delicately but still perfectly hanging together.  Judging by their teeth they would have been young adults when they died.
We took the lad back to his policeman guardian and told him about the find and he said “obviously very old aboriginal skeletons, best leave them alone and don’t tell anyone about them, let them rest in peace”.

 I imagined this not unusual romantic story set five thousand years BC about a young aboriginal man falling madly in love with a beautiful young aboriginal woman but she was chosen to be a wife of the chief.

 “ However they were so much in love that they ignored the ruling of their elders and kept seeing each other.  The Kadichie man, in his emu feather boots and scary mask, points ‘the bone’ at him and sings his death song.  He is curled up on the sand dune dying when she finds him and she cuddles into his back and because she loves him so much she dies with him.  The wind blows, the sand shifts and covers their bodies.  Seven thousand years later, the day before I came along, the wind blows in a precise way and neatly uncovers their bones.”

I feel really privileged to have had this special connection with these two ancient people.    
I would like a good poet to write a poem about them.


Harry Fleming and I started high school the same year and we formed a close friendship.  Harry had three sisters, two younger and one older, and I heard nothing of his mother, they never talked about her.
His father owned the shop on the corner of Seventh Street and the Bridge Road which he leased out and lived in the house next door.  He was a bookmaker by trade which was interesting for me, being from a family that abhorred gambling.
Harry spent a lot of time at our place and I was at his place a lot.  His family was close and affectionate as was ours.  Harry and I grew from boys to men together and we dated girls together.
He fell in love at a young age with Erica Massey who lived with her family on a boat on the Murray and they married in about 1954.
Harry had dark curly hair and was considered a good looking young man.  He could play the guitar, the piano and sing country and western songs and fancied the country life but he was really a city boy.
His father bought him a beautiful horse, called Gypsy, complete with a stock saddle and I was so envious.  Gypsy was bred and trained as a race horse but was considered an outlaw, and could not be properly trained to race. She was unpredictable but not considered dangerous.  That’s why Harry’s father got her for a good price.
I would watch Harry ride her on the river bank behind their house and all would be well until Gypsy decided to take control.  She would take off with Harry hanging on and go wherever she wanted.   When she’d had her fun she would suddenly prop, from a full gallop stop dead.  Harry would gracefully fly through the air in a full arc and still hanging on to the reins go splat flat on his back on the ground in front of the horse but he never got hurt.  Gypsy would sniff him and seemed to think “are you alright” or maybe “did I kill him this time?”.

Harry was going away for a couple of weeks and asked me to mind Gypsy on the Gol Gol property, but he said you have to ride her every day to keep her from getting too flighty.  That was alright while riding her in the paddock but one day mum said “I need some items from the shop, could you ride Gypsy into Gol Gol and get them”?.
The ride to the shop was good but on the way home she decided to take control.
With the bit between her teeth she leaped into the full gallop of a race horse and did her best to wipe me off by going close to trees and under low limbs.
I clung on with my head next to her neck sliding around her to the left to miss a tree and consequently losing my right stirrup.
Sliding around to the right, to miss being wiped off by the next tree, losing my left stirrup.
Then hanging on with my legs, while she galloped at full speed, ducking under branches, the stirrups bashing into my shins.
As we approached the home paddock I thought “oh no she is going to run into the barbed wire fence.  She won’t see it at this speed”.
Harry’s beautiful horse will have to be destroyed.
So I started to yell for help.
Colin came running out of the house, immediately saw the situation and ran up to the fence waving his arms.
Gypsy immediately propped, right at the fence.  I think she planned to dump me over the fence.
I must be able to hang on better than Harry with my legs because I didn’t go flying over the fence, I went splat on her neck and crushed my nuts on the pummel of the saddle.
It was painful and I had to lie down for an hour before I could eat lunch.
   


Early in 1948 I had not seen Harry for about a week when his father came to see me.  Harry had disappeared and he thought I might know where he was and although I had no idea I had a hard job convincing him.  Erica knew nothing of his whereabouts.
After a few weeks Harry phoned home and told his father that he was in Griffith picking peaches and he was not coming back.  He wanted to start his own life.  He was 16 years old.  They got me to speak to him and I promised that if he came back and finished high school, we would take off and work our way around the outback of New South Wales the following year.  So Harry came back and finished his final year at High School.
I now found myself committed to doing this trip with Harry, but my parents were really against it and wanted me to continue with my education.
I had to go against their wishes.

During the school holidays that year Mr. Fleming, to give us experience, took us to an old abandoned shearers’ quarters on the Darling River.  Although we had plenty of tinned food,  we were supposed to live off the land for a week.
We did quite well shooting and trapping rabbits and on one occasion got ourselves a couple of wild ducks.   To show that we were good hunters we decided to try for a nice kangaroo.

On one of our hunting expeditions we noticed that roos used to graze in a bend in the river and so decided to corner some at dawn the next morning.
The river bend had a lot of tree stumps about the size of an average kangaroo and while carrying out our strategy of cornering the roos at dawn we couldn’t see any.  At last Harry spied one move and took a shot at it.
The entire area was suddenly alive with roos charging straight past us, the shot had made them take off.
In the dawn light, while they kept still, we were unable to distinguish them from the tree stumps.  We had a few flying shots at them but hit none.
We then decided to track them through the scrub and came across a huge old-man red kangaroo about two metres tall.
He looked at us as we steadily raised our rifles and shot him.  I aimed for his heart but must have missed it.
He took off through the scrub.
Having wounded an animal both our fathers had taught us that you must not leave it to die in pain so we tracked it for about three kilometres through the scrub and found it lying on it’s side in a clearing.
I’m thinking “the poor bloody thing”.  As we raised our rifles to shoot it through the head it suddenly jumped up.
Standing on it’s tail, came at us slashing with its’ hind legs trying to rip us open with it’s great hind claws.  We staggered backwards firing from the hip.
We must have put eight or ten more bullets into it before it dropped dead.  He died hard.
I had a browning pump action repeating rifle and Harry had a bolt action Winchester repeater.
It was a huge beautiful animal with hands that were bigger than mine.  This was an attitude changing experience for me and I decided then and there that I never wanted to harm another living thing but of course there were times when I had to.
We cut off it’s tail and had roo tail stew for dinner that night.

     
Harry with the tail of the big red roo we shot Self in army disposal clothes    1948

When the school year ended we got a job at the Rendezvous café as waiters to earn money for our trip.  Mr. Fleming with his numerous contacts found a sheep station owner, called Poddy Finche, who was travelling in early January from one of his sheep stations in South Eastern New South Wales through Mildura to his sheep station near White Cliffs in western NSW and then to Bourke near the Queensland border. “Now you need not leave before Christmas, you can have Christmas at home,” Mr. Fleming happily announced.
We fitted ourselves out with back packs, clothes, ground sheets, blankets and water bottles from army disposals where such items were cheap and needed no ration tickets.

Ready for droving