The Tumbledown ---- shack

The family had long gone from the tumbledown shack at the corner of the paddock.

It stood there forlorn and neglected, a shell of the happy home it once was.

Truly it wasn’t much to look at; two small rooms of rough timber construction on wooden piers and a very small porch at the front. There was only one window and one door. The timber cladding was rotting and falling off in many places and the roof was rusted and would never keep out the rain. The old bath tub sitting out the front in the open air once served to bath the family and also served as a laundry tub.

Cooking and heating came from the old wood stove in the kitchen that backed into a galvanised iron shell on the outside wall and funnelled into a chimney. The rain water tank that once stood on wooden piers at the back corner of the shack was long gone.

Inside, the cladding was plywood. There had been no insulation so the shack had been stinking hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. You had to get near the stove which was kept burning most of the time in a futile attempt to keep the cold at bay. The place had never been painted. Everything was now weathered and decaying.

None of this reflected the happy times we shared there. The family; Mum, Dad, my sister and me somehow fitted into that tiny space and whilst we didn’t have much in the way of material possessions we had each other and that was somehow enough.

I remember playing around the dam just below the shack, swimming, catching crawchies and eels and watching the kangaroos come down for a drink in the early morning and each afternoon at dusk.

Mum and Dad have passed away now and my sister and I both married and moved away,--- the shack abandoned.

I come back now and again to see how the old shack is going and feel saddened at it’s failing condition. It’s nothing to look at but it sure holds a host of memories that keep drawing me back. One day the old shack will be gone; I’ll miss it, but the memories will live on.