A little bit about the author.

Well, I was born in a major rural city in central Victoria. We lived a dozen miles or more away from the town, where my mum was the Post Mistress of an old fashioned manual telephone exchange. Back in the day when the switchboard consisted of a bunch of plugs on weighted cords that would have to be placed in the hole of the number required, then the handle on the side of the exchange cranked just so many times to let the person being called know that they were wanted. A long time ago.

Mum (Daisy) and dad (Harry, both deceased now) had emigrated to Australia in 1957 as 10 pound poms, on the trip were Mum, Dad, my elder brother, one of my elder sisters, another elder sisters stayed in England for some reason. I’ve never really found out why and as a result I’ve never met her (but that’s another story I suppose). Then there was me getting a free ride as a yet to be born Aussie, that mum was carting about.  I was the first Aussie born member of our family. Mum later on lost a little brother and then along came my little sister. 

I had a great early childhood, most modern parents would have a pink fit if a little tacker spent their early formative years as I did. Still, I think it was a pretty awesome start to life though. From the time I could walk, there were only a few real rules. Stay away from the creek and the dams, watch out for snakes and be home before your father. Pretty straight forward. Boy! did I have a ball. I started attending the local school just after I turned four, for what that was worth, they needed more kids, or the school would have been shut down.

When I was about three, mum used to fill up my old baby bottle with cold tea, a Vegemite sandwich and a homemade jam sandwich put it all in an old leather satchel bag and away I’d go. With mum’s admonishments ringing in my ears, “be good, watch out for snakes and stay away from the creek!” Fat chance! That’s where all the action was.

So, into the bush I went, I learned the habits of its denizens and its dangers, I learned how to stalk rabbits and in fact, any creature I came across.  I found their places of refuge, I learned their vulnerabilities, through observation and practice at stalking them. I learned to find my way around in the bush, I could find water and wild beehives and I knew how to get a feed from whatever was around me, I was pretty sharp when it came to avoiding “Joe Blakes” (snakes) there were mobs of the sods, mainly king browns all around our way, they were a regular occurrence and some were huge! They were always there and an ever-present threat to man and beast, but you learned to live with them, or kill them, depending on how close to the house they were.

Mum often told the story of the time I was laying on the floor by the fire watching our new TV, she poked her head into the lounge room to see where I was and what I was up to. Apparently I was laying on my belly sound asleep and a big king brown had slithered into the house from somewhere and curled up beside me, by the fireplace, apparently mum grabbed me on the quiet got hold of a fire poker and took a golf swing at the snake, apparently, she sorted the snake and I didn’t get bitten. Life was like that back then. The house we lived in was originally built around 1845, (wattle & daub) it was badly damaged by fire around the end of 1845 and was refurbished/rebuilt in 1846 (approximate dates). Yep, it was an old house, I often think it may have been some kind of general store at one time or another in its history, red gum floors, a six-foot-wide fireplace with iron chains and a steel hob for a big black pot mum had for cooking.

Dad was a returned soldier and a dairyman in England, through and through, but that sort of work was hard to come by here in Australia at the time, so we wound up where we did, a bit by accident or serendipity if you like, but dad was determined to become an “Aussie”, he’d fought beside Aussies at Tobruk and at the battle of El Alamein, he decided there and then it was where his family would go. After getting off the ship in Melbourne, Mum tells me of sitting on the stoop of the migrant hostel and counting up our family’s wealth, it amounted to two half penny pieces. We were supposed to go to East Gippsland as part of a soldier settlement plan or whatever they called it after WW2, but it was back then a five-day trip. To mum, that was a lifetime of distance away and just too much for her, being pregnant with me and unwell from the trip out. Within a day or so, Dad got a job on a dairy farm out Werribee way, but things were a bit crook, Mum was heavily pregnant with me, in a new country in an old cottage that was apparently ramshackle, damp and draughty, but providence stepped up.

 Just before I was born, dad had occasion to take some bobby calves to the old Newmarket sale yards in Melbourne, while he was there he happened to make the acquaintance of a well to do woman, that had made a great deal of money selling scrap iron to Japan, prior to the World War. As a result of this having made her a very wealthy woman, she spent pretty much doing all she could for returned servicemen. She said it was her way of trying to make up for selling scrap to the Japanese that was then turned into bombs, guns and bullets, then using them to kill our soldiers, something for which she apparently held deep regrets forever after. Anyway, she took a liking to dad, he had mentioned he was looking for a new position. When he told her of his plight, this lady (I shall allow her to remain anonymous, although my family will forever be indebted to her, for her kindness and generosity of spirit, we knew her as “Ma”, those that knew her, will know of whom I speak), she put dad into her chauffeur-driven Bentley and drove dad back to the farm in Werribee, whereupon she took one look at the conditions that my family were living in and took great umbrage at it. She could see my mum was in distress at her circumstances, Ma declared that not for another hour, would she allow us to live under such conditions, as it would have been the death of mum and me. She told mum and dad to pack their belongings, while she dealt with the owner of the farm (I would love to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation). Well, she came back and handed dad the equivalent of a few weeks’ outstanding pays, (I’ve been told it was from the farmer, but I have serious reservations about the veracity of that statement). She loaded mum dad, my brother and sister, kit and caboodle into the car, and away they went. She said to dad, “Harry, I can’t pay you, but you can live rent-free in a place I own out Bendigo way”. “In return, all I ask is for you to fence the boundary from the timber you can cut from the block, clear enough for me to run some livestock on it. You can earn a decent quid from the kangaroo bounty. Stay until you get yourselves properly settled”. Sixty years later, that fence still stands, cut by hand axe and adze and the sweat of my father’s brow.

Well, that place was at the Northern end of the district and it was where we spent some time. I have no first-hand memory of that place, only the stories I’ve been told of it. I surmise that we stayed there long enough for dad to honor his commitment to Ma, finish the fences and for mum to secure the opportunity at the post office which was down the road a few miles. “The Post Office”, the place I recall vividly, where I remember an idyllic childhood of freedom, danger (the two things are inextricable from one another), the gaining of knowledge of Australia’s landscape and its animals. It is where my love of the bush and this country came into being, it’s where the seeds of fierce independence took root, grew and still abides within me. in fact, I’d go so far as to say, that the very bones of this land attached themselves to my soul through my bare feet. I feel it still, at 60, I take my boots off even now and allow my feet to revel in the cherished memories that this land has given me.