(By Dorothy Reid)
While reading the “Buloke Times” during the COVID-19 pandemic, many memories have been revived.

The interesting stories and photos have been a delight to read. It is amazing how our lives become intertwined with others over the years, and how we have similar experiences. 

I was brought up on a farm, and have live in the area since 1958, but as I was not born here, my husband informed me a number of years ago that I am not a local!

The articles by Harold Flett, Ian McEwen, Florence Breed, Robin Letts, Maureen Donnellon, Barry Golding and others have all been enlightening and informative, as well as those about family histories and other articles. As we live through a range of experiences over the years, they are live threads, and as these are woven together, they create a tapestry of our life.

Distance
Like Ian, being the first in the family to start school, distance proved a huge problem as I lived seven miles from the nearest school. Consequently, for two years, I lived with my father’s sister, her husband and their four children. 

The three girls aged 13, 8, and 7 sat on the seat of the gig, while the boy aged 6 and I aged 5 sat on the floor of the gig for the five miles to school. As he reminded me years later, we did not have cushions under our bottoms either.

Rationing
Being war time, there was petrol rationing and no spare petrol to run a car. It was kept for the truck. My mother used to take me in our gig two miles across our neighbour’s paddocks on a late Sunday afternoon and pick me up Friday afternoon, which in winter time was quite often dark. 

Later in life I remember asking her, “How could you see in the pitch black to open the gate on the boundary fence and drive across the paddocks?” 

Her answer was, “I couldn’t see, but I knew the horse knows its way home.” 

Riding
For the second year, it wasn’t sure if I would be staying with the relatives so my parents decided to teach me to ride our horse. She was a tall hack, the size of a racehorse, and had been broken in by my father.

They put me on her back, put the reins in my hands and well, the horse took off! Whenever I think of the incident, I can still see the barbed-wire missing my leg by about six inches as she raced along the fence towards the dam where Dad was standing, waving his arms frantically to stop us. 

I don’t remember the ending of this disaster but the next attempt was learning to ride a 24-inch push bicycle, which I mastered to everyone’s satisfaction. However, as the eldest cousin had finished Grade VIII and passed her Merit certificate, it was one less child to get ready for school, so I stayed there for the second year during each school week.

Quarantine
During one week, my brother became ill with the measles and in those days, the household was quarantined. Hence, for five weeks I stayed with relatives without going home. 

Church
I remember wearing one of my cousin’s best dresses when we went to church a couple of times, which was a novelty for me (I did not start attending church until after I was converted, aged 17 at a camp to which two high school girlfriends had invited me). I also remember seeing a “magic lantern” show one evening at the little country church. I don’t remember being homesick, as playing with my cousins was more fun than with a little brother!

The War
As Robin shared his memory of the day World War II was ended, I have a few small memories, unlike Florence, who lived through the horrors. 

When at Teacher’s College, one of my room mates had been born in England and suffered from claustrophobia; the result of being encased as a toddler in some form of gas mask when in the air raid shelters. 

My first memory of the war was when Dad and I were walking out of the school (we lived on the southern edge of the Big Desert) and a small plane flew over our heads so close Dad could have reached up and touched it. The pilot was obviously practising his flying skills of low-level flying under the radar. 

I was only about three, as I remember Mum telling me in later years that she heard the noise, my little brother started screaming, and she saw the plane actually having to rise to get above the cow shed and truck shed, which were only low sheds, each with “a straw roof”. Actually, Dad had thatched the rooves with broom bush instead of straw, as it was plentiful in the scrub, whereas there would have been only a small acreage of crop grown while still clearing the Mallee.

Searchlights
Another wartime memory is that at Nhill and Bordertown there were huge searchlights that beamed high into the sky to search for any foreign aircraft. We must have lived about halfway between, as we could see the light beams in the sky both east and west of us.

The name and number of our school had board nailed over them so that if the enemy invaded our country, they would not know where they were. I believe the train stations had their names removed for the same reason, so the conductor had to walk through the train announcing the name of the next station. 

One of my cousins remembers my father arriving at the school to tell the teacher that the war was over. There was no telephone at the school, and I was six years old before there was one installed at my parents’ house; much later than where I live today, as the Birchip West Telephone League was formed in 1923, my father-in-law having been the secretary and collecting each subscription. Party lines were the norm, as described by Harold Flett in his memoirs. When I was married, there were six Mrs Reids in four houses on the one party line. Married women were seldom called by their first name by business people: “Is that you Mrs Reid?” “Yes, but which one do you want?”

During the war, I remember being in the truck, a Fargo, one dark night, travelling into town. The headlights of any vehicles had special covers that only allowed a narrow slit of light to shine on the road just in front of the truck. It was an experience not to be repeated very often. The covers were to prevent the headlights being seen from above.

Holiday
To celebrate the end of World War II, we had a holiday from school and wore fancy dress to march along a street in Kaniva. I think we ended up at the showground, presumably for some festivities but I do not remember them. 

However, I do remember my little brother, bawling loudly, being taken to our truck by our mother. He was dressed up in a frog’s outfit from head to toe that someone had lent him. I never did find out why he was crying as he was wearing a complete fancy dress whereas all I had was an old-fashioned style of brass-coloured papier mache fireman’s helmet that my teacher found in her box of goodies and matched my fawn-coloured dress.

Driving to School
When my brother started school at age five, I was seven. I drove the horse and gig the seven miles, and he had to open and close the gates. There was no Shire road to our farm, so Dad had modified a gateway on our neighbour’s property to make it easier. 

The track to school was rough and varied, over a sand dune, along a sandy track where hundreds of rabbits lived. Where we often saw white black and yellow ones, a red clay hill which was very slippery when wet for the horse to pull the gig, a black soil formation near a swamp, through a creek, across a reserve and only the last half mile was covered with limestone. For the first two years we had to depend on Grade VII and VIII students to yoke up our horse after school as I was still too short to do it all by myself.

One morning our horse was frightened by some cattle and we didn’t quite make the sharp turn to the left where we had to avoid the muddy formation. The result was I landed on my hands and knees underneath the upturned gig, with the dashboard in front of my head, and the back of the seat behind my feet. 

My brother had jumped out and had to stop one of the gig wheels still spinning so that I could crawl out. That was the second gig accident I was involved in as the year before I had fallen out of my cousins’ gig and one wheel had run over my elbow, which must have been very close to my head.

Cutting Chaff
Some of my early farm experiences involved helping my mother stock sheaves of oaten hay when I was about seven or eight. 

I remember watching my parents cutting chaff so there must still have been a horse team at that stage. The engine to run the chaff cutter was like Harold’s photo with the large flywheel and a long wide belt ran from the engine to the chaff cutter. I remember being terrified of the monster! 

When about eight or nine I remember helping my mother with filling the bags of grain. She would lift a belt (?) of grain to pour into the bag filler to stuff the bags more, and I would push a long skewer like an overgrown safety pin through the tops of the bags.to load them on to the tray of the truck, there was a bag lifter that had a hose attached to the trucks exhaust. Mum would drag a bag on to the lifter, which would then rise up to the level of the truck’s tray, and Dad would then place them into position. 

We lived 12 miles from town and it took an hour sometimes to make the journey. On arriving at the silo, Dad only needed to pour out the grain into the hopper, which would still have been hard work, especially on a hot day. However, I think my mother had it even harder, as she was only 5 feet, 2-and-a-half inches in height.

Mallee
Dad was probably the last farmer in the West Wimmera to roll Mallee with a horse team. After 15 years, he had cleared and farmed 1,000 acres. 

In contrast, Arthur Bolden had a bullock team in the 1890s at Birchip West was reputed to have cleared 640 acres one year. Arthur was a younger brother of Joseph Bolden, who lived at Donald and a great-uncle to my husband.

Because of the Mallee stumps in the ground, my father bought a very small No. 1 or No. 2 Caterpillar crawler, to work the ground to sow his crops. Nearly every time the truck was taken to town it was loaded with Mallee stumps that people in town bought from him. 

Even on the rare occasion we went to the Saturday night pictures in that beautiful shire hall, there was always a load of stumps to be delivered down a back lane and tossed over the back fence into someone’s backyard. These lanes were also used by the night man to pick up the lavatory pans and replace them with an empty one. The word “toilet” was never used then. The Donald Shire still employed a night man when I lived in Donald 1959-’60.

Mud Bath
Nancy Trewin’s memory of the mud bath the basketballers endured at Curyo reminded me of a football match at Curyo Harry Richard told our Historical Society. 

The St. Arnaud team travelled by train to Curyo after an inch of rain the day before. Like most district football grounds, the matches were played on someone’s paddock, according to whose wasn’t in crop that year. 

There were no changing rooms or sheds, and every footballer was saturated with sloppy mud. The train drivers were adamant the men were not to board the train, so (ladies, close your eyes at this point of the story!) the men all had to strip off their muddy clothes and the driver steam cleaned them (i.e., the men) before they could board the train and put on their clean casual clothes from their kit bag or sack. 

Whether they were allowed to reduce the amount of mud from their football gear by the steam, I don’t know, and nobody thought to ask Harry that question.

School
Now, to my time in Donald, when I taught Grade IV in 1959 and 1960. I recently found a few old letters I had written to my friend, who became husband. 

Once a fortnight he travelled to Donald to see me and we always went to the Sunday night Methodist Church service. 

Another couple there was Lindsay Borden and Lynette Falla. I also remember some of the Hollis family in the back row. Lynette and I were two of the Sunday school teachers in the morning.

Some Extracts
Wednesday, December 2, 1959. Time? Approximately 8 a.m.. Have just finished setting the Arithmetic test. Yesterday I finished correcting some others and recording the marks. With December tests today, the work still continues. However, what takes a long time is hearing reading, poetry and asking oral questions for Social Studies, Health and Nature Study.

11.10 p.m. Stayed at school till about 5.50 p.m. and had to make two trips to bring all the test books home in my bicycle basket. Spelling and dictation are left for tomorrow besides the oral tests and marking their Social Studies, Health and Nature Study books and their writing. I hope no one expects too much from me at Church fellowship on Sunday night!

All the children were at school today, so I took their photo while I had them all there. (Grade photos in the Primary section of the H.E.S. were never officially taken, only sports teams and maybe form photos in the secondary section for their magazine.) However, I think it may have been too dull, so will have to finish the film and have it developed soon, in case it does not come out. I took two photos to make sure they were all in it because some will put their heads behind the ones in front.

Christmas Pageant
Last night, after school, we had our first practice for the Sunday School Christmas Pageant.

Footnote: – For the pageant my Sunday school class consisted of Grade V and VI girls. Jenny Russell, Gail Moore and Shirley Jones are three I remember. 

The play was about a sick child in bed, watching through a window at the antics in the street. One of the props was a cardboard pig. Hidden behind the side curtain of the Sunday school stage, I pulled the pig by a long piece of string across the front of the stage, until a toddler in the audience said, “Pig, pig,” ran to the stage and grabbed it. It was so funny and everybody roared laughing. It was one of the Pearse boys.

Monday, June 20, 1960. Duty went all right today, with no serious accidents. I forgot to tell you that a naturalist was coming to school today with live mates – lizards, goannas, a crocodile (which he mentioned he sometimes allows to swim in the bath at hotels), parrots and an eagle.

The school doctors come on Wednesday so we have all sorts of interruptions to our work in the classroom, although the medical check is part of school, really, as sometimes health problem can be discovered.

The time is 9.05 p.m. and I have just finished setting Arithmetic and an English test. Elwyn the Infant teacher is busy darning a pair of her boyfriend’s socks at the moment. (Elwyn normally boarded with Mrs Goodwin, about whom there was a recent article in the “Times”, but she was away on holiday). I have also marked the children’s compositions.

Conference
A circular arrived at the end of school today, saying ALL teachers are invited to the District Inspector’s conference at Swan Hill next Tuesday afternoon, but we are not allowed to dismiss classes before 11.30 a.m. which, he said, limits the radius to 50 miles, but then he’ll want to know why we aren’t there, because the invitation was to ALL teachers. We can’t win!

Tuesday. No children failed their grammar test today, to my surprise, although there were a couple of 5s.

“Skippy”

The latest craze at school is “Skippy”. The funniest is to watch Grade V girls and boys skipping together. Even some of the Grade VI girls are playing footy with the boys. 

While walking around the quadrangle while on duty during playtimes, I have to be careful I don’t get strung up by one of their ropes. There are big ropes, little ropes, fat ropes and skinny ropes.

Sunday, October 9, 1960. The Pleasant Sunday Afternoon was very good today. Mr King, M.H.R. spoke about New Guinea and Papua. He was quite interesting. Doris Hunter and Will Ower sang solos.

Monday, October 10, 1960. 7.30 p.m. Today has been so windy the sand has been blowing across the school ground all day. My thumb and first two fingers on my right hand are painted red as I had to use mercurochrome on four girls today. 

Two boys came to school with cuts on their legs, padded up with cotton wool, Elastoplast and bandages. 

One girl was absent today as she fell off a horse yesterday and now has a greenstick fracture of the right arm, so she will be out of action for a while, while I rack my brains keeping her occupied at school if she is unable to write. Tuesday. She came in today with her arm in a sling – it was only twisted.

Mothers’ Club
Tuesday, December 6, 1960. We were entertained by the Mothers’ Club to afternoon tea, when Avis and I were presented with sprays, and Harry and Geoff with button holes. Ben was busy developing photos for the school magazine, so he didn’t receive his. Leo was given a present for his baby daughter. We all had to make speeches a few minutes later. I said something, but I don’t know now what I said, as I was so nervous.

The children in my class are planning to give me something. Every now and then, someone brings along some money to give to a couple of the girls. It’s a highly organized business. They have a treasurer and president. 

On Saturday morning they are going to buy the present, so it appears I had better steer clear of the street on Saturday. I know I’m going to miss “my kids” next year for a while. Even K (not his or her proper initial to save identification) is lovable these days, and is always wanting to do something to help me – inbetween being a nuisance!

Footnote: – The children had save their pocket money and bought a pair of silver salad servers. I treasure them and always use them for special occasions.

Sport
Bill Dunn was the only male teacher in the Primary School section of the H.E.S., other than George Stebbins, the Head Teacher. Consequently, for sport, I was in charge of the Grade III and IV boys for cricket and football, until later in the year when another male was appointed and taught Grade III. 

So, maybe I can “claim” to have “taught” Murray Gilmour and others their first skills in football! From memory, I think Wayne Jones became a good cricketer locally. I have fond memories of those Grade IV children in 1959 and 1960. Just to mention a few who have made great contributions to society are Professor Barry Golding, to education, and Leigh and Joan (Young) Hardingham, to business. I was saddened to learn of the demise of two of the boys, John McKenzie and Greg Wright, and one of the girls, Paulyne Anderson. There may be others.

Reunions
One of the girls who regularly visits her mother in the Donald Nursing Home, I met again last year when my husband was also in residence there, is Rosemary Pearse. At one stage I thought it would be great to have a 60 year reunion in 2020 from 1960, but the Coronavirus soon put a stop to that. 

Dennis Flett is another past student who has had a great career with a Water Authority toward north-east Victoria and is now Victoria’s Environmental Water Holder. We met again at the official opening of the Environmental Watering Sites that was held on this property about three years or more ago.

When my son was working in the Northern Territory several years ago, he started a conversation about the weather to another man who turned out to be Colin Gust, another past pupil.

Needing a permit to travel interstate is not new. I can remember my father stopping at the police station to ask for a permit so that we could travel into South Australia to visit his mother near Mt. Gambier. This was just after the war when petrol ration coupons were still needed.