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 »

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 »

THE NOT SO SWINGING SIXTIES

When a younger generation looks back over a record of my life the thing I expect they will find so different from their own was the expectations that marriage brought to men and women when I married Stewart McIver in 1960. At this time in Australia a married woman was still expected to leave her paid employment to become a wife and mother. Often, it was also impractical for country women to take paid work away from their farm homes because they didn’t have any form of transport. The family car or utility vehicle was possessed by the man of the family.

My parents gave me a substantial dowry when we married, on condition that Stewart’s parents would assist him with an equal financial contribution. This enabled us to borrow additional money and purchase a mixed farm – dairying, grain, pigs and beef cattle at Walker’s Creek near Bell.

The first farm

This large square hill was in the centre of our property at Walker’s Creek. I took this photo when visiting the area a year ago.

The prevailing attitude of the time was that the husband was the provider and the wife’s role was to meet the needs of her husband. Below is a copy of a text that was still taught to high school girls in 1962 as to how they should greet their husband on his arrival home at the end of the working day. Read the rest of this entry »

Self Portrait 1

I’m approaching seventy years of age, April 2010, and consider this something of a milestone. When people suggest retirement could be an option for me, I laugh and tell them of my grandmother, who at seventy years of age was still riding after her cattle. Grandma lived to the age of 94. My father and mother are still active at the respective ages of 93 and 92. So what does that tell me? It would appear that with such excellent genes for longevity I might live for another 25-30 years. In looking back over the years in which my hair has turned from black to silver, I recognise that it can be broken up into three clearly defined segments.

• The twenty years I was my father’s daughter.
• The twenty-five years I was wife to Stewart McIver and became the mother of five children.

These forty-five years I fulfilled the roles expected of me.

• The almost twenty-five years I have lived with my second husband, Eberhard Helwig, during which I have discovered a personal identity no longer totally reliant on fulfilling roles.

I firmly believe that life is what you make it. You will meet with good fortune and misfortune, but it is how you face the challenges that will determine the end result. I was blessed with loving,  healthy, hard working parents who set out to instill a positive attitude in all their children.

We were never allowed to cry over spilled milk – don’t look back.

If we fell off our ponies Dad told us to “Pick your self up, dust your self down, and get back on your horse before you become scared of it.”

Our mother said, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

I was reared in the country with lots of fresh milk, beef and home grown vegetables but had few toys and no pets. Just as most children don’t recall when they learned to walk, I don’t recall when I learned to ride a horse, as my father began carrying me in his arms when I was aged three months, while riding to bring home the dairy cows for the afternoon milking.

Fay sitting on Peace, one of her father's horses, in 1943.

Eleven years later, I photographed my brother with my first camera, a Box Brownie, sitting on our father’s Australian Stock Horse stallion, Blue Boy. Read the rest of this entry »