by Graham Seal
‘Women of the West’
George Essex Evans was an English-born Australian balladist and writer whose work was very popular during his short life. He died in 1909 at the age of 46 after a varied life as a failed settler, journalist and public servant. The work he is best remembered for is ‘The Women of the West’. Although the poem speaks of the collective story, it sums up the experience of many women along the ‘frontiers of the Nation’ and ‘the camps of man’s unrest’. Many people at the time and since have found this poem well captures the often forgotten experiences of the wives, mothers, daughters and sisters of the ‘men who made Australia’, celebrated by Henry Lawson in his poem of that name, written a few years earlier.
They left the vine-wreathed cottage and the mansion on the hill,
The houses in the busy streets where life is never still,
The pleasures of the city, and the friends they cherished best:
For love they faced the wilderness—the Women of the West.
The roar, and rush, and fever of the city died away,
And the old-time joys and faces—they were gone for many a day;
In their place the lurching coach-wheel, or the creaking bullock chains,
O’er the everlasting sameness of the never-ending plains.
In the slab-built, zinc-roofed homestead of some lately-taken run,
In the tent beside the bankment of a railway just begun,
In the huts on new selections, in the camps of man’s unrest,
On the frontiers of the Nation, live the Women of the West.
The red sun robs their beauty, and, in weariness and pain,
The slow years steal the nameless grace that never comes again;
And there are hours men cannot soothe, and words men cannot say—
The nearest woman’s face may be a hundred miles away.
The wide Bush holds the secrets of their longings and desires,
When the white stars in reverence light their holy altar-fires,
And silence, like the touch of God, sinks deep into the breast—
Perchance He hears and understands the Women of the West.
For them no trumpet sounds the call, no poet plies his arts—
They only hear the beating of their gallant, loving hearts.
But they have sung with silent lives the song all songs above—
The holiness of sacrifice, the dignity of love.
Well have we held our fathers’ creed. No call has passed us by.
We faced and fought the wilderness, we sent our sons to die.
And we have hearts to do and dare, and yet, o’er all the rest,
The hearts that made the Nation were the Women of the West.
Cures!
Hard times seem to bring out the make-do spirit in Australians. Clearing land on the frontier, surviving in war, or coping with the hardships of the Great Depression were experiences that have inspired inventions of all kinds. As well as inventing new things, Australians have continually recycled and repurposed sugar bags, furniture, clothing, bedding and anything else deemed useful for an application other than its original purpose. This inventiveness and resilience is a feature of Australian identity and can be seen in some of our favourite character types, including the digger, the bushman and especially the battler.
Making do also involves looking after the health of families far from professional—or even unprofessional—medical assistance. Usually by necessity, medicine was often homemade as well.
Constipation, colds, hiccups, head lice and the panoply of family ailments were treated with medicines sometimes efficacious, sometimes calamitous! Favourites were molasses, perhaps a herbal poultice or brew of some kind, cod liver oil and castor oil, applied in liberal quantities to cure everything from constipation to skin irritations. Kerosene was good for cuts, as was tar if you could get it. Spider webs were also used to treat wounds. Piles could be treated with a preparation of copper sulphate known as ‘Bluestone’, which was added to a bucket of boiling water over which the luckless sufferer squatted.
Ginger was good for arthritis, while tennis balls sewn into pyjamas would reduce snoring. Honey helped hay fever and dandelion helped kidney stones. Colds might yield to garlic and rum or six drops of kero on a teaspoon of sugar. Sore throats were treated with iodine, painted on the throat with a chook feather, or by tea leaves wrapped in a tea towel and wrapped around the neck—especially good for tonsillitis.
In German tradition, potato water was good for frostbite. So was urinating on your hands in the unlikely event that you suffered that problem in most parts of Australia. Upset tums were said to surrender to flat lemonade, Coca-Cola, plain toast or, more enjoyably, port wine and brandy. Boils were susceptible to a dose of shotgun cartridge powder or a poultice of sulphur and molasses. And of course that old standby for insect bites and stings, a bag of Blue, once a common detergent.
The notion that chicken soup and hot lemon juice are good for colds is old and pervasive, and folk wisdom even provided helpful medical advice, such as ‘feed a cold, starve a fever’. These cures and nostrums could even extend into the realms of magic, with wearing red flannel scarves to supposedly protect against a sore throat and removing warts by rubbing them with meat, burying the meat and waiting for it to rot. The wart would allegedly decay in magical sympathy with the meat.
Around Condobolin the Kooris swear by the bush medicine known as ‘old man’s weed’. It will cure anything.
Aboriginal bush medicine could perform some remarkable cures, according to many bush observers. Retired prospector Jock Dingwall recalled seeing a fight between some Aboriginal men, somewhere at the back of Kuranda. The fight ended with one man speared in the stomach, one with a broken arm and a third with a battered skull. The wounds were treated with a mysterious white substance, not unlike chewing gum, found growing in a seam across the river. The broken head was coated in the white substance and bound up with vines. After returning the broken arm bones to their proper location, the jagged wounds were plastered with the bush medicine. The man with the spear wound had his stomach covered in swamp weed and the magical white salve. All three recovered in a month or so.
Jock’s experience of Aboriginal bush medicine was recorded in 1972, by which time he’d tried many times to locate the site of the fight and of the magical natural medicine. He reckoned it would be valuable, although he could never find it.
As well as making home remedies essential, the lack of doctors left a wide field for the purveyors of commercial cures and potions. These were advertised widely, often through verse. Even Henry Lawson, always in need of a bob, knocked out one of these for the cough medicine known as ‘Heenzo’. Henry called it ‘The Tragedy—A Dirge’.
Oh, I never felt so wretched, and things never looked so blue,
Since the days I gulped the physic that my Granny used to brew;
For a friend in whom I trusted, entering my room last night,
Stole a bottleful of Heenzo from the desk whereon I write.
I am certain sure he did it (though he never would let on),
For he had a cold all last week, and to-day his cough is gone:
Now I’m sick and sore and sorry, and I’m sad for friendship’s sake
(It was better than the cough-cure that our Granny used to make).
Oh, he might have pinched my whisky, and he might have pinched my beer;
Or all the fame or money that I make while writing here—
Oh, he might have shook the blankets and I’d not have made a row,
If he’d only left my Heenzo till the morning, anyhow.
So I’ve lost my faith in Mateship, which was all I had to lose
Since I lost my faith in Russia and myself and got the blues;
And so trust turns to suspicion, and so friendship turns to hate,
Even Kaiser Bill would never pinch his Heenzo from a mate.
A seasonal guide to weather and wives
Do-it-yourself weather forec
asting has long been a favourite activity, especially among farmers. Before the era of scientific weather forecasting, farmers and anyone else needing to know if it would rain or not used traditional methods to decide when to plant or when to take an umbrella. In practice, this meant knowing a great many seemingly trivial pieces of information about the relationship between plants, animals and the seasons.
In springtime, if you saw a rainbow round the moon it would rain in two days. Black cockatoos calling meant that rain was on the way. If ants built their nests high, a lot of rain was on the way. If the currawongs called to each other, a southerly change was coming. If the sky was yellow at sunset, there would be wind tomorrow. The other seasons had their traditional forecasts, all equally reliable.
SUMMER
If it rains on a full moon, it’s going to be a wet month.
Herringbone sky, neither too wet nor too dry.
When the kookaburras call, the rain will fall.
Spider webs in the grass in the morning mean it will not rain that day.
If there is heavy dew, it will not rain.
When flies are hanging around the doors and windows, it is a sign of rain.
Cows lying down are good indication of rain.
A ring of clouds around the moon means it will rain within a day.
When the ants build nests in summer, rain is one week away.
If flying ants are about, rain is only six hours away.
AUTUMN
If the moon is tilted sideways or upside down, it will rain.
Mackerel sky, mackerel sky—never long wet, never long dry.
If flies land on you and bite, it is going to rain.
Croaking frogs mean rain is coming.
If it rains on the new moon, it will either rain again a week later, or rain for a full week, or the month will be generally wet.
Moss dry, sunny sky, moss wet, rain we will get.
WINTER
A ring around the moon means rain in five days.
Rain before seven, clear by eleven.
Winter is not over until you see new buds on a pecan tree.
When the fog goes up the hill it takes the water from the mill.
When the fog comes down the hill, it brings the water to the mill.
Herringbone sky, won’t keep the earth 24 hours dry.
If anthills are high in July, winter will be snowy.
If ants build in winter, rain is one day away.
A lot of this information was handed down through the generations and a lot of it also turned up in almanacs and farmers’ guides. These were full of useful information about planting times, dates, seasons and all manner of things necessary for agriculture. They also carried other items that could just turn out to be useful for the man on the land. If he needed to determine the nature of a potential wife, he could turn to folklore for an indication of what married life might be like. All he needed to know was the birth month of his wife-to-be:
A January bride will be a prudent housewife and sweet of temper.
A February bride will be an affectionate wife and a loving mother.
A March bride will be a frivolous chattermag, given to quarrelling.
An April bride is inconsistent, not over wise, and only fairly good looking.
A May bride is fair of face, sweet tempered and contented.
A June bride is impetuous and open-handed.
A July bride is handsome but quick of temper.
An August bride is sweet-tempered and active.
A September bride is discreet and forthcoming, beloved of all.
An October bride is fair of face, affectionate but jealous.
A November bride is open-handed, kind-hearted, but inclined to be lawless.
A December bride is graceful in person, fond of novelty, fascinating, but a spendthrift.
Backyard brainwaves
The great urge to invent things has long been an Australian characteristic. The need to adapt to a strange and usually harsh environment inspired some earlier inventions such as the stump-jump plough. Long before then, Indigenous Australians had been creating new tools such as the boomerang and the woomera, or spear thrower. A characteristic of these devices was that they were often multipurpose. Not only was a boomerang efficient in bringing down game, but it could also be used as a musical instrument to beat out a rhythm. Similarly, the woomera could be used as a digging tool. Aboriginal people were also quick to adopt items they found useful from Europeans. The first known Europeans to set foot on Australia came with Willem Jansz in 1606. Because they were seeking exploitable riches, the Dutch brought various trade items with them, including glass and metal objects, and the Aborigines they met quickly saw the cutting value of a glass shard and the hardness of metal.
Famous agricultural inventions from the time of European settlement include the grain stripper devised by John Bull and John Ridley in 1843, followed by the stump-jump plough in 1876, which, as the name suggests, did exactly that, allowing for faster and more efficient clearing of land for agriculture. Another agricultural invention was the Sunshine header harvester, an improvement on an 1880s invention of the stripper harvester by Hugh McKay. While this was a useful device, it could not cope with crops laid flat by wind or rain. Headlie Taylor taught himself the essentials of mechanics and built his first header harvester in 1914, which solved the flattened crop problem and caused less damage to the harvested heads of wheat.
The need to preserve food was especially important in the bush, particularly where there was a little water and a lot of heat. In the 1890s, the goldfields town of Coolgardie saw Arthur McCormick, an amateur handyman, use his observation and wits to construct the first fridge, the Coolgardie Safe. He made a wooden box covered with a hessian bag draped with strips of flannel, put a metal tray on top, and filled it with water twice daily. The water flowed slowly down the strips, keeping the bag wet and the contents inside the ‘meat safe’, as these devices were often later known, nice and cool. (The famous bushman’s hessian water bag works on the same principle.) While this ingenious arrangement of evaporation largely solved the problem of keeping food cool, it didn’t stop the ants crawling into the food. A homemade remedy for this was to place a tin can full of kerosene at the bottom of each leg of the safe, which the ants would not cross.
McCormick was a keen gardener and noted amateur athlete who later became mayor of the goldfields town of Narrogin from 1927 to 1930. He does not seem to have made any money from his useful invention.
The sea has been another important focus of Australian inventiveness. The familiar reels used by surf lifesavers to control their safety lines were thought up by Lester Ormsby and first used in 1906 at Bondi. Speedo swimming costumes, ‘togs’, ‘bathers’ or ‘budgie-smugglers’ first appeared in the late 1920s.
At Gallipoli, Australian soldiers invented the periscope rifle, an ingenious device that allowed a sniper to fire at a target observed through a series of lenses mounted in a wooden box with complete safety, as the device could be fired by pulling on a string attached to the trigger and ending well below the top of the trench. It was especially handy for use at short range, the minimal distance between the Turkish and Anzac trenches being sometimes less than 50 metres. Credit for this idea is due to Lance Corporal William Beach, who came up with it in May 1915. A makeshift assembly line was set up on the beach to satisfy the demand for periscope rifles throughout the campaign.
Another innovation was the jam tin bomb. Not unique to Gallipoli, but a characteristically spontaneous element of the fighting, this simply involved filling empty jam tins with spent cartridge cases, bits of Turkish barbed wire and explosive. They were used like an old-fashioned grenade, with a fuse protruding from the top. This had to be lit before throwing, so timing was crucial: if the bomb were thrown too early, the enemy had time to pick it up and lob it back. If it was held too long there was a danger of it exploding in the thrower’s hand. A citation for Lance Corporal Leonard Keysor’s VC won at Lone Pine gives a graph
ic insight into the use of grenades in hand-to-hand combat:
On the morning of 7 August, as the Turks developed their counter-attacks, a great bombing duel developed at the positions held by the 1st and 2nd Battalions. As pressure mounted on the forward posts, the Colonel of the 2nd Battalion was killed and junior officers badly wounded.
It was now that Keysor’s bravery and skill was fully demonstrated. Using little cover, he flung dozens of bombs, returned some Turkish ones and smothered others with sandbags. At times, much to the amazement of his comrades, he was seen to catch incoming bombs in flight and throw them straight back. In all, he was an inspiration to the weary defenders.
Despite the efforts of Keysor and others they were forced gradually back and positions had to be given up. Rallying behind new barricades, Keysor continued his bomb throwing despite being twice wounded. Indeed, he kept up his efforts for over 50 hours until the 1st Battalion was relieved by the 7th on the afternoon of 8 August, so ending what was described as ‘one of the most spectacular individual feats of the war’.