I had learnt much about each child’s family and home. It was clear early on that all the village dads were day labourers, taking jobs wherever they could find them in the local area. The three farm-based dads ran their own sheep properties, and were fully occupied in their pasture and animal management. All the fathers left home very early each morning, including sometimes on weekends, and returned late. The old advice to take advantage of daylight and work with the sun certainly applied to the Weabonga men.
If not out employed on a local property, the village dads spent the day near home, doing lots of heavy labour. Woodcutting was an ongoing need, summer or winter; the men scoured the country gathering limbs and logs to cut up for the wood stove in the kitchen, for the laundry copper, or for the fire in the grate needed in winter to keep the family warm. All these men were hard workers, diligent and reliable, grafting as well as they could to provide for their families.
Every mother stayed and worked at home, typical of women of that era. I knew of few married women anywhere who had employment outside of the home. But these country women had many chores and little in the way of appliances or support. Every chore, without exception, was done manually.
Monday was washing day. At each home, the morning began with the women filling a large copper and setting a fire in a grate beneath to heat the water. Bark scraps and sticks of wood were fed to the fire throughout the morning. Washing was done in batches: clothes, sheets, towels, coloureds and whites. The women had a sturdy stick to help them transfer washing from the copper to a tub. In the copper the washing was at boiling point, so touching it wasn’t possible until it had been rinsed, item by item, in the tub in cold water. Using a mangle—the women turning its handle with the huge effort required—each tub load was wrung of as much water as possible. Setting the mangle with opposing wheels close together expelled most water although this made the job more demanding. Then the washing was ready to be hung out to dry. All the homes had long washing lines, and on Mondays each yard was festooned with whites and colours, each piece having been lifted and pegged in place separately.
Props kept the weighed-down lines above the ground. The men cut these props from the surrounding bush; they would carefully select a long, slender limb, then trim excess branches but retain an end branch to form a vee at the prop end. This shored up the whole line, allowing the washing to wave in a breeze. Lifting the line to place a prop required some strength and effort, but the women were adept at such labours. Washing took up the whole day and, if it had been fine and dry enough with a bit of a breeze, the washing could be collected and brought in, folded, at day’s end. Monday must have been truly exhausting for each woman.
Tuesday was most often ironing day. With no electric power, in some homes the irons—literally just lumps of metal, or ‘irons’—were stood to heat on top of the wood stove and lifted with a detachable handle that slotted into their heavy, solid metal bases. When an iron cooled down too much it was put back on the stovetop, and another heated iron took its place. These transfers had to be frequent, which meant an ironing board would be placed near the fire no matter the temperature of the day. This was the method at the Williamsons, so I quickly learnt how to keep my own clothes in order—and I never grew to enjoy the task.
Other homes had petrol irons, with a small tank of fuel and a pilot light to produce the heat required. Such irons were sometimes involved in accidents, but while I was at Weabonga, no one was injured from one.
All the children and men always wore clean clothes, well ironed although often patched and darned. Having learnt the effort required to achieve this, I admired all the mothers for looking after their families so well.
This was just one reason I developed a huge respect for the Weabonga women. They faced massive challenges and repetitive hard work every day of the week. Given no aids and driven by devotion to their families, each woman created a nurturing home and reared happy, healthy, respectful children. The women gave their all to ensure the best outcomes possible for the kids. I felt I had to match, if not better, their commitment.
Some homes had a kerosene refrigerator, while others made do with no more than Coolgardie safes. There was always a limit to fresh food. The men slaughtered a beast from time to time and skinned, cleaned and dressed it ready to be butchered and cut up into large pieces. The women were efficient at slicing off chops or steaks.
The women and children looked after large groups of chooks, which spent their days scratching happily around the yards or paddocks near the homes. At night, the chooks either came home from habit or were driven back to roost in pens by the children, then they were locked in against predation from foxes or dingoes; wild dogs weren’t much of a problem around Weabonga, but foxes were always lurking. Chooks provided sufficient quantities of eggs as well as, rarely, the source of meals. The women, I noticed, would kill and clean the chook, plucking the feathers after placing the carcass in hot water. Getting a chook ready for the table was a time-consuming and messy process, and good layers were never sacrificed.
The vegetable garden was also managed by the children and their mothers. As these plots were the only source of fresh produce, they were tilled, weeded and tended most days. I could attest the quality of the produce achieved by some of the gardeners.
In winter, at school we kept a large pot on the glowing, red-hot top of the Broadway heater. Children brought along vegetables from the home gardens, and we chopped them into lightly salted water to make a soup. No matter the type of vegie available on the day, and the type of pasta, lentil or rice we added, our cold weather lunchtimes were always satisfying and, sometimes, adventurous.
There was a limit to what Bon could carry, and generally he only came on Fridays. So although a household could order in fresh bread once a week, otherwise they had to do their own baking. Judging by the titbits the children brought in their lunchboxes, most of the mothers were fine cooks. And after tennis on Sundays, I enjoyed their fresh sponges, fruit loaves, biscuits or scones.
All the children had chores to do when they arrived home after school, and many also had morning chores. If not done by a child, these chores would have to be done by a parent, and the parents were very busy people indeed. Through their assistance to their families, the children were learning essential lessons. I didn’t want schoolwork to displace these vital chores—rather, I wanted the children to view their work as being conducted both at home and at school, and to feel their efforts were appreciated. Home and school were united to assist the children in reaching their potential, while enjoying their childhood.
From nine years of age, as soon as they were able, the boys ran lines of rabbit traps. Before twilight they would place out six or more traps in locations they had previously scouted. The boys were clever in identifying paths where rabbits were likely to run. They would dig in a metal trap, place paper on the steel plate in the centre, set the trap by pinning back the serrated jaws, and cover the trap with a light dusting of soil to disguise its presence and to remove any human scent. To set a trap wasn’t easy, and could be dangerous if it sprang shut unexpectedly while being handled. The boys set their run of traps each Friday and Saturday in the late afternoon. Early the next morning, sometimes in frost or snow, they would walk their trap line to find what had been caught: often a rabbit or two. The boys would bring them home to clean, skin and dress. The rabbit meat was welcome to expand the family food supplies and, after being dried out on a wire frame, the skins could be sold to the hide merchant who came to the village once a month or so.
No one viewed trapping as other than cruel but it had to be done. The money was saved by the boys for their trips to town, which were infrequent in most families. From their earliest years the boys contributed significantly to their family through their rabbiting along with their regular chores.
It seemed to me the girls contributed equally to the boys but in ways considered appropriately feminine. All the girls were gaining skills in cooking, and the older girls would often refer to the dinner they’d prepared for the whole family one night on a weekend. All described collecting fruits in season, and the processes they employed to bottle and preserve the harvest or to transform it into jams and conserves. Additionally, the girls were learning to knit, to sew, to dress-make, to darn—in fact, to be ‘good’ housewives. Each girl shadowed her mother at home, engaging with her in the tasks of women in country households.
The boys, who shadowed their dads, liked nothing better than to accompany their father on a day while he was working outdoors. This was one way the boys could spend increased time with their dads, and not only did they observe the tasks and processes with which their fathers engaged—life lessons in themselves—but often they would assist in significant ways. Fencing with an offsider was always easier than fencing alone, and the same applied to rounding up the stock, collecting firewood, and even working in the shearing sheds. The boys could be genuinely useful as an additional pair of hands, as could the girls.
Sometimes as I was walking or driving away from the school in the late afternoon light, I would notice one or more of the boys tracking their dad closely around the home yard or across a roadside paddock. The long evening shadows turned both figures into giants, and each dark image merged into the other.