by Liz Harfull
Behind Malcolm hangs an old map, showing the original blocks created when the area was subdivided from pastoral holdings to encourage more intensive farming. Among those marked is the original 130 hectares taken up by his great-grandfather in about 1870. The McClure family have been farming at Connewirricoo, about 15 kilometres west of Harrow, for five generations. Adam McClure pushed his way through the stringybark scrub to reach his selection when he was only twenty years of age. Six years later he married Bessie Gash and they raised eleven children in a small house with a shingle roof that he built with his own hands, from timber that he cut off the property. Known as Kalang Cottage, today it stands just off the main street, having been moved there in 1988 and restored by the historical society.
Adam witnessed Harrow’s growth as more settlers arrived in the area. In its heyday the town boasted two pubs, three blacksmiths shops and three saddlers, but it was already in decline by the time he was in his mid-eighties. Reminiscing on the occasion of his sixtieth wedding anniversary, Adam told a local newspaper reporter that the greatest hardships in the early years had come from flooding creeks and rivers. There were no bridges and when they rode away from home in the wetter months, they often did not know if they would be able to get back again. He almost drowned on one occasion, trying to swim an inexperienced horse across the Glenelg River. The horse plunged into the fast-flowing water and repeatedly went under before Adam managed to guide it to the opposite bank some distance downstream. ‘Only the hand of providence saved me on that occasion,’ he said.
Mark hasn’t seen rain like that in a while, at least not at a time of the year when it is most useful. At about the time Sherryn moved to Harrow, the district was feeling the effects of the worst drought in living memory. To help pay the bills, Mark was working long days off farm, carting water and doing some contract earthmoving. With grain, cattle and sheep prices all looking good at the moment, times are not too bad now, but in the last year or two the vital spring rains that this country relies on to finish off winter cereal crops, sustain pastures and top up dams have been light on.
The McClure farm has always run livestock, but in Adam’s day it was known for growing quality wheat, too. In 1902, he was awarded a silver medallion as winner of the Australian championship for grain at the Royal Melbourne Show. He counted the medal among his most prized possessions. Malcolm and Mark still grow some oats for grazing, but these days sheep take priority in an operation that focuses on producing prime lambs for meat. The family runs about 1100 hectares in three sections quite a few kilometres apart, including a property that his mother inherited, and 263 hectares that Mark bought on the other side of the Glenelg River not long before Sherryn moved to Harrow.
‘I bought something today,’ he told her one night on the phone.
‘Oh great, what did you buy?’ she replied, thinking it might be a motorbike or a car.
‘I bought a farm,’ he replied in his understated way.
‘What!’
The property included a large weatherboard house which became their first home. Set at the end of a 1.5-kilometre drive, it was badly in need of renovation and full of mice but they could both see its potential and had great plans for it. ‘Mark, being a bloke, put in a bed, a couch and a television and he was ready,’ Sherryn says. Then she moved in with all her possessions, including boxes and boxes of books, and her beloved German shepherd, Polo. The two of them spent hours exploring the farm while Mark was away working, discovering old bits of machinery and going for runs along the driveway.
Sherryn loved her new home, although she wasn’t so keen on the large number of huntsman spiders that were also in residence. Mark would tease her about them. He loved to wait until she had climbed into bed at night and started to relax. ‘So you haven’t seen the legs sticking out on the windowsill?’ he’d ask quite innocently, then he’d laugh when she screamed and ordered him to remove it. ‘He thought it was hilarious,’ she says.
On weekdays, Sherryn drove to Balmoral, where she had secured a job teaching at the local primary school. Going to the job interview highlighted one of the first sacrifices she would be making in her new life. ‘I was due there about nine-thirty so I got up, got myself dressed and psyched up, and headed off,’ she says. ‘I got there early and I thought I could really go a mocha. That was my standard drink in Melbourne. I’d buy a mocha and a muffin on the way to work and off I went. I thought it would get me nice and relaxed and it would be great. So I went into the cafe and I said, “Can you make me a mocha?” And the woman there said, “Sure, no worries.” And then she went out the back.’
Sherryn was a bit concerned that she couldn’t hear the distinctive sound of a coffee machine kicking into action, but the woman soon returned and handed over a takeaway cup with a lid on it. Heading outside, Sherryn got into her car and took her first sip. It was so awful that she held it in her mouth, unable to swallow. ‘It was instant coffee with Milo,’ she says, making an appalled face at the memory. ‘Not only did I burn my tongue, but I ended up spitting it out.’
The mocha experience was not enough to put Sherryn off her country move, although it did set her thinking. By then she was completely committed to Mark and thought she had a fair idea of what she was getting into. She and Mark had lived together for six weeks while she taught at a school in Horsham as part of her training, and it seemed to work. ‘I was ready to come out here and have a go. I was twenty-eight, and I think I was ready in my life as well,’ she adds.
They had been going out together for four years, starting with the very next weekend after Beaut Blokes. On that occasion, Mark and his mate Shane drove all the way to Melbourne, staying in a dodgy hotel in St Kilda. They arranged to give Sherryn and Louisa a call as soon as they arrived in the city, so the girls could meet up with them. ‘We’re standing outside the car shop,’ Mark told Sherryn, who still laughs when she recalls the moment. ‘This is Melbourne. You need to give us more!’ she replied, uncertain which one of the city’s large number of car dealers he might be referring too.
The weekend went well, but at the end of it Sherryn still felt uncertain about the relationship. ‘My cousin and his friend were hot and heavy, so how much was Mark wanting to be here with me? Or was he just here to keep his mate company? I didn’t know.’ The defining moment came a few months later, after Louisa and Shane split up. When her cousin phoned to break the news, Sherryn was convinced the next call would be from Mark, splitting up with her, too.
Sure enough, ten minutes later the phone rang. It was Shane wanting to know if she had any idea what he had done wrong. Ten minutes after that uncomfortable conversation ended, Mark rang. ‘Right. This is it. This is the moment,’ she thought to herself.
‘So, Louisa and Shane have broken up,’ he said.
‘Yup,’ replied an anxious Sherryn.
‘You’re not going to break up with me, are ya?’
‘I wasn’t planning on it. Were you gonna break up with me?’
‘Nuh.’
‘Okay. So we’ll just keep going then?’ she queried hopefully, sighing with relief when he agreed.
As their first year together unfolded, Sherryn and Mark saw each other every month or so, either in Melbourne or Harrow. After eight months, Mark decided to really test their relationship. He took her to the Quambatook Tractor Pull. A massive event that has been running for forty years, it draws thousands to the small Mallee town every Easter, to watch modified tractors tow sledges along a purpose-built track. Competitors and tractor aficionados come from all over Australia, revelling in the smell of diesel and the deafening roars of engines straining to pull enormous weights.
Mark and his father are members of the Rusty Rattlers, a small club based at Apsley for people interested in preserving old tractors and engines, and Mark has a fair collection of old tractors tucked away in a large shed. His pride and joy is a 1938 Caterpillar bulldozer that he restored with a friend and takes to shows. Not so long ago he bought an old front-end loader, too, and put a ne
w engine in it. A qualified boilermaker and steel fabricator, Mark modifies and builds farm equipment for people as an extra source of income outside the busy seeding and harvest periods. A couple of years ago, he and Malcolm spent a month engineering their own air-seeder to sow crops. More recently he was working on an invention to dig out blue-gum stumps. He spends hours sitting at the kitchen table with pencil and paper, drawing up designs, or using the computer to search for components and spare parts.
Going to the Quambatook Tractor Pull is Mark’s idea of the perfect day out. Sherryn packed a book. ‘That was my tester,’ Mark says. He figured if she kept going out with him after that, she was a keeper. ‘She reminds me of it, though. Fairly often,’ he adds, after a pause.
Mark still hasn’t convinced Sherryn to have a go at driving a tractor. He does contract seeding, spraying and harvesting work to bring in extra money. Before Rhianna came along, if she wasn’t teaching Sherryn would sometimes take him lunch and join him on the tractor for a few laps of the paddock. But she reckons if she learns to drive a tractor herself, she will end up with another job. ‘And I don’t need to come home to another one,’ she says.
Her first hands-on task on the farm was tying steel droppers onto a fence. She would head out by herself at weekends, taking the sheep dogs for a run. Since then, Susan has shown her how to raise orphaned lambs and she cooks for the shearers, too, treating it as an excuse to try out new recipes. ‘I was told right at the beginning that you have to treat your shearers like royalty,’ she repeats dutifully.
While she was teaching full-time at Balmoral, it was difficult to do too much on the property, but Sherryn enjoys working with sheep, particularly lamb marking. ‘I get to pick up all the lambs and give them a cuddle,’ she says. The task involves castrating them and docking their tails, so they probably appreciate the pat, but her first experience highlighted that her predecessors weren’t always involved in this aspect of animal husbandry.
Excited at the prospect of lending a hand, she headed out to the yards only to be dismissed by Mark’s grandfather. ‘There are enough of us here. You probably need to go and see to the smoko,’ he told her.
Sherryn was so shocked that she went straight back to the house, tears in her eyes. ‘He didn’t do it in a rude way,’ she says. ‘It was a blow to my ego more than anything, but I was just dismissed.’
Susan did her best to reassure her. ‘They didn’t mean it,’ she told her. ‘It’s just that they’re used to working as a crew.’
Sherryn reacted strongly to the incident because it reinforced niggling concerns that life in the country might be more traditional than she was prepared to accept. Since becoming politically aware as teenagers, Sherryn and her school friends had always considered themselves feminists. They wanted to be independent and treated as equals, both in the workplace and in relationships. It’s one of the reasons why she refuses to take on all the cooking in the household, although she ends up doing most of the evening meals because Mark works until late almost every day.
When she first moved in, Sherryn discovered that while Mark could cook, he tended to have a pretty narrow repertoire. Home-killed beef or lamb was the staple diet, with fried potatoes and onions. ‘If I cooked I got to eat some vegetables or a bit of salad, and I introduced him to chicken,’ she says. Apart from broadening their diet, making the evening meal has also become more convenient since she changed jobs, teaching part-time four mornings a week at St Malachy’s Catholic primary school in Edenhope. ‘Rhianna eats at 5.30 so if I’m cooking for her, I cook for all of us,’ Sherryn says.
Lunch has been a greater point of contention, especially since she and Mark moved into the house at the heart of the farm enterprise. Mark grew up there with his younger brother Tim, and their parents were still in residence until 2011 when Malcolm and Susan decided it was time to make room for the next generation. Susan always prepared lunch for the men and Mark thought Sherryn might keep up the practice, at least during school holidays. Sherryn didn’t see why she should, just because she was home. After all, she was meant to be on holidays and it was something he was more than capable of doing himself.
Living away from the main farm during the first few years created a greater sense of separation between work and home life. She and Mark would have breakfast together in the morning and then set off. Having grown up in a suburban household where both parents went out to work, it was a more familiar routine. Sherryn also struggles with the rural psyche regarding where the house sits in terms of farm priorities and individual responsibilities. ‘Mum and Dad would come back to the same space, and they shared the housework, whereas Mark thinks that if he’s tidied the shed, that’s his job done. The house paddock and the house, that’s my job,’ she says. ‘The same with finances. The house is not really factored in. If it needs repairs, well, maybe that can happen next year after we have bought what the farm needs.’
Wrapped up in this tricky area of conversation is her awareness that it’s been hard for Susan and Malcolm to walk away from the house that was their family home for so many years. Apart from some painting, she and Mark tried not to make too many changes when they first moved in. Meanwhile, without being asked to, Malcolm respectfully knocks on the back door he once opened multiple times a day without a second thought. Sherryn finds the whole situation confusing. ‘I know they moved out for the right reasons, but I still don’t really understand, and because of that I guess I still don’t feel like it’s entirely our house,’ she admits.
Brought up by parents who believe in hard work, she says part of Mark’s appeal is that he has the same values. The flip side is that it can be a struggle to convince him to take a day off and just sit and relax. On a farm, public holidays and weekends have very little meaning when there are animals to look after and crops to harvest. Sherryn came to understand this leading up to her first Queen’s Birthday weekend at Harrow. A keen gardener, her father always pruned his roses then so they bloomed in time for the Melbourne Cup. ‘So that was my thing, too. It was always my rose cutting and report writing weekend,’ Sherryn says.
Mark had other ideas. Crutching was starting and she would have to cook for the shearers. ‘I can’t cook. It’s a public holiday!’ she protested in dismay.
Even Good Fridays often pass Mark by. ‘Aren’t you meant to be at school?’ he has asked her on more than one occasion. And then there is the holiday most sacrosanct of all in Victoria—Melbourne Cup Day. When Sherryn moved to Harrow, she was horrified to discover that while a lot of people stopped to listen to the famous horse race, no-one had the day off. It wasn’t a designated public holiday in the area because the local council had the option to reassign it to coincide with a major local event instead. In the West Wimmera, they settled on the Hamilton Sheepvention—a field day about all things sheep and wool, held in June.
Now that he is no longer playing football, Mark works most of the weekend, too. Sherryn was recruited by the local netball team as soon as they heard she was moving to the area, and she has been heavily involved as a player, coach or umpire ever since. That can chew up most of her Saturdays during the season, as well as Thursday nights for practice.
One of her greatest challenges has been adjusting to the fact that no matter what community activity she is involved in, she is going to be mixing socially with the children she teaches and their parents, and that whenever she leaves the farm, it is inevitable she will meet someone she knows. By comparison, city life was anonymous so it was easy to separate her persona as a teacher from her personal life.
‘Someone explained to me that being a teacher in front of a classroom is a performance. When you step out of the classroom, you go back to being whoever you are, but down here you step out and you are still with the kids and the parents,’ she says. ‘In Melbourne, it was very easy to keep things separate. My school had three hundred students and I knew them all, and I only lived ten kilometres from the school, but I would never see any of the kids at the weekend and only very occasionally w
ould I see a parent.’
In Harrow or Edenhope, she bumps into students from St Malachy’s all the time—in the supermarket, at the pub where everyone goes for pizza on Sunday nights, walking down the street. ‘They are my peers on the netball court, or when we are serving in the netball club canteen, and I am still trying to figure out how to deal with that. When I stand in front of them at school, I am their teacher, that is my personality and my role play, but I don’t know how to do that when I am also their equal on the netball court, or when we are serving in the canteen, and they have done it a hundred times more than me. I don’t mind having kids explain to me how to do things, but how do they feel?’
She is conscious that even off-duty she represents St Malachy’s and needs to behave appropriately, and she often finds herself modifying her conversation. ‘We have friends with kids at the school and when we go out and see them and they ask how work’s been, do I say it’s been a fantastic week or do I admit it’s been terrible? I’m still figuring it out to be honest, and it might take a while.’
Despite these dilemmas, Sherryn has taken on the Harrow spirit of volunteering and joined more than a few committees, although she has stepped back a little since Rhianna was born. ‘It would stick out like a sore thumb if you didn’t do anything,’ she admits. Mark has served as president of the B&S ball organising committee for more than ten years. He is captain of the local rural fire brigade, secretary of a new committee trying to start up a mud bash event, and on a committee for the Connewirricoo community centre. He volunteers so much that he was named the West Wimmera Shire Citizen of the Year on Australia Day in 2015.
Sherryn helps him with Tussock Jumpers Ball and the annual billy cart races known as the Mullagh Championship, and is on the committee managing the Johnny Mullagh park. They are both on a committee planning celebrations to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Aboriginal cricket team tour to England, in 2018. Obvious advocates for how they met, they have helped behind the scenes with Beaut Blokes, Sherryn organising the catering for the black-tie dinner as a fundraiser for the netball club, and Mark serving behind the bar. They even hosted a few girls for the last event back in 2012. There haven’t been too many in recent years because the district started running out of single men. After her own experiences, Sherryn wouldn’t hesitate to encourage others to give it a go if there are more events in the future. She believes that even if people don’t find their soulmates, they will have a good time and make some great friends. ‘It can be life changing,’ she says. And not just for the participants.