Introduction
Some years ago, these stories first appeared on our old website.
Websites, like farms, have their seasons. They flourish, they age, and eventually they are replaced by something newer. The old site will soon close its gates for the last time. Most of what was written there will quietly disappear into the digital ether.
But not these.
These are the stories I wanted to keep.
They are small memories from a childhood on a farm on Kangaroo Island – moments of mischief, hard work, mild catastrophe and unintended comedy. None of them are grand. None of them are heroic. They are simply fragments of a time and place that shaped me.
There were many other articles on the old site – political commentary, arguments, opinions formed in the heat of public debate. Those belonged to their moment. These belong to something steadier.
So I’ve gathered them here, not because they are important in any historical sense, but because they still make me smile – and because they carry the voices of people who are no longer standing in that kitchen, or that paddock, or that classroom.
The website may close.
The stories don’t have to.
Running with Cows
A young boy can find plenty to do on 1,500 acres. Yet when Mum announced she was heading off to another farm for a Country Women’s Association meeting – she was the regional president at the time – I leapt at the chance to go along.
There would be other kids, she said. A dozen or so. Hours of fun beckoned.
I can’t remember whose farm it was. I’d never been there before and, mercifully, never went back. The children went to a different school. I never saw them again – and for that I remain grateful.
The resident boy suggested we head down to the river. No plan, just freedom. That was enough.
Before long, we boys decided a mud fight was in order. The girls, displaying superior judgement, chose to sit this one out.
I wasn’t particularly good at it. My mud balls disintegrated mid-flight. If there were official statistics, I would have rated a generous two out of ten. I began to suspect I might have been better off staying home.
But perseverance is a virtue.
If plain mud wouldn’t hold together, I reasoned, I would improve the engineering. A few sticks. A couple of small stones. Structural integrity. Increased range. Possibly aerodynamic superiority.
I crafted what can only be described as the mother of all mud balls. I paused to admire it – a masterpiece of rural ballistics. Genius, I thought.
With all the strength my scrawny frame could muster, I hurled the missile blindly over the stone bridge.
The scream confirmed a direct hit.
I crept forward and peered beneath the bridge. One poor girl stood frozen, her face entirely encased in mud. A thin line of blood trickled where one of my “structural supports” had apparently been less aerodynamic than intended. Her Sunday-best dress was no longer fit for church or civilisation.
Pride evaporated. In its place arrived the cold realisation that I had committed a social crime of biblical proportions.
Flight was the only option.
If I ran back to the farmhouse quickly enough, I could plausibly claim I’d never been at the river. Yes. Excellent plan. No time for the road – I’d cut across the paddocks.
Even as I sprinted, I knew the lie would fail. Justice was coming. My legs pumped faster. Tears arrived uninvited. I was running at record speed while bawling uncontrollably.
I did not notice the cows.
Anyone raised on a farm knows one simple rule: do not run past cattle. They will chase you. If you walk, they walk. If you run like a fugitive fleeing a mud-related war crime, they run like an angry committee.
I ran.
The herd thundered behind me, the bull out front, clearly appointed to lead the investigation. I was certain they intended to kill me. I may have assaulted a girl with agricultural artillery, but I did not deserve to die in a paddock.
The house came into view.
The gate? Where was the gate?
No time for gates. Desperation demanded improvisation. I launched myself over the fence.
That was the first time I had ever encountered an electric fence in a meaningful way. Being tangled in one is an educational experience. I remember thinking, through tears and mild electrocution, “This isn’t my day.”
I am sorry to disappoint you, dear reader, but there is no triumphant resolution. I do not remember escaping the fence. I do not remember reaching the farmhouse. I do not recall the drive home, nor any punishment that may have followed.
Memory has preserved one thing with clarity:
my run with the cows.
Trurio
Speaking of cows, there was one particular dairy cow who, in my considered opinion, was the meanest creature ever born with four legs and a personal vendetta.
Her name was Trurio – as in “goodbye.” I’m not sure who named her, but the sentiment felt appropriate.
Trurio didn’t like me. I didn’t like her. Ours was a relationship built on mutual distrust and simmering hostility.
She had a look about her – head slightly lowered, horns angled with quiet intent, eyes that suggested she had measured you and found you wanting. While the other cows possessed a kind of dull, grassy indifference, Trurio radiated calculation.
One afternoon, fortified by the reckless confidence that only young boys possess, I decided it was time to assert dominance.
I approached from behind, football grasped like a professional lining up for a grand final kick. She was standing peacefully enough, swatting flies, minding her own bovine business.
I took careful aim at the region just below the tail.
Bullseye.
It was, objectively speaking, a magnificent kick.
The reaction was immediate.
Trurio spun with astonishing speed for a creature of her size. Her head dropped, horns forward, and in that instant I understood that diplomacy had failed.
I ran.
A nearby tree became my sanctuary. I scrambled up it with a speed that would have impressed Olympic selectors. Below me stood Trurio, glaring upward, occasionally snorting, making it abundantly clear that this matter was not closed.
Time passed.
Quite a lot of time.
You see, this minor act of war had occurred roughly five hours before milking time.
And Trurio, it turned out, was patient.
She stationed herself beneath the tree like a sentry guarding a prisoner. If I shifted, she shifted. If I leaned, she leaned. Her message was simple: gravity would eventually assist her cause.
I learned a valuable lesson that day.
Never kick a football at an already irritable cow five hours before she is due to be milked.
Unless, of course, you are perfectly content to sit in a tree all afternoon, negotiating with fate, while a nasty piece of work with long horns waits below to determine which comes first – milking time, or your inevitable fall.
The Washing Day from Hell
Washing day was a long day at the best of times.
In summer – if you started early enough – you could get the washing, drying and ironing done in a single day.
Sounds manageable.
It was not.
Every item, once washed, had to be fed through the wringer. One hand guided the wet clothes carefully between two rollers; the other hand turned the heavy handle that squeezed the water out as the fabric passed through. It required coordination, strength and a tolerance for tedium.
Hanging the clothes on the line was the easy part.
The real ordeal began once everything was dry.
We didn’t have the luxury of an electric iron. Ours sat on top of the wood stove to heat. When it was judged sufficiently scorching, a detachable wooden handle was clipped over it and Mum would iron one or two items before the iron cooled and had to be returned to the stove.
Strike while the iron’s hot – literally.
This process repeated itself dozens of times. On a hot summer’s day, Mum stood in the kitchen beside a wood stove belting out punishing heat, pressing shirts and dresses while sweat gathered at her temples.
By late afternoon she had done the whole lot. Washing. Rinsing. Wringing. Hanging. Collecting. Ironing.
There, on the kitchen table, sat the reward: neat, precise piles of folded clothes, sorted according to owner. A day’s labour reduced to order and symmetry. I imagine she felt relief. Perhaps even quiet satisfaction.
Job done, she stepped out of the room.
Now I must introduce my younger brother Geoffrey, about five at the time, and my sister Trish, roughly three. They were the only ones in the kitchen.
When Mum returned, she froze.
The neatly folded piles were gone.
In their place lay one enormous, chaotic heap of screwed-up clothing – a fabric landslide covering the table.
“Who did that?” she roared.
Geoffrey and Trish stared back.
“I did, Mum,” Geoffrey announced, beaming proudly. If anything ever went wrong, Geoffrey was usually involved. His confession surprised no one.
He received the full force of Mum’s indignation. She shook him so vigorously his ears nearly required reattachment.
“Why? Why did you do it?” she demanded.
Geoffrey’s pride dissolved into tears as he tried to explain.
“Trisha knocked them off the table,” he sobbed, “so I picked them up for you.”
Silence.
The day’s exhaustion collided with maternal remorse. A monumental effort had ended not with gratitude, but with a five-year-old’s well-intentioned catastrophe.
Yes, Mum felt bad.
But by the next day, we were all laughing about it.
Anyway, that’s nothing.
Running with cows isn’t much fun either.
Just Another Normal Day
One more story, if I may – one you will never, ever hear happening today. Never.
Our area school sat just outside the town of Parndana – population roughly 150. It boasted a general store and not much else. In those days it didn’t even have a pub, which tells you how modest its ambitions were.
It was 1967. I was in First Year.
Our new Deputy Headmaster, Mr Bennett, had recently arrived. He looked like a cross between Skull Murphy and Benito Mussolini – a formidable presence to young eyes. Broad-shouldered, stern-faced, the sort of man whose shoes alone commanded obedience.
One morning he strode into our classroom and asked a simple question:
“Who’s the fastest runner here?”
Without hesitation we all pointed to Terry.
Mr Bennett beckoned him forward. Terry rose cautiously, as though approaching a firing squad.
The Deputy produced some coins from his pocket and placed them in Terry’s hand.
“I want you to run into town,” he said, “buy me a packet of Craven A, and hurry back as fast as you can.”
Terry nodded, mission accepted.
As he turned to sprint off, Mr Bennett added – with the faintest trace of a smile:
“And Terry… I want the cellophane left on the packet!”
Off Terry ran, representing the school in what may be the only inter-town tobacco relay in Australian educational history.
No permission notes.
No risk assessments.
No parental outrage.
Just another normal day at school, way back when.
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Keep running. Be agile, mobile, erstwhile, but not futile, sterile, servile. Find a target, aim, keep running…
Laundry by hand, in a wood-fired copper, I know. Fortunately we had an electric iron. And electricity. I learnt to iron almost as early as I learnt to handle an axe. The woodchopping was far more fun.
But the mud fight … dear me. I thought every child learnt immediately that the one unbreakable rule of mud fights is not to augment the missile. Of course, that sort of rule was supposed to apply to cracker fights as well, but I still have the scar on my nose that resulted from someone ignoring the rules when he ran out of crackers and lobbed a rock at me instead …
Free range childhood was fun. If you survived.
Oh Michael so many memories. We had fig fights with the kids next door. Their fig tree hung over the fence so we would arm up and then go, All good fun until one of Mary’s figs seemed to have grown with a rock inside it. My brother mildly concussed. No more fig fights. Mum’s old washer was the type with an attached wringer. The clothes would come out like card board. There was a popular song by Mungo Jerry, ln The Summertime, The washer played the back ground riff. if the washer was going when guests were there they would all go home singing it. A friend and l went overseas, my first time. Early twenties. We went to look at a mansion which appeared to be closed. So we scaled the fence and halfway across the field the cows came toward us. At first we were pretty cool with it until they just kept coming at which point we turned to calmly leave. They just kept coming so neither of us having grown up on a farm ran for our lives. And they just kept coming but faster!
If you want to see pigs feeding these days, just go to an all-you can-eat buffet…if they still have them.
1967?
That IS a significant date.
Coming to Elizabeth in SA in 1960 the writer had a good kiddy-hood, we had rock fights, dirt clogs and shanghis. Elizabeth at the margins was still all paddocks. Lots of stumpy lizards skinks, mouse plagues and grasshopper plagues, still planty of trapdor spiders. And ants. Millions of them.
And crackers. Especially useful for the stormwated drains. We suspected cats and the l ike were hiding in them and often lobbed a penny bunger down them to see what turned up, fleeing in terror. At worst, we were horrible young people- an infantile version of the IDF.
Schools could be good, I remembered ny primary school time as really tops at times but high school was a reality jolt.
Cattle.
Dad retired to a country town and down the road there was a paddock with a huge bull, bellowing irritably. I stayed for a bit but the look in his eyes and general movements told me it was good to leave now.
I’ve got a magic neighbour, an active woman who was born in the Barossa, who has more brains than the rest of the street put together, including meself, at her age of ninety.
Ive made friends with her; I trimmed her lawn till the electric mower blew up and for years she has regaled me with stories of the old days.
These people were TOTALLY self -sufficient.
Mungo Jerry? I remember the sideburns/mutton chops.
Harry Lime, some of the species you described may been of the male chauvinist variety?
Who would have thought an intelligent young person could get into so much mischief on a tiny little Kangaroo Island. Heheheheheheh
I am surprised that there was no attempt to sail or row over to the mainland, just because it looked like a good idea to young eyes.
Good memories, well related, laugh out loud material. Thanks, Michael. I was never chased, but as a primary school kid who walked to school I had to traverse a paddock with bulls in it. Always kept an eye on them and a sense of having to run for it if they took offence at my trespassing.
Living in a tiny Adelaide Hills hamlet in the fifties… not much traffic on the road; me and a couple of mates thought it a good lark to hide in the long grass and chuck stones at the odd car that passed by. Until one bloke stopped, found us, read the riot act, game over.
Kids have little comprehension as to potential consequences. We thought putting penny bungers into an orange, lighting the fuse and tossing them like a hand grenade was great fun, until one exploded over the head of a woman walking on the footpath outside the school grounds. Again, game over. Surprised that no-one got caned. Or going to a classmate’s home on a weekend with two or three other kids, a flash house near one of Adelaide’s beaches, big garden – his dad was a pub owner, wealthy – and all of us having a slug gun and a pocketful of pellets and shooting at each other, oblivious to the danger… until getting shot in the arm with the slug embedded under the skin. The rites of passage from idiot child to idiot adult to eventually wash up on the shores a few metres from something that might be called maturity… a painful journey, albeit necessary, working off the karma carried across from the previous existence.
[Minor observation: my kangaroo avatar has disappeared, skipped away as it were. Why?]
Ah one teacher schools At the one I attended the teacher used to go home for lunch(about 1 kilometer) and leave we students to our own devices Great fun was had by all A few bruises and scrapes but nothing serious Were we tougher back then or more careful?
Fixed it for you, Canguro. The culprit was a typo in your email address.
Thank you, Roswell, you are too kind. 🙂
(note to self: pay attention)
Thank you Michael for this collection of your memories which evoked an avalanche of memories of my own-from childhood adventures with my cousins on my Grandfather’s farm where my Grandma made her own butter and cheese. There was no electricity so you went to bed by candlelight, there were outside toilets which were a short walk away from the farm- cleaned out every now and then with the contents added to the natural fertilizer which the animals produced. There was a cold room – dark with no windows with stone benches around each side in which to keep food cool. The sinks were stone – shallow sinks, only downstairs- and years before anything plastic!
My Grandfather cut the grass at ‘hay-making’ time with threshing machine which Dolly- the horse – pulled along. We all were involved in raking the hay and then getting the dry grass into the barn . There was no such thing as a ‘bailer’ in the early 1950’s.
We all remained quite healthy during those early years.
Those memories are distinct from memories of play. We used to play a game called “Slatey” – after school- which involved throwing a ball on to the school roof and calling someone’s name to catch the ball. Occasionally the ball used to get stuck in the gutter and not fall down. This involved someone to go round the back of the school and climb up onto the roof and down the other side to retrieve the ball! It’s a miracle there were no fatalities.
Thanks again Michael for rekindling some rural memories of my own from N. Yorkshire.
Thank you Michael for a wonderful read, many laughs and the return of many of my own memories.
I love cows ….. now ! Wasn’t always so. Poddy calves are friendly little bovines, and always hope anyone and everyone might have a bucket of milk or a bottle. I was only about 5 or so at the time, and caught the interest of a dear little soul who ran toward me at a great speed ( I thought ) capering, as they do, all the way. I was terrified, and bawled me eyes out. Nowadays, I so wish I could revisit somehow, just for a repeat performance. Sadly that is no longer possible.
Wonderful story Michael and real good LOL material.
What does stand out for me is how ignorance (positive/negative) works for and against us; positive in that children just do what they do and genuinely engaged in exploration and play, more’s the pity that helicopter parenting interferes with that natural curiosity now; negative in that those learned habits can become self-serving to the detriment of all around us, animate and inanimate.
There is always consequence from our choices, aware or not.