City Girl, Country Girl

by Liz Harfull

  While termites undermined the structure of the house, rabbits were accomplishing the same thing out in the paddocks. ‘Our farm was one humungous rabbit warren,’ says Wendy. Along with Peter and John, she was given the job of setting more than two hundred rabbit traps every evening and then going round to check them the next morning before school. ‘It took me a while to be brave enough to do it, because if you made a mistake you’d lose your finger,’ she says.

  The infestation was so bad the children caught more than a hundred rabbits every day. Most of them were cooked down in a big copper, skin and all, for the pigs, but a good number ended up on the dinner table. They were skinned and taken up to the house where Doris soaked them overnight in a large bowl filled with water and vinegar. To make up for the monotonous diet, she became extremely inventive about how they were cooked. ‘She used to roast ’em, bake ’em, curry ’em, you name it,’ Wendy says.

  The children were not always impressed. ‘Not rabbit again, Mum!’ they would chorus.

  ‘Never mind, it’ll put a little hop in your day,’ Doris loved to reply.

  At one stage, the Western Australian government provided poison to help landholders get on top of the rabbit plague. The poison was laced through large batches of apples, also provided by the government. Ted would then feed them out through a hopper, towed behind a horse and cart. The next day the children would head out into the paddock with the horse and cart to collect the dead rabbits, which were dumped into hollows left after tree stumps were removed, and then burnt. This approach to rabbit control brought unexpected benefits because Doris would hijack some of the apples before they were treated. ‘They were a soft apple called Cleo, very good for cooking. I can still see Mum—she would have a whole bucketful, peeling them and cutting them up into this big saucepan to stew.’

  Apart from trapping rabbits, Wendy, Peter and John also had to help milk the cows before going to school. The farm had a herd of about twenty-five, which Ted worked on improving over the years. The children would climb out of bed at five o’clock. Carrying hurricane lamps, they would collect the farm dog they had acquired and then head out into the paddock to bring the cows in to the dairy where they were milked either by hand or using a portable machine.

  Milking was barely finished in time for the children to have a rushed breakfast of Weet-Bix and fresh cream, and then change and catch the school bus that pulled up at the bottom of the long driveway. Doris would head down first with the youngest children to help buy them a little extra time. ‘It was about a five-minute walk. We could see the bus coming, and Mum used to send the two little ones first because they would be ready. And the driver would say, “Any more coming?” and then the next one would run down the hill, then the next, then the next one, while the old bus was ticking over. We would always hold the bus up.’

  After such an early start, the children would often fall asleep at their school desks. Wendy can also remember struggling initially because the lessons were too advanced. ‘They put me in a class and I didn’t know what they were talking about because it was out of my league. In England we had huge classes and I sat at the back and didn’t learn anything,’ she admits. But she soon made two good friends, both named Phyllis, which helped.

  In her spare time, Wendy found work harvesting potatoes. At the age of twelve, she earnt eleven shillings during her first harvest so she headed into Manjimup and spent it all on a new dress from the local Woolworths variety store. ‘All the clothes I had were hand-me-downs from my sisters. It was the very first new dress I’d ever had in my life,’ Wendy recalls, describing it in great detail. It had a square neck and full skirt, gathered at the waist according to the fashion of the day. The white fabric was printed with images of cacti and Mexican men wearing sombreros. ‘I thought I was the ant’s pants,’ she says.

  Wendy’s memories of her years on the farm are dominated by laughter, frequently at the family’s own expense as they adapted to a strange new country. She recalls her mother’s first lesson in Australian slang. After helping them to settle in, the neighbours told Doris they would be back the next morning with twelve ‘chooks’. Where Doris came from, a similar word was used to described little pigs, so she told Ted to get a big pen ready to hold them. Ted was extremely puzzled that anyone would be so generous as to give them so many pigs, small or not, but he dutifully set to work. The next morning the neighbour drove up in his truck, with some crates on the back. He took one look at Ted’s handiwork and told him, ‘That’s no good, they’ll fly out.’ Still laughing heartily today at the wonders of a country where it seemed that pigs really did fly, Wendy adds with great understatement, ‘We had a lot to learn!’

  Another favourite family story relates to Ted’s first experience fighting bushfires in February 1950. The fire started just up the road from the farm, and he and John set off with a neighbour. It was a hot day but there was no wind, and the area had been burnt out only a couple of years before so there was very little undergrowth to fuel the fire. Armed only with wet hessian bags, shovels, rakes and a few knapsacks filled with water, volunteers managed to bring the blaze under control just as night was falling. Relieved that the danger was over, Ted sat down to enjoy a well-earned mug of tea and a sandwich. Moments later John was startled to see his father leap into the air. ‘I’ve got a bloody red-hot coal down my pants,’ he exclaimed. Yanking down his trousers, Ted discovered instead a very large bull ant, much to the amusement of the locals looking on.

  And then there was Peter’s adventure with a renegade bull which kept breaking out of its paddock and getting onto neighbouring farms. The neighbour who owned the bull offered its carcase to the Turners if they could catch it and shoot it. Dreaming of steak and roast beef instead of rabbit, Peter volunteered to round up the animal with the help of some friends. Peter was good with horses, training a brumby while only a teenager and working the Clydesdales to plough paddocks, tow logs and feed hay out to the cows.

  The boys saddled up and managed to direct the bull into an old stockyard. Then instead of waiting for Ted to come down with his double-barrelled shotgun, Peter decided to use his new single-shot .22 rifle and have a go at shooting the bull himself. It did not go well. The rifle was too small in calibre and Peter not a good enough shot to bring the animal down. All he succeeded in doing was infuriating the bull which broke out of the yards, threw the dog and terrorised Wendy, Richard and Faith who were watching from up on the stockyard fence. John managed to reach a horse and galloped off for his father who dropped the bull with a single shot.

  Ted and the boys rolled the animal onto a makeshift sleigh and used one of the Clydesdales to tow it back to the house yard where it was skinned and butchered. There was no refrigeration, so Ted gave most of it to neighbours, while Doris salted as much as she could for her family. It was an old bull and had been under some stress, so the meat turned out as tough as old boots, fit only for stewing.

  The Turners were often homesick, and there was plenty of hard work and very few luxuries, but their helpful neighbours and Ted and Doris’s sense of humour stood them all in good stead. ‘We used to sit around the table and laugh every night. I have never laughed so much in my life as when I was a kid,’ says Wendy. Even the grace recited before meal-times was not sacrosanct. On more than one occasion Ted brought it to a close by asking God to supply at least one of his daughters with a rich husband so he wouldn’t have to work anymore. Doris would pretend to scold him: ‘Father, how dare you say that. You wicked man!’

  7

  THE OUTLAW RETURNS

  About two years after the Turners moved to Australia, Doris decided it was time to go back to England for an extended six-month visit. Jeanetta was missing her grandchildren and had never seen the newest baby, Roslyn. So after receiving yet another pleading letter from her mother, Doris promised to return with the two youngest as soon as she could. Regulations stipulated that people who arrived under the assisted scheme could not go back to their home country for two years, even for a hol
iday. When the time eventually came, thirteen-year-old Wendy was recruited to go along, too, and help look after the children.

  Wendy was very excited to be back in the New Forest, revisiting her old haunts and catching up with relatives and friends. ‘We had a great time. I was allowed to go out with my cousins to the beach and the pictures, and I thought it was wonderful so I wanted to stay. I didn’t want to go back to the farm and milking cows,’ she says. Doris eventually agreed that Wendy could remain with her grandparents for another year, and set sail for Perth without her.

  She had barely said goodbye when Wendy began to regret her decision. ‘I was like a prisoner,’ she says. ‘Grandmother was very old-fashioned and she wouldn’t let me do a lot of things after Mum had gone. She wouldn’t even let me read books.’ Forced to go to bed early and spend considerable time in her upstairs room, Wendy dreamt of escape, especially when her carefree cousins wandered down the road, whistling for her attention. During the afternoons, while her grandfather was at work and Jeanetta was taking an afternoon nap, Wendy would practise climbing out of her bedroom window, onto the roof of the front porch, and then sliding down the drainpipe and jumping as silently as possible onto the front lawn. The only problem was that she couldn’t make the reverse climb, so there was no way to get back inside.

  A little relief came when a young priest at the Anglican church just down the road began organising dance classes on Saturday nights in the church hall. Two local women provided the music and instruction, teaching popular ballroom dances of the day such as the Veleta waltz. Wendy was convinced her grandmother wouldn’t let her go, even though it was a church-organised activity, but the priest made a point of visiting Jeanetta and wangling permission. There was one stipulation—her granddaughter had to be home by eight o’clock. ‘The dances only started at seven o’clock, and the worst of it was the boys didn’t arrive until an hour later,’ says Wendy.

  One night a boy offered to walk her home. Knowing there would be trouble if her grandmother saw them, Wendy only allowed him to walk with her for part of the way. As they strolled along, he decided to push his luck further and ask her out to the movies. ‘Don’t be funny,’ she told him. ‘My grandmother won’t let me out of the house, let alone go to the pictures.’ Wendy recalls laughing when he remarked, ‘She’s very Victorian, isn’t she!’ But Wendy is honest enough to now admit, ‘It was probably just as well because, when I think about it, I was a bit of an outlaw.’

  Outlaw or not, Wendy began to wage a letter campaign to her mother, begging to come home. The dilemma was that this time the cost of her passage would not be subsidised. Her parents would have to find £78 for the boat fare, and that was an enormous amount of money for the cash-strapped Turners. Eventually, Wendy’s brother-in-law stepped in. ‘Otherwise I might still be there!’

  Almost two years after returning to England, Wendy was finally on her way back to Australia. Her grandmother found a local married woman prepared to act as chaperone on the ship, but she spent most of the trip drunk and distracted by a male companion so the irrepressible teenager was left to her own devices. Wendy took full advantage of her unexpected freedom. Gregarious, attractive and confident for her age, she was able to pass for eighteen, and soon had young men falling over themselves to buy her exotic treats like her very first Coca-Cola and fresh pineapples. ‘I only had one pound to spend that a sister sent me, but I didn’t need it. I changed it for two ten-shilling notes, and when I got off the ship I gave one to the purser and one to the fella that served me at the table.’

  Settled back on the farm, Wendy was expected to find seasonal work to contribute to the family income. In the early 1950s one of the main options around Manjimup was hoeing and picking tobacco.

  Few people remember that Western Australia once had a tobacco industry. Much smaller than its better-known counterparts in northern Queensland and Victoria, and much shorter lived, it was centred around Manjimup. The first commercial crops were planted around 1930, with encouragement from a government keen to find lucrative cash crops to boost the local economy. By the early 1940s, more than 600 hectares were under cultivation in the state’s south-west. There was another spurt of growth after the war, powered by the labours of returned servicemen and immigrants from southern Europe where tobacco was an established crop.

  A driving force behind the industry in the west was the Michelidis family. Originally from Greece, they set up a cigarette-making business in Perth in the early 1900s. By the time Wendy was looking for work, Michelidis Tobacco Limited was the third largest manufacturer in Australia, producing a range of brands such as President and Golden West cigarettes, Luxor fine-cut tobacco, marketed as ‘the Ultimate Smoke for Men who Want the Best!’, and White Oak tobacco, which was promoted during the 1933 cricket test series with England as the brand that ‘always leaves the Ashes in Australia’. The company was also the largest tobacco grower in the Manjimup shire where they owned nine plantations and employed more than two hundred people. Many were Macedonians who migrated to the area in large numbers between the two world wars, bringing with them first-hand experience in growing and curing the notoriously tricky and labour-intensive crop.

  Initially, Wendy joined an older sister hoeing tobacco for a Macedonian bloke who rented the top end of the Turner farm. Battling flies, dust, heat and an aching back, she found the work hard and tedious, the rows of plants seeming to stretch on forever. She persevered, finding a certain kind of rhythm, and then the next season went to work for a Macedonian family with their own small farm north-west of Manjimup. Spring and summer for six years she lived with Jim and his wife, who Wendy called ‘Majka’, Macedonian for mother. ‘I was treated like a daughter,’ she says.

  Wendy recalls tiring days of demanding physical labour, fuelled by nurturing meals of exotic flavours that she later wove into the meals she prepared for her own family. Her routine started just before dawn when she headed out into the paddock with the other workers to hoe weeds. This filled her days from October to January, and then picking would start in about mid January and continue well into March. ‘You couldn’t just pick anything, you had to pick the leaves that were going a bit pale, and that usually started with the bottom ones. Never any more than four at a time. You went over and over the crop for weeks, until you got to the top of the plant and all the stalk was bare.’

  At half-past eight every morning, Majka would bring them a hearty breakfast of French toast made with eggs from their own chickens, olives, roasted capsicums and hot coffee with sweetened condensed milk. The family didn’t have a cow but they grew their own fruit and vegetables, including plenty of red capsicums which Wendy soon learnt were a staple of the traditional Macedonian diet. One of her favourite dishes involved grilling and then dressing the capsicums with olive oil, garlic and basil.

  At lunchtime, the workers traipsed back to the house for soup so thick it almost qualified as a stew. One version was made with lamb, risoni, tomatoes and a big handful of fresh mint. For afternoon tea there were sandwiches filled with roasted chillies, eaten out in the paddock, and then for a special treat in the evenings, sometimes there would be steak, served with eggs broken into the juices and scrambled roughly. ‘They looked horrible, but the flavour!’

  Wendy’s mouth waters at the memory. ‘It was totally different to the food I grew up on, but in those days I was always hungry and I would have eaten anything. For instance, there was always a dish of hot chillies served with everything. For a start I was a bit timid, and I was the same with olives. The first one I tried, I thought, “How could anybody eat those?” But I acquired the taste.’

  The Macedonian family took such a shine to Wendy that after a season or two, they offered to rent her a hectare of land so she could grow her own crop and keep the proceeds. Farmers weren’t required to hold a licence to grow tobacco; however, they could only purchase seed from the state agricultural department and the crop could only be sold at the official tobacco auctions held every year in Fremantle. Thinking her b
oyfriend, Joe, and his mates would help with the hoeing, Wendy took up the offer and then went to the agricultural department, where the staff assumed she was collecting seed for her father.

  No doubt they were surprised when she popped up on the front cover of a weekly rural newspaper, which reported excitedly that Wendy had become the state’s only woman grower. Still only seventeen years of age, Wendy was described as ‘a tall, raven-haired English girl with a cultured voice and a flair for hard work’. Not only was she ‘good looking with lustrous hair and a flashing smile’ but she could ride a horse, drive a truck and swing a dexterous hoe. ‘Wendy knows the anxieties of veteran growers, dreads the thought of summer hail storms which can flatten and ruin a crop in minutes,’ they wrote. ‘Her hopes are the same as the hopes of other tobacco planters: to have a good leaf pick, a good colour cure, an uninterrupted grading period and a bumper price at the annual Fremantle auctions.’

  Wendy knew that growing tobacco wasn’t easy—her own father had tried and failed, and many other inexperienced growers who settled in the district as part of a Commonwealth War Service Land Settlement Scheme gave up within a few years. The government set up a training centre at Manjimup for returned servicemen, but according to Wendy it wasn’t successful because the Queenslander in charge didn’t understand local conditions. Meanwhile, she was being mentored by her Macedonian friends and could count on them for advice when needed. ‘The Macedonians, the Greeks and the Slavs had all been growing tobacco here through the war, so they knew what they were doing,’ she says.

  The first step was preparing the ground. Wendy’s small patch of land was prone to flooding in winter so she dug a drain to carry away the excess water. Then the paddock had to be ploughed and harrowed to create a fine, even seed bed. She tried to hire someone to do this, but when that didn’t work out she tackled the job herself. Even though she had never driven a tractor before, looking back along the nice straight rows, she was pretty happy with her efforts.