BOOK SIGNING

As a published author I must now undertake book signings at the shops stocking Wildflowers, wilderness and wine. As many of you know I had a life prior to moving to the Granite Belt with Eberhard almost seventeen years ago and the opportunity presented for me to visit the districts of Dalby and Bell again this past weekend.

BOOK CITY Dalby

I was amazed when a man I had known 50 years ago at a time that we were both members of a Rural Youth organization approached me, with an expression of delight, to renew the acquaintance. We chatted about old times for an hour or so before he bought the book.

An important reason why I had chosen to appear at BOOK CITY on Friday was that I wished to attend the Bell camp draft where my 94 year old father, John Mulcahy, was to be honoured. Read the rest of this entry »

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FOR CARMEN

Carmen was one of three Italian girls who came to WWOOF for me in August. Recently she wrote to ask:

Kookaburra by David Osburg.

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AN ABUNDANCE OF POTATOES.

With a bit of luck I can manage to grow several crops of potatoes each year, planting the first seed potatoes in  October with a further planting after Christmas. Potatoes will handle quite rough soil so are a good crop to put into new ground. They are not a deep rooted plant like carrots, which will push down into the soil. Instead, the tubers grow out from the original seed potato. It is necessary to hill them as the plants grow to cover the young tubers. If you keep building up the soil around the stem of the plant they will continue to make fresh tubers in ever increasing layers. This may also be done by creating a support for the soil with rubber tires mounted on rubber tires.  This is a great way of cropping for people with limited gardening space. Using this method it is also possible to grow potatoes in the milder winter climates, providing the tops are covered each night against frost.

Potatoes are well suited to growing in furrows which can be flooded with a garden hose and is the way I prefer to grow mine. To get an early start this year I planted two rows of seed potatoes in October amongst the red Flanders poppies in my Remembrance Field at Das Helwig Haus B&B at Glen Aplin on the Granite Belt of southern Queensland.

Potato rows

Three young Koreans came in November to work for me as WWOOFers – Willing Workers on Organic Farms and as the poppies finished flowering they removed them and hilled the potatoes. Read the rest of this entry »

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AN ABUNDANCE OF SWEET CORN

As a child the only corn I knew was maize. My father always planted a plot of this corn, much of which was fed to the pigs. If it was picked young while the kernels were still milky with juice it could be boiled and served for a dinner vegetable, but my favorite treat was to roll the young cobs across the hot metal top of our wood burning stove until some of the kernels blackened. Then I would sprinkle the cob with salt, slather it with butter and go outside to chew every last kernel off the cob while butter ran down my chin.

Back about 1983 I spent a week holidaying in Fiji at one of the expensive beach side resorts. I had slept  too late to take any of the Saturday morning excursions organized for tourists, but found the Fijian entertainment manager in the lobby trying to put together a trip for his own amusement. With nothing else to do I accepted his invitation to join him and a few other stragglers, to attend a football match in Sigatoka. We all piled into a little bus, then made a side trip to collect the children of his family, before taking the road through sugar plantations over the hills to Sigatoka. The football field was a bare area of grass surrounded by a high ring of corrugated iron sheeting. Young lads perched, seated on their rubber flip-flop sandals on this sharp edge. Men had climbed trees and were sitting on all roofs  that offered a view. We were led by our guide through a muddy area where forty-four gallon former fuel drums, set over fires, were boiling water with corn cobs still in their husks. The Fijian locals were buying this corn on the cob, pulling off the husks, dropping these on the ground, munching off the corn kernels and then dropping the chewed cob to join the other refuse under foot. I reminded me of my father’s muddy pig pens.

By the time I had my own garden at Das Helwig Haus B&B and began growing vegetables the seed of sweet corn was readily available. Now there are many seed varieties from which you can choose.  While seed packets give instructions about the distance apart and the depth to plant seed it is important to note that corn is wind pollinated and should be planted in squares, not long lines.

Sweet Corn growing at Das Helwig Haus B&B

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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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 »

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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 »

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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 »

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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 »

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