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.

John on Blue Boy

In the 1940’s paper was scarce so I seldom saw a newspaper, my mother possessed only a few books and my father didn’t read. I was almost seven years of age when I began school, as it was necessary for me to ride alone the six miles between my home and the Yamsion school. At night, reading by kerosene lights, I studied my school books. Today it is not uncommon for children to be able to read before the age of five, but I must have been over 8 years of age, when one night as I studied the words before me, I realised I was capable of reading an entire sentence. What exultation I felt!

I don’t remember when I learned to ride a horse, but I do remember in considerable detail, the moment that I began to read.

The Yamsion school only had eleven children attending it when this photograph was taken. I’m the second person on the left in the back row, and the dark haired girls in the lower two rows are my sisters. As was customary in the country in those days, children only got one pair of shoes each year, to wear in the winter months, or on the rare occasions when the family went to town.  By 1951 five of those children had left and another of my sisters, not yet five years of age, was doubling behind a sister on her horse. At the age of eleven I had become the oldest child in a school with only nine pupils. The school required an attendance of nine pupils to remain open.

Yamsion school 1950

It was at this time that I received an abundance of wealth. My father had employed an elderly man to undertake some fencing. This man lived in a tent and possessed few worldly goods. Each day when work was done, he rested in front of his tent, reading a paperback book. He must have witnessed my envy, for when his contract was finished he handed to me a wooden, half-bushel case of Zane Grey westerns. Oh, what a treasure!

The next example of good fortune to come my way was a new school teacher, no more than twenty years old herself. She began lending me her romantic novels. As I was the only pupil in my class she  suggested she would teach me two years work within the one year, allowing me catch up the grade I had missed by my late school start. I accomplished this feat without any fall off in my exam marks, but it was a lonely life. I had no friends living near my home or at school. I begged my mother to be sent away to boarding school.

Fay's mother with the four youngest children.

Times were tough, although my parents had just bought their first car, a Holden. My mother now had five daughters and a son to feed and clothe. She sewed our dresses and knitted us each a pullover every year. We lived in a poor house without any modern conveniences. My father had been buying up other small dairy farms within the district, and with share-farmers to assist had become the largest supplier of milk to the Yamsion Cheese Factory. It was my mother who recognised my unhappiness and pleaded with my father to find the money to send me to boarding school.

Fay, wearing the summer uniform of the Presbyterian Girls College, Warwick.

Fay wearing the PGC winter school uniform.

What I didn’t realise until many years later was that I am an introvert. The dream of finding soul mates amongst my peers never eventuated.  When surrounded by a hundred other girls I became one of the group, but made no close friends. Disappointed because no one was seeking my friendship and socially inept, I spent much of my time over the next four years hiding out in either the school fiction or reference libraries, reading randomly. Without my mother’s discipline my grades quickly slipped to mediocre levels. I wasted the opportunity this excellent school provided, partly because I had no sense of direction. I knew I must leave school when sixteen years of age, so my parents could afford to send another daughter away. I had no option other than to take a commercial course. I had no goals other than to achieve a reasonable Junior Pass.  The two extra curricular subjects I wished to study were denied to me by my parents. I asked to learn Art, because I could draw and Art of Speech because I enjoyed acting. Instead, my parents decided it would be more useful in the country social round for me to have tennis and ballroom dancing lessons.

I left school at sixteen and stayed home a year to help my father with cattle work. By then my parent’s finances were improving rapidly. They had bought enough land to allow them to give up dairying and my father was building up a fine herd of Hereford beef cattle. In 1956, my last year at boarding school, my parents were able to move into a new house.

The new house built at Hill View, Yamsion.

At seventeen I became a debutante at the Dalby Highland Ball.

Fay, a debutante at the Dalby Highland Ball, 1957

When eighteen, I moved to board with an elderly widow in the small town of Bell, where I worked in a clerical position for the butcher, a friend of my father. I went to the weekly Friday night dances and to see the pictures in the same hall on Saturday nights. I attended Church on Sunday mornings and played tennis in the afternoons.

I met Stewart McIver and after a two year courtship and engagement, we were married in 1960

Stewart and Fay as teenagers.

My next post will tell of the twenty-five years I spent as a homemaker on farms at Bell, and in the town of Dalby.

The third post will give a summary of how I entered the workforce at the age of forty-six and began to realise the potential of my visionary, writing and marketing skills in tourism on the Granite Belt. It is an inspirational story.