Go Do It Lad

GO DO IT LAD

An Autobiography

By

Ernie Kriewaldt

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2010 Ernie Kriewaldt

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The information, views, opinions and visuals expressed in this publication are solely those of the author(s) and do not reflect those of the publisher. The publisher disclaims any liabilities or responsibilities whatsoever for any damages, libel or liabilities arising directly or indirectly from the contents of this publication.

A copy of this publication can be found in the National Library of Australia.

ISBN: 978-1-921791-29-1-(pbk.)

Published by Book Pal

www.bookpal.com.au

Unfortunately, my dad passed away before we had the opportunity to have his book edited and printed.

And so it goes to print just as he had written it.

I am Brett, dad’s eldest son, and I would like to dedicate this book to his life and to his memory.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

My gratitude to Mr and Mrs Charles Harvey for inserting the commas, removing the hyphens, correcting my English and, in general, showing an interest in me and what I have been trying to write. They are nearly old enough to be my parents, and here am I, an old-age pensioner.

They may well be only two of three people, the other being Pattie, to read this book. If you are proving me wrong, please give a thought to Charles and Marjory Harvey and their efforts to make it anything like readable. Without their support, I doubt that I should have written the years onwards from 1949.

COPYRIGHT © Ernie Kriewaldt 1992

FOREWORD

I started this way back in l985 and it’s now l993 and my thinking it's still the same - each generation owes it to the next to leave some sort of record not only for the next generation but even for all future ones.

At the last count I had eight grandchildren and even one great-grandchild and I have them all very much in mind as I begin this book; I call it a book for want of a better name - I am not writing it to be a best-seller, that really would be very unlikely; it's meant for my own family and so there will be very few copies in existence.

I've seen it said that only a fool writes a book without money in mind. So I'm a fool, but who but a fool would want money at my age? If I wanted to I suppose I could sell excerpts in the form of short stories to various magazines, but should I?

This will be the truth as I remember it but I do feel free to omit little bits that are of no moment as some people still living might find them hurtful or perhaps give you the wrong impression of others now dead.

As I have grown older my own interest in my grandparents has led me to the conclusion that it was up to me as the oldest of my generation to make the effort to leave something in writing to posterity.

Of recent years I have during the course of my travels learnt quite a lot about our ancestors, both on my father's and on my mother's side.

In fact I think you will probably find this much more interesting than my own life - and so I plan on including what I know of them.

I have no proper name for this book and at first I had thought of calling it One to Sixty-six being the period of my own life that I shall be covering in more detail, starting in l925.

My childhood in Australia will cover the first twenty years; the next thirty years are about my life in Papua and New Guinea, and the final span - to date of seventeen years, living in England.

I shall be able to write from personal experience of Grandfather E.B. Noske well-known in the Western District of Victoria, Australia,) and Grandma Kriewaldt, who lived with us for a while when I was only a boy.

Grandpa Kriewaldt was a Lutheran minister who came from America to work in Australia at the turn of the century and died before I was born. Even so, so many people I have met through the years who did know him have left me with a lasting impression that he was indeed a very fine man. More about him as I progress.

If I do not progress very far, although I have written most of what I want to say, perhaps either of my younger brothers John or Bill, both more capable than I am when it comes to writing, will continue where I leave off.

Or it may be left to one of my sons, Brett or John, both of whom are computer-literate and would have no difficulty printing out the discs on their own word-processors. But I hope to see this through and leave all four of them to tell their own stories one day.

Daughters Breen (now Renee) and Peta are just as clever as the boys but, without being thought sexist, I cannot see either of them being quite as interested in this family history.

There is only one born author in my immediate family, in my opinion, and that is my son-in-law Graham. He has a natural ability to put words together and one day, as he has more experience of life, I hope he goes down this road.

I've mentioned various members of my family but what of my friends? There are many with whom we are still in regular contact who have been mates for upwards of forty years or more. Our children grew up together and because we had no proper uncles and aunts living with us in P.N.G. these people were de facto relations.

There were Uncle Bill and Auntie Anne Carter, Barbara and Del Underwood, Joan and George Wearne, Pamela and Craig Kirke, Flora and Leo Bowman, Mavis and Don Harvey, Tony and Sue Pike.

There were many more who will also find their names in the index at the end, but I feel I should mention at this early stage that several who began as employees stayed to become lasting friends.

And they weren't all Europeans but also 'locals' as we called the native population in those days; John Mea, John Manoka, and Morea Heni worked for me for many years and I regret having lost track of them - except for John Manoka who I know has died.

Amongst the women there was Irene Tosh, my secretary for longer than either of us would care to remember, twenty years would be a good guess, and Vivienne McEvoy, whose exploits alone would fill a book. Two very different people but both exceptionally good at anything they put their hands to.

Most of our friends now living in Australia are from our P.N.G. days, including those I've already mentioned, but here in England, except for Ken and Billie Nizette, our first contact with any of them was in l975. The numbers have grown and there are certainly too many to start naming names here. After all, this is supposed to be a Foreword, nothing more.

Most of these people were connected with Age Concern during my time with that organization and of course will be mentioned then.

Finally .....

I dedicate this book to my wife Pattie. How could I have ever been so lucky as to find someone as wonderful as she? She has put up with me through good and bad times and I never did say Thank you - until now.

Table of Contents

PART ONE

AUSTRALIA 1925 - 1945

PART ONE

1 From Morpor to Minhamite

2 Myrniong

3 Minhamite

4 Walden

5 Dimboola 1937

6 Adelaide 1938-1943

7 My War 1943-1945

PART TWO

PAPUA-NEW GUINEA 1946-1974

8 A Civil Servant 1946-49

9 RABAUL .... New Britain 1947-49

10 PORT MORESBY ... Self-employed 1949

11 E.E. Kriewaldt & Coy. Ltd 1950

12 The good and the bad years 1951-52

13 Pattie Kriewaldt nee Fischer 1952-53

14 Kriewaldts (Automotive), Limited 1954

15 Redex Round-Australia Trial 1955

16 The Far East 1956-57

17 Kriewaldt's (Boroko), Limited 1958-60

18 Moresby Martin Kriewaldt 1962-69

19 World Travel 1960

20 Kriewaldts (South Aust) Limited 1962-64

21 Lahara, Kriewaldt Engineering, La Palette

22 Behind the Iron Curtain 1960s

PART THREE

ENGLAND

23 Why England? 1975-1993

24 LONDON... Another Road Begins 1975

25 SEVENOAKS... With Age Concern 1976-80

26 ISLE of WIGHT 1980-85

27 SHREWSBURY … Shropshire 1986-93

28 1992

ADDENDUM (January 22nd, 1994)

PART ONE

AUSTRALIA 1925 - 1945

CHAPTER ONE

1925 – 1932 From Morpor to Minhamite

I remember very little before the age of five but those memories are only happy ones.

I was too young to realize how poor we were, Dad having been the son of a clergyman who died early in life, leaving a widow to raise five boys.

All except the eldest received good educations, but it was Uncle Fred's lot to work from an early age to help with his younger brothers. That Dad's education had an agricultural bent proved of little use to him in the time of the Depression, at the time he met Mum and they were married - in l924.

It was the 28th. of August and twelve months later to the day I was born and, in this connection, it is one of the very few dates that I have had any difficulty remembering.

Dad was given a job by his father-in-law, E. B. Noske, a wealthy grazier of the Western district of Victoria, who lived at Hamilton.

This job was little more than that of a farm labourer but times were then so bad that any job was better than none and at least a cottage went with it. Up to this time he had been to Wisconsin University in America to get a diploma in Agriculture but he had no real practical experience.

If it had not been for marrying the boss's daughter even this poorly-paid job would not have come his way. There is little doubt it was poorly paid and the position was not helped by the isolation of Morpor, the name of the property.

It was about three miles along the Caramut road from near Hawkesdale, which was the nearest shopping centre, another two miles further one.

When I say shopping centre that really is an over-statement, as there was only one country-store that sold most everyday needs, a pub that had accommodation for perhaps four people, a post-office, school, a couple of churches, a green-grocer, a bank that opened only occasionally, a football ground and a tennis club, a residence for a District Nurse, Council Chamber, and a hall where the pictures were shown on a Saturday night and dances perhaps monthly. That was Hawkesdale, still on the map today with little changed I suspect, except that it now has electricity.

But this meant Dad having to have a car which he could ill-afford to run. It was one of the very first Chevrolet tourers made about l923, with big wheels, wooden spokes, and tyres with tubes; at one time a new tyre was needed so badly that Dad removed the tube and filled it up with old rags to keep the car on the road until he could afford another one.

Although it was one of the two cheapest cars on the market when he bought it, it was considered quite a car with its fold-away roof and celluloid side curtains. It never seemed to give any trouble and by the time it was traded in on another car, and this not until l936, it must have done well over one hundred thousand miles.

The new car was an Oldsmobile, which cost £595 with Dad having to go to Geelong to take delivery of it to get this price, and as a trade-in he was allowed £100 for the old Chevy, as these cars were affectionately called.

That it had done such a big mileage was due to two things. First of all the nearest Lutheran church was at a place called Tabor, a few miles north-west of Penshurst and about twenty five miles from Morpor. We went every Sunday almost without fail. Dad was very involved in the affairs of the church and on several of the committees. Often we stayed to have Sunday dinner with friends in the area and as most of these people also had small children with whom we enjoyed playing, we looked forward to Sundays.

Hawkesdale being such a small place most of the shopping was done at Hamilton although Warrnambool was a lot closer. Hamilton was home to Mum; Grandpa lived there in a beautiful big home called Myrniong, where we were always welcome and often stayed, particularly at Christmas time and at Easter.

So Dad was lucky that the car rarely let him down, it was a major expense just to buy petrol. As for Tabor, don't look for it on a map, you are unlikely to find it. There was nothing there apart from the church and the Lutheran day-school, the cemetery, and the manse. But most of the surrounding country was, and probably still is, farmed by Lutherans.

Things were still financially bad when my brother John came along nearly two years after me and Mum was down to making our knock-about clothes from old flour and sugar bags, not that either of us remembers this. We have been told we suffered from the chafing of these rough materials not only on our knees but also on our bottoms.

My first knowledge of how poor we were came about by the anxious look I saw on Mum's face one day. Up to then I had not realized just how important were the regular monthly visits of Grandpa Noske to have a look around his property.

This day he arrived with a large bag of flour, probably weighing about one hundred and fifty pounds, which he would have got cheaply from Noske flour-mills, of which he was a part-owner.

When she heard the sound of his car I saw the look of expectation on her face and at the sight of the bag of flour her face lit up. Soon afterwards she was busy making bread. We certainly never starved but there must have been times when we were living pretty close to the bread-line, an apt use of a word in this case.

So with that little bit of background let me go on to tell you more about our mother, but not before correcting the impression that I may have given you that Grandpa Noske must have been a real ogre. Not so.

He was a lovable gentle man and, in spite of owning a lot of property, times were so hard a lot of it would have been showing him a loss.

Nor could he be seen to be favouring his son-in-law when there were other workers on Morpor who had been there many years earning the same money as Dad. I doubt if Dad would have wanted it any other way. That he did his best to help out in all sorts of ways will be told about later; meanwhile, his arrival with a badly needed bag of flour is the sort of help I well remember him for.

Mum was born in January 1900 and her mother died giving birth to her. Her surname at that time was Marett and her ancestors have been traced as far back as Philip Marett (1568-1637), Attorney-General for Jersey, one of the Channel Islands, who in turn was descended from Norman families on both sides resident on the island.

Her father Alfred migrated from Jersey to join in the gold-rush to Bendigo in Victoria in the mid-l800's, married a Fanny Gibbs and of their family of four boys and, of their two girls, Mum was the youngest.

As a child the only one of these relations I had any knowledge of was Uncle Frank as we called him. We were unaware that he was quite entitled to be called this being in reality Mum's brother - we thought that he was just a family friend of long standing.

Soon after her birth Mum was adopted by the E. B. Noske family and naturally from then on she was known as a Noske.

The Noskes had also adopted two others, Aunt Lizzie and Ruth. They had been unable to have any children of their own.

In l9l7 their adopted mother Emelie died and Grandpa remarried in 1918. His second wife's name was Gertrude and she was nearly thirty years his junior (he was born on the 20th June 1861 and christened Ernst Bernhard). In 1923 Dorcas was born. This completed the family.

It's quite likely that Mum was called Emily after her adopted mother although the spelling Emelie is different. Mum's friends called her Em.

I doubt if this is the connection between my being given the name Emil as a second name. It's much more likely to be due to Grandpa Kriewaldt being Emil. So with the first name of Ernest I was obviously named after both of my Grandpas, being the eldest of my generation.

Now for a little about Dad. Bits about both of my parents will keep cropping up as I progress and they come to mind but meanwhile I do know this.

Dad was born at Lobathel, which was then called Tweedvale, in l899. His parents had come from America in 1895. His father was Pastor Emil Kriewaldt who was to serve in more than one parish in Australia during his short life. He died when only 46. He also served on the Council of Concordia College in Adelaide.

Years later, when I was a student at that school, I came across his name in one of the library books in one of the seminary classrooms, showing that he had been the owner of this particular book.

Dad also went to school there and later on, when they all returned to America; he completed his education at the University of Wisconsin.

His younger brothers, Emil and Martin, were also mainly educated in America, Martin in Law and Emil, who was to follow in his father's footsteps, became a Lutheran clergyman.

Emil graduated from a St. Louis Seminary, Wisconsin, at the age of 21 with a Bachelor of Arts degree and accepted a call to Karoonda where he stayed for six years. Grandma Kriewaldt kept house for him. The other sons also returned to Australia at this time, ca.1920, having been in America since the death of Grandpa Kriewaldt in 1916.

Most of their American uncles and cousins were farmers and were into cheese manufacturing in quite a big way.

One branch of the family had migrated across the border into Canada and, because of a mix-up with their migration papers, their name was shown as being spelt Kriewald, without the T, and so it is in Canada to this day.

These three brothers seemed to have been very close to each other, even at this early age, and were given to taking their school holidays as a group. I have seen photos of them at such times, on one occasion as lumber-jacks somewhere in Canada; they may well have been staying with an uncle there.

On their return to Australia, Emil at Karoonda, South Australia, Martin to the Adelaide University to complete his Law degree - although qualified by American standards he still had to repeat certain sections to become eligible for entry to the Australian bar, Dad returned to Hamilton, in Victoria.

Why should he have done this? It was an area he knew well and although without any experience, but with his qualification, he was confident of getting a job there. Through his father the name of Kriewaldt was well-known and respected in the district.

To explain why this was so it is a good time for me to tell you more about Grandpa Kriewaldt. I have before me a copy of his obituary which was published in an American Lutheran Church magazine in l9l6 and handed on to me by a cousin living there.

As it was in German, and my knowledge of that language not being all that it should be, even though I learnt it at school for nearly five years, I asked the German language master at Shrewsbury School to translate it for me.

Shrewsbury School is in the town of that name which is the County-town of Shropshire in England. It has been in existence for nearly five hundred years and is recognized as one of the biggest and best Public schools in the country. Of all its many famous students, Charles Darwin is perhaps the most famous.

I make no apology for giving you this verbatim even though, to those of you who are familiar with German, it is obviously a translation. It is headed Hochkirch; today this place is called Tarrington, a place I have already mentioned, and is dated the Sixth July, 1916.

"OBITUARY... Pastor Emil Kriewaldt. Another unswerving confessor of the truth, an untiring worker in the vineyard of the Lord, a faithful witness of Jesus Christ, has been called to rest. On May 23rd, Pastor Emil Paul Gerhardt Kriewaldt, the Moderator of the Eastern District of our Church Council, died after a short illness. He was cut down at the height of his powers, and the loss, which has afflicted not only his parish, but our entire Church Council too, will not be easy to make good. The Lord our God is a mysterious God; we cannot understand His thoughts, and His ways are not accessible to us, but we bow to His will and say: Thy will be done.

The deceased was born at Watertown, Wisconsin, on the 29th. March 1870. He was baptised there at a very early age into the Christian Church, and after attending the Christian school in that same place, he was confirmed at the age of fourteen by Pastor C. Schwan.

Although his father had intended him to become a farmer, he never-the-less followed the desire which he had cherished since his youth, devoting himself to the service of the Church by studying for the priesthood. He was further strengthened in this resolve by a good friend who entered college at the same time. He began his studies in Watertown, but soon moved to Milwaukee, where he completed a six-year preliminary course. At the age of twenty two he entered the St. Louis Theological Seminary, and finished his studies there three years later, in 1895.

Even before he sat his examinations, a living was offered to him in the parish of Lobethal in South Australia. It was not easy for the deceased to bid farewell to his father and mother, six brothers and one sister, seemingly forever - and that is what has now proved to be the case. But his conscience told him Your Saviour is calling you there, and his love for the Lord was greater than that for his parents and brothers and sister, and thus in 1895 he immigrated to Australia. Even before leaving America, he was married to his dear wife, Emma Eberlein, who for more than twenty years shared joy and sorrow with him and who now, a grieving widow, is mourning at his graveside. The young couple were married by the present writer (I don't know his name) who was at that time pastor to the bride.

The deceased served Lobethal for fifteen years, his ministry was greatly blessed, and he devoted his energies not only to his parish, but also simultaneously to the entire Church Council, becoming in turn a member of the Ecclesiastical Court, the Missionary Council, and the College Council.

The late pastor was an unswerving confessor of the truth who, in the hard struggles which our Church Council had to face, continually honoured the Lord, was as firm as a rock in his devotion to the Word, and was not afraid to take on himself the burden of the Cross.

In 1910 the deceased accepted a calling to Hochkirch, Victoria and there too his ministry to young and old was to end greatly blessed; he enjoyed universal popularity. In Victoria, too, he not only served his parish, but the entire Church Council as well. In 1910, even before moving to Hochkirch he was elected Vice Chairman of the district, and the following year the district Church Council appointed him their Moderator. It was in this office that he was serving when he was struck down by his last illness."

And so ends the obituary. The one word in the translation that I'm not happy with is the word Moderator. The German word is Brafes. On the a there is an umlaut and in Lutheran circles I think the word is more likely to be President.

Until recently I had believed that he had died from a snake bite. The country was crawling with tiger snakes and if you were bitten by one of these you were unlikely to survive.

A lot of people used to carry around in their pocket a little first-aid kit about the size of a thimble but thinner. The ends unscrewed and at one end there was a little cutting edge to be used to cut around the bite; at the other end there were some Condy's crystals to be sprinkled on the wound after you had sucked the poison out of it. If you did this you might survive, otherwise you had no chance.

But Grandpa, at the age of 46, died from tetanus, a terrible way to die. Doctor Glynn Davies, a Cambridge graduate in Veterinary Science and much more knowledgeable than most on this subject, tells me that tetanus in humans is similar to rabies in dogs. The agony is so terrible that you are driven insane.

I have a first-hand report that on a calm day his screams could be heard from miles away. What a way to die! In my mind I see Jesus on the Cross, but in Grandpa's case, to what purpose, I ask myself.

And how did he contact this disease? In those days pastors were expected partly to keep themselves and to this purpose were given a few acres of land on which to run some sheep and perhaps the odd cow. After church he had to help with lunch for many of his people who had a long journey home in front of them.

This day he was lighting a fire for the boiling of water but because it was so windy he was using a piece of iron sheeting to control it. He snicked his finger on a jagged edge and it became infected. The germ must have been on the metal and that was that.

I shall call Hochkirch Tarrington from now on. It is only a few miles out of Hamilton on the main road to Warrnambool. Even today it is a big Lutheran community, one of the biggest in Australia, and that's including the capital cities.

When Grandpa Kriewaldt went there in 1910 my other Grandfather E.B. Noske was already a leading light in this congregation and it was mainly his financial support that was behind the building of a beautiful new church there.

A bond of friendship was soon established between them neither man realizing at the time just how inter-twined their lives were to become in the future.

The Kriewaldt boys were still at school and, in Dad's case, he was at Concordia College in Adelaide.

During the next six years he would have spent a lot of time at Tarrington during school holidays, becoming well-known to the Noske family - and Mum, Emily Noske as she then was.

Soon after their arrival at Tarrington they adopted a little girl called Ruth and then a baby boy called Eddy. They had planned on returning to America at about the time Grandpa was struck down so that the boys could further their schooling there. But these plans had to be changed on his death, Grandma realizing that she was in no position to cope with such a large family.

She had the support of the whole church and in particular Grandpa Noske. He and his wife had taken quite a fancy to little Ruth, and already having adopted two other little girls, they asked if they could have Ruth.

You can imagine the soul-searching that must have gone in Grandma's mind, what best to do for Ruth, and she really had no alternative. Life was going to be very difficult for the family as it was. And so she agreed to part with Ruth. Naturally this led to an even stronger bond between the two families.

Now it's easy to understand Dad heading back to Tarrington/Hamilton when he had finished his schooling in America and Grandma had decided to return permanently to Australia with her brood.

I would hazard a guess that Mum being there was the major drawcard but there was also the little girl who had been his sister, Ruth, and the other members of the Noske family who thought a lot of him. His ambition was to make a success of a career on the land and from this point-of-view the Western District of Victoria would have to be a prime area.

And so it was that he gained employment with his prospective father-in-law. This would have been about 1921....and so back to Morpor.

Apart from the name on the gate there was nothing to see except for the gravel road going off down the hill to another gate. The homestead was still a mile further on hidden from view by the trees.

There were all the usual out-buildings the biggest being the shearing-shed, eight pens, which means that a team of eight shearers could be employed and would shear almost a thousand sheep on a good day.

These shearers as well as the other shearing-shed hands, the wool-classers, the bailers, their cook, had their own quarters. They moved as a body from one sheep station to another and from district to district following the shearing season. The same team of men returned year after year and so we got to know them, even as children.

Then there was the cow-shed. Not many cows, only a few to supply milk for our own use. We also had a wooden churn for making the butter. It was here that brother John and I first learnt how to milk a cow. It was fun at that age and we were too young to be expected to do it regularly.

To help round-up the cows whenever we felt like it was another game to us and most of my childhood memories are of helping Dad in these ways, playing at it, but learning all the time.

The fowl-yard was full of fowls, not that they were particularly good layers; in fact they were awful. Some days there would be no eggs at all. That they were living mainly off scraps from the kitchen may have had a lot to do with this.

They tended to lay their eggs almost anywhere except in the pens. Again it was fun play-ing at who could find the most eggs but you were on your honour to leave one behind to encourage the fowl to continue laying eggs at the same spot. This also helped you find them in the future.

When I say we, I mean John and I. Winona wasn't born until I was four, brother Bill two years still later by which time we were about to leave Morpor.

We knew that when a fowl was sitting on its eggs and didn't want to be disturbed that it was hatching chickens and these chickens were one of the joys of our life.

There is a family story that one day Mum had not seen us for some time and she knew that any such quietness usually meant that we were up to something.

She couldn't find us anywhere and as a last resort she thought she would try the fowl-yard, and there we were sitting on eggs as we had seen the mother hens doing and expecting that we too could produce little chicks; all we had were foul-smelling rotten eggs that had accumulated in a nest that we had not found until that day. Another lesson learnt.

Apart from the fowls in the farm-yard we had geese and turkeys, bantams and the odd pet rabbit. This was real rabbit country and before the days of myxomatosis. We had a dozen or more dogs, mainly greyhounds for rabbiting, and three or four men were employed all the year around as trappers, to gas or dig out burrows. Ferrets were also used to try and keep the rabbit population down. But it was a loosing task. And so we were never encouraged to breed our own pet rabbits. The one or two we had in the fowl yard was as far as it went.

Then there was the machinery shed which contained not only a tractor but a combine harvester, several types of ploughs, a spreader for fertilizer, a bailer, a grass cutter of the type drawn by a horse.

There were also a binder which is a machine for cutting hay and binding it into sheaves drawn by either two horses or the tractor, and a drill, a machine about twelve feet wide with a large wheel at either side. You filled it with seed and super-phosphate, and as it went along it drilled a trench, planted the seed and covered it over, all in one operation. There were many other smaller farming instruments - and we small boys could and did, play there for hours on end.

The blacksmith shop wasn't much fun unless someone was actually working there; you needed the fire to be going so that you could pump the bellows and watch the heat grow. Here the horses were shod and machinery repairs made. I still remember the blacksmith saying stand back as he wielded a big hammer when shaping a red hot piece of metal into a horse-shoe.

And to one side of all these buildings stood the homestead which was also built of weather-boards on a wooden frame and with a galvanised iron roof. It would have been built ca.1900 as the Manager's residence and it wasn't that big as station homesteads go. Today it would be called a small bungalow, two bedrooms, lounge and dining rooms, bathroom, kitchen, a veranda front and back.

Nearby was another building attached to the house by a covered walkway. It the laundry with its hand-operated washing machine and hand wringer, a copper set in concrete and needing a fire under it for boiling the worst of the dirty clothes and a set of tubs and that was about it.

The dairy-room was also in this building. Here was the churn for making the butter, from the ceiling hung all sorts of sausages such as lieberwurst, fritz, sides of bacon, ham, all made by Mum and smoked in the smoke-house by Dad. Thinking back, there may have been very little money in the house but we mostly lived well - when it came to food.

There was an orchard covering nearly two acres containing cherry, apple, plum and apricot trees, and enough jam was made in season to last the whole year through.

The vegetable garden, too, was large enough to supply everything from potatoes and onions to cauliflowers and cabbages, so even though times were hard throughout the world we as children were not aware of it.

There was yet another building, the smallest of them all, the lavatory, a hole in the ground with a wooden seat, a roof, three walls and a door making the fourth side. It was not that far away from the house but in the middle of winter it seemed to be a mile away. It certainly lacked any form of heating and so was not a place in which to hide even with perhaps a comic to look at.

You must remember that properties such as Morpor had no electricity or gas and that all the water was rain-water collected from off the roofs. It ran into an underground tank and from there had to be pumped daily, sometimes even more often if Mum was washing.

It was a hand-pump and the first job I can remember ever being given to help with on a regular basis was pumping the water. Not hard to do, even for a little boy, but talk about monotonous; there were much better things I could think of doing with my time after the first five minutes of each of these stints. This water ended up in a header-tank which stood on a wooden platform about twenty feet high; high enough to give a decent pressure throughout the house and laundry.

The only thing within reach of this pump, that was of any interest to a small boy, and that only when they were ripe enough to eat, were the banana passion-fruit. It's a fruit I've never seen growing anywhere since but it certainly grew very well there. I now think that the roots could well have been growing into the underground tank. This would explain just how luscious was this plant.

Water was a very precious commodity, particularly during the dry summer months. Saturday night was bath-night for the whole family. John and I were first, I well remember, and even in those days the soap stung if it got in your eyes; apart from that bath-time was a happy time. For the rest of the week at bed-time we had to make do with a 'lick-and-a-promise', a minimum of water but a lot of rubbing with a hot soapy washer, especially on our dirty knees.

There was always hot water available. Pipes ran through the back of the wood stove in the kitchen and the water heated in this way was stored in a lagged tank.

Wood was our fuel and our heating. A lot of time was spent first of all gathering it in the form of long-dead trees from out in the paddocks, then sawn by a tractor-driven saw into suitable lengths, and finally cut by hand into small pieces as required, at the wood-heap.

This old timber was left over from the days when the country was first cleared by the original settlers so that the land could be ploughed. A lot of it was red-gum, a very hard timber, often used for making railway-sleepers, but it was also excellent fire-wood.

The wood-heap was not far from the house and little as we were we were often sent out to get an armful of firewood. John I guess could manage one piece at a time; My lot was probably twice that! We realized at a very early age that if the fire went out it would soon be cold, very cold and being sent to fetch some wood was the lesser evil.

There seemed to be fireplaces everywhere, certainly in the shearers' quarters, and in most of the rooms of the homestead.

But the warmest room in the house was the kitchen with its wood-stove that was kept burning for twenty-four hours in the day. It was a big room too and so it was as much a family room as a kitchen.

During the winter months we spent much of our time playing there. I don't remember any special toy, apart from my bike; more of this later. Perhaps I didn't have one that lasted long enough after the rough treatment I probably metered out to it.

Leading this sort of life we really didn't need toys in the strict sense of the word. Almost everything around about was used to play with, not only the machinery and animals and the trees, but also the chores were treated as being a game.

As boys our love in life was climbing trees and of these there was no shortage. They came in all shapes and sizes and grew right around the house - and every other building for that matter. I don't know what the fascination was that they had on us but the first call we would hear at meal or bath time was a loud shout from the kitchen-door: Come on down, its bed-time.

I haven't mentioned the stables. They were big enough to house and feed about ten horses at a time. The feed storage was up above and came down by chute into the feeding boxes. It was mainly chaff and crushed oats or barley grown on the property.

We had all sorts of horses from heavy draught animals used for ploughing, lighter draughts for drawing the wagons which were mainly used for carting the wool to the railway station two miles away, and returning from there laden with super-phosphate and sowing seed for the next harvest.

Then there were the ponies; four or five of them used by the men for rounding up the sheep and doing the rounds of the paddocks during the lambing season looking for ewes in trouble.

These horses all had names as did the cows, dogs, and even some of the poultry. I have no idea where these names came from but I do remember that the biggest horse of them all was called Bonnie. Dad seemed to us to spend most of his time on his pony and we spent a lot of time waiting for him to come in sight and chasing after him for a 'leg-up', a ride home in front of him. We certainly developed horse sense at a very early age.

I did have one toy of my own, if it could be called that. It was all mine only because John was too little to ride it. It was a tiny two-wheeler that resembled a scooter almost as much it did a bicycle. The overall shape was that of a scooter with a small ten inch wheel at either end, wheels with wire spokes and hard rubber tyres.

It must have been Xmas 1929 that Santa Claus gave it to me. My parents certainly could not have afforded such a present then or at any other time in the year. Not many years later I found out that Grandpa Noske always played the part of Santa for the whole family. I suppose it was his way of sharing out his wealth without it appearing to be charity. Whatever his reason, my bike was my pride and joy and it must have given him a lot of satisfaction to see the pleasure I got from it.

The brakes were hardly adequate and I came many a buster before I mastered it. It was just as well that it was close to the ground. I didn't have far to fall but far enough to gravel rash my knees and hands but somehow I always managed to protect the bike from any damage.

Often we knew the day Grandpa was coming to do an inspection of Morpor and on those days I would ride my bike to the main gate and wait for him there.

Having opened and closed that gate for him I would go like a bat-out-of-hell down the hill to the next gate to have it open before he caught up to me. And then on to the third and last gate at the homestead, I suppose about a mile and a half all told.

This was a game I enjoyed playing with Grandpa. He never really made any serious effort to pass me and he never failed to reward me with a coin, maybe only a penny. All coins were money to me to be put in to a money-box and my first experience of handling my own finances were at the ripe old age of four and a bit!

Grandpa had three cars at that time, but more of this later. His favourite for doing the rounds of the paddocks was a 1926 Buick, a tourer high enough off the ground to clear the rough patches and not easily bogged. The bag of flour he often arrived with would have come from Noske Brothers, a firm founded by him and his brothers with flour mills at Horsham, Nhill, Murray Bridge and Charlton.

They also had extensive interests in such things as the distribution of farming machinery and motor vehicles through a company called Queens Bridge Motors, the Head office being in Melbourne near the bridge of that name. This company was taken-over by Ron Brierly in the 1960's.

Grandpa even looked like what a small boy would expect Father Xmas to look like. He had a long flowing beard, gentle manners and smiling eyes. I still think back on this man with great affection, he always had some time to spare for me and the first tears that I can remember ever shedding over the loss of a loved one were shed the day I heard that he had been killed in a car accident.

He was out in his old Buick inspecting a property he had near Hamilton and on the way home he was hit by a train on a level crossing.

In the country there were no gates on these crossings. This line had only one train a fortnight and you could see down the line in both directions for many a mile. It is hard to see how he could have met his fate at this particular spot. It has been said that he may have suffered a heart attack while driving. He was a non-drinker, I must add, so that does seem to be a likely cause.

He was known throughout the district as E.B., his Christian name initials. He took an interest in local politics being a councillor of the Hamilton Shire for many years and served as its President. He was a staunch supporter of the Lutheran church and I believe the beautiful church at Tarrington would never have been built without his support. His generosity was so wide that it could not be kept secret, but he was not the kind of man who went looking for publicity. As you can see, to this small boy he was not only my Grandpa but my hero. He died in 1936, aged seventy-five.

The shearing season at Morpor was always the big occasion of the year with something like six thousand sheep to be shorn, then dipped, and the wool bailed and carted to the station.

We were allowed into the wool-shed and had a lot of fun jumping up and down in the wool bales doing our little bit towards packing the wool down; that they used the wool-press anyway was beside the point. I suppose we were often in the way but many of the shearers had families of their own which they had to leave at home, so we youngsters were generally made welcome by them not only in the wool-shed but also in their quarters.

We joined them during their smokos, the short breaks they had at fairly frequent intervals for a 'cupper' as they called a mug of tea, and a roll-your-own cigarette. In those days most men on the land seemed to smoke. In Dad's case it was a pipe of Log-cabin flake-cut tobacco which came in a 4-oz. tin was his favourite smoke.

After the shearing came the dipping. The sheep-dip was close by the shearing shed and the sheep pens were interconnected. The dip itself was made of concrete and was about forty feet long, sunk into the ground to a depth of six to seven feet and filled with a solution of water and sheep-dip of sufficient strength to kill all known parasites so long as each sheep was held under the water with the aid of a crutch for short periods during its swim down the dip.

The dip was only as wide as the largest sheep so that they could not turn back on each other and try to escape from the end from which they were pushed. The dippers, the men, would stand on either side of the dip with their crutches which were something like a shepherd's crook made with a handle about six feet long and a shaped cross-piece about fourteen inches long.

As the sheep swam from one end to the other they were pushed under several times before they got to the ramp at the far end. As they walked up they would shake themselves and a lot of the wash would run off them and back into the dip. This meant that the same solution would do a big mob of sheep and one day when it was all over for the day, so I was told, at the age of four I had what I thought was a good idea - I'd put little brother John aged two, through the dip too!

While Dad and the others were moving the dipped sheep I pushed John off the edge into the dip and using a crutch in a very professional manner I was gently pushing John back under the water each time he came up gasping for air and trying to cry out for help.

Dad was some distance away and when he spotted me and not being able to see John anywhere he guessed what it was I was doing. Dad always did pride himself on how well he could run and in no time at all he had hurdled the fences, grabbed John by the hair, heaved him out of the dip, and immersed him in the sheep-trough of fresh water close by. After a good wash-down, Dad gave me little John by the hand with strict instructions to walk him up and down the paddock until he was dry.

John had had a beautiful head of snow-white hair, but no more. It was now dyed the dirty mustard colour of the sheep-dip and the mere fact that he was still alive probably was enough for Mum to be happy to wait until the colouring had grown out.

It was considered punishment enough for me to have learnt the lesson, through seeing Dad's reaction, that little brothers do not need dipping.

We had no electricity. Lighting was by Aladdin lamps which burnt kerosene and were smoky if you tried to get too much light from them. The radio was operated by a car battery and as the battery became flat so the reception died away. We had a record player called a gramophone; you wound it up by a handle and if you didn't do this the music became slower and slower and finally became a terrible noise.

My favourite record was called That daring young man on the flying trapeze, a hit record at the time and a gift from Uncle Martin and Aunt Mary when they came to stay one holiday. There were a lot of other records, all 78 rpm. of course, as there was nothing else, but it was that one that has stayed with me.

We had no refrigerator, very few people had in those days, certainly not us without any power. In its place we had what was known as a Coolgardie-safe. It was like a kitchen safe with sides made of fly-wire, so that the air could pass through it, and lined with hessian which was kept moist by a tray of water at the top. This water dripped down all sides of the hessian and really did have a cooling effect, important during the hot summer days of that area.

Visitors to Morpor were few and far between and generally at Xmas time as there were several good beaches within thirty miles.

Warrnambool was the biggest centre but its beaches were thought to be too dangerous for little children. It had a beautiful botanical garden for picnics, whereas Port Fairy with its two beaches, one for surfing and one protected by a breakwater, was our favourite.

It had an ice-cream kiosk and swings and slippery-dips, and all the other usual play-ground equipment, as well as a picnic area where you could be out of the sun.

Of these visitors the first one that comes to mind is Uncle Frank, as we called him, and his family - his wife and Frank junior. It was only recently, fifty years on, that I learnt that Uncle Frank was indeed Mum's true brother, his name being Marett as was Mum's until her adoption by the Noskes.

Then there was the visit from Uncle Martin, Dad's lawyer brother from Adelaide, and his family. He brought the record I have already written about. On their only visit to Morpor they had Robert with them. He was John's age; their two other children, Michael and Rosemary were born later.

They arrived in their Essex car, a box-shaped sedan without a radiator. On the long trip all the way from Adelaide on a hot summer's day they had to keep stopping to let the engine cool down. I thought it a very elegant car with its wind-up windows, plush seats and interior, protected from the weather by its hard-top roof.

An annual visitor was an Indian hawker with his horse-drawn van on which the sides opened out to show his wares. He seemed to carry almost everything from pots and pans to materials and clothing. I don't know that we ever bought anything from him but he used to camp overnight at Morpor and I was allowed to go calling on him just before bed-time.

I was fascinated by his turban, the way he spoke, and by what he was cooking on his open fire for his tea. He used to share some of it with me and to this day I have no idea what it was I was eating but I do remember the aromas - and they weren't curry. My interest in exotic foods was probably aroused at this time.

I have already mentioned Hawkesdale briefly but there was a little more to the town than that. It was the main focal point for most of our activities.

As towns go it was really very small; two miles away from the railway siding of the same name, a Post Office with less than 100 mail-boxes one of which was ours. The so-called hotel relied on commercial travellers, such as wool and skin buyers who were working the area, to book what accommodation they had. For its bar trade it depended on farm hands from the surrounding district and the shearers and their followers, a hard-drinking mob of blokes as a rule, and bar fights were not uncommon.

Of the two churches, one was Catholic, the other Church of England. The Catholic priest came from Koroit fifteen miles to the south and the vicar from Penshurst ten miles to the north. It was some years later that there was a Lutheran church opposite the State school. Dad was a moving figure in its inauguration and if not playing the organ he was the lay reader. There was no regular clergyman for quite some years.

The biggest and most modern building in the town was the Shire Hall, the H.Q. of the Minhamite and District Shire Council. At one time Dad had ambitions of becoming a Shire Councillor probably egged on by Grandpa Noske who was very civic conscious, and himself a Councillor in Hamilton. Dad lost by only eighteen votes, the winner being the biggest grazier in the area, a Mr. Lal. Robertson.

It was called a Shire Hall but it would have been more apt to have called it the Shire Council Chamber because that is what it was with offices for the Shire Engineer and Shire Clerk, along with their staffs, incorporated into the building.

There were about twenty private homes in the town, some owned by tradesmen self-employed in the district, and others who were employed by the Council on work such as road maintenance and bridge repairing.

Most of these people, as did Mum and Dad, belonged to the local Tennis Club which had two asphalt courts, and the Golf Club. Both these clubs also had various social events such as card parties throughout the year. Dad was particularly fond of playing bridge, and if not bridge, then solo.

As children, too young to take part in such entertainment, we were generally left in the care of a friend, a Mrs. Warburton, who lived in Hawkesdale down in the flat past the school, whenever there was an evening card game or some such thing going on. If it were a tennis tournament in an afternoon, we were taken along and enjoyed playing with chums. One of these still comes to mind, Dicky Hammett, about my age and the son of the Postmaster.

Hawkesdale also had a race-course. These races were really picnic meetings and held only once or twice a year. On this course they also held gymkhanas. A part was used for inter-school sports which were an annual event.

Did I ever take part in these sports? Yes I did. In the egg-and-spoon race I lost my egg near the beginning, and in the sack-race, I soon lost my balance and fell over. So much for my athletic ability at an early age. Years later as a fourteen-year-old I did get to run on the Adelaide Oval in the Inter-collegiate sports. I may well have finished last but that I did finish was an improvement on my performance in the sports at Hawkesdale. Come to think of it, I was also in the relay race team which wasn't last, but even so it was apparent at that age that I was not destined to become a famous athlete.

Then there were the football matches, Australian Rules, and that Hawkesdale could boast of having its own team, and not a bad one at that, was due to the eagerness of the lads working around about on the sheep-stations. So there always seemed to be something going on in the town.

Finally there was the Bush Nursing