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.
In 1967 Debra and Paul were born. I was still writing to Margaret Arnott in Canada and on 24th May, 1969 I sent her this letter.
“My babies are now more than double trouble! They are driving me up the wall. Debra has just squashed apple all over one of the walls. She is the chief wall painter – using pencils, bananas or wet soap. Paul is a climber and mechanically minded. He loves switching off refrigerators and lights. I can’t leave the iron plugged in or he is sure to switch it on. They can open every cupboard in the house and hardly anything is out of their reach. By standing on tiptoe I can reach the top of the kitchen cupboards where I now store what I consider dangerous items. This follows an incident last week when Debra and Paul got to the contents of my cutlery drawer. Debra stated hitting Paul over the head with a wooden spoon and he retaliated by trying to stab her in the belly with the carving knife. Fortunately he only nicked the skin, but she then had a finger cut trying to fend him off.
While I was administering first aid to Debra, Carol began to scream as Paul had just climbed to where she kept her favorite doll, dropped it and cracked the head.
My house is one continual mess as they are constantly emptying things – the teapot, the tea canister, a packet of rolled oats, detergents – squeeze bottles are particularly popular, the contents of the toy cupboard, or worse, turning on water taps. I hope for some warning if I’m to get visitors. After having Rodney and Carol go through this stage, I know it will pass, but I never realized what utter chaos two babies together could cause.”
The day after the knife incident, late in the evening, Debra was running towards the house when she tripped and fell. She hit her cheek on a sharp rock, opening up a deep cut, which needed stitching. An employed man was available to remain with the other children while I drove Debra into Dalby to have the wound treated. Two hours later when I arrived home, Stewart was there. He was treating Paul like a pariah. What a sad sight was this little boy, standing in his cot with a heavy, wet nappy hanging around his knees. Rodney and Carol didn’t know how Debra had received her wound and told Stewart that Paul had attacked her with the carving knife. Stewart had put Paul in the cot, told him he was in disgrace and used this as reason why he should not learn to change a nappy. Although we were later to have a fifth child, Adrian, Stewart never gave me any assistance with housework, meal preparation or child care considering these duties to be a woman’s work.
The small farm house is gone now.
During 1967 Stewart had begun using our farm Caterpillar D4 tractor to build farm dams or clear a few trees for our neighbors bringing in some handy, cash income. As always, he worked from sunup to sundown, moving further afield looking for work for the tractor. Soon he figured he needed a second tractor, then other machinery for particular jobs. Next he needed to pay men to drive the tractors and cultivate our farm fields in his absence. We were constantly in debt, struggling to keep our creditors from suing us for payment of accounts. Stewart was too busy to reply to demanding letters from our bank manager, and would send me to explain our position. I walked out of the bank once, in tears and feeling I had failed my husband as a business partner because the manager had said to me, “I don’t want to talk to you. Send your husband in to see me!”
Stewart had a solution. In 1970 he was offered a contract to construct road culverts on a new railway line to transport coal from the mine at Blackwater in central Queensland. We would purchase more machinery and he would put a team of men together and move with them to Blackwater. I refused to live alone with the children on the farm, supervising the farm work. It was decided that we would employ a farm manager, purchase a house in Dalby and I would move to live there with our family. To be continued.
