City Girl, Country Girl

by Liz Harfull

  Elaine also applied the skills from her years at Hesse’s and took on the farm book-keeping. The amount of paperwork grew as the milking herd expanded, because individual records were kept for every cow, tracking the history of their mating and calves and their milk production. With her brilliant memory for numbers, she could recite unprompted the statistics for almost every cow, even when the herd reached close to one hundred.

  She wasn’t always quite so proficient when it came to preparing the paperwork at the end of the financial year. Mr Plate, the farm’s tax agent, would always put off calling them until he received a final notice, warning they would end up in court if their annual tax return wasn’t lodged within fourteen days. ‘Mum would store every piece of paper in a pillowcase in a cupboard, and when she got the dreaded phone call from Mr Plate, out it would come,’ Valerie recalls. ‘She would sit at the table and all the stuff that was rubbish would be thrown on the floor, so there would be this growing pile, and then there would be these more orderly piles on the table.’ With the deadline looming, Elaine would repeat frantically, ‘I’ll just have to go to gaol, Lyall. I’ll just have to go to gaol.’ Valerie became a chartered accountant and rural financial counsellor helping people avoid this scenario, in part, she asserts only half jokingly, because of this childhood experience.

  In summer, Elaine’s focus switched to bringing in the harvest. Rich volcanic soils and reliable spring rainfall made the Mount Gambier area ideal country for growing oats, which the Harfulls fed to their working horses and dairy herd as either hay or chaff. After leaving school at the age of twelve, Lyall earned money with his own team of Clydesdales, ploughing land and sowing crops for farms around the district. He kept at least one harness horse right up until the 1970s, just because he loved handling them—born in 1962, Elizabeth learnt how to harness a horse to a cart or gig before she learnt how to ride a bike.

  Harvesting oats for hay was a labour-intensive business. Right up until 2005, the Harfulls used binders to cut the oats and bundle them into sheaves. The sheaves then had to be stooked into small teepee-like structures of twenty or so sheaves each. After a few weeks curing in the sun to develop the sugars in the stem and dry the hay out thoroughly, it was loaded onto a large flat dray, one sheaf at a time, using pitchforks to toss up each sheaf and place it carefully so the load would hold together on its way back to a yard near the house. Then it was unloaded one sheaf at a time and rebuilt into a haystack, shaped like a picturesque cottage in golden straw, with a pitched roof to deflect the rain. Building these stacks so they had tight, round corners to hold them firm and keep out the mice was an almost-forgotten art and Lyall was very good at it.

  Elaine often helped with the stooking, taking the children with her. When they were not playing, they would sleep among the sheaves while she worked. Sometimes, she would operate the binder, which had a little iron seat perched at the back. From there she could reach a series of levers that set the height of the blades so they avoided small stones or rough patches, and the height of the wooden arms that swept the oats onto a canvas. She also had to keep an eye on the knotting mechanism that tied the string around each sheaf, making sure that it was tying them correctly and that the twine didn’t run out. And most importantly, she had to operate the cradle that collected the sheaves, using foot levers to release it so they fell in neat lines across the paddock.

  Elaine spent plenty of time in the kitchen, too, cooking to fuel the harvest workers with dozens of scones, sponge cakes, tomato and cheese sandwiches sprinkled with salt and white pepper, corned beef served with new season potatoes, and every week a roast, cooked in the wood oven which was kept going no matter the temperature outside. She was an excellent cook, and besides the workers, there was often a stock agent or the fuel delivery man or a neighbour, who just happened to arrive at the right time for afternoon tea. Farmers dropping off milk at the factory would often come by in the mornings knowing full well that she baked bread first thing every day. ‘She would make two big, double high-top loaves, so four loaves when you pulled them apart, but the family would often end up with just one,’ recalls Valerie.

  In early autumn, once the harvest was over and the cows had stopped producing milk before the birth of their next calf, Lyall and Elaine would take the children on holidays. Lyall bought a caravan shell and fitted it out with a double bed, two bunk beds, a table and cupboards that he made himself. Then Elaine painted and decorated it with bright curtains and bed covers.

  Sometimes they would head just over the border to Portland for the weekend, where Lyall would share memories of his own childhood summers spent in a boarding house near the foreshore, with his mother. Most years they wandered Victoria, dropping in to visit the Schwennesens in Melbourne and the Marriotts in Bendigo. Lyall often planned trips so he had an excuse to take in anything powered by steam—riverboats, railways and traction engines. More than a few days were lost tracking down old engines left behind in the bush where timber mills once stood. Elaine was not always happy about these lengthy diversions, which her husband sometimes snuck in despite her protests.

  One year they decided to take the caravan as far as Sydney, pulled by a second-hand 1934 Plymouth that Lyall acquired in the early 1950s as the family car. It was one of Roger’s favourite holidays, not because of the destination but because of the adventures along the way. ‘Somehow we managed to get tangled up in a circus that was moving camp in a long line of vehicles, and then we found ourselves in the middle of the famous Australian Redex reliability road trial, with people lining the roads to see it pass through.’ To Elaine’s mortification and the children’s endless amusement, someone shouted out, ‘Come on, Mum. You’ll win it yet!’

  Then came a period that Elaine didn’t talk about very much. In July 1958, she had been pregnant for about three months when she lost the baby. It was one of at least two miscarriages that darkened their hopes of expanding the family, until January 1962 when Elaine gave birth to Elizabeth. The following year Elaine was startled to find out she was pregnant again. Another daughter, Fiona, was born in June 1964.

  The pattern of her days changed again in the mid 1970s, when she and Lyall decided it was time to give up milking cows. By then Roger was married to Anne and their first child had arrived. The small farm had another family to provide for, and the future of dairying was looking very bleak. Milk prices were poor and thousands of Australian dairy farmers had already walked away from the industry after markets collapsed when Britain decided to join the European Common Market in 1973.

  Talking over the problem together, they decided the logical solution was to turn their hand to something the Harfulls had been doing for generations—growing oats and cutting chaff. There might only be a handful of working horses still in existence but the Lower South East was home to thousands of ponies, trotters and racehorses, and they all needed to be fed.

  That autumn, Lyall and Roger spent days sowing more of the farm to oats so they would have enough hay to supply a modest number of customers. When summer came, they employed extra people to bring in the harvest, and Elaine found herself in charge of hiring labour. As trade built steadily, she also took on the job of serving the customers who came to the farm, and maintaining the books that tracked every sale. With Miss Jenkins’s training holding firm after thirty years, she made sure they balanced right down to the last cent. She was still helping with the bookwork a few weeks before her death at the age of eighty-nine.

  It is cold—the kind of deep, damp, bone-chilling cold that people expect of winter in Mount Gambier. The sky is heavy and grey, the light dull and flat. Inside the hospital room the warmth of a decades-old friendship has shifted the season to long ago summers. Elaine is in hospital with pneumonia and the prognosis is not good, so Grace has come to say her goodbyes.

  Elaine has barely spoken or even been conscious for a day or two, but she wakes when Grace gently calls her name and takes her hand. Her eyes light up in a way her family never thought to see again. ‘I’m a bit of a
mess, Grace,’ she says, pushing the words out in short breaths. The two women start to talk, sharing treasured memories stretching back to their girlhoods in Melbourne, how they met, the boys they liked, their chance meetings during the war. Grace searches for names. More alert now than she has been in days, Elaine prompts her friend. She even finds the strength to laugh.

  Roger, Valerie, Elizabeth and Fiona are in the room, and they are astonished. Grace’s visit has been transformative. There is a sense of great privilege witnessing this unforgettable moment, the joy on their mother’s face, and the power of the friendship between these two strong women who have led such parallel lives: city girls who found love in wartime and gave up their cosmopolitan ways to marry country boys. In between learning how to drive tractors, milk cows and do the farm bookwork, they made homes, raised families and cared for invalid husbands. Till death us do part, in sickness and in health, they both pledged, and they stuck true to the promise.

  Elaine died in June 2014, outliving her husband by almost eight years. Lyall had died a few months after their sixtieth wedding anniversary and she never stopped missing him. Dreading the idea of having to move into aged care, she was luckier than most. She was fit enough to stay in the family home they created together, watched over by her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

  Most weeks she went into town to do a few errands and go to church, and on a regular basis she picked up the phone and had long chats with her friend Grace. In her younger days, they had been known to go on for as long as two hours, husbands and children and approaching meal-times forgotten until someone caught their attention and reminded them of the time. ‘I miss that telephone call from Mil Lel,’ Grace says.

  5

  CHILD OF THE FOREST

  Doris Turner had a reputation for remaining calm in a crisis. Having lived through two world wars and the Great Depression by the time she was in her early forties, she was usually quick to see the humour in any situation and rarely lost her temper, no matter how much her patience was tried by husband Ted and their eleven children. Her daughter Wendy cannot recall seeing her cry. The first sight of her new home in the Australian bush broke that resolve—at least for a moment.

  It was the end of a stinking hot day in March 1949 when the Turner family arrived at the farm they had purchased sight-unseen, from the other side of the world. Doris was in the front seat of the truck, nursing her eighteen-month-old baby daughter, Mavis. Her husband, Ted, was on the back with the rest of the children. Hot, tired and bedraggled, they perched on bales of hay as the truck rattled over the last ten corrugated kilometres of gravel road. The vehicle’s wooden tray had been hosed down in an unsuccessful attempt to get rid of the smell of pig manure, but that didn’t worry them so much. The Turners were used to farm animals. The heat was another thing, and the flies, and the all-pervading dust that had settled over their Sunday-best clothes, donned so they would look their finest for such a momentous occasion.

  The Turners had left the immigrant camp at Point Walter in Perth early that morning, excited to be on the final leg of their journey. A slow train took them south to Bunbury, where they climbed onto a bus for the next 130 kilometres to Manjimup. The trip seemed to take forever as the bus rattled over gravel roads, stopping occasionally in the middle of nowhere to drop off bags of mail. There was no cooling system, and everyone sighed with relief when they were allowed to get off in Bridgetown for refreshments.

  As the bus passed through established orchards near the town, the children spotted apples trees, branches heavy with bright red fruit waiting to be picked. Closer to Manjimup, farms were still being carved from the bush. To the Turners’ English eyes, the landscape was bleached of colour. Turning into the driveway of their new home, they passed ghostly stands of dead eucalypts, ring-barked but not yet cleared, and pasture bled white-gold by the sun. There was no sign of life, until the ground shifted in a tawny blur as hundreds of startled rabbits ducked for cover.

  Hardly able to take it all in, eleven-year-old Wendy and her siblings looked up the rise to a small weatherboard building just below the brow of the hill. ‘There’s the shed, but where’s the house?’ one of the girls asked. Then the truth dawned.

  Early April and it’s show time in Kalamunda, a picturesque town in the Perth Hills. Wendy Turner, now Bonini, is standing in the kitchen that serves the historic red-bricked agricultural hall, making cups of tea and doling out homemade cake and sandwiches. Now in her late seventies, she has been on her feet for days. Not only is Wendy a keen participant in the traditional amateur competitions that have been held in the hall for more than a century, she is a member of the Kalamunda and Districts Agricultural Society committee that stages them. Apart from attending all the planning meetings, she has been on hand for the past three days to help feed volunteers as they convert Kostera Oval into a showground, set up the hall and its exhibits, and coordinate the judging process for hundreds of items. It’s a mammoth task for the small committee that involves working as late as midnight to make sure everything is ready. On top of that Wendy has spent hours preparing her own entries, baking and preserving, and organising pot plants and flower arrangements for the competitive classes.

  Wendy was drawn into this world by her daughter, Giuliana, who has been the society’s president for seven years. Married to a local orchardist and a more than competent cook, Giuliana often wandered into the hall as a spectator to check out the traditional displays of cookery, handicraft, plants and produce that remain a highlight of most country shows. Every year she noticed the same names on the prize cards in the baking and preserves classes, and decided to see if she could add her own to the collection. Wendy thought it was a great idea and entered something, too. They both went home with prizes for their first attempts, and like generations of men, women and children before them, they became hooked on the experience. Since then Giuliana’s daughter, Kiara, has also joined their ranks.

  The Kalamunda show may be smaller than its iconic city cousin, the Perth Royal, but it’s the premier event for the local shire and people turn out in their thousands every year. Patrons start pouring in through the main gates as soon as they open on Friday evening. Many of them return the following day for the full program, which always ends with a spectacular fireworks display. Despite temperatures climbing to almost 40 degrees, by mid morning on the Saturday the crowd is starting to swell and the hall is busy.

  In the secretary’s office just off the main auditorium, Pam Edwards is fielding last-minute queries and coordinating the giant task of typing up the results and calculating prize money. The stakes aren’t huge—the majority of classes offer only two or three dollars as first prize, but competitors tend to enter more than one class so working out how much they are due in total is a big job in itself. No-one wants to be show secretary—myriad tasks stretch over many months, and how well they are done can make or break an event. But Pam is an old hand, and things are going smoothly so far. Across the passageway, the kitchen is cool and quiet, too. Most of the volunteers are yet to come in, so Wendy takes a moment to sit down and reflect on her family and the place where she grew up.

  Wendy’s story is deeply rooted a long way from here, in the ancient woodlands, bogs, heaths and commons of the New Forest. Covering a vast area in southern England, this area of extraordinary natural beauty was given its name almost a thousand years ago when it was designated a royal hunting ground by William the Conqueror. Renowned for its wildlife and free-roaming ponies, much of the New Forest is still protected as a national park which draws millions of visitors every year.

  Wendy’s family on her mother’s side comes from Brockenhurst, one of the larger villages, where it’s still not unusual to see ponies and donkeys wandering up the high street. Her mother, Doris, was an Anstey. The Ansteys have been associated with the village since the Middle Ages when, according to family lore, one of them was given a patch of land by a local lord of the manor as reward for saving his life during the Crusades.

  The
earliest descendant that Wendy remembers personally is her grandfather, Charlie. His father worked as a signalman on the railway but with a reputation for being good at handling horses, Charlie chose a different path. By the time he was twenty-one he was employed as a coachman at Langdown Lodge, a modest country house at Dibden, on the eastern edge of the New Forest. Working as a housemaid in the same establishment was a Dorset lass, Jeanetta Davis.

  Charlie and Jeanetta soon married and found work together about twenty-five kilometres away, in the picturesque village of Sway at a private residence called Arnewood Towers. A country house with forty or so rooms, it was well known for the remarkable architectural curiosity that stood in its grounds. Sway Tower was built by Andrew Thomas Turton Peterson, a barrister who made his fortune practising law in India before retiring to England in the 1870s. A keen amateur architect, he was obsessed by two things—the little appreciated potential to create buildings out of concrete, and spiritualism, the then-fashionable idea that you could communicate with the dead.

  The two worlds collided in 1879 when Peterson laid the foundations for an elegantly slender 66-metre tower made almost entirely out of Portland cement. Working through a medium, he claims to have been guided by the spirit of long-dead English architect Sir Christopher Wren, the genius behind St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Peterson devoted seven years of his life and a staggering £30,000 to proving the value of concrete by creating what was then the world’s tallest non-reinforced concrete structure. The heritage-listed tower is revered today as a landmark building of its time and one of England’s most unusual architectural follies.