AN ABUNDANCE OF ZUCCHINIS 1

Every year when I was a child my father cleared a piece of scrub land on our farm at the foot of the Bunya Mountains and burnt off the felled scrub, before planting pumpkins, watermelons and other vegetables in the ashes. Years later he asked me if I knew why these crops flourished? By then I had become the gardening guru in the family. Dad said, that if he merely added ash to a vegetable garden he couldn’t get the same healthy result. I explained that not only was he using fertile soil for the first time, but the heat of the fire had killed all the nasty pathogens in the soil which might have inhibited the growth of his vegetables. This is a method of growing vegetable gardens in tropical countries like Papua New Guinea.

When I was a child we never ate baby vegetables like button squash and zucchini. The Acorn Squash and Marrow, as we called zucchini, were rather despised and tasteless vegetables, best hollowed out and stuffed with a savoury meat mixture. It was only after Eberhard and I moved to live on the Granite Belt of southern Queensland in 1992 that I came to have an appreciation of Mediterranean vegetables like zucchini, eggplant and capsicums. The Granite Belt has a cool mountain climate and many of the farmers here are descendants of earlier Italian immigrants. Each year this district supplies a huge volume of vegetables and fruit to the Brisbane and Sydney markets.

Disaster struck the Granite Belt community on Christmas Day with a huge hail storm that destroyed or damaged many of the vegetable crops as the farmers were about to commence the seasonal picking.

Hail storm over the Granite Belt on Christmas Day 2008

The farmers had two choices. They could slash their damaged plants to the ground, plough the soil and replant, or they could pay workers to strip from the plants and throw away all the damaged vegetables, in the expectation that the bushes and vines would recover and begin bearing produce again. Read the rest of this entry »

THE BREAKDOWN OF A MARRIAGE

When a girl of my generation dreamed of her future, it was a dream about marriage and a family. Despite years of hardship I continued to dream of a future when Stewart and I would sit one day on a veranda dandling our grandchildren on our knees. Never did I dream that after twenty-five years of marriage Stewart would leave me destitute and take my children from me.

How did it all happen? I had, like so many other women of that generation, been prepared to follow my man. I had uttered marriage vows to love, honour and obey till death do us part. Selflessly, I gave.

When Stewart wanted a farm where he could teach his sons farming skills he promised to spend two days a week with me and our children working that farm. He promised to take mid-week days off from his work with the transport firm if he was obliged to work there over weekends. I knew of a small farm that I could afford to buy. Stewart looked it over and negotiated the price. I wrote the cheque. Stewart sprang into action. He said, “This place has great potential!” He hired contractors to come in and demolish an old packing shed, clear old grape trellises and bulldoze the eucalyptus trees from more land suitable for planting with citrus trees. Friends and family came to help with the building of new trellises; the planting of more table grapes and citrus trees. Stewart arranged for the construction of a new farm shed and sourced a tractor and other farm machinery for me to purchase. I agreed to every request until my money was exhausted. It would be at least five years before the farm became viable, but I figured it was worth the wait for a return on my investment to be able to have my husband spending time with his family. Read the rest of this entry »

AN ABUNDANCE OF CHERRIES

For me, cherries have always been associated with Christmas mornings. As a child I left a pillowslip at the end of my bed on Christmas Eve as I recited, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Waking in excitement at the first light of dawn I would peer into the depths of the pillowslip to find the small brown paper packet containing apricots, plums and cherries. Stone fruit were scarce and expensive, but always a Christmas treat.

I knew nothing of Morello cherries, the sour kirsche of Europe, until I married Eberhard. Almost thirty years ago he established one of the first coffee shop restaurants in Toowoomba, which became rightly famous due to his skill as a baker of Continental cakes. In those days it was nothing for him to bake and assemble two large Black Forest Torte every day. In those days he was able to buy 5kg tins of sour kirsche imported from Yugoslavia.

When we moved to the cool mountain climate of the Granite Belt in 1992 and established Das Helwig Haus B&B, one of the first trees I planted was a Morello Cherry tree to enable us to harvest and preserve our own cherries. Like many other Australian fruit eating birds, the Eastern Rosella parrots have flourished since fruit orchards were established on the Granite Belt and now every year farmers set up scare guns to startle the parrots away from their orchards and vineyards, or they shoot hundreds. These birds are not an endangered species and the alternative is costly - to net the crops.

Grape vines covered in bird netting

I did not want my cat,  Patches, hunting the parrots and bringing them to me like trophies. Read the rest of this entry »

SUNSHINE YEARS

Sunshine returned to my life in 1974 when I realized I was pregnant with our fifth child. I had been feeling the despair of poverty - making do on a truck driver’s wage, the loss of a car and the need to once more begin paying off a home.  All my homemaking skills came in useful as I again established a vegetable garden. I began sewing school uniforms to earn a little cash.  To this day Carol despises any food called soup or stew and refuses to eat ripe bananas, because I discovered that one of the fruit shops put aside boxes of spoiled fruit and vegetables, which could be purchased for only a dollar. We ate lots of apple pies, banana cakes, fruit salad and vegetable soups. My children were never hungry but they sometimes wished for the ‘take away’ foods that other families bought. Stewart’s work meant that once more he was frequently absent and I had to cope alone in emergencies, like when Paul had acute appendicitis.

The return to Dalby and Stewart’s employment in the family transport firm had a downside, in that there is always dissension and rivalry when family members live and work in close proximity. The bankruptcy of our business brought shame on the McIver family name. Stewart worked long hours partly to bring home extra money, but also to lose himself in his work. Less forthright women within the family began to see me as different to them and labeled me as “strong and capable“. This allowed all family members to look the other way when I was in need of assistance. I was slipping into depression when I realized I was pregnant. Stewart welcomed the thought of a new baby, saying he had neglected his other children and promised to become a family man after the birth of our son. Adrian was a much loved baby and I called him the “Sunshine of my life,” because he brought joy and hope back into our home.

Then Cyclone Tracey struck Darwin in the Northern Territory and once more our lives were changed. Read the rest of this entry »

AN ABUNDANCE OF BERRIES

As November came to an end and December arrived in this cool mountain climate of the Granite Belt, I have dealt with an abundance of mulberries, strawberries and currants, converting these to fruit compotes in Vacola bottling jars, jams and jellies. There is such a huge abundance of Boysenberries each year from my three vines in the garden at Das Helwig Haus that I can’t keep up with the processing and I have learned to save for another day the fruits that I can’t use today by temporarily freezing them.

Frozen Boysenberries

One begins by picking the berries from the vines, which are thorny, and then removing any green husk that comes away with the fruit. When they are harvested and cleaned you must make the decision of what to do next. Freezing is easy, just fill boxes like shown above and place in the freezer. Read the rest of this entry »

A THOUSAND MILES AWAY

The twists in my journey through life have been unexpected. Within two years of leaving the farm at Bell, situated on the road between Dalby and Kingaroy, and moving with our four children into a house in Dalby, I was to find myself living temporarily with them in Cooktown, north Queensland. Cooktown was established as a busy port during the Palmer River gold rush. Cooktown sits on the banks of the Endeavour River where Captain Cook beached his ship for repairs after holing it on the Great Barrier Reef in 1770.

I had moved a thousand miles from my home.

The Old Palmer Song

Oh, the wind is fair and free, my boys, the wind is fair and free,
The steamer’s course is north, my boys, and the Palmer we will see.
The Palmer we will see, my boys, and Cooktown’s muddy shore,
Where I’ve been told there’s lots of gold, so stay down south no more.

Chorus

So blow, ye winds, heigh-ho, a-digging we will go,
We’ll stay no more down south, my boys, so let the music play,
In spite of what I’m told, I’m off in search of gold,
And we’ll make a push for the brand new rush, a thousand miles away. Read the rest of this entry »

MORE HARD YEARS

As an idealistic personality type I had extremely high expectations of myself. I attempted to be the perfect wife and mother which meant that I found it almost impossible to say “No” to my husband. He in turn always took on more work than he could handle and delegated jobs to me. I have a strong sense of responsibility which he exploited.

The year after we bought the second farm and were experiencing one of the many droughts of the sixities Stewart needed to transport truck loads of water and attend to other matters, so after breakfast he would feed the pigs and I would wash down the floors of the piggery. I would then put Rodney and Carol in the family car, before releasing a herd of beef cattle onto a road fronting our property. The ‘long paddock’ is the name for stock routes used for droving cattle in times of drought. We had a permit to graze our cattle on a 2 mile strip of road, linking  arterial roads in the Bell district. I would release the cattle and turn them to walk and graze in one direction. When they reached the arterial road, I turned them back to graze in the opposite direction. The forage was dry and dusty and the cattle did more walking than eating, making it necessary for me to spend the day in the car with my two young children. We played word games, we sang and I told them stories. I also succeeded in knitting them each a pullover.

It was at this time that a National census was taken. When as ‘head of the household’ Stewart filled out the forms he listed our occupations as FARMERS. Late one evening as I was bathing Rodney and Carol, a city born woman came to, collect the forms. After examination, she said, “You can’t write your occupation as farmer, you are a housewife.”

Having spent the day on the road I was dirty and tired, in no mood to comply. My house was in a mess, my children were noisily jumping up and down in the bath and the vegetables were probably boiling dry on the stove.

I argued that my husband and I were equal business partners, but she said I must be receiving a wage before I could call myself anything other than a housewife.

“Okay,” I said, “I draw a monthly allowance for housekeeping and personal needs. I’ll call that my wage.”

The confrontation continued for some time. Finally, she crossed out the words FARMER and replaced them with PAID HOUSEKEEPER, PAID PIGGERY ATTENDANT. This was the story I typed up and sent off to the Australian Women’s Weekly magazine for which I was paid ten pounds the equivalent of twenty dollars.

Read the rest of this entry »

AN ABUNDANT SUMMER BEGINS.

Is it possible that our Queensland climate could be reverting to the type of summer weather this state hasn’t experienced for two decades? It is shaping up that way with excellent rain on the Granite Belt and a devastating storm hitting Brisbane a few days after my last Red November garden tour. Now my garden is growing like a jungle and the neigbour’s cattle are happily grazing our grass land. The Severn River is flowing and our dams are full.

I set out to take a walk with my camera on Saturday afternoon and met our flock of geese marching home to be penned for the night safe from foxes and other predators. They are always rewarded with a handful of cracked corn to encourage their return, although as a grazing bird their diet consists mainly of grasses and herbage.

Geese coming home.

I was heading down to photograph one of the dams when I began to see the occasional speckle of a white field mushrooms amongst the grass, so promptly returned for a basket and knife. Read the rest of this entry »