Chapter 16 Natural Food and Nature’s Fuel
The wood heap, a stone’s throw from the house, was strategically placed off to one side but generally between the house and the backyard toilet. Apparently this was a deliberate design strategy recognized as necessary to protect the dignity of the women of the household. In any case I know that the situation suited Mum fine. She was nothing if not modest to a fault. (As she was for the rest of her life.) If she felt the need to visit that barbaric restroom, she paused outside the house, casting her eyes around to check for the presence of any males within sight; satisfied the coast was clear, she proceeded hastily on her way. The same performance was repeated on the return journey. Hesitating outside the toilet, she’d do a quick reconnoitre, and if she suspected any men were within view, she’d walk casually to the wood heap, pick up a piece of wood and nonchalantly return to the house.
When visiting Brisbane, I’d noticed a box of sawdust in Grandma’s outside toilet, but no such luxuries were enjoyed at the farm. Mum used phenyle, a strong black disinfectant smelling of tar, to scrub the toilet, but other luxuries were sparse. Toilet paper consisted of old telephone books from which you could conveniently tear the required size. When the phone pages ran out, Dad contributed Hansard, (a record of parliamentary proceedings,) to the cause. I enjoyed reading the dialogue in them, especially if there had been a heated discussion during debate.
Our toilet was the typical outside dunny, or earth closet. It was a square wooden box with a round hole in the top. The top was hinged and lifted up to reveal the can underneath. Sadly, Dad was not good at keeping the toilet emptied, and poor Mum nagged him for days, the toilet dangerously near capacity, before he at last dug a hole, up behind the toilet amongst the brigalow trees, and buried the waste. If the toilet was too full to use, Mum sent me to perch on the ground hidden by the trees. I never witnessed anyone else doing this, but I guess they must have.
If we were caught short away from the house, it was a case of find what you could to do the job, behind the largest tree you could find to serve as protection. Soft leaves were best, although not up to the standard of the telephone pages.
The woodheap was somehow a centre of activity.
If we were short of meat, I’d hear Mum say, “You’ll have to kill a couple of chooks, Alec.” In preparation for the slaughtered fowls she’d have a four gallon tin of water simmering on the stove.
Dad threw grain to the fowls and when they were busy pecking with their heads down, he’d grab two of the younger ones by the legs and carry them to the chopping block at the would heap. Holding the chickens by the legs, Dad stretched them out across the big wood block and lopped off their heads with the axe, dumping them on the woody ground of the wood heap to bleed, where the headless bodies bounced around like mexican jumping beans.
Meanwhile, he fetched the can of steaming hot water from the kitchen stove. Neck first, he dunked the chickens into the hot water, after which he tied them by the legs, and they hung suspended. Dad had tied a piece of rope between two trees near the wood heap especially for this purpose. Having been immersed in the hot water, the chickens were easier to pluck, and he soon had the feathers off them, plucking quickly and flicking the wet feathers into the water.
Totally plucked, the chickens were cut open between the legs and the gizzard and entrails removed. The chickens now 'dressed,' Mum soon had them in her large aluminium boiler on the stove. One time Dad heard of a scheme to sell dressed poultry, known as capons. It required male chickens of a certain age to be injected with a hormone tablet to fatten them. Dressed for sale, the capons were very popular and my parents made quite a bit of money out of them. I remember people ringing to place an order, and then driving up to the house to pick up their dressed chickens on the appointed day. In our district dressed poultry was a luxury.
As a bush housewife, Mum became an expert at managing the heat of the fire, at knowing how much wood to put on for certain cooking tasks, at knowing which types of wood burnt down quickly, and at knowing which ones were slow to burn, going black and smoking. She rose at five every morning specifically to light the fire in the stove. First and foremost there was Dad’s early morning cup of tea, and the kitchen to warm up. If everyone was still sleeping she ironed with the petrol iron. Much of the washing was starched stiff, particularly white table linen, and all of the ironing was damped down using an empty sauce bottle or similar with a special rubber stopper which had a metal end with holes in it. She’d select a stack of about half a dozen items, laying them one upon the other, dampening as she went, by shaking water from the bottle, and then rolling the bundle up tight so that they all became evenly damp. Left bundled tightly for a short while, the items were then ironed.We never sat down to a meal without a starched tablecloth.
Unfortunately for Mum, Dad was not good at keeping up the wood supply at the woodheap. When the heap was bare, Mum and I often set off walking down through the grass and trees. We picked up as many pieces of old dead wood as we could carry. After a time small pieces of wood became scarce in the paddocks around the house. Mum and I, later also dragging Owen in the stroller, walked further and further. In desperation, she often dragged home a long dead limb. Manhandling one end into the firebox, she propped the protruding end up on one of the kitchen chairs, and as the log burned down she fed it into the fire. It was awkward moving around the kitchen with that log protruding out of the firebox, but many a cake or piece of meat got cooked like that!
My mother was a great cake maker. Dad loved cake, especially sultana cake, and generally started his day with a cup of tea and a piece of cake or a home-made biscuit or three. His other great love was baked custard, or baked rice custard. He came in twice a day for meals and expected sweets with each meal.
The stove burnt all day and a lot of wood was needed. Eventually Dad built himself a little sawmill at the wood heap. On a flat bodied dray that was pulled behind the tractor, he brought home loads of dead logs to saw them into blocks of firewood size. After that it was easy to split the blocks with the axe. By the time I was nine, I showed off by lifting the axe with the block on the end and letting it fall on the chopping block, thus splitting it in two. A heap of wood blocks lasted about three months. Unfortunately, after one lot burned down, it could then take several months before Dad got around to sawing up another load.
Dad’s diet defied all the odds. He ate huge plates of sweets, but very few vegetables, and he loved fatty meat. His greatest love was pig’s trotters or pig’s tails, both very fatty, and he would chew into them until the fat ran down his chin! His favourite roast was a rolled rib roast held together with wooden skewers. In fact, I don't remember ever having had a different roast. Strangely, though chicken was not uncommon in our diet, we never ate roasted chicken as Dad preferred chicken boiled. When we ate rib roast, I cut out all the fat from between the layers of meat and Dad would chide me over it. He loved corned brisket, fatty chops, bullocks’ tongue and oxtail. I don't remember margarine ever being on our table. We used a lot of butter and in winter time when the butter was hard, Dad simply sliced thick slices onto his bread.
Another diet faux pas of his was bread and cream. Living on a dairy farm which supplied cream to the cooperative butter factory in Assville, we naturally ate a lot of cream. Dad’s favourite was a slice of bread with cream poured over and sugar sprinkled thickly over the cream. Delicious! No wonder we used so much sugar. We even put it on sliced tomatoes. Years later, when Dad was killed in a car accident at the age of sixty-seven, he didn't have so much as a high cholesterol.
When Mum first moved to the bush, she was used to cooking with butter, as she did as a young special cook at Rowe’s Café in Brisbane. The harsh realities of economising in the bush overtook her with unnerving haste, however. She quickly learnt to utilise beef fat for cooking. I watched her break eggs into the black frying pan, and as they sizzled in deep fat, spoon it over each egg until it was cooked pink on the top.
To my shame, I became notable for once asking for bread and dripping when we were out visiting friends!
Dad frequently bought day-old chicks by the box full from a company in Brisbane called Red Comb. He bought Black Australorps or White Leghorns, and we had a few Rhode Island reds as well. Sometimes he experimented with exotic breeds and for a while we had a pair of pretty grey, speckled guinea-fowl. These were a great conversation topic but difficult to manage on the farm. They roamed far and wide, roosting in trees and disguising their nests in long grass.
A flock of geese roamed free, laid huge eggs and produced lots of little goslings. I loved them, when I wasn't being chased by the ratty gander. Unfortunately, prolific piles of little soft logs were a trap for a little girl's bare feet. Our free-roaming poultry had an unending supply of grass and natural grit. One of my jobs was to feed the poultry and gather the eggs every day.
“Choook...chook-chook-chook. Choook...chook-chook-chook,” I called in a high-pitched croon, as I scattered a tin of grain. The hens came running. My mother used a lot of eggs in cooking, especially in cakes, and one of our favourite cakes was a fresh cream sponge.
When I was old enough I loved to help Mum cook, and one day, after searching through the Bundaberg QCWA cookbook, I decided on a 'ginger fluff.' Hopeless with the hand beater, my little arms tiring quickly, Mum always stepped in and did most of the beating. Without electricity, the eggs and sugar had to be beaten together for 20 minutes. I always marvelled at how she could beat that mixture for the whole time without stopping. Finally the cake was cooked, and Mum whipped the beautiful fresh dairy cream, (more beating!) We had a visitor that day who was away with Dad in a field somewhere, and when they returned for morning tea to the house we served the ginger sponge.
After they left the house, I asked, “ Mummy, could I have a piece of my cake, please?” To our dismay all that was left was a few crumbs!
I'm afraid I've never been able to find a sponge cake with the moist texture and flavour of those that Mum cooked on the old wood stove.
Of course eggs were on the menu every morning for breakfast and I almost always ate two before leaving for school, along with cereal or porridge with milk and maybe a sausage with the eggs.Such an appetite I had! That's good old country air for you.
School lunches were always a problem and my poor mother puzzled a great deal about what to give me. During the long hot summers the bread on sandwiches became dry and curled at the edges, turning stale in our old-fashioned, hard-case, brown school ports. Jam or peanut butter dried out during the day and by afternoon was boring and tasteless. I envied my friends who brought meat and pickle sandwiches to school. Mum frequently gave me the flaky cereal vita brits cut through the middle and thickly spread with butter. At first I quite liked the taste but I grew to hate them after a while, but they were usually good for swapping.
When I was still travelling in the open back school bus, some of us threw unwanted lunch leftovers out through the back of the bus for the crows. At three o'clock every afternoon the black birds gathered in the gum trees near the school gate, cawing, like old men chatting on a park bench, as they waited for the feast to come. As soon as the bus pulled out onto the road on its run, children started throwing dry crusts and leftovers out of the bus and the crows, calling loudly and flying from tree to tree behind the bus, swooped down and devoured the scraps. It was a great game, but after awhile the crows got left behind and the children ran out of scraps.
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