70's, 80's, 90's

Originally posted by RedCedar: ↑

This is an old essay I wrote years ago.

My earliest memory on arrival in tropical Australia was of a row of mandarin trees drooping under the weight of hundreds of multi-coloured fruit. Displaying a mixture of red, orange, yellow, and green,the stunning fruits were so prolific, they caused the branches to weep while moist green leaves glistened in the sunlight.

For children, the place was a paradise where we threwrocks at mangoes, hoping to knock down some half-ripe fruit, foraged for wild guavas, stole watermelons and chewed the sweet fibrous sugar cane growing everywhere. We ate bananas, paw paws and oranges and dug for up sweet potato tubers found below a dense mat of foliage.

We fished in nearby creeks that became swollen torrents in the wet season, bathed and splashed about when dark clouds discharged their heavy cargo of warm, misty rain.

We ate molasses placed in cattle troughs while keeping one eye on large, dangerous looking bulls. Nearby swamps were explored, running across a carpet of floating vegetation in order to take short cuts over water while taking in the sights and sounds of thousands of colourful finches.

There was no concern for highly poisonous snakes orthe creeping, crawling life forms encountered day and night. Mosquitoes did notbother us, nor did the humidity of the wet season.

We played games with cane toads, hunted with homemade bows, shanghai and cracker guns, shooting at anything that moved. I remember the shock of actually hitting a kingfisher and watching this iridescent bird fall dead from a power pole.

It was a carefree life in our small village, except for one problem from which there was no escape. The only school was run by catholic nuns and the kids were terrorized by Mother Carla who was usually in rage.

Maybe she went mad in the tropical heat, or maybe she was just an angry person. As a nine year old, I was not a model student and somehow couldn’t get inspired by the Immaculate Conception, the Holy Trinity nor the Assumption of Christ.

One day I ran away from school to spend time watching the men nearby who were cutting and loading cane onto trucks. The field was burnt a day or two earlier and it was an engrossing sight as so many animals were killed in the fire; rats, snakes, toads, and bandicoots as well as strange forms covered in black ash.

Fascinated by charred and distended bodies scattered among blackened clods, I forgot that returning to school the following day meant having to deal with Mother Carla, a solidly-built woman who kept her heavy ruler near at hand.

The next day she gave me a good beating, breaking her heavy ruler on my buttocks, and adding insult to injury, I suffered the indignity of being paraded around the streets by my mother who pulled my pants down to show everyone the bruises.

There was a small hotel in our township where older boys checked empty bottles disposed of at the rear of the building for any remaining drops of alcoholic drink. We heard loud chatter and the antics of men who drank, sang, and got noisier as the evening passed.

Sometimes their voices were accompanied by angry outbursts and the hard sound of fists hitting human flesh. Later a short period of quiet ensured after which the chatting and singing returned.

In time, I came to understand the lives of those single men who had future wives and loved ones a long way from there, hopeful men who had just started their journeys in a new world, eventually heading families in the larger towns and cities to become part of the fabric of a vibrant,growing Australia.

While playing with our gang near a handball court built by Spanish migrants, I found a twenty pound. Everyone was excited as we rushed to the nearby corner shop to change the note into smaller denominations so we could share the windfall and as the finder I held the notes and with each reason why group members needed some money, handed them the amount they needed.

One needed to buy the materials for a bird cage,repairs to a bike, a new schoolbag, and so on. Stories of desperate need flowed freely until I had the least amount of money and felt nonplussed at being so easily fleeced.

On a visit some thirty years later, every part of our forest playground and nearby swamps had disappeared, sugar cane being the only vegetation outside the village. Farmers used machines to harvest the cane and no longer needing to be burnt, it was planted even closer to dwellings.

A small hub made busy by the presence of itinerant cane cutters stood eerily silent. Businesses that once flourished, the bakery,corner store and even the school had become victims of progress and the motorcar taking residents to Ingham for their needs.

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This follows on from Far Nth Qld.

Our family moved from the north after mechanization removed the need for cane cutters and in the early sixties we arrived at the lower reaches of the Murray-Darling basin in South Australia. Here we found a man-made ribbon of lush, green vegetation where irrigated orchards contrasted strongly with the semi-desert surroundings that were dominated by tough, gnarled Mallee gums.

Soon after arrival new impressions were overwhelmed the senses as deciduous trees and vines shed yellow-bronze leaves in autumn to later bloom in early spring. Almonds were the first to bloom and on sunny winter days they evoked a mixture of joy and awe at the ability of these plants to defy freezing cold nights that could kill citrus trees.

Later in spring and summer flocks of parrots, galahs, and cockatoos arrived to forage in nearby plantations. While feeding, these intelligent birds socialized, indifferent to my approaches until I neared,causing them to surge away in a swirling kaleidoscope of colour, sound and movement. Needless to say the owner never harvested much of a crop as those powerful parrots made short work of the crop, including the difficult to crack, hard-shelled varieties.

With the river so near, it was no problem reaching our spots where we bathed and fished during summer, and in order to demonstrate our courage, we swam across the river on quite a few occasions. Depending on the speed of the currents, we aimed upstream in reach our landing spot, blissfully unaware of a river capable of sucking down strong swimmers into whirlpools, not to be found for several days until their bloated body rose to the surface.Swimming across the Murray is something few residents would dream of doing nowadays.

Building something that floated was a common preoccupation as youths. Tin canoes were hastily constructed using an iron roofing sheet, flattened out and nailed onto pieces of wood for a bow and stern. Gaps were sealed with bitumen scraped from the road on hot days,creating an unstable and difficult to navigate canoe.
After experimenting with rafts and canoes, I wondered about bark canoes cut from large river red gums by aboriginals as indicated by scars found on the old trees. How did those crafts actually manage to float!

I came to appreciate the value of River red gums, the true characters found along the Murray’s banks and floodplains. They provided food and habitat for a wide range of birds, insects, and mammals within their expansive canopies while aquatic creatures found niches around submerged branches and roots.

Those giants allowed settlers to build homes and animal enclosures, fence the land, fuel the kitchen, and until roads were built, powered steamers carrying people and cargo along the Murray.

We made tracks through thick stands of bulrushes along riverbanks, arriving at creeks where we fished for yabbies using a piece of string, some meat, and a wire scoop for lifting these menacing looking crustaceans from the water.

As teenagers spotlighting for rabbits and foxes was commonplace, but in time I developed an aversion to rabbit flesh, maybe the result of the cruelty inflicted on the animals. Not appreciating the violence of spring-jaw traps, se tin the evening and checked the following morning, my trapping inflicted much suffering on those pests, still animals capable of feeling pain. Often only half a rabbit remained as feral cats and foxes ate the snared creature.

Rabbits caught in a trap had their leg mangled and if a young rabbit was caught, its whole body would be crushed. This occurred for several years until my mid-teens when I was able to use my brother’s rifle fitted with a telescopic lens.

Our football team aptly had the colours green and gold─ a reflection of the orchards and vineyards which stood out against a backdrop of yellow Mallee wheat crops, but the strongest image that remains is of a sea of golden cut apricots placed on drying trays in the sun. Within a couple of days in our hot dry summer golden fruits dried to become a deep orange red shade.