A Country Nurse

by Thea Hayes

  It was a great wedding; some partied on all night. I went to bed about 3 a.m., mindful of having to get back to the shop the next morning, but Ralph didn’t return until about 5 a.m. And what a mean thing I had to do.

  ‘Sorry, Ralph, don’t go to bed. We have to leave now.’

  Who would want to run a corner store?

  Our boys were home from school for the weekend, with Penny aged just five. By the time we got back from Kingaroy they had opened the shop and started serving our customers. It was their first time behind the counter. They did a good job too. The customers seemed very happy.

  7

  Life as a dairy farmer

  When Ralph took over the milking, our previous dairy man Owen gave him a hand until Ralph was able to employ young people, one at a time from the Ipswich Social Services, to help him. Having no other accommodation except our house, that’s where they had to live. They were a diverse lot of unemployed youth, sometimes turning up for work and sometimes not. Some showed an interest, and some couldn’t have cared less, and in general the girls were much more reliable than the boys.

  After I found one of the young men in our bedroom, about to help himself to something from my dressing table, Ralph and I realised this set up was not going to work. Our house was too small to accommodate both our family and the hired staff. The alternative was for me to help Ralph with the milking.

  I had never milked a cow before and the only time I had seen cows milked was when I was eight years old, when my mother, brother Terry and I camped with a friend on a dairy farm on the Macquarie Rivulet on the road to Bowral. Terry and I would go to the dairy nearly every day from our campsite to watch the milking; having never been on a farm before, we were fascinated.

  After running a corner store, I didn’t mind milking at all—anything was better than being a shopkeeper, so I became a dairy farmer with my husband.

  Ralph would get up at 4.30 a.m. and ride up to the back paddocks to bring in the dairy cows, while I made him tea and toast, a pre-milking cuppa.

  Penny was now going to and from school on the school bus, which picked her up at the end of our driveway, 200 metres from the house.

  We had a walk-through dairy. The cows would come into the yard and be ushered into the bales. A chain would be put across their rumps. One cow, Snake, was always cranky so she had a leg rope to keep her from kicking. They would all get a measure of grain; their teats were washed and milking cups were applied. After they were milked, the gate in the bales was pushed open and the cows went off to feed for the day or night or to graze on irrigated pasture.

  At no time in my life had I ever complained of a bad back until I started milking. Sitting on a forty centimetre block of wood, leaning forward and down to place the dairy cups on the teats of each cow, then back down to take them off while looking up to see the flow of milk all the time, was excruciating. Not only did I have a pain in my back but in my neck as well. After the first week I couldn’t wait to get to a chiropractor. I became a regular visitor to Mr Kennedy’s chiropractic practice in Toowoomba.

  After milking the 120-odd cows, we would take them down to the electric fenced area full of rich ryegrass which was constantly fertilised and irrigated. Fertilise and irrigate, fertilise and irrigate; every day the same. Have you ever carried and laid irrigation pipes after a huge frost? Our aluminium irrigation pipes were twenty feet long, we had to move them every morning to a new section of ryegrass, which had to be fertilised every day with the fertiliser spreader, before we started irrigating. When we had a frost, the pipes were like ice, but we still had to pick them up, carry them to the new site, connect them together and then turn on the pump.

  Ralph and I enrolled in a five-day artificial insemination course at the University of Queensland farm in Brisbane, to learn how to inseminate a cow with semen from a bull. It meant getting up at 4 a.m. to milk the cows to get down to the university farm by 8 a.m.

  We were instructed in how to watch for oestrus (the heat period in a cow that lasts twenty-four hours). Artificial insemination or AI needed to be carried out twelve hours after oestrus. We had lessons on the anatomy of a cow and how to insert the semen. I guess being a nurse helped with the anatomy.

  We were taught how to insert a straw of semen from a liquid nitrogen canister into an AI gun and hold it in the right hand, while inserting a gloved left hand into the anus to feel for the cervix below. We then had to insert the gun into the entrance to the uterus and inject the semen. But it’s not easy to feel the cervix with your hand in the rectum and to find the cervical opening. It took Ralph and most of the other pupils two days to get ‘the feel’, but I still couldn’t get the hang of it.

  What’s wrong with me? I began to think.

  Suddenly, on the third day, I could feel ‘it’—the opening of the cervix—and everything fell into place. One Holstein Friesian cow was so large I had to stand on a stool, with my face level with her anus; thank goodness she saved her business for later.

  It would be early evening by the time we returned home after the AI course, and the old girls in the dairy yard would be getting agitated waiting to be milked.

  It was a very educational week, enabling Ralph and I to AI our dairy herd with great success. It’s a great feeling when you help create a living creature, and when the calf is born you feel so proud.

  In 1985 when Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen was premier of Queensland and the South East Queensland Electricity Board employees went on strike, I remember we only had power for two hours in the morning and two in the evening. We faced a dilemma: would we feed ourselves or milk the cows? The cows took precedence and we didn’t have a hot evening meal any night that week.

  We were dairying when the Commonwealth Games were on in Brisbane in 1982 at the QE11 Stadium. It was wonderful to watch it all on TV after milking in the morning and before milking in the evening. We also went to Expo 88 in Brisbane in 1988. A quick trip down and back. The theme of Expo 88 was ‘Leisure in the Age of Technology’, and the mascot was an Australian platypus named Expo Oz—a life sized platypus in bright colours, framed by a Ken Done sculpture of the word Australia. The site of Expo 88 was across the river from the CBD where old houses and wharves had existed. It is where South Bank is today. Thirty-five nations took part. It was a World Fair, a wonderfully exciting time, and promoted Brisbane as a tourist destination throughout the world. We enjoyed it so much, we envied the Brisbanites who could go anytime.

  Our dairy herd improved, and we gradually changed from Jersey and Shorthorn to Holstein Friesians. We even became serious about showing heifers at a Friesian heifer show in Toogoolawah—a great education in the daily handling and conformation of cattle, which was so very different to station cattle in the Outback, which were usually handled less than once or twice a year, if that.

  But the relentless dairying lifestyle was very hard to take. In 1983, after a few years, we decided to sell our dairy cows and change to beef cattle.

  There hadn’t been a dairy sale in the area for years and the locals were predicting a very good result for us. Of course, I wanted to have the best auctioneers, choosing a Brisbane firm in preference to a local. My first mistake.

  At this time dairies were being advised to test their herd for EBL—Enzootic Bovine Leucosis, also known as Bovine Leukaemia.

  As not many local herds had been tested and since ours appeared very healthy, we decided not to test. However, when the sale catalogues arrived, the auctioneer had put on the cover ‘Dairy Cows EBL Free’. Instead of demanding a new catalogue be printed, without ‘EBL free’, we decided to test. When the results came back, we were devastated. Forty-six of our best cows were diagnosed with EBL and sent off to the meat works.

  It was absolutely tragic. For weeks I would wake up in the middle of the night with the number ‘forty-six’ illuminated, flashing in and out of my brain.

  A month later we had our dairy sale, conducted by the local auctioneer, Shepherdson and Boyd. It was pretty ordinary—121 head of dairy cat
tle were sold—but at least we were out of dairying, and could concentrate on building up a herd of Murray Grey cattle.

  8

  Our Queensland workers’ cottage

  Life was so busy, and with The Corner Store and the property there was no time to worry about the state of our Queensland workers’ cottage, with its flyspecked, tongue and groove walls and rough wooden floors; a far cry from our last home at Wave Hill Station. Ralph, of course, had to live out there when he took over the milking—it became a ‘bachelor pad’. Jason moved to the farm to help Ralph, catching the bus to school each morning, while Penny and I lived at the shop. We planned to think about improvements when I moved out of the shop and onto the farm. This was our very first home of our own and we had plans aplenty to improve it. But as long as we had no visitors, renovating could wait until later.

  A Queensland workers’ cottage can be very attractive, with an open front veranda, a front door in the middle and two windows on either side. Unfortunately, the previous owners had at some stage hung a killer (a beast killed for meat) from a rafter on the front veranda, which collapsed the beam. The quickest solution for us, not knowing at the time that we would disfigure the essence of a Queensland workers’ cottage, was to have the front veranda closed in. We really needed the extra room, but the house never looked very attractive after that.

  Some friends of ours, Pat and Grey Lapthorn from the Gold Coast, came to visit just after we purchased the property. Pat and I were discussing renovation ideas, when I asked Grey’s opinion on the removal of a wall to enlarge the lounge room.

  His reply? ‘Well, Thea, I know what I would do. I’d hire a bulldozer and knock the whole house down.’

  Well, really! This was our very first home and Ralph and I were quite sure we could improve it.

  Tim and Faye, my brother and sister-in-law, and their children flew out from America to visit my mother in Wollongong. I flew down with Anthony and Penny to meet them for a family get-together. David and Jason stayed home to help Ralph with the milking.

  It was wonderful to see everyone. My other brothers Tony and Terry were there too, and everyone wanted to know all about our new place. Especially Tim and Faye.

  ‘Dying to see your property,’ they kept saying.

  Oh no, I thought, the house is so horrible. But I said, ‘Oh yes, I’d love you to come!’

  They quickly agreed. I hadn’t realised they were serious about coming to see our farm.

  After Anthony, Penny and I returned, Ralph drove down to pick them up at Ellerston, Kerry Packer’s Hunter Valley property, just out from Scone in NSW, which some of our friends were managing.

  As soon as Ralph had left, I rang my mother-in-law, Cudge, and asked her if she would come out to the farm to help me do an urgent make-over on our dilapidated farmhouse. For three days we cleaned, scrubbed, painted and put grass matting all over the old floorboards. Brightly coloured cushions and quilt covers were thrown around with gay abandon and by the time we had finished the place had been transformed—well, up to a point. The kids and I were sitting around our now much more stylish house, pretending it always looked vogue-ish, when Ralph arrived back with Faye and Tim.

  Ralph looked around and exclaimed, ‘Good heavens, what the hell have you done to this old dump?’

  Thanks, Ralph, for giving the game away. We did have a good laugh when Tim and Faye heard of the panic we had been in.

  During my first year on the farm I started painting the inside of house, as the boys were home for the school holidays to help Ralph in the dairy. I painted for weeks, filling in the gaps of the tongue and groove wall panels with loads of the miracle product ‘No More Gaps’. I carefully painted the unique scrolls above the doorways and in the hallways that came with all Queensland workers’ cottages.

  As soon as the painting was finished—seemingly using hundreds of tonnes of ‘off white’—we had a free-standing wood-burning stove put in the lounge room.

  Our attempts to beautify the floors were not as straightforward, particularly in relation to the faux-lino cork tiles in the kitchen. After a day at the local races, Ralph dropped a bucket of hot ashes on the lino, wanting to light the barbeque outside, causing much damage to the floor. After repairs, it was then my turn to be the centre of a new lino drama: I dropped a red-hot frying pan onto the floor. By then the carpet and tile man had no trouble finding our property. We ended up with three layers on the floor. No drafts coming up through the floorboards now.

  Our pianola brought us much enjoyment. We would all stand around singing as we followed the words on the rolls. But it was hard to find a pianola tuner, which is necessary to keep the pianola in tune—it needs to be done once a year. Fortunately, we had been told of a pianola tuner, John Rowse, who was the only one in Queensland and came each year to tune our pianola, before making a date for the following year.

  One year I completely forgot the date of his visit. Visitors were coming for lunch, Robyn and Graham Fulcher our Territorian friends, bringing Miriam and Alan Hagen from Muckaty Station, near Renner Springs in the Northern Territory, where David had worked as a jackeroo. This particular time, the dining room table was just in front of the pianola where we were all sitting eating, when John the pianola tuner knocked on the door.

  I greeted him and apologised, saying it wasn’t a convenient time. Could he come back another day?

  ‘No, I’m sorry, but I won’t be back for another year.’

  My poor guests had to put up with the ding, dong, gong, song, ting, again and again and again for about ten minutes. We couldn’t move anywhere else as we were in the middle of our meal, so we sat on, hardly hearing one another talk. Everyone except me thought it was so funny.

  Every couple of months we would get together with the Dorans and the Fulchers who also lived in South-East Queensland, reminiscing about our lives in the Outback. Jocelyn and Tim Doran were great friends from the Northern Territory who worked on several Vesley properties before moving south. We had a Territory reunion one year, partying on until the early hours. We loved getting together with our Territory mates.

  My mother came to stay at the farm for a couple of weeks from Wollongong, where she lived unhappily in a retirement village. ‘Full of old people,’ she said.

  When she was seventy-eight, my mother had a deep-seated cerebral haemorrhage. We were still at Wave Hill at the time, but I flew down to Wollongong expecting the worst. She recovered, even flying up to Wave Hill for a visit and to America to visit Tim and family in the following year. Knowing she was unhappy at the retirement village, I wanted her to stay and live with us in Queensland, but she said ‘no’. I wasn’t surprised—at the time our life with a corner store and a dairy wasn’t an especially pleasant option for a woman of her age.

  About a year after her visit to us, my beautiful mother passed away aged eighty-two, from another cerebral haemorrhage.

  After the boys left school and worked or went to the university in Toowoomba, they often brought their friends down to the farm. We always had someone visiting.

  Over the years we employed Mark Gardner, a farmer friend, builder and great carpenter to help us improve the house. At one stage the site for the washing machine was on the ground outside the back door. We removed walls, enlarged the kitchen and bathroom areas, and added verandas to the back and side of the house. Years later, when I came to Toogoolawah for my dear friend Jill Roughan’s funeral, I stayed the night at Bidgi. It seemed much bigger than I remembered, and I was surprised at how comfortable and pleasant it looked.

  9

  Back to nursing

  With the boys still away at school, expenses were very high. I decided I would go back to nursing, and in 1982 applied to Esk Hospital where I was asked to relieve the night sister for a month. I had been away from hospital work for twenty years, so it was a real challenge, especially as I had to learn how to do x-rays and take blood for pathology.

  Esk Hospital was a small, thirty bed hospital 28 kilometres south of Toogoolawah in
the Brisbane Valley, mainly a nursing home for the district but was also used for emergency cases. Critically ill patients would arrive at the front door and ring the bell. The doctor would then be called for and only first aid would be performed by the nurse in charge until the doctor arrived. Seriously ill patients and women in labour would be sent on to Ipswich Hospital by ambulance.

  It was a little nerve-racking, especially when I heard some of the horror stories about patients who arrived too late.

  A young teenager who had won a ticket to ride in a horse trial, similar to a Quilty ride, through the town of Esk, had an enormous allergic reaction to horsehair and died of an asthma attack on the steps of the hospital.

  Another story was of a young girl who, after spraying tomatoes with a chemical spray, accidentally squirted some on her face, and before she could get atropine she died in the car outside the hospital, with her mother blasting the horn. Atropine is an intravenous medication used to treat certain types of nerve agents and pesticide poisonings.

  There was a snake bite incident where the patient was bitten by a brown snake on the ankle, which he had wrapped in his shirt. Fortunately, he arrived at the hospital and was given the antivenom. Though it saved his life, it took a year for the wound to heal.

  Another case I heard of, but not at Esk, was a snake bite victim who decided to drive himself to hospital instead of calling for help and immobilising the wound. By the time he arrived at the hospital, he was bleeding from every orifice and died.

  With these stories in mind, I was lucky to have the Esk general practitioner, who lived on the outskirts of town, to call when needed.

  I would do my rounds as the registered nurse, with my assistant nurse checking on the patients, particularly the incontinent ones. This involved making a list of duties for the morning; collecting urine specimens; taking blood and completing observations—temperature, pulse and respiration—of all my patients.