Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (Picador 40th) (9 page)

— 11 —

AFTERNOON TEA WITH DORIS McKETTERING

I
t is hard to imagine the Mallee before it was cleared. A scribble of thin trees giving off their skeleton light, birds crying into the dry blue air. Now everything is in boxes. The men of the Mallee toil within the straight fence lines of their paddocks. I have swapped the metal box of the train for the timber box of the house, or the houses of others.

In Elsie Ivers' front room I sit with Lola Sprake, Iris Pfundt, Wilma Noy, and Doris McKettering. They are showing me their school photograph –
Wycheproof District School 1915
. The children are balanced on some invisible scaffolding to make a neat pyramid. There are no uniforms. It must be winter as they wear heavy jackets in dark colours. Some of the girls have white hair ribbons tied in big floppy bows that fall down to their shoulders. Growing up here seems to have been an exercise in name-swapping. Lola Sprake started out as Lola Noy, Wilma Noy was Wilma Sprake, Iris Pfundt is unmarried, but her sister, Doris, is now a McKettering. The photograph shows Iris and Doris had two large and handsome brothers, but they were both killed in France, having run away to Horsham to enlist where they could lie about their age without fear of being recognised.

Elsie doesn't feature – she grew up in Boort. Although the Wycheproof women say they didn't know her back then, they knew of her brother who was a champion bicycle racer. He won the Lake Boort picnic race year after year until, at the age of seventeen, he was racing a Buick and the front fender clipped his wheel and dragged him under the car. It seems to me that women should be the ones to carry a name on – we have a better record at continuity.

‘We saw your Sister Crock up at Sea Lake and the cooking girl, what's her name?' Doris McKettering turns the conversation to include me in it.

‘Mary.'

‘Mary. Do you know Wilma's husband gave a report on our trip to the train at the Mechanics' Institute. What did Les say, Wilma, that thing about the grass?'

Wilma settles her teacup on her ample lap. ‘The Better Farming Train can teach a man to grow
one
blade of grass where
two
grew before.'

The women titter.

‘But did you hear Una Wearmouth?' Lola asks no one in particular. ‘I think it was in the home economics lecture. The Sister's going on about kitchen gardens, how you can use your carrots here and your tomatoes there and Una pipes up, ‘What about pigface, Sister? It's the only thing we can grow up here and that's when me husband waters it with the trouser tap!'

Lola slaps her thigh as she delivers the line. She likes to tell a story. Lola and her husband run the Commercial. She's a good barmaid – a listener and a gossip.

Elsie had warned me about Lola earlier as I helped her put out the teacups. ‘She's a bit of a gate is Lola. Not much gets around her.'

A plate of cakes is passed from hand to hand.

Iris from the library encourages us to try her slice. She looks as desiccated as usual in a knitted peach sundress that droops sadly at the back. ‘It's a new recipe, this slice, from a book.' She gives me a dry smile, all cake crumbs and false teeth.

‘I wouldn't have thought there was much on that train that couldn't be found in books.'

‘I liked the chickens,' Doris says. ‘There were some lovely chickens. The big white ones – Wyandottes. And that funny little chick-man. Little Chinese. He was a card. What was his name, Jean?'

‘Mr Ohno – from Japan.'

More laughter. Doris blows tea out of her nose and has to dab at her face with a napkin.

‘Mr Oh-no.' She gasps between dabs. ‘His little feet, Jean, his dear little feet. Do you know I dreamt about his little feet? Like a goat's, they were – cloven.'

I notice Elsie's face is flushed. She chews her lip and seems torn between wanting to protect me and joining in the fun. I can hear the boys outside doing laps of the house, waiting for cake scraps and the dregs from teacups. I think of Mr Ohno's pale pink tongue. Of his cool hands with skin so perfect, so without lines or joins or blemishes they look moulded from clay. I wonder what I am doing with these women whose lives seem to have neither science nor passion.

I clear my throat to gain their attention. ‘Actually Mr Ohno taught me the art of chicken sexing while I was on the train. It can only be done by those with nimble fingers and a quick mind. I believe he does it for pleasure. In fact when I did it I found it quite pleasurable too.'

The women lift their teacups in unison and drink through pursed lips. Elsie picks at a rumball on her plate and shakes her head. There is nothing left to do but leave.

Doris McKettering stops me at the door. She is large and barrel-chested. All of her curves are outwards but in a firm and quite attractive way. She is the only one to meet my eye.

‘My husband, Mrs Pettergree, fancies himself as a bit of a scientist – although he's pure duffer from what I can see. I'm going to send him over. Ern's his name. Tell your husband to expect him.'

Then she pats me gently on the arm and lowers her voice. ‘And don't fret about fitting in. You'll find your place, lovey. Things just move a bit differently in the Mallee.'

I'm well down the driveway when I hear her calling out behind me. When I turn around she's holding a small parcel aloft.

‘Jean. Jean. Leftover cakes. Take a box. Sweeten up that man of yours.'

— 12 —

SOME THOUGHTS ON FENCING

T
he farm is changing Robert's body. He is hardening. Growing some thicker outer crust to his skin. His hands are bigger. Recently I have woken with his hands on my belly and been momentarily confused, thinking that another man is touching me. Orange soil is seeping into his hands. His face is leaner and a deeper red, while the hair on his arms is so white it is almost translucent. When he scoops water to his face in the mornings, his shirtsleeves rolled high, I am reminded of Sister Crock preparing to bathe an infant – water dripping from her forearms like falling light.

On Tuesday 9 April Robert sows
Rannee 4H
south of the house. He sows twenty-three acres with three and a half bags. From 14 to 18 April he sows fifty-four acres with eight bags. On 3 May he sows Wethers thirty-two acres with just under five bags. On 4–6 May he sows the West paddock of twelve acres with two and a half bags of
Ghurka.

On Tuesday 9 April I do out the front room, do out bath, coppers, floors and safe, Bon Ami windows, clean fireplaces, peg out clothes, clean shoes, test new Trio Brite cleanser, bake mutton, potato and onion pie, make rice custard, milk Folly and take her out to graze in the ‘long paddock', water the house trees and experimental plants, sew some school pants for Elsie's boys next door, write to Buckleys & Nunn for a Dr Young's Sanitary Belt and write to Mary.

I ask Mary for advice about Folly, who often gets the better of me. She is hell to catch and has twice broken into the hay shed and eaten herself sick. Mary has enough on her plate with a new husband and a baby on the way and having to support her parents as the depression has hit Gippsland hard, but she always writes back.

After lunch I collect Folly from the roadside and tie her under the peppercorn tree for an Insectibane bucket wash to keep the flies away. The chemicals must sting her udder because she skips around and steps on my toes. Robert is bucket washing the car at the same time and I think I catch him smiling at me as I curse Folly and hop about in pain.

Doris sends her husband, Ern McKettering, and he helps Robert with the fencing. One day Ern brings Robert a dog – an eager collie cross with a tufty coat. Ern says the dog is called Jumbo but Robert calls him Will. The dog trails Robert through the paddocks, nose down and shoulders sloping.

I take tea out into the paddocks where Ern helps Robert to dig a deep, long hole to take an old strainer post. The timber, mainly greybox, is still metal hard after many years in the ground. The first layer of soil is hot and smooth. Tiny grains pour over each other. I stand back and watch as Robert uses the back of his shovel to shore it up. He tells Ern of his time at the Research Station when he saw men with great skill on the shovel. They were trialling new fencing styles and a team of labourers worked with the students digging holes. He saw a man dig perfect holes, square or circular or even a simple triangle, so smooth and clean and deep they looked like an arrow had been shot into the ground. There was another man who had lost a hand in the war yet he dug with a smooth flicking action, the shovel handle pushed high on his stump. Robert said that these men knew the earth intimately. They knew the exact angle at which to use the blade and the depth and force required.

Later Robert and Ern remove an old dogleg fence – a fence like a living cross-stitch of timber without a single nail or strand of wire. Ern brings Doris over for a look before they tear it down because she's in the local historical society. Doris shakes her head at her husband. She doubts anyone would be interested in a dirty old fence. She spends the afternoon in the kitchen and I find her easy company. She tells me about her three boys who are all up in Queensland working on the sugar cane. She laughs at my stories about Sister Crock and is grateful for advice on the double reinforcing of side seams.

After our evening meal I sit with Robert at the kitchen table. He works on his samples, opening wheat heads on the chopping board to search for bunt and smut. I watch him stroke out the arms of a young plant still pale in its early growing while I hem the curtains for the caravan.

Robert has built the caravan from old fencing timber. It is a timber box on an old plough axle to be hooked behind the tractor. It will mean he can go further and work longer without having to come back to the house each night. There is a small window at the front and a door at the back. Inside, a narrow bed and a fold-down table. I make him a mattress for his new bed, stuffing kapok into the calico and finishing it in neat blanket-stitch. I sew a loop onto a white huckabuck guest towel that he hangs on a nail behind the door.

I sit a while in the caravan each day while Robert is out on the farm. It is cool inside and I must check the length of the curtains, but as soon as I am sitting on the narrow bed I fall into an engrossing daydream. I imagine the caravan is my home – and I imagine how I would live in it. My mind carries each of my essential possessions into the tiny space and thinks of ways to arrange them – my books on a shelf above the door, a drawer for clothes under the bed, a corner for my sewing things. The daydream gives me such a sense of completeness and satisfaction I am reluctant to enter the caravan with Robert in case I am drawn into the dream in front of him. I am not sure what it means. It seems to be a wish to be self-contained. There is no space for Robert in the dream, or for science.

‘It is your project,' I say, when he asks me to hold the tape measure. The caravan will take Robert away from me, but it will bring him closer to the land. I would like this closeness too. I would like to lie in the darkness watching the stars through the little window, listening to the earth as it cools and cracks during the night.

The test run for the caravan is not a success. The floor falls out piece by piece as the tractor does its slow lap around the house. I wave and call to Robert but he can't hear me over the noise. More timber poles are needed so we plan a trip to the pine reserve at Patchewollock. I come along to tend the fires and make our lunch but mainly because of the clearing sale at Day Trap along the way. A whole farm is to be sold up – all machinery, household goods and a long bobbin Singer treadle sewing machine in good working order.

Hec Bowd's farm has poor soil. Mallee sand that shifts underfoot and rises with the smallest wind. Robert says Hec Bowd has made terrible mistakes with fallow. He says he let the fields stand for so long between plantings that the soil upped and drifted off by the time he came back to it. Hec was following advice from the
Department of Agriculture Journal
– that long fallow would protect his wheat from field smut. They had three bad seasons and were hanging on. The bank took the final decision.

Robert parks the car under some poplars behind the house. We can see Hec Bowd in the paddock demonstrating his tractor to some prospective buyers. It's a Clectrac crawler that runs on tracks like a tank with a tall air inlet to get above the dust, giving it a military look – like a periscope on a submarine. Robert straddles the fencing wires and walks over to a crowd of men around the tractor.

Mrs Bowd and her daughter have set up a tea table on the back verandah. They are wearing their best dresses, serving sandwiches and cakes and tea from patterned china normally reserved for a wedding or a christening or Sunday best at least. I have seen them in town before. The daughter, Ollie, is a famous local tennis player. She is strong and spare like her father with a sharp, serious face. I have regularly seen her photograph on the back page of the
Ensign
.

The sewing machine belongs to Ollie. She leads me into the dark sitting room where it takes pride of place on the circular table. The auctioneer has tied a large tag to it with a number. Ollie runs her hand over the shiny black metal.

‘What do you think, Mrs Pettergree? Dad got it at Swan Hill when he went up with some sheep. It was my eighteenth.'

‘It's lovely, Ollie. I'll thread it up and run something through it.'

Ollie must be in her early twenties by now. She brings me her sewing basket and rummages about for some thread and a bobbin. The basket is made of birthday cards covered in cellophane and sewn together with raffia. The auctioneer's label half covers the face of a white kitten –
to our darling ten year old girl . . .

Ollie watches me trace the thread through the shiny guides and loops.

‘Oh, Mrs Pettergree, do you know I've been doing it the wrong way all this time?' Her cheeks quiver. ‘It never worked properly, the stitches always pulled tight, and I thought it was me.'

She clumps glumly back out to her mother on the verandah.

I look at the photographs on the mantel. Generations of sharp-faced Bowds, Hec's shy young face as a bridegroom, Ollie as a teenager in her Highland dancing outfit.

The auctioneer's voice breaks through from outside. Many more people have arrived. A large crowd is gathered in front of the poplars. The auction men bring box after box of tools and equipment to trestle tables at the front where it is quickly dealt with. Hec Bowd is at the front, nodding and smiling. He tries to engage with the bidders – reassuring them of the quality of the goods but most are embarrassed to meet his gaze. Robert bids on the crawler tractor but is beaten to it by the Bowds' neighbour who, although farming the same treacherous ground, seems to be doing better from it.

There isn't much interest in the sewing machine but Robert is slow to bid. I grip his arm through his coat, urging his elbow up.

‘It's a tool too. Just like a tractor. It's a tool for sewing.'

Ollie comes over and helps us load it in the back of the car. Then she stands waving to us as we drive away and the dust kicks up around her.

Results from the

1936 Harvest

This year's sample had a lower bushel weight (59 lbs) than in the previous year. It is hoped this downward trend will be quickly halted and reversed by next season. In accordance with standard sampling procedure a portion of FAQ (fair-average-quality) wheat was critically examined and subjected to analysis and a milling test in the experimental flourmill.

The sample is of generally pleasing appearance but the percentage of screenings is considerably higher than usual, due mainly to a high content of broken grain. The moisture content is slightly low, as is the protein content.

Test Baking

Purpose:
To measure the quality of wheats grown by Mr R.L. Pettergree of Wycheproof in regard to high yields of good-coloured flour with superior baking quality.

Quality Tests:
The Pelshenke figure, which indicates gluten quality (time taken for dough ball to expand under water at temperature; time divided by protein content = quality), is just below average. Mechanical testing of the physical properties of the dough using Brabender's Farinograph and Fermentograph shows average to poor-average flour quality with acceptable gas-producing power.