Can My Pony Come Too?

by Rosemary Esmonde Peterswald

  Sue with her Nordic blonde hair, eyes the colour of the sea on a sunny day and forthright attitude and Don became our great friends and still are to this day. Their son, Marcus, and daughter, Karina, and our girls soon formed a strong friendship, although Marcus was somewhat overcome with having three giggling girls to contend with.

  Over the years we were at Windermere, Don, like Bruce, used to shake his head in wonderment as we came up with what we thought were good ideas on how to farm this Peninsula land. Yet he gave us the greatest help and encouragement with whatever brainwave we had, no matter what he thought. He only balked once, when Rob asked him to help chase our wayward boar, Hitler, around the orchard in order to put a ring through his nose to stop him ploughing up the paddocks. After two hours of chasing and then trying to hold the screeching Hitler down on the ground, he shook his head and exclaimed to Rob exasperatedly. ‘Bloody Hell, Rob, there must be an easier way than this.’

  Not having had much to do with pigs before (Cascades is a cattle and sheep farm), he wasn’t sure what that was.

  Hitler got his own revenge. A year or so after the orchard episode we eventually caught him again and off to town he went in the trailer attached to our small Mini Moke. His day had come. I was somewhat sad, but realised this was part of farming. He came back all dressed up and ready for the spit. We decided to make a day of it and set the spit up over a log fire under the walnut tree within the old convict ruins at Cascades. We left the spit in the charge of Marcus, as we helped Don and Sue move a flock of sheep from one paddock to another by the convict Mess Hall on the shore.

  It wasn’t long before Marcus came bolting down to find us. ‘Hitler’s on fire. Hitler’s on fire,’ he screamed at the top of his voice, pointing to the huge flames visible over the sandstone wall around the ruins. By the time we rushed up to see what we could retrieve there was just a charred mess with only a few morsels of very tough flesh left. He’d certainly got his revenge!

  Soon we settled into our new life at Windermere, with Rob commuting to the army barracks in Brighton, where he was in charge of school cadets throughout Tasmania, coming home at weekends and Wednesday nights.

  In the meantime I learned the ropes in the apple sheds from Bruce. Each day I was on the assembly line, packing some dozens of boxes of apples every hour, which had to be wiped, wrapped in tissue paper and gently laid in the boxes. I then had to pick the box up and carry it to a conveyor belt opposite. The other women on the assembly line, including the wonderful Blossom with her mass of fairy floss ashen hair, floral aprons, coloured socks and lace up shoes, being the oldest and most experienced, had been doing this job for years. She told me later that she and the other women doubted my stamina to stick it out. Mind you, I don’t think I’ve ever looked forward to a morning tea and lunch break so much in my life, when we’d sit on the dilapidated vinyl chairs under the window often listening to the broadcasters, Sue Becker or John Laws, conducting their talk-back shows on the radio.

  I also learned how to make the apple boxes, how to grade and sort the apples at the beginning of the assembly line and how to drive the fork-lift truck to move the pallets around. Rob learned all of this on his odd day off from the army and at weekends. It was more than satisfying to see the apples head off in large container trucks, which would arrive to the front doors of the shed to be loaded up for the markets around the world. Apple orcharding in the 1980s wasn’t what it had been just after the war, when five acres was enough to make a good living and huge container ships would leave the docks of Hobart laden down with apples bound for the United Kingdom. The Common Market ruined this for many orchardists, for suddenly Australian apples were not as competitive as they once were in Britain. Fortunately we now had cool storage in Tassie, allowing orchardists to keep their apples until a market was found. Even so the golden days of Tasmanian apple export had long since gone. So despite the long hours in the orchard and sheds we certainly weren’t going to make our fortune in the short run.

  The earliest variety of apples to be harvested is Gravenstein. The first year we had a glut. It was my job to find a market. I rang around all the fruit and vegie merchants in Hobart and found a sympathetic ear at one outlet fairly quickly. I must admit at this stage, although I could sell a house fairly easily, I had little idea of how to market apples.

  ‘How many in a box?’ the man on the other end of the line asked warily.

  I hesitated, not having any idea at this stage. ‘Are there eighty?’ he probed.

  I was pretty sure there were far more than eighty. ‘Oh yes… there certainly are.’

  ‘Well, bring them in then.’

  That afternoon I packed at least twenty boxes of apples onto the back tray of the Holden and drove up to town. At the fruit and vegie outlet the man came out to inspect my offerings, as I stood back proudly.

  ‘There aren’t eighty in here,’ he sighed in disgust. ‘There must be at least a hundred and fifty…these are nothing but bloody marbles.’

  Needless to say he refused to take any boxes and I realised I’d made a huge tactical error, for he was obviously after ‘big’ apples, not ‘tasty small’ apples. I wasn’t sure what to do next. Refusing to give up, I continued around the outlets until I got rid of the lot, including to the delightful Mrs Chung and her sons at Chung Sings in North Hobart. Mrs Chung, with her wispy grey hair tied up in a scarf and wearing a colourful apron, ran the floor of Chung Sings until what would appear to be well into her eighties. I used to love to stop and have a chat with her or Michael, as we dropped off boxes of apples and apple juice for the next six years or so.

  On their way back to Ireland my parents came to stay in the little cottage by the woods and my father, being an old orchardist, gave us constant advice. Rob continued with the army at Brighton and sent a truck-load of sheep home every second week from the Bridgewater market nearby, until we were so saturated in sheep that even Bruce and Don panicked.

  In order to cope we got Shep the sheepdog. Unfortunately herding sheep was not her forté. Sitting on the back tray of the truck, with us herding the sheep was much more her style. When she came on heat, Rob put her kennel onto the roof of the carport. (He’d read this in Footrot Flats, a New Zealand comic strip.) Even that didn’t stop the neighbour’s dogs and Gatsby collecting underneath in lustful hope.

  It was no sooner than we installed all of our new sheep in the paddocks that Bruce announced to me apologetically one sunny afternoon that we were in quarantine as his sheep had lice. Now his sheep and ours were unsaleable, including the fat lambs we thought we could sell at a hefty profit. As you can imagine we were slightly overstocked for a while, with every single sheep and all the cattle having to be deloused, checked and checked again before the quarantine was finally lifted three months later, meaning the income we thought we’d be getting from the fat lambs went down the gurgler.

  Gatsby took an instant dislike to Bruce’s dogs, Bill and Ben, and they to him. This didn’t surprise me, for they were a terrifying pair of blue heelers, baling me up time and time again, unless Bruce was there to tame them with a glare. One day, after much niggling from the two, Gatsby decided to take to them with a vengeance. With blood and fur flying everywhere, I screamed hysterically. They took little notice. Eventually Bruce came running from the apple sheds. Grabbing an oar by the side of the dam, he managed to chase the three dogs into the water. They continued to fight until they were in imminent danger of drowning, then let off long enough for Bruce, who’d now bravely waded into the water (still with the oar) to whack them apart. Gatsby ended up with teeth holes all over him and having to be rushed to the vet at Sorell. Bill and Ben looked reasonably unscathed as they swaggered off to the back of Bruce’s truck. Another time Rob put his leg between the three to try and kick them apart, ending up with six stitches in his calf.

  Running the farm with Rob still in the army had the odd perk. One day there was a knock on the door. There stood the local agricultural officer. He’d just been down to Cascades and Sue h
ad told him we’d moved in, and with Rob still in the army, I was running the place on my own with Rob’s father. Now this fellow was somewhat easy on the eye and charming to boot. Poppy and I were having lunch at the time, so I invited him in for a coffee to join us. In the excitement of finding such a specimen on my front door I’d forgotten I’d just turned the tap on in the sink in the laundry. After about half an hour he looked down at his feet and lifted them in the air.

  ‘Is it always under water in the kitchen like this?’ he asked with a lopsided grin, at the same time running a hand through his mop of dark hair.

  It was only then that I realised I’d clean forgotten to turn the tap off. For over an hour he helped us mop up – and from that day on often popped in to see how Poppy and I were getting on, staying to give us a hand with the sheep, followed by a cool beer or a glass of red.

  When the worst hailstorm in twenty years annihilated our crop of apples, just ready for harvesting the next year, we had to do some quick thinking. After much swearing and cursing about the injustice of the gods up above, we decided to go into juice production. We’d no idea how to make apple juice; however, that didn’t daunt us. Don arrived one day when I, with the help of a friend from Ireland, was trying to coax the juice from a batch of apples going through the new press Rob had brought home from town to experiment with.

  In my column, She’ll Be Apples, that I later wrote for the Sunday Tasmanian Newspaper, I described Don as being ‘The Know it All Bystander’. In this instance he certainly was. He suggested that we cut the apples up into small pieces first before putting them into the press. This needless to say was a great step forward and before too long we were producing more apple juice in Tasmania under the Apple Maid label than anyone else, outselling orange juice in the large supermarkets.

  With Bruce’s help, Rob, now retired from the army, became an expert in all angles of juice production. He managed to find a great recipe, mixing a variety of apples to produce what some described as the best juice they ever tasted. I took my hat off to him, for it wasn’t an easy ask for an army officer to change into a successful orchardist and juice and cider producer within the blink of an eye. He spent hours testing and tasting until he came up with a recipe we were all happy with. The uniqueness was that each batch tasted slightly different depending on what apples we had available. Gravensteins and Golden Delicious were sweeter, Red Delicious fruitier, Granny Smith’s tarter. Sometimes we mixed them all together. Our customers loved the variety and we often got phone calls telling us which was their favourite. Rob employed industrial chemists to show him the best way to preserve the juice without using preservatives and how to retain the best colour. We designed labels and advertisements. We chased Australia to get the correct bottles to put the juice in. We’d found Don Calvert (one of Tasmania’s foremost yachtsmen who represented Australia in the Admiral’s cup), a plastic bottle producer in the Huon, but the glass ones needed to come from further afield.

  Bruce was invaluable. He helped us set up the equipment we needed, including a fancy apple washer he managed to put together with bits and pieces lying around the shed. Even after five years Bruce still had bits and pieces around the shed.

  ‘I know there’s a twelve-inch screw in that box up the back,’ he’d say scratching his head in deep thought. ‘And whilst I’m here I’ll have a look for that gasket I left in the hayshed.’

  Needless to say when we needed a part for anything, Bruce could usually lay his hands on it fairly quickly. We also travelled to the Huon Valley to purchase another larger press and some steel vats from a defunct wine producer, ending up with boxes and boxes of the worst wine ever produced (Chateau Lorraine) as Rob was so overcome with the great packaging. For years we used to take a batch to give away at the Tasman District School fair, where others were also seduced by its appearance. Then no doubt they’d cook up a feast to do justice to this great-looking wine, just as we had done. After tasting it they’d soon realise there was no way you could finish the bottle. The next year you’d see it back again at the fete. And once more it would go off to unsuspecting connoisseurs of fine wines, only to reappear the next year. It may still be doing so for all I know.

  The girls started at the Tasman District School over at the seaside town of Nubeena, catching the school bus at the end of our driveway, which would take them over the dirt road lolloping up the steep hill behind Koonya to Nubeena. I often did tuckshop duty in the canteen, run for many, many years by the renowned larger than life, Lola, with a heart of gold and a no-nonsense manner. Charlotte and Georgie made many good friends at Tasman, some of whom they keep in touch with today, although tragically Charlotte’s special friend, Elizabeth Campbell, was killed, together with her cousin, in the Port Arthur massacre, as they crouched in terror behind the counter trying to hide from the lunatic gunman. (I refuse to mention his name.) Their funeral and many others were held at the small Koonya chapel on the shores of Norfolk Bay, followed by a sad wake at the Mess Hall on Cascades.

  After school the girls would help in the apple sheds, washing out the vats and cleaning up the apple press. As Georgie was still tiny, the best way to clean a vat was to put her inside with a hose; not a good job on a freezing cold winter’s day, when the only way we could keep our feet warm was to cut up old sheepskins, putting them inside our boots. To give them their due, young as the girls were, they never complained, seeming anxious to help, with the odd bit of pocket money an incentive.

  Not long after we arrived at Windermere I found Devil – Devil by name and Devil by nature. Once again I was overcome by good looks. He was about fifteen hands, with a white star running down his aristocratic Arab face. I probably would have been better off getting something older and quieter, but once I spied Devil in a paddock the other side of Port Arthur, I was smitten. For the years we lived at Windermere we had a love-hate relationship. In reality he was far too much for me to handle, often bolting through the orchard (once I caught my neck on a Red Delicious tree and was ripped out of the saddle), or dumping me (Rob too) in a heap of blackberry bushes. Yet I persevered and eventually Charlotte was old enough to ride him also, both of us winning a few ribbons at the local gymkhanas. For hours I’d ride through the countryside, sometimes ending up down at Cascades or a little further along at the small Koonya shop (stocking everything from garden spades and chicken feed to bread and milk), where I could grab a few things and ride on back home.

  Cascades is a lush green farm of some 700 acres of prime grazing land spreading inland from the shores of Norfolk Bay to the far reaches of the hills behind Koonya, with spectacular views across the sparkling waters of the bay. At its peak in the 1850s there were between 300 and 400 convicts at Cascades, gainfully employed in the timber industry. When we arrived at Koonya Sue and Don were living in the weatherboard house, which Don’s father had built after the war overlooking the Cascade River (where the cascading water provided one of the first hydro schemes in Australia). The house where they now live was the convict hospital. Across the road is the original convict Officers’ Mess and Officers’ Quarters, which they’ve now completed the restoration of (winning a nationwide heritage award for restoration). During the Second World War a group of Italian prisoners lived in Rotten Row (another heritage building they’ve restored) while working on Cascades’ orchard. Photos of the prisoners, appearing more than happy with their lot, are displayed on the thick stone walls.

  Our life at Windermere wasn’t all work, however. At the time there was a great group of people living on the Peninsula and we constantly seemed to be at parties or giving parties, leading Rob to mutter one day, as we were shearing the sheep in the old wooden hut off the apple sheds, ‘Not sure if I can keep up with this social life.’

  For not only did we have the local people to socialise with, including, to name a few, Sue and Don at Cascades and Marg and Paul Hansen at Highcroft, where apart from the magnificent job Marg has done in restoring a significant Hobart property, Summerhome, in Moonah, which has been in her
family for generations and where we still often party, they have one of the best peony farms in Tasmania. There were also Kate and John Hamilton who ran the popular Tassie Devil Park, John’s wonderful parents, Bill and Meg, Tom and Brenda Newton who started the Tasman Gazette, Alistair and Caroline Mathieson, a former Miss Tasmania, at the renowned Bush Mill where Alastair had installed a steam train he’d imported from the UK, which ran from the Fox and Hounds to the Bush Mill and where I’d help out when they had huge busloads in for cray bakes, and Phillip Thomson, the local doctor (who still looks after Rob) and his wife, Carmel, (with whom Rob’s Uncle Keith fell madly in love). Then there were quite a few of the class of ’65 and their families visiting, plus many other friends from the mainland. In fact in our first two years at Windermere we had no less than thirty visitors from the mainland (more that they were curious to see what we had let ourselves in for), some of whom stayed for weeks on end, giving us a welcome hand. The summer of 1982 was one of the hottest on record, so there was a lot of carting irrigation pipes around the orchard. Eugene arrived and was there to help with putting rings in the pigs’ noses to stop them harrowing the orchard. I’ve a wonderful photo of him attempting this job with a long pair of white gloves on. I can only imagine this was to stop him being bitten by a furious pig. Dibs and Kevin came for Christmas with Kevin’s two children, Cameron and Minnie. For hours we played tennis on the courts at Taranna and golf on the Port Arthur Golf Course, surely one of the prettiest courses in Australia, straddling the high cliffs looking towards Tasman Isle.

  Rob’s Uncle Keith (the Rat of Tobruk and the one who fell for Carmel) also used to come for months at a time as he had now been widowed. He loved to stride through the orchard like a sergeant major pointing out how things could be regimented. And he was forever giving Poppy (his brother) advice on how to grow vegetables, which used to drive poor Poppy to despair. As an ex-sheep farmer he also had plenty of advice with regards to the stock. As he was now living in Sydney on his own, he found Windermere a haven to escape to. Although he was a great character, I must admit there was a collective sigh of relief when he would announce it was time to return to the ‘big smoke.’