A Fortunate Life Read online

  When Eric came back a man came with him. The man told us that he had a cow and some fowls, and offered us milk and eggs, and said his wife would be glad to give us any bread we wanted. He helped Eric to cut poles out of the bushes and scrub. About an hour later we had somewhere to sleep and have our meals in.

  The next day Eric cut more poles and we all carried and dragged them in and built another bush mia-mia. Grandma said the ground that we had slept on in our camp was very damp, so before we built the new mia-mia we had to carry dry twigs and leaves and small sticks to build a fire on the ground to dry it out. When the fire burnt out we scraped all the hot ash and coals off, then built the mia-mia. We used this one to sleep in and had our meals in the other one. After about three days we got used to living like this.

  The people living around where we camped were very good to us. I am sure that none of us will ever forget those wonderful people. They kept us supplied with fresh meat and eggs, bread, vegetables, milk and many other things. They would not hear of any kind of payment. Grandma offered to let the boys work to pay for the goods.

  Each day Eric walked into the Post Office in Northam, hoping for a letter from our mother or Aunt Alice. We had to wait nearly three weeks before a letter came. Aunt Alice wrote, and in the envelope was a money order for the Northam Post Office sufficient to pay our fares to Kalgoorlie. Our mother didn’t write.

  Eric arrived back with the letter near midday; Grandma explained what was in it and said we would catch the train that night. So we packed our few things, returned all the things that the people had lent us, and the man that first helped us make camp came and drove us to Northam Railway Station. Grandma thanked him and all the other good people for their kindness.

  Just before midday we arrived at Kalgoorlie and Aunt Alice was there to meet us. We had been unable to see what the country was like as we had travelled during darkness for most of the way and slept during daylight. Aunt Alice had her two older daughters with her. Grandma, Aunt Alice and Myra left the two girl cousins to help the rest of us take the luggage out to Aunt Alice’s place. Grandma and Aunt Alice went to see our mother. We found out later that Mother wouldn’t have us at her place but was glad to keep our sister Myra. Grandma said our mother was going to have another baby.

  3

  ON THE GOLDFIELDS

  When we arrived at Aunt Alice’s place we were dog-tired and hungry. Aunt’s place, which was only a hut, was built near a big hill. It consisted of bush poles for uprights with hessian pulled tight around the poles making an enclosed space of about thirty-six feet by twelve feet, sub-divided into three big rooms. The outside walls were whitewashed with a solution of chalky clay mixed with water which stiffened the hessian and made the inside private. The roof was bush timber and galvanised iron. The three rooms of the hut were used as bedrooms. A few feet away from the hut was another structure, the kitchen, and this had a fireplace at one end and a large table with a long stool along one wall. The kitchen was fourteen feet by sixteen feet. We were to have all our meals in this room.

  We had been there about an hour when Aunt Alice and Grandma arrived. They had left Myra with Mother. We were told that our older brothers, Joseph and Vernon, were no longer living with Mother. Joseph had left Kalgoorlie to work with a surveyor and Vernon had joined the Australian navy.

  Grandma said that she had had a long talk with Mother about our situation and that Mother was very ill and would see us when she was well enough. So until then we were to make Aunt Alice’s place our home. The house and furniture showed that Aunt Alice didn’t enjoy a surplus of money. There were many families living in similar circumstances.

  The surface gold was just about prospected out, and the men had to find other means of employment to keep their families. Aunt Alice’s husband, Archie, was away chopping wood for the mines at Boulder, and for the many condensers that were condensing the water for all the Goldfields people. In those days there was no fresh water, and it became too costly to have water carted. There was plenty of salt water underground so this was pumped up from wells and bores and converted to drinking water by the condensers. There was a large condenser about a mile from Aunt’s place and the water obtained from there had to be carried home in buckets. It cost two shillings a gallon if you carted it yourself, or two shillings and sixpence a gallon if you had it delivered. The condenser people wouldn’t deliver less than fifty gallons at a time and as Aunt Alice couldn’t afford to buy that much at one time we had to go and get it.

  Uncle Archie used to come home every two or three weeks, and we had been there for about a week when he came home. That was the first time I had seen him. He would come home on Saturday and go away again on Sunday afternoon. When he went away this time he took Eric and Roy with him. Eric was nearly fourteen years old and Roy was nearly eleven. Uncle said Eric could help with the wood stacking and Roy would be useful around the camp boiling the billy, washing-up the dishes and doing many other little jobs. So my brothers could not go to school.

  Aunt’s three older girls – Alice, Daisy and Mary – went to school in Kalgoorlie and they had to walk nearly eight miles each school day.

  We lived there with Aunt Alice until 1902. Uncle and my brothers came home for a weekend once a month and two Christ-mases came and went.

  We used to have a lot of fun when a heavy shower of rain came and made the ground very wet. We would all go out into the diggings looking for gold that had had the earth washed off it, and between us we found quite a few pieces. It was worth twenty shillings an ounce.

  Aunt Alice found another way to make a few shillings – she took in washing and ironing. She made us kids – May, Bill and myself (she now had another child, Jim, but he was still a baby) – go to the camps and get the washing, and after it was washed and ironed, take it back to the owners and collect the money.

  Also, Grandma and Aunt Alice used to take all us kids, who were too young to walk the long distance to school, to hunt miles around for places where prospectors had camped. The prospectors lived on tinned foods. When the tins were emptied they were just thrown into heaps near the camps.

  Aunt and Grandma gathered the tins, then we would gather bushes, scrub and sticks, spread them onto the ground, and pile the tins on top. A pile would be left for a few days until the bushes and scrub, which were mostly green, dried enough to burn. Then we would come back and set it alight. The heat from the fire would melt the solder that was in the tins, and it would fall down into the ashes and onto the ground. Then, when the fire finished burning and cooled off we used to sieve the ashes and the ground under the ashes, to get the solder that had melted into small lumps. We put these into a bag and took them home. When we had enough Aunt Alice would melt them in an iron pot. Then she would wet a small piece of level ground, make impressions in the damp soil to the size of a stick of solder, and pour the melted solder into them. When the solder cooled she used to wash it and take it into Kalgoorlie where she got five shillings a pound for it. A fairly large heap of tins would be worth about thirty shillings. All this used to help, and, as Aunt Alice said, it gave us something to do.

  In August 1901, just before my seventh birthday, Uncle came home one weekend and didn’t go back on the Sunday afternoon. He sent my two brothers back, to carry on with the wood-chopping as usual, and then, on Monday, dressed himself up in his best suit. I heard him tell Grandma that he was going to Perth to see about the land the State Government was offering to encourage people to settle as farmers.

  Uncle was away for over two weeks and when he returned he had selected one thousand acres of first class land under the Government’s conditional purchase scheme, and a homestead block for himself, Aunt Alice and Grandma. The Government was giving a homestead block to any approved person over the age of twenty-one for twenty shillings, and that land, one hundred and sixty acres, became the freehold property of the person concerned. The conditional purchase land could be obtained at twenty shillings per acre for the first class land, and second class and other
land was priced according to its classification. Some of the poor land could be purchased for as low as two shillings and sixpence per acre.

  Uncle’s one thousand acres were classified first class. The conditions of purchase were that the settler paid nothing for the first five years, then paid so much a half year for the next twenty years to complete the purchase. The Government wouldn’t sell land straight out as a cash sale.

  Uncle went out to my brothers and brought them and all the tools home. He had got a new job working as a plate-layer on the railway the Government was building from Kalgoorlie to another gold find. Uncle had worked on a railway construction job in South Australia before coming to Western Australia. Eric got a job on the same gang as Uncle. His job was one of messenger, and bringing tools to the men and so on – they called him a ‘nipper’. Uncle’s wages were good on this new job and so were Eric’s. Roy got a job in Kalgoorlie with a grocer, helping to deliver groceries and doing odd jobs around the shop. This was the first job that Roy would be earning wages at, as he had never been paid by Uncle Archie.

  The new jobs meant we were all home together at night, and we had Christmas 1901 together. After Christmas, Uncle and Eric had to camp out, as their work was getting too far away to travel to and from each day. So Uncle arranged for Aunt Alice and Grandma to take all the kids and leave Kalgoorlie and go to York. Uncle’s land was twenty-six miles east of a town named Narrogin (a native name) and York was about one hundred miles north from Narrogin.

  So we packed all our goods and chattels. A man with a horse and four-wheeled trolley came and took them to the Kalgoorlie Railway Station. My brother Roy stayed with the grocer and was paid six shillings a week and keep. Our uncle got his groceries from this store, and Roy’s wages helped to pay for them.

  4

  A LONG WALK

  We left Kalgoorlie in February, late in the evening, and arrived at York the afternoon of the next day. We kids had to wait at the railway station while Aunt and Grandma found a place for us to stay. We waited for about two hours before they came back with a carrier. He had two horses hitched to a four-wheeled lorry. We all helped the man to pack our household goods and luggage onto the lorry (the heavy beds, and so forth, had come on a special train), then we all piled on and away we went.

  Aunt had rented an old mud house about four miles out of York on the banks of the Avon River. This was too far out for us young ones to go to school. I was then seven years old and had had no schooling, but eight miles was a little too far, so Grandma said.

  This old mud house, which cost five shillings a week to rent, was all Aunt could afford. It had one big living-room with a large fireplace, and three bedrooms. I’ll never forget the first night we spent there. There hadn’t been anyone living there for some years. We got settled for the night, beds fixed and made, and a nice fire going in the big fireplace. Aunt Alice got out the lamps, filled them with kerosene and lit them, and we all seemed pleased although very tired.

  Then Aunt and Grandma fixed a meal, mostly bread and jam. We were all sitting at the table, the women and girls were talking about the trip, when suddenly there was a terrible scream. Two of the girls jumped onto the table pointing to the floor where there was a big black snake, over six feet long, with its head raised about eight inches from the ground. The screams of the girls seemed to make the snake stop. He was staring at us. Grandma said, ‘Don’t move! Stay still!’ She took off her apron and put it on the floor a few feet away from the snake, then walked backwards towards the door, then through the door and all the time she kept saying, ‘Don’t move. Leave it to me.’ Then she appeared again through the door with a long-handled shovel in her hands. She walked across the floor as if she was going to pass the snake, then suddenly turned quickly, and hit the snake with the blade of the shovel cutting its head off. Oh! what a relief that was to us all.

  Just before this happened we were all sleepy and tired, but I don’t think any of us had any sleep that night because of the snake, and a possum that kept running over the roof. Two days later Aunt killed another snake, a much smaller one, at the back of the house. The floor of this old house was dirt, and there were little holes going under the walls to the outside, but after the killing of the first snake we blocked up all the holes we could find. Grandma said that the snakes would be looking for somewhere to stay for the winter, as it was nearly the end of February. It wasn’t until near the end of April that the rains came and the snakes were forgotten.

  We kids were very happy living there. It was so different to Kalgoorlie. There was plenty of water and wood; we only had to fetch the wood out of the bush. The nearest neighbour was a mile away. We lived there until the end of August, and one day, just after my eighth birthday, Uncle and my brothers came. They had finished the railway work, and Uncle had come to make arrangements to go onto his land and start farming.

  The McCalls were one of the first families to settle in the wheat-belt of Western Australia under the Government land settlement schemes.

  We kids thought we would be going by train to Narrogin, but we got a surprise when Uncle said he didn’t have enough money to pay all our fares because he would have to buy a horse and cart and harness. We would need these to be able to get our stores from time to time, as we would be twenty-six miles away from the nearest town of Narrogin.

  So Uncle bought the horse and cart and we set off by road. Uncle said we could take our time; the land was about one hundred and forty miles by road from York, so we could do it in short stages. There would be plenty of water along the road, and at night we could pitch tents to sleep in. So about a week later, having purchased the horse, cart and harness, early one morning in the first week of September 1902, we packed all our belongings onto the cart and left the old mud house for Uncle’s ‘dream land’.

  Uncle Archie was born on a farm in South Australia, and when he was old enough to work and understand, his father, who had skills as a veterinary surgeon, taught him all about animals. Now Uncle had his chance to fulfil the ambition of his life, and, as he would be one of the first settlers in the great wheat-belt, with the knowledge of animals he could be of great help to other settlers. When Uncle’s father died, the farm in South Australia hadn’t been big enough for the four sons, who had all married, so Uncle went to Victoria just after he and Aunt Alice married. He worked the mines at Bendigo, and on the building of some of Victoria’s railways, and also on many farms. Now Uncle was returning to the land and he and the women were very excited about the venture.

  Uncle didn’t have much money but he said there were many ways of making some until we got the farm going. He explained that there were thousands of possums in the bush up where we were heading, and that their skins were worth a shilling each. He said he had bought the necessary string and fine wire to make the snares to catch them. Also, he told us, there were hundreds of kangaroos and their meat was good to eat. He intended to buy a kangaroo dog so that we would be okay for meat. All these possibilities we discussed at meal times before we left, and all the way to the wonderful land.

  The trip was hard. Only one person was allowed to ride up on the cart and that was the driver. Uncle, Aunt and Grandma did all the driving while the rest of us walked. We averaged about ten miles a day while travelling, but there were about five days when it rained and we camped on those days. The trip took us nearly three weeks, but we made it. We kids went without boots on the trip – it was Grandma’s idea, as we couldn’t afford to buy new ones when the ones we had were worn out.

  5

  UNCLE’S SETTLEMENT

  The night before we expected to arrive at Uncle’s land, Uncle, Aunt, Grandma and Eric got to making possum snares under Uncle’s directions. They made about two hundred between them. Uncle said we were camped at a place called Gillimanning – an Aboriginal name – but no one lived near, and his land was about eight miles away. We had spent the rest of the money we had in the last town, a place called Pingelly, by purchasing stores such as flour, baking powder, golden syr
up and jam. We had followed the road along the railway line until we reached Pingelly, then we had gone in an easterly direction along an old bush track.

  We were all up early the next morning, very excited. We were soon to see this wonderful land that Uncle Archie spoke about so much. We had our breakfast and were soon on our way. About two hours later we arrived, and Uncle took a map out of his pocket and checked the survey pegs. He stood up and said, ‘That’s it, that’s my land,’ pointing to a big belt of tall trees and undergrowth, and I thought, ‘A chicken would find it hard to get through.’

  Aunt Alice, Uncle and Grandma left us sitting under a nice shady tree while they walked over Uncle’s land to find a suitable place to camp. About an hour later they came back, explaining that they had found the spot where they would camp and later hoped to build a house. We moved to the place they had picked out and Uncle and my brothers set about putting up the tents. They also made a fireplace for the women to do the cooking. Towards evening Uncle and my brothers set some snares for possum. We were all very tired and went to bed early that night. We didn’t expect anything to trouble us, as Uncle said that the blacks around this place were friendly.

  When everyone had turned in and everything seemed quiet, there was a terrible frightening howl; long, sharp and very clear. Then a few minutes later another one further away, and another one closer. These howls frightened the wits out of me. In another tent Grandma and Aunt’s three older daughters were in bed, and the girls all ran out to Uncle and started to cry. The howling made by the dingoes went on all night, and when a howl sounded close to our camp I could feel a shiver go up my spine.