Our home on the farm was a small, off-white, timber house with a grey roof, and an assortment of grey galvanised iron sheds spread about. Surrounding the house was a vegetable garden with seasonal vegetables like pumpkin, beans and rockmelon, as well as a small number of flowers. In my early years the house had a lean-to kitchen and three main rooms – mum and dad’s bedroom, the dining room, and a spare room for visitors.
There was a long-drop toilet about 20-30 metres from the house and not far from the wood heap. Every time we went past the wood heap we had to bring back an arm load of wood for the stove, which was the source of heat for all the cooking as well as warmth in winter. We also had chamber pots under the bed and if we needed to go out to the toilet after dark we took a hurricane lamp with us. It had a glass cover around it which apparently would burn even in a strong wind and was fuelled with kerosene. We also had one or two gas mantle lights which gave off a very strong white light.
Green frogs were everywhere and they would come into the house, attracted to the lights, if we forgot to close the windows at night.
I really don’t care for frogs. They have a right to exist, but just do it somewhere else. I wasn’t frightened of them but they were unnerving and we often had to sweep them out of the shower before using it. I trod on one on the step in the dark once – very off-putting. Thankfully there were no cane toads back then.
When we were little we just stood in a tin bath to be bathed. As we grew older, we used the shower at the back of the house. We would walk down some steps to a little concreted area with a low ceiling. The shower was a four-gallon drum with a shower nozzle on the bottom. It was connected to a pulley which we used to lower the drum and fill it up with a bucket (mostly just cold water but sometimes for a treat some hot water). We would then raise it up high, reach up, and twist the nozzle to set the water flowing. When the drum was empty that was it, so you hurried with the soap. At the house we had water tanks filled only by rain so we had to be careful with water use and I remember dad tapping each tank periodically to check the water levels. During a drought or spell of dry weather we had to be very careful with water use of course.
Before we had electricity on the farm, we had a wood stovethat, as well as cooking our food, also heated our water. It had a very small sidetank with instant hot water which was great. Mum had to use the wood-heatedcopper to deal with any larger requirement for hot water.
If we wanted a cool drink there was a canvas water bag hanging in the shade under the tanks, where the water would evaporate and the water left in the bag was always pleasantly cool.
When I was young we had an ice chest to keep things cold – the cream truck would deliver huge blocks of ice when it came for the cream two or three times a week. Then later we had a kerosene fridge which always smelt very kerosene-y. The kerosene tank for the fridge had to be filled periodically, and sometimes it wouldn’t burn right for some reason, and there’d be black smoke going up the wall behind it.
When I lived on the farm, if we wanted to make a phone call, we had a party line between the three farms. Our joint number was 104 for the three farms. Uncle Wilfred’s number was 104M, we were 104U and Uncle John was 104S. If someone in town wanted to phone one of us, the telephonist would put it through. The phone would ring in all three houses and then we had to listen for the morse code to see which family should answer. If the sound was dit-dit-dah (two short turns of the phone handle followed by one long turn), that meant U and so a call for us. But if the brothers wanted to talk to each other, they didn’t have to worry about the 104 – just the morse code for the separate lines did the job. Uncle Wilfred was M, so dah-dah, and Uncle John was dit-dit-dit for S.
The house had a front verandah and all three rooms in the house had double doors that opened onto it. As the three children came along, we all slept out on the front verandah. When I was a very young baby in the cot, mum said one day she could see me from her bed and there, wrapped around the mosquito net on the cot, was a python! No doubt this was a nasty experience for her.
Next to the shower under the house was the laundry and on Mondays mum would boil the linen and the clothes in the copper. Then with a special big stick (the ‘copper stick’) she would lift the heavy items out and drop them into a concrete laundry tub where they’d drain and cool. Then she’d rinse them, put them through the wringer (hand-operated of course) and hang everything out on the clothes line. When it was all hung out, she would have to push the long stick (which served as a prop for the line) up and under the line to raise the washing above any chance of being chewed by a cow, or dragging in the dirt.
Once the washing had dried she would do all the ironing but of course there were no electric irons. Instead we had little dolly irons which were quite heavy boat-shaped metal irons, with a handle we could clip on and off. These irons would be heated up on the wood stove in the kitchen upstairs, without a handle, while mum was downstairs ironing in the laundry. When her iron grew cold she would call the nearest child to bring the next iron from the stove. When it was my turn I found this a very frightening task. I had to go upstairs with the cold iron, put it on the stove to heat again, take the handle off it and put it on the next hot iron, and carry it down the stairs to mum in the laundry. I was always terrified of dropping the hot iron but thankfully never did. Later on, we had an iron with a little fuel tank that mum would ignite and heat up that way.
When we finally had the luxury of 32volt electricity we had all the mod cons.
Dad had the 32v electricity setup in a shed in the backyard. It was powered by a motor that charged a big set of storage batteries, a task that had to be carried out every now and then, when he would start the motor. (Are we coming full circle with power generation?!) This setup ran a fridge, vacuum cleaner, hot water heater, radio, lighting, and anything else electrical we had. This was real self-sufficiency.
Modern home generators produce 240v electricity now. When I was about 12 the 240v electricity arrived, carried on a line from town. Then of course we had to buy all new appliances, and dad heard about someone starting up a 32v system so all our 32v appliances were sold to that family. Everything was used and reused in those days.
The 32v electricity arrived at much the same time as the renovations on the house, when I was about seven years old. This was of course after the war, when the community was finally able to spend money on such inessential things as house renovations and new furniture.
Mum and dad hired tradesmen to build a side porch, a kitchen, and a lounge room. We installed an inside bathroom with a bath with running hot water (such luxury!) and there was a septic toilet in its own little room upstairs – so no need to go outside day or night. Of course there was no sewerage service then, so sewage ended up in the septic tank which was in a big pit dug into the ground in the back garden.
The new kitchen had the original wood stove, a sink, fridge, built-in cupboards, and the dinette – a built-in table and benches where we would sit to eat breakfast or just to chat. The floor was a boring beige linoleum and I remember one day mum allowed me to polish it – which I did with dark brown shoe polish. It was never quite the same again and she was very, very annoyed.
When we got the 32v electricity and the renovations, a hot water tank was installed up in the roof, which provided pressure for the delivery of the hot water. Unfortunately, cold water had to be pumped up to this tank – and one of my daily tasks was to fill that tank, which could take about 30 minutes. I would always take a book with me to read as I stood pumping, and I guess sometimes my arm got tired or I got lost in the book, because I remember lots of shouting: Get on with it! Get pumping, you’ve stopped pumping!
The old lean-to kitchen became an office and there was a big bedroom for the three girls to share. Auntie Amy commented on its likeness to a school dormitory. We had a bed each, all hand-me-down cheap timber frames, with metal mesh bases and rather thin horsehair mattresses, and on each bed was an eiderdown and a couple of blankets. I had a really special pink blanket, bought during the war especially for me. Apparently one day my toddler persona found the scissors and had a lovely time cutting holes in the blanket. Mum thought, She’s going to have to live with that for the rest of her life, so she stitched all the bits together onto a dark grey blanket which was then mine for many more years. I don’t know where it ended up but I think I must have been a very irritating child.
Excerpt from ‘The Girl from Gayndah’