I’ve been thinking about the fabric of people in places. There will probably come a time when I leave this property – one way or another. I am thinking of other local historic places I have visited – Anlaby Station, Bungaree and the like. How fortunate we are to have had their founding families value them enough to preserve the heart and soul of these properties.
We were down in my cellar the other day. It has been, till now, just a store room – a place where the women before me, stored their jams, chutneys, sauces, pickles, preserved fruits, smallgoods, bacon – all prepared using family-specific recipes, handed down through the generations.
Our hands stroked the walls in utter admiration and wonder, at how a place like this came to be. This cellar is about four metres by four metres, by three high. It would have been dug by hand, with pick and shovel, I’m sure, although there is an implement down under the big old red gum tree, that I’ve been told was used behind a draught-horse for scooping dams. Maybe it was used to begin the dig. Then the stones (iron) would have been picked from the hills – 10 km away – and lifted onto a dray, to be pulled home by the horses each evening. Unloaded then from the dray, one by one, they would have been placed in beautiful formation to create the walls of this underground room. When it was finished, work would have begun on building the house, in the same manner – a stone at a time. These men would have slept like the dead each night.
Sadly, much of the character of this farm has been lost. I can remember, as a young wife here, being devastated to see things being demolished. The old horse stables – built of massive hand-cut redgum posts and rafters and thatched straw rooves, pushed down with tractors to make room for a new steel and iron implement shed. The day the old fig tree came out, to clear the area for a driveway. I would have had the driveway go around it. And the day I came back from the street to find my beautiful old wooden fence that had been built of hand sawn red gum planks – gone. It had become a little quiggly-aggly, a little leaning in places, but it had so much character. My father-in-law would have had a little spare time that day and decided to straighten things up a bit on the farm, make things all new and shiny. I had different ideas, of course.
Another day I came home to find a whole orange orchard gone – to make way for another acre of vineyard. The pain I felt at these losses was physical. But we all have different ideas of how our environment should look. There can be two homes, side by side – one with a front yard covered in paving and a row of roses, and the one next to it, alive with a rambling cottage garden that creates its own eco system – a haven for birds, insects, lizards – all damp and shady and smelling of sweet earth.
There are remnants of the old times here, sections that missed the scrutiny of the renew-ers. An old can-type dunny still stands – tacked on to the end of one of the sheds – once used by the uncomplaining, even grateful vineyard workers. There’s a patch of old shed floor, as big as a large room, exposed in the middle of the farm-yard, where the black-smith shop once stood. Who knows what pieces might be found just a few inches below the surface around there. There are sheep yards made of old non-matching gates, the latches of which are made of roughly-fashioned wire twitched into a figure eight, one loop of which goes over the fence post and the other over the gate post. Rough, work-worn hands made them, and they worked. The simplest engineering.
All cocky gates are gone from here but I’m sure there were plenty in the old days. They were the bane of my life on our big farm (four thousand acres) in the Murray Mallee, when I was first married. The weaker left side of my brain just couldn’t cope with the mechanics of them.
There are stories in the old rusty appendages, nailed into, or wired onto rails and walls. The old gambrel still hanging under a tree – decades on from when it last had two sheep carcasses hanging from it for the required two days, before being dressed for the kitchen.
When I am no longer here, I hope the next owners will feel the history, the lifeblood of the men who toiled here, all that which I am passionate to preserve.
For me now, my final chapter is happy, no longer lonely, slower-paced but with adventures big and small ahead. We recently spent a week on Kangaroo Island with my siblings, in my brother’s beach house. A blissful time of beach walks, talking, reminiscing, good food, wine, complete relaxation. What is it about the sea? It’s not our domain but it comes up beside us and caresses us at the edge of ours.
I will tell you about our adventures as they come.
All for now,
Warmly,
Sue
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