by Liz Harfull
Despite the laughter on that occasion, not being able to speak Italian proved to be a real issue between Wendy and her in-laws. Joe and Wendy had saved money to help them migrate, but after a short time they wanted to go home. They found the Australian bush far too different. ‘If we had been living in Perth, it might have been better,’ Wendy says. ‘But we were four hundred kilometres away in the bush. People don’t know what that’s like until they get here.’
They didn’t have much, and there was certainly the occasional heated argument or two, but there was also plenty of laughter in the Bonini household in those early years on the farm near Northcliffe. The tiny community is tucked away right at the bottom of the state in an area of extraordinary natural beauty, with towering forests of giant jarrah and karri trees, and the dramatic unspoilt coastline of what is now D’Entrecasteaux National Park.
The town itself only came into existence in the 1920s during the development of a land settlement scheme to establish dairy farms, which proved to be a dismal failure. The blocks were small and many of the new settlers struggled, either with poor quality soils that couldn’t grow enough pasture or the effort involved in clearing the forest. By the mid 1930s, most people had walked away. Very little of Joe and Wendy’s farm had been cleared, but there was enough ground to grow tobacco and hopefully make a reasonable living. The farm already had its own kilns and drying shed, and they put in a dam. Neither of them were afraid of hard physical work, and they already had experience.
Before too long, Wendy raised the idea of them starting a family. In stark contrast to a prediction by one of her sisters that she would be barefoot and pregnant for the rest of her life after marrying a Catholic, Wendy discovered that Joe didn’t want any children at all. More than a little shocked by the surprise revelation, she headed to the bedroom and started packing her suitcase. ‘Where are you going?’ Joe asked. ‘I’m leaving,’ she replied. ‘Well, I’ll come with you,’ Joe insisted. The humour of the situation didn’t escape Wendy, and the argument soon blew over.
Joe and Wendy celebrated the birth of their first child the day before Christmas 1960. The event was not without its funny moments, too. The plan was that Wendy would go and stay with Doris just before the baby was due, because the farm was so isolated. In what was meant to be the last week of her pregnancy, Wendy went to see her doctor for a final check-up and he told her not to worry, the baby would be some time yet. At about four o’clock the following morning, she woke up with a stomach-ache. With complete faith in the wisdom of the doctor, she put it down to eating some bad food.
A few hours later she reassured Joe over breakfast that she would be fine. He was driving to Manjimup to pick up a part for the irrigation pump and was worried about leaving her alone. At the last minute Wendy changed her mind and decided to spend the day with her mother. Joe could drop her off on his way. ‘And we were driving along and every few minutes I got these pains. I didn’t have a clue,’ she admits.
When they arrived at the Turner farm, Wendy told her mother, ‘I’ve got this terrible bellyache, I keep getting these sharp pains.’ Doris immediately ordered Joe to head straight for the Pemberton hospital.
‘What for?’ he asked.
‘She’s having the baby!’ her mother replied.
At the hospital, the doctor told them both that, given it was Wendy’s first child, the labour was likely to go on for some time. In those days men were not welcome in the delivery room, so Joe decided to continue on to Manjimup as planned rather than spend hours pacing the corridors. ‘He had only just left the hospital and out pops the baby, eight pounds, just like that. He’d gone, and there was no-one to celebrate with,’ Wendy says.
Joe’s mother liked the name Lorenzo so that is what they christened the baby. From the beginning they called him Laurie because Wendy was concerned that later on his schoolmates might give him a hard time if he had an unusual name. After developing milk fever, Wendy stayed in hospital for two weeks before the day finally came when she and Laurie were allowed to go home.
Six years later the Boninis’ second child, Giuliana, was born. By then they had left the farm and moved to Manjimup. The local tobacco-growing industry shut down in the early 1960s because Western Australian growers couldn’t compete against much cheaper imports from Africa, and their product fell out of favour with major cigarette manufacturers who claimed it had a high salt content. Some farmers turned to growing potatoes but in those days it was a regulated crop and a licence was required. The Boninis couldn’t get a licence and their farm with its tiny acreage of cleared land wasn’t really suitable for much else. So Joe found employment at a timber mill and Wendy worked a three-hour shift at the Manjimup hospital, preparing the evening meals.
The Boninis gave up rural life when Giuliana was about three and moved to a newly developed housing area in a south-eastern suburb of Perth, at the foot of the Perth Hills. But farming wasn’t quite finished with the family yet.
Picking peaches is an art. Knowing when they are ripe to exactly the right degree. Judging the colour, feel, smell and even shape before plucking each delicate fruit from the tree. Handling it gently so it is not bruised. Giuliana had an inkling of these things before she married an orchardist, but after more than twenty-five summers she can almost do it in her sleep. Not that there is much time for that during harvest.
The seasonal rhythms of the orchard became hers in 1988, when she married Garrie Vincenti, a third-generation grower from the Perth Hills. They met at the Last Drop pub in Kalamunda. Giuliana often went there to catch up with friends on a Sunday afternoon, but this was a Thursday night and she had to be talked into it by a work colleague. Her friend soon spotted Garrie and two of his mates, who she knew, and they started talking. ‘Garrie’s two friends were in the front and he was behind, and he was saying nothing. He was just standing there, while these two were just yapping and yapping, trying to get my attention, but I wasn’t paying any attention to them. I was thinking, why is he so quiet?’
They married eighteen months later on Giuliana’s twenty-second birthday and moved into a two-storey house overlooking the Vincenti family orchard at Carmel. She may not have been raised on a farm like her mother, but rural life wasn’t completely foreign to Giuliana. Growing up she spent most school holidays and long weekends visiting her grandparents on the Turner farm at Pemberton. Ted finished his days in a small farmhouse with Doris, on the edge of the property, which their sons John and Richard took over after he retired. ‘When we got there, I would hop on the back of Granddad’s old orange Holden ute and we would head off down to his berry patch. He had a little plot amongst the karri forest, and the soils were spectacular. He grew the most amazing raspberries and strawberries,’ Giuliana says.
The Vincentis don’t grow berries. Instead they have about 18,000 stone-fruit trees to care for, covering sixteen undulating hectares, rimmed by bushland. ‘It feels like that many, too, especially when you get to the beginning of a long row in picking season and it’s already thirty-two degrees and it’s only six o’clock in the morning. You look up the row, and you think, “Oh no. Look at all that.” The rows look so long.’
Originally from the same Tuscan province as the Boninis, the Vincentis have been orchardists in the hills overlooking Western Australia’s capital for almost ninety years. Garrie’s grandparents settled just up the road at Pickering Brook where they grew vegetables as well as fruit. His parents, Tony and Anna, took charge after Tony’s mother died and his father moved back to Italy. They bought the Carmel property in the early 1980s with Garrie, and still live there in a separate house at the opposite end of a shared driveway.
Today the Vincentis’ orchard is one of the larger operations in the area, well regarded for the quality of its fruit and the management techniques applied to produce it. They also import specialist horticultural equipment from Europe, which they sell to growers across Australia, and Garrie often finds himself in local newspapers commenting on industry issues and encouraging people t
o buy local produce. The orchard even featured in an episode of Adam Liaw’s popular Destination Flavour series on SBS television. Standing among their fruit trees, the celebrity chef demonstrated how to make a classic Peach Melba dessert with an Italian twist, which he appropriately renamed Peach Giuliana.
She may now have a fancy dessert named after her, but Giuliana is no prima donna. She works long days on the property, particularly during picking season, which starts in November and ends in about mid March. It’s just gone nine o’clock on a hot Monday morning in December and she has already put in three steady hours. Now she is back in the cool, dim light of her kitchen, quickly gathering up morning tea. There is no time or energy left during the week to bake, so Giuliana cooks at the weekend to restock a large deep-freeze with homemade cakes and slices for her family and their employees. ‘My husband has always liked his cup of tea in the morning and afternoon. In the beginning I just gave him biscuits, but I like baking and I thought, why not do it for everyone? It gives me a boost and it makes them happy,’ she explains.
Her favourite cookbooks are spattered with batter on the pages with the most popular recipes. Given time pressures, they tend to be ones that don’t take long to make and have relatively simple ingredients. One-bowl cake mixes that freeze well are her absolute favourites. Today she sliced up a caramel coffee cake and left it on the bench to defrost before heading to the orchard. She is back inside just long enough to make a large portable container of tea and grab the cake, which she puts in a carry bin on the back of the quad bike that serves as the orchard runabout.
A few minutes later Giuliana parks the bike at the top of a gentle rise and walks down to one of two hydraulic picking platforms that have replaced the more traditional ladders in recent years. Tony, Garrie and son, John, are waiting, along with half a dozen hired hands. During spring, when the crop has to be thinned so the trees can produce larger fruit of better quality, there may be as many as twenty additional workers. They are all backpackers from overseas, and mostly young university graduates, earning money while they travel around Australia. They live in dongas on the edge of the orchard, with some of them staying for the whole season because the Vincentis make a point of treating them well and paying them proper rates. ‘You make them happy, you have fun with them and you give them something nice to eat and you treat them properly, and they give you their labour back in return,’ Giuliana says.
Unless the weather is extremely hot and there is danger of too much fruit being lost, Sundays are rest days, even at the peak of the season in January and February. ‘We are all knackered by then and you need a day off,’ Giuliana explains. She and Garrie tend to spend it catching up with family. Often that means sharing a meal with Wendy and Joe, who live only fifteen minutes away, in the same house where Giuliana and her brother, Laurie, grew up. The modest suburban family home has seen of hundreds of family parties and social gatherings over the years. In their heyday, Joe and Wendy often entertained as many as fifty people, dancing under the large pergola at the back where they set up coloured lights and a bar to lend a festive air. If they weren’t entertaining, they went out to dances every Saturday night until just a few years ago.
Their health doesn’t allow much dancing now, but Joe is still drawn to the Latin rhythms he favoured when he first swept Wendy off her feet. He practises them almost every day on the electronic organ. Even though his skills as a dancer hinted at a natural musicality, Joe did not learn how to read music and play a keyboard until he was in his forties. He took it up when he became ‘bored something stupid’ during recovery from major back surgery. Once a fortnight he went to see a music teacher, who was impressed with his aptitude and urged him to keep practising.
It is the Sunday after the Kalamunda show, and Joe is serenading his wife while she works in the kitchen. He is playing the Cole Porter classic ‘Begin the Beguine’ to a syncopated beat. Wendy is humming along as she sets a table with the best china and silverware. Giuliana and her family are coming for dinner and she has prepared a roll of lamb, basted in the distinctly Italian flavours of tomato and olives. It is a long way from the charred chops fried in fat that she served Joe on the first night of their marriage. ‘I had no idea,’ she confesses, pondering again all the differences that could have made their marriage a disaster.
Joe has been listening in. ‘What do they say? Love is blind,’ he adds sagely. ‘We are still going strong after fifty-six years.’
9
THE ONE NUN STORY
There’s trouble at the whorehouse. A notorious bushranger is on the loose, and the ladies of the night are leaning out the single window of their modest establishment making lewd suggestions to the crowd gathered outside. A sign on the building says Madame McGee’s Young Ladies Finishing School and Deportment College, but no-one is fooled. Certainly not the local police trooper, who decides it’s time to shut the joint down. He’s in the process of warning the crowd to move along when the escaped bushranger is spotted making a dash for it. Mounted on a fine bay mare, the trooper takes off in pursuit.
The year is 2015 and it’s a fairly typical Saturday night in Harrow, a small town tucked away on the banks of the Glenelg River, in Victoria’s West Wimmera. This scene is what happens when people let their imaginations run riot. When they refuse to accept that the place they love most in all the world is in danger of becoming nothing more than an historic curiosity. When people become convinced they can do anything and that no idea is too silly. This is the story of the little town that decided it could reinvent its future and buck the national rural trend of declining populations and closing services. In the process, it changed the lives of two city women who had never heard of the place just a few years before, let alone considered living there.
Unlikely as it may sound, it all started with a nun. The good sister provided pastoral care for people across the Catholic parish of Harrow until the mid 1990s when she was transferred out of town and not replaced. Her loss had an unexpected effect on the local publican, Ange Newton, but not because the nun was a big drinker. Ange could sense the implications were much broader than what might happen to her own business.
‘I sat down and thought about the impact one woman would have leaving the town, and I added it all up. It was shocking,’ she says. ‘There would be a car that wouldn’t be serviced a couple of times a year at the local garage, and she covered a fairly big area so she would have been buying a decent amount of fuel. She would have been sending a lot of letters so the post office was affected. She was buying groceries at the grocery store, so they were affected, too. The economic impact on the town was not good. And then I started to think, if one nun can have that impact, what if a whole family left, or the garage closed?’
It was a personal epiphany of the non-religious sort for Ange, who is not the type of person to just sit back and accept the inevitable. She was also very aware that the local community was going through some tough times. For 150 years, most properties in the surrounding area had relied on sheep and wool for their income, but in the early 1990s the global demand for wool crashed, taking sheep prices with it and leaving behind a massive stockpile of unwanted fibre. Government and industry organisations decided the quickest way to turn the situation around was to reduce the national flock by 20 million sheep within a year. For farmers who could not find a buyer, that meant shooting their livestock and dumping them in pits. It was a very bleak time even for old hands in the wool industry, who thought they had seen everything.
The warm and vivacious Ange took over the Hermitage Hotel in 1994. She had no previous experience running a pub but she did know Harrow, having grown up in south-western Victoria. The only licensed premises in town, the hotel was barely managing to sell a couple of kegs a week so there was plenty of scope for improvement. After a while, business lifted a little but she was acutely aware that the town relied on the farming sector to survive. ‘Our business was okay, but I wasn’t sure how the other businesses were coping.’
What happened
next stemmed from a combination of fear and stupidity, according to the very modest Ange who is quick to share credit with the broader community. ‘I was fearful enough to want to do something about it, but too stupid to know what I was getting myself into,’ she says.
Looking around for inspiration, Ange realised that Harrow’s greatest asset was its history. Originally known as Upper Glenelg, it was settled in the 1840s, making it one of Victoria’s oldest inland towns. Over the centuries, it has been connected with more than a few colourful characters whose stories are part of a rich local folklore, including explorer Major Thomas Mitchell, who trekked through the area in 1836 and named the Glenelg River; undertaker William Burrell, whose real trade was gun-smithing; and two Chinese market gardeners, who grew vegetables on the riverbank. The town is also the burial place of legendary cricketer Johnny Mullagh, a skilful all-rounder who was part of an all-Aboriginal team that in 1868 became the first Australian cricket team to tour England.
Ange considered their stories provided perfect material for a theatrical sound and light show. The evening event would bring to life the town’s history, using its old buildings as stage settings, and the community as the cast and support crew. Hopefully, it would attract visitors who would stay for the weekend and spend some money.
The first step in bringing this grand vision to life was convincing the locals it was a good idea. ‘So we had a barbecue and got them full, basically. We told them all how special they were and talked them into their roles,’ Ange says. Even though most of them thought she’d lost the plot, they liked their publican and didn’t want to upset her, so they agreed to lend a hand. At the end of three months, there were about sixty cast and crew. Most of the community had become engaged in making it happen.
From the beginning, the show has been about making the most of local talent and resources. Two musical brothers who had never played for anyone but their families were recruited to form the band. Anyone who could sew helped to make the costumes. Bruce, a local farmer, was an excellent horseman so he became a trooper. A couple of others were sent off to Melbourne to gain technical qualifications as armourers so they could manage the firearms and explosions that are part of the production. And the pub employed ten more casual staff to prepare and serve dinner and drinks. ‘It was this total social inclusiveness. People came together and worked for one goal. It was wonderful, and it still is,’ says Ange.