Where I Grew Up

There are two places where I grew up – one was boarding school – the less said about that, the better – and the other was a dairy farm.

The farm was situated 23 miles north of Gympie in an area called Upper Wonga (an uncle lived at Lower Wonga) which was halfway between Widgee and Woolooga. Woolooga consisted of a church, general store, petrol station and depot, a butcher shop, a bakery, a hall where weekly dances were held, tennis courts and of course, the pub. Widgee comprised a church, a school, sawmill, tennis courts and the grounds which were packed each year at Easter with the Bushman’s Carnival. It was also the home of the local telephone exchange which was manually operated in those days by a lovely elderly lady who kept everyone up to the mark with telephone party line etiquette. The two Wongas were just general farming districts but each had their own little one-teacher school.

Being at boarding school most of the year meant that I was only at home for school holidays, but I fitted a lot of living into those holidays. Apart from the daily chores of milking and keeping the wood box full for the kitchen stove, there was little that I was required to do, so my horse and I would disappear each morning and return in time for evening milking, usually wet and muddy from leaping across the creek in places too wide for my pony to achieve and landing with a glorious splash in the big waterholes and frightening the life out of the local wildlife.

When we arrived home with the cows for evening milking, my mother would just roll her eyes heavenwards and shudder at the state of my clothing and hair. Eventually she learned to say nothing. During milking the cows would crowd up around the bails waiting their turn, and they were very generous with their warmth and their ticks. I had a habit of burrowing my head into the flank of whichever cow I was milking and of course the little parasites migrated. Each night my mother did a tick patrol through my hair and because I wore it in long plaits, she always found a few that had changed their diet.

Until I was 10, our lighting was provided by a series of big batteries that stood on a shelf in the laundry and were charged each morning by a generator that also powered the milking machines and separator in the dairy. The milk was separated off, the cream into cans for the factory and the milk into troughs where it was mixed with pollard for the pigs and calves. That was when I developed the habit of turning off any light that was not wanted because each time a light was turned on, the lights in the rest of the house were dimmed.

Each year at the beginning of December, an old aboriginal man would come walking through the farming area looking for jobs in exchange for “baccy, tucker, old clothes and a place to sleep in the shed”. He introduced himself as Joe and was always unfailingly polite and deferential to the ‘boss’ and ‘missus’ and nobody ever sent him away empty handed. The kids from all seven farms used to congregate at my place because I was the only there during the holidays and there was always a lot of catching up to do. Because we kids didn’t see many aboriginals around, Joe was at first an item of curiosity to us and we used to hang around him and ask him an incredible range of questions. He was always ready to down tools and talk to us

which meant that the jobs didn’t get done but we kids were kept occupied and out of our parents’ hair so nobody seemed to mind too much. His politeness extended to us also, with the girls always being ‘little miss’ and the boys always ‘young boss’. The chats under the shed lean-to invariably led to conversations about where he came from (way back up the road), where he was going to (way on down the road) and then what he ate on the road – that was when things got interesting. He progressed from telling us about the wonders of nature to showing us where he was able to get the juicy titbits that had us shuddering in disgust at the thought of eating – things like witchetty grubs and snake for instance.

After the first day or two of Joe being around, our parents didn’t see much of their children during the day, as long as we were home by dark, they weren’t worried because we were all with Joe, and he would deliver every child safely to their own farm before returning to wherever he was sleeping for the night. During those wonderful days he taught us how to tickle the belly of a sleepy catfish without rippling the water, how to sneak up on a basking tortoise and quickly pick it up before it could get into the water and escape. We learned to lay quietly on our bellies on the creek bank so the platypus would go about his business in the clear water unworried about the twenty or so eyes fastened on his every move, and we experienced the rare sight of seeing a baby brought out for a swim by its very attentive parent.

He showed us how to light a tiny smokeless fire no bigger than a teacup but hot enough to cook a whole snake coiled around it. We learned how to quickly grab the tale of the snake and crack it like a whip so its head flew off, then skin and clean it to cook it around our little fire. Witchetty grubs became something of a favourite because, cooked quickly in our hot ashes for 30 seconds, the flesh tasted like sweet almonds when sharp little teeth scraped it off the centre vein. The first one we tried was accompanied by shrieks of delighted disgust, especially by us girls, but our hunger and the sweet taste overrode our objections and we dined in style. Fresh cooked eel wrapped in the leaf of some plant that I have forgotten the name of was often on our menu as well and most days we were delivered back to our parents with our bellies bulging with food our mothers preferred not to know about.

Then one year he just didn’t come and we never saw him again. He was sadly missed by every child in the district.

When I was 10 the electricity came through and we got an electric jug and fridge. The demented bubbling of the jug being boiled was no substitute for the gentle singing of the kettle kept on the stove. Likewise with the fridge, the ice-cream was not the same and lacked the flavour of what was made in the old kerosene powered fridge that was turned on its side and became a dog kennel when the electric one moved in.

There were some quite hilarious experiences following the connection of the electricity, but they will be for another time.

It is with much fondness that I wander sometimes down memory lane and revisit my childhood. Even though there wasn’t much in the way of material things, I remember my childhood on the farm as being rich with experience and the sheer love of life.