More about Cowaramup Life

Sleeper Cutters

When clearing the land sleeper cutters used to come through and would select fairly straight jarrah trees to fell and cut into sleepers. They used to get one shilling for each sleeper, provided that it was top quality. The sleepers were collected by the Government and stored at each railway siding ready for shipping to Europe or South Africa. A number of timber jetties had been built for sailing ships on this trade, i.e. at Flinders Bay, Hamelin Bay and Busselton. The farmers got a fee per sleeper apart from assisting in clearing their land. These sleeper cutters lived in tents and kept their axes, saws and adzes razor sharp for easier work. They could shave with a broad axe. This lead to competitions for log choppers at the local shows. They had to cut through a log either horizontally or vertically in the quickest time. It just makes one tired to even think about it these days!

Busselton Jetty

At Busselton was the mile long timber jetty with a railway to take sleepers out to the ships. This jetty was and still is very popular for people to walk out and fish from it. Every so often a fire burns a section away and it has to be replaced. The wooden piles get attacked by marine borers such as toredo and limnoria. Copper sheeting and charing is sometimes used to reduce the rate of deterioration. Steel piles will last longer but this option was not available originally.

Today a little tourist train runs along the jetty.  John is seen here chatting to the driver.

Homestead Buildings

Around the house were various buildings – cowshed, chicken shelter, pigsties, dairy, machinery shed and hayshed. Foxes would steal chicken at night so they had to be protected by a high fence. The attached sketch shows roughly where these buildings were but not a trace of them is left. This was perhaps one of the better laid out farms in the area. The buildings were mostly built of timber and corrugated galvanised iron while the pigsties and cowsheds had split jarrah walls covered with  whitewashed hessian bags to keep the weather out.

Garden

My mother used to keep a very good garden for fruit, vegetables and flowers such as rambling roses, holyhocs, larkspurs, gladioli, lupins, stocks, etc. There is a photo of the front of this garden. There were wattle trees but the indigenous black wattles grew too big.

Ann’s Accidents

While on the farm my sister managed to break a leg when a strainer post fell off a cart.

She was run over by one of the rare cars in Cowaramup coming up a steep slope without much visibility. Miraculously she was not injured. The car was driven by a Main Roads Engineer who was eternally grateful that she was not injured.

Group Settlement Scheme Generally

This was run by the State Agricultural Bank, later the Rural and Industries Bank and now Bankwest. The bank would lend farmers money to clear the land, build all the necessary sheds and fencing, acquire plant and stock etc. to get going. They also paid a wage of 50 shillings a week while this was going on.

The intent was that the farmers would finally repay all the money lent to them and they would receive freehold title. This happened very rarely because the holdings of 160 acres proved to be too small and the fertility of the soil was poor before the discovery of trace elements some 30 years later. The Bank was always trying to get its money back and sent inspectors out to see what was going on because many farmers were getting an income that could not be readily policed. The basic income from sales of cream was quite apparent but that from pigs, chicken, potatoes, onions etc.. was harder to establish.

The Bank even tried to cut off the farmers’ income at the butter factories but they would not cooperate. When the inspector (John Vickery) came the children would be sent away, Dad would have gone missing, and Mother got him a cup of tea.

Even though it was the heart of the depression, we were never hungry or cold and really enjoyed the life as kids. In the end however it was not really viable and we were never going to get that freehold title, so the family packed up, sold its stock and walked off as most of the other farmers nearby had done before. There was also the question of us going to a proper school fairly soon.

Food and Meals

We naturally have fond memories of the various foods my mother used to provide.

Breakfast in the winter usually was rolled oats and in the summer cereal such as “weeties”. We sometimes had a cooked breakfast such as scrambled eggs, bacon or potatoes from the night before now called “hash browns”. Toast was available cooked on top of the cast iron stove or on coals with the oven doors open.

For lunch we were often out in the fields so we had sandwiches, cheese and fruit.

Also we would have salad with lettuce and lots of olive oil and salt. This was instead of cod liver oil which my mother was very keen on to keep away chest infections? To this day I enjoy lettuce, olive oil and salt.

For our evening meal we would have a roast once a week at least and sometimes chicken, rabbit, lamb or pork. We often had Irish stew and occasionally dumplings. Fish was good when we could get it. We did not have any fridge so we kept things cool in a Coolgardie Safe which was a container with water in the top and flannels over the side so water could evaporate and keep the inside cool. Butter we kept in a semiporous container for the same reason. Incidentally we kids made our butter using mature cream which we beat for several minutes with a paddle until it thickened and turned into butter. We could make cottage cheese from the same type of cream using a muslin bag.

I don’t remember having pasta, pizza, Indian or Chinese food. We always had plenty of vegetables and fruit from our garden including potatoes, onions, cabbage, cauliflower, beans, peas, carrots, apples, plums, oranges and apricots in season. Rice was popular but had to be purchased, also sago, tapioca and vermicelli.

I always liked sweets better than the main courses. My favourites were apple pie, blackberry and apple pie, bread and butter pudding, rhubarb and rice pudding and rolly polly pudding. We used to make jam and marmalade. Honey was sometimes got from a wild hive with some difficulty but mostly from a large drum in the local shop using a treacle valve.

 

Sometimes we could catch jilgies in the creek in winter time, which we would boil up in a tin. We could catch parrots using an upturned box propped up on a stick at one end. When the parrots were inside busily eating wheat, you could pull the prop out. However the parrots were far too tough to eat so parrot pie was a myth for us. We never ate kangaroos but some people did.

We never had sheep because they used to suffer with footrot in the wet climate at that time. Occasionally we would have a few goats, ducks, geese and turkeys but some of our neighbours were keener on them than we were. We used to make ginger beer and hop beer every so often. You needed a living yeast plant in those days and now and again a bottle would explode. We had plenty of eggs for boiling, scrambling or poaching. Dad used to draw pictures on the eggshells on a Sunday.

Pets

I have mentioned the kangaroo and the magpie earlier. The magpie used to steal bright things like coins and jewellery and take them up into the nearest tree. However when he started to sing about his success, he would drop his loot and we could often find it. Some people could teach a magpie to talk but we never did that.

We also had a pet owl  (mopoke) for a bit. He liked worms and mice but he was asleep during the day. We also had a pet possum but there was the same problem. You could catch a possum with a stick about 4 feet long laid against a tree with a wire snare.

Aboriginals

Regarding indigenous Aboriginal people, we never saw any on any of the farms near us.

We never saw them in Cowaramup or Margaret River. Maybe they retreated to virgin bushlands as the clearing took place. Originally they must have been about in numbers because the early surveyors used a lot of Aboriginal names. Cowaramup was not one of them. This relates to a type of parrot.

Blacksmith

There was always a blacksmith in the town. He would make horseshoes and rims for cartwheels among other things. As kids we used to like watching his forge and him hammering out bits of metal on his anvil and quenching things that had to be hardened.

Many farmers had a small forge and bellows for jobs around the farm.

Christmas Time

We had to leave a hole in the canvas awnings to the front veranda so Santa Claus could get in and try not to wake up too early. We were also allowed a drink of port and lemon on Christmas Day. We always had a Christmas Tree. Sometimes we would invite someone who had nowhere to go for Christmas dinner.

Other Activities

We would enter produce such as clover, oats and maize in the local Agricultural Show and sometimes we won. As kids we used to put in examples of hand writing and drawing often beating the other kids from the local school. There were competitions for our father such as “stepping the chain” i.e. pacing out  and marking what you believed to be one chain (100 links, or 66 feet or 22 yards). The nearest to the right distance would win.

Then there was ploughing the straightest single furrow with a horse and single share plough. There was also “tossing the sheaf” of hay with a pitchfork over a bar which would be raised progressively. There were log chops for those good with an axe.

We used to make cricket balls from the very hard root of the blackboy trees – now grass trees. There were lots of zamia palms which were poisonous to cattle so we used to kill them by spiking with a crowbar and putting half a jam tin full of kerosene in the hole.

Our two draught horses were Judy and Bess. We used to ride them bareback because we had no saddles. We would take them as far from the haystack as we could and let them race back for a feed. Sometimes they were not easy to catch in the morning but they enjoyed working.

What Happened to the Farm?

It was many years before I visited the Cowaramup area again but our old farm was amalgamated with the block immediately to the west and run by a family called Dempster (Bill).  Our house was removed and combined with the house next door.

With the discovery about adding trace elements to the soil, many of these farms became more viable.  Originally the more gravely soils on the hilltops were not worth cropping but with trace elements and deep ploughing you could crop almost 100% of our old farm and the ones around it. Nevertheless the return from dairy farming (even with mechanised milking) was not that good as the twentieth century progressed. There was a move to beef cattle which was not as labour intensive. Then there was a big move to planting and harvesting bluegums to make woodchips for export and papermaking. Everyone wanted to get on that bandwagon and our old farm was planted wall to wall with bluegums. They seemed to grow fairly well, but the only ones making any money from the scheme were the accountants and stockbrokers.

Next thing all the bluegums were ripped out before they had reached the first harvest and the whole area planted in vines for winemaking. This seems to be going O.K. but that industry has also been having its problems. So that is what you now see on Miamup Road - vines as far as the eye can see.  Originally we used to grow a few table grapes on the old property and were possibly the first ones to do so in the area, long before the Cullens, Cullities and John Gladstone. 

Current map of the area.
 The green shaded part shows a modern subdivision.  Our property is number 1688. coloured yellow.  It adjoins Miamup Road to the north.  It is now planted with vines, which we think supply grapes to Madfish Winery.