Chapter 13 Father Rules

Chapter 13 Father Rules

Unlike Larry, I found the farm boring. Mum had been a city girl and also found the farm hard to cope with at times. She disliked the bush and all its horrors of snakes, frogs, goannas, and savage bulls. Being a girl I spent most of my time with my mother in the house and naturally, I grew to dislike the same things and to be very frightened of many bush things.  Larry and I were seven years apart in age and so were never good play companions. Larry loved to tease and I was never a good sport about it.

I was a shy little girl and that shyness stayed with me well into adulthood. Dad never ever laid his hand on me when disciplining, but his voice could be harsh and frightening.  Sometimes in the evenings I guess I chattered a lot, because if my father wanted to say something, he barked at me with a sudden rebuke. Although he swore roundly I never heard him use the F word, ever. 

 He was a big man of six feet and he towered over all of us. His skin was olive brown from the sun and his large weathered hands were well formed and strong. I trusted those smooth, long-fingered hands. He always surprised me the way he could build barbed wire fences, sink posts, and cut down large trees. Once during my childhood I noticed the hands of a doctor, and thought how pale and soft they were, because I was used to seeing my father's big brown, sturdy hands. While I trusted him implicitly, I suffered a lot of fear from his temper.

 Once on a holiday with Aunt Lu in Brisbane, she said to my mother, "Peg, you'll have to stop Alec shouting at Gayle; she's a nervous wreck!"  When Mum took notice, she realised every time my father spoke, I jumped.

    I was lonely and bored most of the time, and occasionally I’d beg Mum to allow me to walk up to the caves beyond the ridge. It took a lot of begging though, because she worried about my safety.

 “You’ll hurt yourself.” or “You’ll walk on a snake!” or “You’ll get lost!”

I’d whine. “No I won’t, Mum,” until she finally gave in.
The caves must have been a couple of kilometres away, but I knew the way well. One thing I had to be careful of was large cobwebs strung between the trees, which usually contained a big St Andrews Cross spider in the middle, patiently hoping to catch his lunch as it flew by. The much smaller redback spiders were also around in small cavities, and were more dangerous, though not fatal.

I walked half a kilometre from the house, making my way up the stony face of the ridge until I reached the top. The walking got easier then as it plateaued out level. The eucalypts weren’t too thick, and grass was sparse on the grainy pale ground. A kilometre across, the land slowly tapered down to the caves.. They were only small caves, maybe 15 feet across, but I could see where wallabies and bandicoots had left paw prints in the fine white dust. All sorts of creatures must have sheltered there out of the elements.

 I’d sit for a while, daydreaming about hiding from mysterious 'invaders.' On the walk back I perched at the top of the ridge and rolled the ancient grey and maroon rocks down the steep face, watching them tumble and bounce, chocking and knocking against tree trunks and big rocks stuck in the sand. While I played I daydreamed about ancient volcanic eruptions which might have spewed out these very rocks.

Life on the farm was often lonely and difficult, but we had our fun times too.  For all his harshness, Dad loved a joke. Once during a hot summer he came home from a visit to Assville with some plastic water pistols, and couldn’t wait to try them out. He shot everyone in sight with a spray of water until, in an effort to get the better of him, we all joined in.

Mum had just mopped the verandah floorboards and she implored us, "Oh come on, stop this, you’re getting water everywhere!" Her words went unheeded in the joy of the moment.

"I've just mopped the verandah!"

After a while we graduated from water pistols to cups of water. My Dad gave as good as he got. We were all laughing uncontrollably, and throwing water at each other. Mum tried to intervene and for her trouble copped a dousing herself! In the end Mum was laughing as much as the rest of us, and she finally trapped Dad with the hand basin full of water. The tanks must have been full that summer.

Every summer that verandah became the centre of our lives. We ate out there; we sat on the steps and talked in the dark after dinner; and when I was little I lost many a teaspoon down between the floorboards after raiding the old kitchen dresser for something delicious like peanut butter or Saunder’s malt.

When Mum found the teaspoons in short supply, Dad jemmied the floorboards up and retrieved the missing culery out of the dirt and cobwebs.

One evening I insisted on sitting in my baby brother’s highchair. I must’ve been seven, and I only just fitted, the sliding tray fully out and hard up against my stomach. Suddenly Dad spied a brown snake out on the grass. We had only two steps, and the table was too close to the lawn for comfort. Everybody rose from the table at once, but I couldn’t move. I was stuck in the high-chair, panic stricken and terrified the snake would gobble me up! (After that I lost my desire for the high chair.)

When my parents first took over the farm some fences had been built and the dairy of course, but my father built many more fences over the years and spent long hours cultivating the land. Sometimes Mum and Larry, (and me if I wasn’t at school,) worked alongside, gathering up small pieces of wood and packing them against stumps. Dad got a few fires burning, then he’d take a burning piece of wood or a shovel full of hot coals from one fire and start another, and so on.

One piece of land on the side of a hill was visible from the house. Sitting out on the verandah that cool dark evening, the whole hillside was a sea of fires, resembling a night-time view of the city. I loved the smell of wood smoke that hung in the air as the evening cooled. After dinner we walked up the hill, taking cobs of corn and slices of bread to toast over the coals. We used long home-made toasting forks; and while we were there Dad shovelled coals from burning fires to heaps of wood that weren’t burning so well. It fascinated me the way a fire smouldered its way down into the ground until all the roots of a stamp were burnt out and only ash remained.

 Dad had the ability to work in the fields for hours, return home, soundly catnap--now called a power nap--for half an hour on his couch, then be up, refreshed, and off back to work. I never knew him to be anything but a hard worker. If he was in a good mood, he’d take me with him to watch whatever he was doing.  Once he was blasting large stumps out of the ground with dynamite.

I was there too and he told me, "Go over behind that tree and don't move." Not for anything would I disobey Dad. 

I felt important knowing he trusted me, and I waited with excitement as he lit the fuse about 50 yards, (or metres,) away. Then he ran back and joined me behind the big tree. We held our hands over our ears until after the explosion. I marvelled at my father's cleverness.

I enjoyed the phenomena of the bottle trees, typical in the area. Easily distinguishable by the unusual bottle shape, they stood dotted amongst the eucalypts and grassy paddocks like forgotten beer bottles. Because of the moisture in the trunk you could sometimes see damage done by lightning after a storm. The white spongy trunk of the tree would be shattered to pieces, its whole narrow leafy top gone completely. Also because they were full of water, old bottle trees often simply rotted away and collapsed into a spongy white heap.

 Electrical storms were frequent during my childhood, and Mum still held fast to some old wives tales about lightning. She doesn't do it now, but on the farm she covered the windows with blankets and put away the knives and scissors. One night we listened fearfully as a tremendous storm raged and cracked. Jagged streaks of lightning whipped across the sky, and suddenly, Mum screamed as a blinding fireball raced through the house. The crack of thunder was deafening, and I was fearful that the house would be struck and burn down, but gradually the storm abated and we all went to bed. The next morning we could see the damage. About 200 yds from the house there had been a tall dead spike of a tree. It was an old dead trunk with hardly any limbs and it had been struck by that bolt of lightning and shattered into splinters the size of fence posts. Some were just outside the front door.