Chapter 5 New Ventures

                                                           Chapter 5  New Ventures

In his father’s engineering shop, Alec had earlier completed an apprenticeship as a fitter and turner. After his marriage, he and his father, Simeon,  secured a position installing huge steam pipes at the Brisbane General Hospital. The contract was completed in a year and their work came to an end.

An enterprising young man, Alec was always full of ideas, suggesting to my mother that they try running a business in the little town of Green Springs, six miles from where Dickie and Molly lived in the bush. The town consisted of a grocery store, a bakery, a post office, a railway station, three churches and a butcher shop. Alec was to set up a fuel depot, but of course when they first arrived in Green Springs there was very little money to spare and they lived in an upstairs room above Daisy Deckle’s grocery store. Alec worked for six weeks on the railway filling in as a labourer. 

After a couple of weeks they moved into a rented house about two miles out of Green Springs.

As they had no ice chest, Alec made one for them using timber.

 Peggy related,“He made it like a box. It had a cavity around the outside that he filled with coal, and he lined the chest with sheets of lead, and added a lid. We kept the insides of the chest cool by wetting the coal, and inside we kept butter and meat and things like that.”

They hung the chest in the cool shade of a tree, in an attempt to protect their goods from the severe Queensland heat.

One weekend Alec and Peggy had been out at the brothers’ farm, where Alec was continuing to clear land, and they returned to the house late that afternoon, just as a storm was building in the west. As they approached the house they came across a long line of beef ants on the march.

The ants were moving fast, four abreast, and Alec remarked, "Look at the beef ants, we’re in for a lot of rain."

Beef ants are a large red ant about as long as your fingernail. They can give you quite a nip on the foot if you stand too close to their nest, but they are quite harmless.

Alec and Peggy followed the ants to see where they were going. Concern set in as they watched the enthusiastic red column head straight up the trunk of the tree where Alec's cooler box hung. They were even more shocked when they discovered those voracious ants had completely invaded their home-made ice chest and devoured a large joint of boiled meat that Peggy had cooked before they went out in the morning. All that was left was a few tiny morsels of meat. That evening Peggy and Alec went to sleep listening to a wild storm pelting raindrops onto their tin roof.

When they established their fuel depot near the edge of town, they lived in an adjoining shed with a bed, a chair, and very little else. It was the glory days before margarine, and butter was transported in large lots of about 20 pounds in good quality pine boxes, so Peggy set to work with a hammer and nails, and using the little pine boards from the butter boxes, and the top half of similar quality fruit boxes of the time, she made side tables for their bed, and other small pieces of furniture.

 “I used one of those great big car boxes, too,” she told me. “I bashed out the boards from the sides and left one along and under the top edge for strength. I left the ends intact and they formed legs. That was our kitchen table.”

  Alec helped by using the pine boards to make a complete new floor for their little dwelling.

“I kept everything scrubbed clean with washing soda and in no time the pine boards became snow white from the scrubbing,” Peggy remembered.

 Everything was always tidy and neat in the little shed and she told me proudly it was spotless and inviting. She also had a very fine glory box filled with beautiful white linen, embroidered doilies, runners etc. and good china and glass ware, and she enhanced her decor with those.

Never short of ideas to utilize his skills, Alec built, beside the fuel depot, a blacksmith's shop, where he set up his forge and anvil. There he worked as a blacksmith and wheelwright, applying steel tires to buggies, mending spokes, making horseshoes and shoeing horses etc.

Alec’s parents were of European stock. I understand Alec’s grandfather, Rasmus, and his wife Maria, migrated to Australia with their very large familly, from Denmark. After they settled on the Darling Downs, their youngest son, Simeon, fell in love with a girl called Millie.

Millie's father had taken a job as a merchant seaman on a ship scheduled to visit Australia, and then jumped ship in the north of Queensland. History shows this was not uncommon. After changing his name, he met and married his young Danish sweetheart, already migrated to and settled in North Queensland. They too eventually made their home on the Darling Downs and gave birth to the daughter, Millie. When Millie grew up and married  Simeon, they had a family of six consisting of four boys and two girls, Alec being the youngest of the children. Milly and Simeon were my grandparents.

Peggy and Alec were managing their business well and had twelve pounds set aside to cover the cost of their monthly fuel bill. Meanwhile in Brisbane, Millie became ill and needed hospitalization. Simeon contacted Alec to supply twelve pounds to pay her hospital costs. (Alec's eldest brother, Alfred, had died of a heart attack in his 40s, and his second eldest brother, Vin, was never well after the war.)  Alec and Peggy sent down to Alec’s dad their twelve pounds fuel money and this put them in debt. Alec contacted his father for advice, and was advised to file for bankruptcy, which proved to be a serious error, but Alec and Peggy left the fuel depot and returned to Brisbane. Bankruptcy left Alec unable to control a cheque account for many years, making it necessary for Peggy to sign cheques, and write business letters. The stigma eroded Alec’s self confidence.

(Before his own death from a car accident at 67, Alec would lose two more brothers and a sister, all with heart disease.)