The Badger Creek Regattas were a highlight of our summers. Together with Cascades we’d sail around from Taranna and anchor in Badger Creek not far from Nubeena. Here we’d take part in riotous activities, including dog races and rowing competitions, ending up at the shearing shed belonging to the Shoobridge family for a cookout and more games, followed by a concert put on by the talented Shoobridge clan.
As we didn’t have many restaurants to go to, a bit like New Guinea, we mostly entertained in our own homes or met on the beach for a barbeque. The Fox and Hounds at Port Arthur was a favourite haunt if we wanted to dine out, or otherwise it might be the RSL Club at Nubeena or the Fairway Lodge.
Poppy was very much part of life on the farm. He was now in his eighties and going blind from glaucoma, but still managed to hike down to the apple sheds each day to help make boxes, when he wasn’t working in his extensive vegetable garden. For even then he was as fit as a fiddle. Having been a good swimmer in his early days he never lost the build. He was more than proud when they produced a television show about us called Making it in Tasmania, and he was a star, striding down from his cottage on the hill, swinging his walking stick (we built him a small cedar cottage overlooking the dam), past the pickers’ quarters and into the sheds to make boxes. He loved to socialise at our parties, on many occasions outlasting us all, having another wine, followed by a port, which we eventually had to ban as he became far too argumentative, particularly if Uncle Keith was there.
Our apple sheds became the venue for many Peninsula occasions; from political and school fund-raisers to just a good old apple shed party. We’d light discarded steel barrels as barbeques, place lanterns around the rafters, and hire a bush band. With the tantalising smell of cooked sausages and onions filling the air we’d all sit on hay bales or take to the floor dancing to the old cassette player on the windowsill. This is also where we’d hold our end-of-apple-picking season bashes. Here I’d award the pickers with a certificate of accomplishment for their weeks of hard work in the orchard. These were usually hilarious nights, as most of the pickers were from all ends of the earth and there was no common language, apart from the appreciation of a cool drink and a bit of fun. I gave certificates for the ‘best drinker’, ‘best pool player’, ‘best singer in the orchard’, ‘laziest picker’ (Jean Paul, a tiny Frenchman sporting a wispy goatee beard, who spent more time lying dreaming within the rushes by the dam than apple picking, won this hands down), ‘quickest picker’, and ‘sexiest picker’ (Rob employed her without me seeing, mainly due to her never-ending brown legs.)
When I asked him what she looked like he lied through his teeth. ‘I didn’t really notice,’ he said. ‘But she seemed keen.’
Much to my chagrin she turned out to be very good. She was also great fun and with her long flowing blonde hair she kept her male colleagues as keen as mustard too, which Rob assured me was a bonus in itself.
For months on end the pickers would live in the long row of white painted fibro pickers’ quarters by the apple sheds. Some also came for the pruning and thinning, although Rob and I mostly carried out this laborious and boring task ourselves, with the help of the highly efficient Murray Boon, who had worked the orchard for years. We also had Michael, an ample fellow, who always wore a short-sleeved T-shirt, no matter how cold it was and whose trousers never seemed to quite adequately cover his extensive rear end, revealing a huge plumber’s crack. Then we had Nick with a mop of long blond hair. At one stage we had thirty people working shifts.
On a blistering hot summer’s afternoon I opened the door to find Michael, whom I’d last seen lugging the heavy irrigation system around the orchard. I had been perched on a log keeping an eye out for blackbirds with my shotgun posed to shoot. Blackbirds are the orchardist’s enemy. Much as we tried putting scarecrows and many other deterrents in the orchard, nothing seemed to work. So it was my job to try and shoot them, or at least scare them away. With my gun aimed, I diligently followed one bird down and pulled the trigger. But by that stage it was close to the ground and an unsuspecting, happily grazing prized ewe got in the way. Needless to say I was not popular when I had to admit I’d killed the poor thing.
‘I’ve been bitten by a bloody snake and reckon I’m for it,’ Michael told me with a painful grimace, holding his behind and looking ashen, as he grabbed hold of the door handle to steady himself.
I gasped in horror. First I’d killed a sheep and now this. Not a good afternoon. ‘My God! Did you see what sort it was?’ I asked him.
He shook his head. ‘I reckon the bugger was in the blackberry bushes. I probably disturbed it and he got me when I was leaning down to join one of the irrigation pipes.’
I had a vision of Michael’s ample bare behind right in the firing range of an enraged Tiger snake on the rampage. There was obviously no time to waste. The poor bloke was in dire straits.
I asked to look at the bite, but knowing it was in a delicate spot, I wasn’t sure if he’d be embarrassed to show me. Not to be deterred, Michael swivelled around and gave me a full view of his shiny derriere. I looked hard at the small red mark, but couldn’t see any puncture holes. However, not ever having been bitten by a snake, nor in fact ever having seen a bite on anyone else, I wasn’t too sure what I was looking for, even though I’d studied my first aid book at length. I knew you were supposed to put a tourniquet on. How on earth I could tie a bandage around Michael’s rear end I had no idea. A leg or an arm would have been a far more convenient spot to have been bitten. A large fat behind was beyond my knowledge of first aid. The doctor’s surgery was the only answer. And obviously there was no time to waste.
Before Michael had arrived at my door, I’d just put a dark hair rinse through my long hair in order to cover the rapidly appearing grey hairs I’d been getting of late, due I felt to the stress of being a farmer, orchardist, juice producer, wife, mother and real estate agent, for I’d just started with Henry Jones selling property on the Peninsula. Plus I was now a sheep murderer.
But seeing the emergency before me, I knew there was no way I’d have time to wash it out. Instead, I grabbed a scarf from the cupboard and rushed out the door. After manoeuvring Michael into the passenger seat of the Holden, I jumped behind the wheel and backed out from the fence, whereupon there was a bellowing BAA, BAA!
‘Bloody hell…it’s Milly,’ Michael exclaimed in alarm, as he looked out of the window.
My God! I’d forgotten I’d tied Milly the goat to the back-tray so she could use it as shelter from the sun. I leaped out, saw that she was okay, with only her pride in tatters, undid her chain, and tied her hurriedly to the fence. (If you left her free for a moment she was into everything including Poppy’s prize garden.) Hearing all the commotion going on, Gatsby came flying out from under the oleander bush and leaped into the back-tray. Soon all three of us were sitting outside the waiting room (Gatsby giving a ferocious growl at anyone who dared to look at him), at the Nubeena surgery waiting for the affable Dr Phillip Thomson. He took a quick look at the bite, got out a magnifying glass and then proceeded to laugh, which I thought was a bit off in the dire circumstances.
‘Did you actually see the snake?’ he asked Michael, whose face was still the colour of a large bucket of creamy milk. He appeared even more put out than I was with the doctor’s seemingly uncaring and unprofessional mirth.
‘No. But I bloody well felt it.’
Phillip picked up his stethoscope and after listening to Michael’s heart, he took a deep breath and winked at me. ‘I think it might have been a bull ant,’ he said to Michael, giving him a pat on the bum. ‘They can give a nasty bite.’
Immediately I saw the colour come back into Michael’s ashen cheeks. Maybe he wasn’t going to die after all. ‘Are you sure about that, mate?’
‘Well, it certainly wasn’t a snake and you seem fairly healthy… nothing that a good diet wouldn’t fix.’
Back outside the waiting room, I grabbed hold of Gatsby (I’d tied him to a downpipe), and soon we were all
in the truck heading home over the dirt road to Koonya.
‘You reckon he was right. A bull ant, eh?’ Michael said, winding down the window and shouting for Gatsby to stop barking. ‘Well, I’ll be damned.’
It goes without saying that I had very dark hair by the time we got home.
Yet to say I was relieved was an understatement, for I knew we’d lots of snakes at Windermere, mainly in the blackberry bushes – a bit of a hazard when trying to harvest the huge crop of berries surrounding the apple orchard. For hours Charlotte and Georgie would sit on the side of the road at Taranna selling punnets to tourists going past, or otherwise we’d supply some of the local shops.
When we’d finished pruning our orchard, Rob, Murray and I headed down to Cascades, as we’d now taken over their orchard for a year. Often Sue would join us, more so that she and I could have a good gossip. The steel ladders were heavy and not easy to manoeuvre and many a day I ended up with large blisters on my hands from the pruners and a bruised leg where I’d either fallen off my ladder, or given myself a nasty knock. We really had to push ourselves on wet winter days when the rain would run down our arms or get in our eyes.
‘We’re stark raving mad. Totally insane,’ I shouted to Rob across a Golden Delicious tree one freezing cold morning, getting off my ladder and throwing my pruners down on the grass in a wild rage, before heading inside for a warm drink to defrost my limbs.
But, of course, before too long I got the guilts, going back out again to continue the job.
There was a definite knack to pruning; one I didn’t always get. I lived in terror that Murray would discover I wasn’t doing it correctly. If I wasn’t, as was often the case, all hell would break loose (well in a nice sort of way). I was always glad when the school bus came and I could down tools to go and pick up the girls. Rob, being of hardier stock, stuck at it out through thick and thin, often not coming in till late at night. One day, whilst waiting for the school bus to arrive, I thumbed through a copy of TV Week magazine and was fascinated to see a photo of my friend Vera Toll and Tony Barber, famous for his TV show, Sale of the Century, staring out at me. I remember thinking crossly how much I’d rather be Vera, who was running a ski resort in Mount Bulla with her husband and doing ski weather forecasts with Tony Barber, instead of spending hours in a freezing cold orchard scaling thousands of apple trees.
Our juice business continued to thrive and we formed The Port Arthur Cider Company. We also registered the names Apple Maid and Orchard Fresh, still going to this day. To begin with we did our own deliveries around the Peninsula from a trailer towed on the back of the small Mini Moke we’d bought when we’d first arrived. Yet before too long we couldn’t keep up with production using our antiquated equipment. Hence Rob flew to Adelaide to try and find a more efficient press. There he found Bernard, a large rotund German (with half a dozen strands of died yellow hair lashed across his pasty head and who wore his shiny black trousers, kept up with black braces, high over his humpty dumpty stomach) to install the most modern of German presses available. It worked in a rack and cloth kind of way. We crushed the apples, placing the pomace into cheese cloths. Then we laid them between the racks until we formed a large stack, which hopefully wouldn’t fall over. The hydraulics would push them all together with the juice flowing out the bottom. From here it went into stainless steel vats and through a pasteurising machine before being piped into bottles. A cold and wet job. For two weeks Bernard lived with us, going up to Hobart with a small brown leather suitcase packed with his Freemason gear to attend meetings. He became enamoured with our friend, Marg Murray, who was down from Hobart helping us during the lambing season. Unfortunately for him, Marg found him about as attractive as one of our large cider barrels. Besides, we were pretty sure there was a Mrs Bernard back in Adelaide somewhere.
All the machinery in the apple sheds never seemed to work at the one time. Either the press was broken or the pasteuriser was out of steam, or the bottling machine was not bottling. On one occasion we waited for a new shipment of bottles to arrive that were supposed to take the boiling hot pasteurised juice. Just when we were panicking to get an order out on time, they all collapsed into a sticky mess when the first lot of juice was poured in. Another time I looked at the bottom of one bottle and found black floaty objects there. I looked at all the others. They too had black floaty objects. The pasteuriser had burned the apple and all of that batch had to be thrown out. At moments like this I’d sit on the floor crying at the injustice of it all, wondering why the hell we were doing this.
Rob would try valiantly to cheer me up, at the same time trying to keep cheerful himself. One day all the lids on the bottles leaked and the juice got mouldy. That batch also had to be ditched. Another time, as I was doing the rounds of the supermarkets promoting the juice, I noticed that the pear had coagulated in the bottles on the shelves of Coles in Burnie. (At that stage we were producing mixtures of apple and pear and apple and berries). All that had to be withdrawn. But, despite all this, the orders kept rolling in and we were flat out trying to keep up.
My job, apart from helping to make the juice, was to promote it. I did this in every supermarket throughout Tasmania, sometimes with the help of Don Calvert, who’d not long before returned from sailing in the Admiral’s Cup. David Boon, the solidly built, moustached, and brilliant Tasmanian cricketer, made a commercial for us. It was so bad it was good.
He had to say. “The thing I like doing best is opening for Australia and the thing I like doing second best is opening a bottle of Tasmania’s Pure Fresh Apple Maid Apple Juice…it’s a real BOON for your health.”
How corny is that!
When I asked David to put a bit more oomph into his voice, he said, fairly, ‘I’m a cricketer, Rosemary. Not a salesman.’
Mind you these days he makes many commercials and has improved somewhat, although he still sounds more like a cricketer than an actor. We did have a fun day making that commercial and another one, where we used a Hobart model, dressed in a blowsy Apple Maid costume, frolicking down the orchard carrying a pail of apple juice. The girls were so embarrassed that she was so obviously wearing a blonde wig and the ad was so twee that they refused to watch it. However it sold lots of juice.
Apart from appearing on television in the series, Making it in Tasmania, and You’ve got it made in Tasmania, we also appeared on the front page of the Mercury and The Age newspapers in Victoria when we sold our juice to the Jewish Community in Melbourne. The day the Rabbi and his followers (including Enzra, a huge boulder of a fellow who seemed to be the Rabbi’s bodyguard), arrived to make sure all was ‘kosher’ it was pouring rain, with huge rivers pouring off the gutters onto the ground. The whole entourage were all in black suits with large brimmed black hats and sporting long flowing black beards, which they spent a lot of time patting. The Rabbi, an elderly gentleman with a stooped back and wearing thick black spectacles and sporting a longer beard than the others, sat in a dilapidated armchair in the sheds reading his verses until he nodded off to sleep, producing a loud snore.
Much to my horror I saw that a dozen of our nosey piglets (we were breeding them to eat the apple pomace) had escaped from their pens and were trotting in, squealing in delight. Before I could get to them they rushed up to where the Rabbi was sitting and started sniffing around his feet. As you can imagine, for a Jewish Rabbi, pigs in the apple shed would have somewhat tainted the idea of the juice being produced in kosher fashion. Thank God the good man didn’t wake up before I managed to shoo the piglets out. Till two o’clock the next morning we produced bottles and bottles of kosher juice for the tables of the Victorian Jewish community. The next morning a truck came to collect it all and take it to Devonport for the ferry crossing to Melbourne.
They took forever to pay. In fact they didn’t. Not until I threatened to get them the same sort of publicity we’d got in the first place for being the only juice producer in Australia able to provide them with kosher juice.
The pigs were a necessary
sideline. The apple pomace had to be disposed of somehow, so mixed with dry feed this provided an ideal way to fatten pigs. In the end we had a herd of eleven, producing a heap of little piglets. And although I got the top price at the Bridgewater sales one week (where I’d taken a load up myself with the local stock carrier), they still caused a bit of friction between Rob and me. It was always ‘your damn pigs’ who’d broken through a fence or dug up another paddock.
One year we swapped a dressed pig for three dozen crayfish and fifty dozen oysters (not all coming in at once) with a local fisherman and continued to barter in this way with a few others. Rob tried to convince Phillip Thomson to go into ‘Piggy Bank’ rather than ‘Medi Bank’ seeing as we seemed to spend so much time sitting in his surgery with one injury after another. He politely refused.
Another day I had to hurriedly fly to Brisbane to dispose of five pallets of apple juice that had gone up the week before. There had been a stuff-up with our agent and the supermarket had over ordered, refusing point blank to take delivery. From five o’clock five mornings in a row I sat at the Brisbane markets selling apple juice to local businesses, eventually getting rid of the lot and arriving home with a most unbecoming permed hairdo, (the girls christened it ‘the busby’) which had seemed a good idea at the time when I’d a few hours to fill in before catching the plane home.
It was during this time that we bought a new yacht. Although our sailor trailer, Prauwin, was great for sailing around Norfolk Bay we were keen to go further afield. We’d done a few trips away with Sue and Don and all the children on their boat, Cascades, down the D’Entrecasteaux Channel and up the East Coast. Now we were keen to have our own boat to go exploring in. After much searching we found a 38-foot Huon and King Billy pine sloop in an old shed at the bottom of the noted boat builder Tom Pilkington’s house in Marine Terrace in Battery Point. She wasn’t quite finished, but Tom was getting on in years and was keen to off-load her. For weeks we worked on her at Purdon’s slipway in Battery Point, finishing her off, installing a new engine, decorating her with plush cushions and curtains and varnishing her woodwork. Soon she had a name: Charlotte Rose, and was bobbing up and down on a mooring in the picturesque tree-lined bay at Taranna beside Don and Sue’s Cascades.
Can My Pony Come Too? Page 29