A Fortunate Life

by A B Facey

  After our midday meal on one of the hottest days we had had for late February, we left the fire in the stove as usual, with the saucepan put to one side to simmer. We closed the fire-box doors as we had done for the last two weeks and then drove off to work.

  We had been working for about one and a half hours when the hired man looked up and noticed thick smoke reaching to the sky – it was coming from, we thought, a scrub plain behind the house. We couldn’t see properly in that direction on account of a small hill which was between where we were working and the house. We both jumped into the cart and drove off to investigate – and what a shock we got. The house was on fire. It was burning fiercely, so fiercely that we couldn’t get within a chain of it. The grass all around it was also alight. We had to grab a bush each and beat the grass-fire out, and by the time we had done that, everything – the house and everything in it – was destroyed.

  I was left with only the old felt hat that I was wearing, a flannel shirt, a pair of working trousers, and a pair of socks and boots – that was all. Most of Evelyn’s clothing – she had taken her best clothes with her – the children’s clothing and the pram were destroyed.

  This was a terrible blow for us – we only had a small insurance policy for fire, and that covered some of our furniture. The house, which had been built about three years before, only had a two hundred pound fire policy on it. We had to do all our work over again.

  We had some poultry sheds close to the house, together with incubators and chick-brooders, and these were all lost in the fire. The man working for us also lost everything, his best suit and rugs, everything. I had to go some three miles to a store to get some bedding and food to carry on with until we could build a humpy to live in temporarily.

  The fire was probably started when a can of phosphorous rabbit poison I kept on a shelf above the stove exploded. I kept it there so that it would be out of reach of the children. The heat from the fire and from the roof above on that particularly hot day would have been enough to cause the can to explode.

  After a few weeks we employed a carpenter who built us another house; a four-roomed, jarrah weatherboard house with an iron roof and a brick chimney, all of new materials. It had verandahs back and front and we could only afford to line the main bedroom and loungeroom properly – the rest of the house was lined with hessian. There was no bathroom and an old galvanised wash-tub was carried into the kitchen so that Evelyn could carry out the Saturday evening bath and hair-washing ritual. The water was heated in kerosene tins on the stove. Evelyn also did the family wash in this tub – with wash-board and home-made soap.

  We never lost any stock; we managed to keep the fire from spreading into the paddocks. Building and refurnishing took all our money so we were back to where we had started.

  That year we managed to put in three hundred acres of wheat and fifty acres of oats for hay. My health was a little better, the country life was good for me. I was able to work long hours as long as I didn’t overdo the lifting. The average man could lift a bag of super or wheat but I used to handle only a four-gallon tin at a time. This took me longer but saved me over-straining myself. Evelyn always helped a lot with the physical farm work and this made it easier for me.

  The sheep were our mainstay, in fact they kept us in food and helped us to buy extras for the new house.

  Our 1924–25 harvest was good. We got fifteen bushels per acre average from our wheat, and about sixty tons of hay from the fifty acres of oats. Wheat prices were good. However, the price of wool fell to two shillings per pound, which was down sixpence per pound on the previous two shearings.

  By 1926 we were starting to get on our feet again.

  In the 1927 seeding period we put five hundred acres in and it turned out to be a bad year for wheat. We got a lot of rain in March and April. One storm in March rained over four inches in about three hours. We had two one-thousand-yard dams on the property. One was there when we took over the property and the other we put down ourselves. The March storm put soil, straw, leaves and rubbish into both dams to such an extent that they were three parts full. Our neighbours were in the same plight, so we all joined in and gave each other a helping hand to clean the dams out again, so as to be sure of enough water for the stock through next summer.

  After the March storm we got several inches in April, and then no more until well near the end of June, and then the winter rains came and we got too much and most of the wheat became water-logged. Then the hot weather followed, making the ground dry and hard, so the crop was retarded and never recovered – it was a failure. The wool prices fell further, making it a really bad year.

  We did, however, have our good times – and there were always plenty of these to make everything worthwhile.

  The annual Wickepin Agricultural Show was always a highlight in our lives. The children who were old enough to exhibit used to enter all sorts of things – farm produce, sewing, cooking, flowers, and so on. If they won any prizes, which were always announced towards the end of the day, they would line up to collect the prize money and then rush off to spend it before it was time to go home.

  Evelyn used to be sewing for weeks before the show so that the children would all have new outfits for the occasion. They always looked grand. (We had five children by 1927 – Joseph was born in that year and Barbara was born in 1925.)

  Another highlight was the monthly trip into town on Saturday morning for the provisions. Whenever possible the whole family would go in on these trips. It was about ten miles and we’d all dress up for the occasion and drive in in the open cart. If the weather was wet all the children were dressed in black reversible raincoats and matching sou’-wester hats. They used to look like a group of little old witches sitting in the cart behind me.

  A funny thing happened one time when Barney took Evelyn in for the stores. I was too busy on this day to afford the time and so we decided that Barney was old enough to take charge.

  In the mid-afternoon they still hadn’t come back and heavy storm clouds began to build up rapidly. It got darker and darker and they still weren’t home and I was getting very worried. I was wondering whether to set out on foot to look for them.

  The storm broke and darkness fell, there was thunder, lightning and heavy rain, and I was worried stiff pacing up and down the verandah. (The verandah was completely closed in with chicken-wire to keep the poultry out and the small children in.) I couldn’t think what had happened to them and was blaming myself for not going in with them.

  Suddenly, through the heavy rain and thunder, I heard a ‘coo-ee’ coming from down the track. (It was a signal that Evelyn and I used to contact each other at a distance.) I was so relieved that I took off in that direction, forgetting where I was, and went straight through the chicken-wire. I fell, tangled in a mess on the ground. Everyone always thought it was very funny.

  Our evenings were also very pleasant. We’d all sit around and play cards and other games and listen to gramophone records. One day while I was in Wickepin I bought a battery-operated wireless. The children were delighted by it. We particularly looked forward to sitting down of an evening and listening to a serial about farm life called Dad and Dave.

  As the children got older I also used to enjoy gathering them in front of the fire in winter and reading stories to them. One of the favourites was Lasseter’s Last Ride by Ion Idriess.

  I also built a tennis court at the side of the house – it was only gravel, but we all enjoyed it. I made the net out of binder-twine and fashioned the racquets from pieces of timber. The only problem was that Evelyn always had plenty of cut and grazed elbows to patch up.

  One event that is very vivid from this time was when a snake crawled under the house one day when I was away working. Olive decided that she would try to coax it out with a bowl of milk. She put the milk just out from the edge of the verandah and stood on the verandah above it with a garden hoe. While she was standing there waiting the cat came along and drank the milk. After locking it indoors and replac
ing the milk, she took up her position again and waited. She waited half the day and then just before dark the snake came out and she chopped it up with the hoe. When I came home she was very excited and told me all about it. She said, ‘It was a long wait but it was really worth it.’

  Our children were wonderful and were always a great joy to Evelyn and I. We were very proud of them.

  64

  DEPRESSION

  The 1928–29 year was also a bad year. We got too much rain and the paddocks were water-logged before the end of May. We were only able to put a crop in on the higher ground – all our flat land was too boggy to carry the horses or the machinery. But we managed to carry on and hope for the best. Wool prices declined further.

  The following year was the best harvest that we had. Over five hundred acres of wheat were put in, and we had eight thousand bags of wheat for sale in 1930. We were advised to put the wheat in storage. The advice came from the Agricultural Department through their Inspectors, and also from the bank managers. The price of wheat had fallen to below five shillings per bushel. The advice to store our wheat was because they were sure that the price would rise to well over five shillings in a month or two, so we took this advice and stored our wheat.

  The firms who stored our wheat advanced us three shillings and sixpence per bushel so we could carry on. The storage was free and we were at liberty to sell at any time we wished. All we had to do was to send a telegram authorising the sale if the price went up to a level that suited us. But now the disaster came. Wheat never recovered, in fact the price fell to a level below the advance we had received. And as it fell further we had to make up the difference between the advance and the lower price, whatever it happened to be. Finally we actually sold our eight thousand bushel bags of wheat for the sum of one shilling and seven pence per bushel.

  That wasn’t the worst – our wool clip for the 1931 year returned us threepence halfpenny per pound. And we owned some of the finest merino sheep in the district. Our position was becoming hopeless. Wheat growing was a failure because of over-production and no export markets. The Government would not help.

  Now to top all that was the rabbit-plague – they came in thousands. They not only destroyed our crops, they also took acid grass and stock food out of our paddocks to such an extent that the sheep and cattle, or any beasts that chewed a cud, were unable to get sufficient acid food to make the stomach work to digest the food. So these animals lay down and died in horrible agony. We tried all kinds of treatment to no avail. We paid veterinary doctors but still our sheep and cattle died. The veterinarians called this thing toxic paralysis. We lost all our cows, seven of them within one week of becoming sick, and eight hundred sheep within four months in spite of our hand-feeding oats and hay to them daily.

  My health broke down and I had to go to hospital for one month in 1932. I was very ill, my left arm was useless and there was a bad swelling under the shoulder blade. After fourteen different X-rays they were not able to find what was wrong with it. I couldn’t raise my left arm any higher than my shoulder so the doctors decided to do an exploratory operation. The operation found a piece of a bullet that must have chipped off the bullet that had gone into the fork of my collarbone and down into my body. A fibrous tumor had formed around it making my left arm useless. The operation that was supposed to take about twenty minutes lasted about two and a half hours.

  When I returned home we were just about down and out. There wasn’t any assistance coming from the Government to the farmers. Things were so bad that the city people who were out of work – there were thousands of them – had to be paid enough by the Government to just buy their food. The farmers were told that the Government would pay them ten shillings per week for every man they could keep on their farm. However, we had a full job trying to keep ourselves, so we couldn’t keep an extra mouth on the Government’s ten shillings a week.

  We did have one very pleasing thing happen at this time. The state of Western Australia had a baby competition. The state was divided into districts for this purpose. Our baby at the time was our youngest daughter, Matilda Shirley, who was about four months old at the time of the judging. Several places were clubbed together to make a district. Our daughter was entered in the Great Southern District, which included Wickepin. There were twenty-six districts. Our daughter won the first prize for our District and was selected to go to the final judging. The winner of this final judging would be declared Western Australian Champion. Our baby came fourth and the judges told my wife she was placed fourth because she had a small birthmark on her arm, otherwise she was the most perfect baby in Western Australia. This was one of the proudest days of our lives.

  In the middle of the year I received shattering news. Grandma had died at Bruce Rock a few days before – on July first 1932. She was a hundred years old. Her funeral was on the third and I missed it.

  Grandma was a wonderful woman and had looked after me and my brothers, Roy and Eric, like we were her own children. She was the closest to a mother that I had ever had. If it wasn’t for her I would have been completely on my own for all those years before I came home from Gallipoli and married Evelyn. She was a strong, capable and warm-hearted woman, always ready to help. Grandma Carr was respected and admired by everyone who knew her. Many of the people born in the Wickepin District have her to thank for their birth. She was always on call as a midwife.

  I was very upset that I hadn’t been able to see her from the time I went to the war. I always wanted to but it was never possible. We did exchange letters but that was not the same. Although it is expected, the death of someone like Grandma is always a tragedy when it happens.

  Things continued to get worse. I made a special trip to the city late in 1932 to see the Minister for Agriculture and the manager of the Soldiers Settlement Scheme, and also the manager of the Agricultural Bank. I pointed out to them the hopelessness of trying to carry on unless we were supplied with enough rabbit-netting to put around our property to control the rabbit menace. But all to no avail. There were hundreds of soldier settlers leaving their properties and shifting to the city, or large country towns, as they were starved out. Many of the farmers had been on their farms for over twenty years.

  Things were becoming so bad that the machinery people who sold farming equipment to the farmers on terms were repossessing the machinery without court orders, and a lot of the settlers who didn’t understand the law let them do this.

  When it was too late to save the many hundreds of farmers who had already left their farms, the Government passed a bill placing a moratorium on all debts to try and keep those that were still there from leaving. We had a National Government at the time which changed its name to Liberal, but it never helped the farmers to buy their few stores to live on, or in any other way. All farmers were broke.

  One day, at about this time, a chap representing the Agricultural Bank came to see me to try to get a promise of payment on money owing to them. I was out harvesting at the time.

  On a previous visit the same man had been shown a dress that Olive had made herself out of an old disused tent. She was very fond of sewing and Evelyn couldn’t afford to let her practise on good material so she gave her the old tent. Olive was very proud of the dress she had made and liked to wear it about.

  On this particular day when I was harvesting, she turned up, appropriately dressed in her dress, with my morning tea while I was talking to the man from the bank. He seemed suitably impressed and went quiet on his demands for money. I talked on through morning tea about the hard time we were having of things, and how no one would help us at all. It was something that made me very angry and I let him know.

  After morning tea I decided that the harvester needed a slight adjustment so I went around to the tool box to get a spanner. When I came back to where the man was, he took one look at me with the spanner in my hand and took to his heels across the paddock. He obviously thought I was going to strike him. Olive and I thought it was a great joke – we never saw t
he poor man again.

  However, the general worry and anxiety were too much for me by this time and so my doctor sent me to hospital in Perth. While in hospital I decided to pack up and leave our farm. We had six children now and I couldn’t keep them all on the farm. So when I was discharged from the hospital I made enquiries about finding employment in or near the city – I was prepared to do anything. A patient who was in the hospital (he had a business north of Perth) offered me a job as a truck driver carting lime from his lime-kilns to the city, a distance of twenty-six miles. I accepted this, explaining that it would take me about two weeks to fix up and arrange the shifting. He agreed and set a date for me to start.

  I returned to the farm and we got busy with the job of shifting. My wife was delighted and said that if we had stayed on the farm we would have faced starvation. We were packed up and ready to leave the farm within ten days. We sent our furniture and personal belongings by rail in a sealed furniture truck and a neighbour drove us to Perth in his car.

  65

  RETURN TO THE CITY

  On arriving back in the city we rented a house in a suburb north of Perth. It was February sixteenth 1934. My work was twenty-six miles north of Perth at Wanneroo and I had to camp there as there weren’t any houses at the job. In fact the nearest house was seven miles away. So I had to leave my wife and family and camp at my work until we could erect a humpy near the lime-kilns. Our boss helped us to do this. Then we were all together again. The only trouble now was that there was no school nearby for our children so Evelyn commenced to teach them herself with the help of the correspondence people.

  Our eldest son, Barney, had left school just before we left the farm and he got a job at the kilns with me. Our humpy was too small for us all so he had to live in a tent outside.