PICKING FRUIT WITH THE BRUDERHOF

After camping overnight in their swags on the bank of our Severn River the ten youngsters and their two teachers were awakened by a chorus of kookaburras – sometimes called the laughing jackass. The adventurous boys gathered fresh water mussels and boiled them in a billy over the coals of a fire, determined to try real bush tucker.

“What did they taste like?” I asked.

“River water,” was the consensus.

Meanwhile, Tabatha and the girls were busy preparing a stack of breakfast pancakes in our kitchen. Nancy on accordion and Joe on guitar led a round of singing to keep us entertained and everyone occupied.

Joe plays guitar

After breakfast as Nancy stripped her bed and cleaned house for me, while Tabatha packed Bruderhof belongings into the back of their bus, two girls reminded me that I had promised they could pick our elderberries. In past years I’ve made elderberry jelly but these girls said they wanted to dip the whole spray of berries into batter and fry as a sweet pancake. I’ve also heard that the white flowers can be used this way, or placed in custard to give a vanilla flavour.

Ripe elderberries

Bruderhof girls pick elderberries

These berries then had to be found a space in the bus, beside the grapes that other youngsters were busily picking from our Isabella grape vines covering the terrace over the guest parking.

Tabatha loads the bus

Picking the grapes

The previous night I had phoned David Dunn whose family has grown stone fruit near the top of the ridge of hills on the western side of the Glen Aplin valley since the 1920s. He had agreed to welcome this Bruderhof group as a school excursion to the family orchard. The Bruderhof said their goodbyes to Eberhard and I accompanied them on the bus to their destination.

What a welcome they received! Brendon Dunn loaded the youngsters, all sitting down and under the supervision of Mike, into the tray of the farm utility. Tabatha rode up front with Brendon until they reached the plum orchard.

Farm utility

Ripe plums

Nancy, Joe and I travelled in comfort in a 4WD car with David and John Dunn. Nancy was delighted as the smell and taste of the ripe plums brought back to her memories of picking fruit in the orchards of Ontario, Canada where she had grown up in a Mennonite community.

Nancy tries a plum

The children were overjoyed at the thrill of picking an abundance of fresh fruit straight from the trees.

Girls gather plums

From the plum orchard we crossed a track and entered a peach orchard.

Peach orchard

Nancy kept remarking how different these Australian orchards were in comparison to the ones she had known in her youth. As David Dunn explained, his family had cleared pockets of fertile land amongst the granite boulders to establish their fruit trees. The eucalyptus forest growing in the rocky terrain around these pockets provided protection from winds, but not hail.  Much of this fruit was blemished due to hail damage and would be sold as second grade fruit.

Mike watches John Dunn pick peaches

Brendon phoned a neighbour over the hill, who said he was about to throw out fruit he had graded as unsuitable for sale. He drove off with Mike. They returned with Golden Queen peaches (the best type for bottling) and nectarines. After the Bruderhof group returned to Danthonia these could be made into jams or preserves.

Peaches and nectarines

A blue sky day

Back we drove to the packing shed where Brendon brought out boxes of second grade plums from the cold-room, which he gifted to the Bruderhof.

This is the district, the Granite Belt of southern Queensland where Eberhard and I have lived for more than seventeen years. It is the district I describe in my book Wildflowers, wilderness and wine.

Book cover

Das Helwig Haus B&B owned by Eberhard and Fay Helwig is situated at Glen Aplin, near Stanthorpe on the Granite Belt of southern Queensland, Australia.

This is a region noted for Australian wildflowers, four wilderness National Parks and sixty wineries. In 1997 Eberhard and Fay established the Remembrance Field of red Flanders poppies, a European wildflower.

To obtain Fay’s book Wildflowers, wilderness and wine send an email to helwig@halenet.com.au The price is $33.00 posted to destinations within AustraIia.

Internationally it is available on

http://stores.lulu.com/strictlyliterary

http://books.google.co.uk/

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AN ABUNDANCE OF ZUCCHINIS 2

I promised one of my readers a recipe for Zucchini Pickles. As I wrote in An Abundance of Zucchinis 1, zucchinis didn’t feature highly in the diet of Australians until after the migration of many Mediterranean people to Australia in the past fifty years. I planted my first packet of zucchini seed in the 1980’s and was amazed at the abundance of zucchinis this packet produced. A friend, Margaret Arnott from Canada, sent me her recipe for Pickled Zucchinis.

When we moved to live on the Granite Belt of southern Queensland to establish Das Helwig Haus B&B we found ourselves blessed with Italian born neighbours who grew fields of Mediterranean vegetables every year. On her welcoming visit to our home, Nerrina brought us a box of zucchinis. She said, “Just climb through the fence and help yourself any time you want more.” Thus, I have not bothered to grow zucchinis in recent years.

Basket of freshly picked zucchini

Every year I make up jars of Margaret’s zucchini pickle recipe, often serving it like a bread & butter cucumber pickle. Read the rest of this entry »

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A NEW START

A successful business has three essential components.

• A good product
• Good financial management
• Good marketing

A good financial manager and a good marketer are never found in the same person. My husband, Eberhard, is a work motivated Introverted, Sensing, Thinking and Judgmental personality/temperament type – an ISTJ. This type are the salt of the earth and make great middle managers, school inspectors or hospital matrons.

I am an Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling and Perceptive type – an INFP – a spirit motivated person. Although rare in number this type are to be found in nurturing positions as teachers, nurses and missionaries, but they also have a capacity for creativity and drama as actors or writers.

There are values that Eberhard and I have in common like we are scrupulously honest, but apart from the Introversion of preferring small groups of people over large crowds, we are opposites in many ways. My reading of psychology helped me greatly to understand the motivation of my husband, especially his work related values and how to partner him in a joint business. We developed a clear demarcation of duties, recognizing the strengths and weaknesses that each possessed.

Eberhard managed our finances and the nitt gritty matters of keeping everything functioning smoothly.  I am the holistic thinker looking to the future and planning our marketing – a visionary. I chose to call our Bed and Breakfast home Das Helwig Haus B&B - The Helwig House; to provide a German decor, German music and German food. Thus I differentiated it from every Honeysuckle Cottage, Apple Blossom Inn or Camellia Cabin in the district.

Das Helwig Haus B&B

After moving to the Granite Belt my personality began to bloom. Here no one knew my father, my former husband or my children. For the first time I was not seen as a daughter, wife or mother, but as an intelligent, hard working woman to be valued as a person. Already in his sixties, Eberhard had achieved most of his goals in life and was willing to support me while I followed my dreams. In 1995 I was asked to contribute to the tourism community by standing for election as a Director of the Southern Downs Tourism Board. Read the rest of this entry »

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A FIGHT FOR SURVIVAL

From the very beginning of writing this Travels in Life series my focus as been on my desire to read, write and speak eloquently.  I have written about my country childhood deprived of music and books. I’ve have written about my twenty-five year marriage when I was kept so busy that I found it almost impossible to read or study.

When my marriage ended I began a two year fight to avoid bankruptcy, selling my home, the factory and attempting to sell my farm in an endeavour to pay the debts which had been incurred in my name. Just as joint assets may be divided for a divorce settlement, the Family Law Court also considers such as debts as were in my name, joint debts of the marriage. In addition, my husband had signed a guarantee to meet any shortfall when purchasing the factory.  His wealth of more than a million dollars was tied up in family trusts within the transport company controlled by his father, uncle and brother. This meant that I wasn’t fighting for my rights against one runaway husband, but against four ruthless men determined to protect their family assets. Read the rest of this entry »

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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 »

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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 »

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TWO CITRUS RECIPES

It is 48 years since I married my first husband and moved on to a dairy farm to live. I milked cows morning and evening, boiled water in a copper to wash clothes and cooked on a wood burning stove. The only way to gauge the oven temperature was by putting ones hand in the oven and hazarding a guess. Wood was split to different thicknesses, making it possible to regulate the heat by the quantity or variety of wood being burnt. For slow cooking of dark fruit cakes for Christmas only a small amount of wood was allowed to burn and several thicknesses of stiff brown paper was layered around the mixture in the tin, while other sheets of the same paper were placed over the tin. It was generally considered desirable to have the cake cook 3-4 hours, with testing after 3 hours with a straw from a broom to determine if the mixture was still sticky.

Those were days when men joked that they had bought the Missus a new axe for Mother’s day so she could split her own wood. Read the rest of this entry »

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