AROUND 1881, THREE of Father’s brothers, Thomas, Harry and Edward were each granted three hundred and twenty-acre selections of Crown land in the Otway Ranges, close to a hamlet called Beech Forest. They conjoined their sections which was just south of the town and they would be some of the first inhabitants in the area. Armed with swag’s, tucker bag and axe the brothers set off together to start work clearing portions of their land that would ultimately be suitable for crops and running a few cattle.
Selecting a parcel of Crown land was not a gift from the government. There was an initial cost to the purchaser who would be required to pay for survey of the desired property and then enter into an arrangement with the Crown to purchase. In the Otway’s at this stage the going rate was one pound per acre with the payback terms being one shilling per acre per year over 20 years.
Placing their fingers over a map and declaring the block of land they each desired was fraught with danger. Without ever having laid eyes on the properties, a map laid out on a table would have given them the impression that the lay of the land may have been flat. What it failed to show them was high mountains, deep, steep gully’s or how heavily timbered the rain forest was.
It must have been quite a shock for them to have fought their way from the high ground of Beech Forest and along the southern ridge, through the incredibly dense forest without an inch to spare between tree ferns and three hundred feet high Mountain Ash trees. The forest canopy only allowing the faintest of filtered light to reach ground level. Eventually, three miles out of Beech Forest, they located a survey marker that indicated where their land perimeter was.
Lesser men would have been despondent looking up through the tree tops searching for the sun, not knowing where to start. Our boys were pioneers, they accepted the challenge, pitched their tent, and got on with the job.
Over the next couple of years, they collectively made good progress and cleared a few acres along the marginally flat ridge that they would name Hall’s Ridge Road. The land dropped away very sharply on both sides, in some places it is as steep as forty-five degrees, impossible for cattle, dangerous for horses. A magnificent waterfall to the north of the ridge, down near the Aire River would become known as Hall’s Falls2.
A large percentage of the one thousand acres proved too steep to utilise and the brothers applied to Crown Land administrators for reconsideration on the value of the properties based on it being “unsuitable for settlement”. The Crown declined to write the value down, but it was worth asking the question.
Thomas, the eldest brother would name his selection “Woodlands”. Edward would call his “Riversdale” and Uncle Harry chose “Fernlea”.
The brothers were constantly in touch with my father, encouraging him to join them, which in 1893 he did.
After helping his brothers for a time, father moved his tent to his own property which straddled both sides of a ridge that ran between Beech Forest and Ferguson. A beautiful section of the forest with a large area of flat or gently sloping ground running along the ridge before it dropped away sharply to the Aire River on the southern perimeter and Charley’s Creek down the bottom of the north slopes. He called his property “Cloverdale” and it would cover 313 acres.
Father purchased the transfer of lease from Mr Malcahey, paying him for the small improvements that had been made to the land and effectively taking over the balance of the contract with the Crown. There was provision to adjust the payback terms and father would be forced to apply for a freeze on repayments on a couple of occasions when times were tough.
He had chosen exceptionally well, the block had the main corduroy track into town, known as the Beech Forest to Lavers Hill Road, running straight through the centre of the property. The proximity to Beech Forest with an existing track was critical to father’s farming needs.
The standard size of the Crown Land blocks around Beech Forest were 320 acres, but the Crown surveyors had taken seven acres off the original size of father’s block to compensate for the track passing through the middle, bringing our farm down to 313 acres.
The property was anything but clover when he first took possession though. It was heavily timbered, similar to the territory his brothers had taken on just a few miles away. Only a very small portion had been cleared previously, and a lot of work would be required. Dad struck a match to the forest floor on several occasions to help clear the undergrowth, it was simply too dense to clear by hand.3 A bush fire that had gone through the area years earlier had left a couple of massive tree stumps on the property that were in excess of 40’ in diameter. They would have been four hundred years old, well and truly mature trees when Captain Cook first stepped on Australian soil.
Father sowed his pasture between the felled trees and burnt-out logs. A horse, a single rake plough, shovel and a pick being his only tools.
The track that led the mile eastwards into Beech Forest or the 28-miles north to Colac were rough, narrow and badly corrugated. Corduroy tracks made with sawn timber planks laid across ways in the mud. The Colac to Beech Forest railway line that would run adjacent to the track and through the middle of Cloverdale wouldn’t be built until 1902.
There was a very limited possibility of salvaging the fallen timber and removing it from the farm for sale in those early years, so the majority was simply destroyed. The local townsfolk of Beech Forest salvaged some and built the first church and a set of stables in town with timber from our farm.
Father then commenced building a cottage using timber he had cut into planks or sizes suitable for floor joists, roof trusses and weather boards, standing them in a corner of the property to dry. They were all rough sawn, formed with a wedge and trimmed using an axe, not an accurate science but a good bushman’s expertise. The remaining off cuts and kindling were stacked up and burnt.
My mother had remained in Melbourne while father spent long periods of time working on Cloverdale. They were in constant contact via mail and had planned to marry but asking a new bride to live in a tent wasn’t an option. The cottage was set back twenty yards from the front fence line with the front door facing east so that the morning sun would shine on it. Four-rooms with a veranda on two sides, a steep set of steps out the back door, a single chimney servicing the needs of the household below. A corrugated iron roof with the inside walls beautifully lined with hessian and newspapers. With help from his brothers they had built a magnificent cottage, fit for a new bride.
As soon as the cottage was liveable, Dad returned to Melbourne and my parents were married in Richmond on 9th May 1894, father was thirty-six years old, mother twenty-six.
Like my father, mother had very strong work ethics and would do all she could to help with the land clearing, domestic duties of cooking and cleaning plus caring for the two-dairy cows they had been given as a wedding present from uncle Thomas and the Woodlands farm relatives.
Dad taught her how to handle the two guns they owned, a single shot .22 and a shotgun, and she handled them well. She could shoot a rabbit at 100 yards, skin it and have it prepared for supper within an hour and a half, supplemented with vegetables from the small veggie garden she also tendered. An excellent woman to have by your side in the bush.
Mum fell pregnant with me in the summer of ’94-’95. Neither of them were confident about their first-born child being born at Cloverdale with the nearest doctor 28 miles away, so in July 1895 mother caught the train up to Melbourne from Colac and camped up with the Trinick side of the family in Richmond. She gave birth to me at the Women’s Hospital in Melbourne on 25th August 1895. Father remained on the farm and would learn of my birth via letter a week later. It would be five weeks before I would meet him and be carried through the front door of Cloverdale.
I didn’t have to wait long before I would have a playmate, my brother Frank Albert Hall was born in October of 1896. Dad sent Mum and I up to Colac for Franks birth, we were away from Cloverdale for a month.
Frank and I had a bonny upbringing on the farm, loving and caring parents, spectacular countryside, beautiful animals and I had a brother I would love to death to play and explore the farm with. A young lad couldn’t have wanted for more.
I have many fond memories sitting on the front veranda eating a bowl of mum’s “special” mash potatoes, all the ingredients including the cow’s milk and butter having come from our farm. Frank and I had to share a spoon though as there were not enough of them for all of us to use at the same time.
When father built our cottage using the timber from the stock pile he had accumulated it was still very green and the shrinkage in the floor boards became an issue when they aged and dried out. Some of the gaps that appeared were up to three quarters of an inch wide. He would plug them with old newspapers and timber strips that he would hammer through the gaps. Some would be well hidden with a floor rug to cover over but mostly they were hard to hide. It could be a bit breezy during the winter and hard to hold the heat in, summer wasn’t bad with a bit of cool air wafting up late in the day. There were a couple of larger holes where tiger snakes had come up through the floor boards seeking warmth and mother had blown their heads off with the shotgun. I believe some of mum’s best cutlery disappeared through the floor board gaps over the years.
Twin girls were born on the Cloverdale kitchen table. It wouldn’t be till many years later that I would learn from my mother that my sisters hadn’t survived their birth.
Their run of misfortune continued when another bush fire went through the area. The house and animals survived, but most of dad’s supply of stock feed and crops were destroyed. This prevented my parents from earning anything from the dairy cows for quite a while. The winter that followed was a very severe one on stock and half the dairy herd died. Dad wrote to the Crown land department seeking an extension of time to pay the rent (lease contract) because of the setbacks and to allow some breathing space. When spring arrived, there was plenty of feed back in the paddocks and he again purchased more head to replace the ones that had perished.
Early in 1899, Mum, Frank and I were on the train back to Melbourne to stay with the Trinicks again. Baby brother Walter was born in February that year, no more chances with the kitchen table I guess. We were now a three-man team, plenty of strong young lads to help around the farm.
Beech Forest Primary School opened in 1901 and I was one of the first children to walk through the door. School was just over a mile from Cloverdale and those early classes were conducted in a room of the Ditchley Park Hotel in the centre of Beech Forest.
Mother walked me in for the first week, but I was on my own after that. Walking to school wasn’t much fun, knee deep in mud during the winter and inches of dust in the summer, a mile each way, each day, could be a bit testing.
In 1903 the school moved out of the hotel, a few hundred yards further away to a departmental building, adjacent to Wilson’s store. By that time, Frank was school age, so we walked to school and back home together, rain, hail or shine.
In 1906 a fire started in Wilson’s store, it spread quickly and destroyed the school and the Anglican Church next door. A couple of weeks later the school reopened in the Public Hall which had been built near the road bridge that went over the railway line to Crowes. Fifty children attended that year which included our baby brother Walter.
Four more children would be born into Cloverdale in the following years, all girls, all still born. I remember being woken by a commotion in the house one morning and jumping out of bed. Dad was standing near the kitchen opening and very firmly told me that everything was okay and to go back to bed.
I cannot imagine the grief my dear mother must have suffered to have lost six children. Her heart must ache terribly.
Father buried the infants in a very holy place in the forest. A sharp, deep gully that ran down the west side of the farm. I spent many hours as a boy walking the area in search of my sibling’s grave site, nestling down in the ferns, eating blackberries that grew in abundance. The gentle trickle of the creek water flowing down through the forest floor, glow worms and fire-flies around me.
I would never find the exact position of their resting places. Father had not marked the graves, but he knew where they were and that’s the most important point. At the base of a mountain ash tree that faced back up through the gully I always felt some sort of connection, a tingle up my spine. Boy hood fantasy or some Divine message? I’ll never know.
Dad came home from town one day with a black pup. He claimed it over a bet and a rum at the Ditchley Park Hotel. At first, its name was Solong because when mum first saw him she said, “So long dog” meaning that the dog should keep going. She wasn’t all that excited about having an additional mouth to feed around the farm. She would ask my father if the dog’s arrival meant he had won the bet or lost it!
We never knew if he was any particular breed or not but there was a bit of Kelpie/cattle dog in him from the way he rounded up the sheep & cows. Black, lean, fast, big brown eyes and not afraid of work, he was a ripper animal. The name “Solong” faded out and he would be renamed “Dog”.
We all grew to love that animal very much and he loved us back. It was as if there were four boys in the family, he could do everything except talk. Some days he would walk with us to school, hang around all day and walk home with us. If dad needed him on the farm he would hold him back till we were out of sight and Dog would stay with him all day. He worked well with all the other animals and became a valuable member of our farming family.
After mum got over the initial arrival of Dog, he grew on her too. She loved him to bits. If Dog wasn’t at school with us or working the farm with dad, he could be found beside mum as she worked in the kitchen, or at milking the cows or laying in the veggie crop. He was welcome company to all of us.
The five of us sat on the veranda one summer night and collectively cried our eyes out when Dog was killed by a tiger snake.
The farm ticked over quite well, all the hard work slowly paying off, the stock holdings grew, and a small but steady income was realised. We carried up to fifteen dairy cows. They all had names, Milly, Missy, Polly, Annie etc. and were all milked by hand.
Milk and cream were separated, the cream being carried to the front gate in square milk cans each morning to meet the Colac Butter Factory cart. A small sample was tested and around two gallons of cream a day would leave Cloverdale.
The remaining milk was used for the heifer calves and for mum’s kitchen. Some of it was also used to feed the weaner pigs when we had them. Occasionally mum would sell butter in town if she was flush with milk/cream and there were always a few chooks running around that produced a healthy supply of eggs.
We didn’t own a bull for the cows, but our neighbour had one. We called the neighbour, Mr Neighbour because that was their family’s real surname. Dad would walk the cows next door, wait for the bull to service them then walk them home when the job was done. No money was ever exchanged, the bush worked very well with a barter system. Maybe a heifer calf from the cows next year or lend a hand sowing a crop or the loan of equipment would act as payment. The Neighbour’s had a son, Jim, a couple of years older than me. We would often explore the bush on horseback together and would become close mates.
Common food for the community was bunnies, bread, and milk. Cloverdale was self-sufficient in all of them plus we grew our own spuds and swedes. Mother made her own bread and it was occasionally the duty of Frank and I (Wal was a bit young), after we had returned from school, to take the guns out and shoot a rabbit or two for dinner. It was on one such occasion in January of 1909, Frank was 12 and I was 13 years old, when bad luck rolled back through the front gate.
Frank and I moved away from the house to hunt up some tucker. Father had taught us the first golden rule was to never fire back towards the house or livestock, so we always had the farm to our backs, we were careful with guns. Frank spotted a fox, (which would kill our chooks), and to get a better shot climbed up onto a fallen log, the shot gun latched onto a notch in the log and fired accidently, shattering Frank’s right hand.
My screaming alerted mother and father who bolted down through the paddock to find us. Jessie our horse had to be caught and harnessed to the jinker, she is a flighty thing and hard to catch at the best of times, but I suspect she sensed the tension and fear in the air and obeyed on father’s first instructions. I was terrified, scared, frightened for my brother’s life. The blood, the missing hand, I didn’t know what to do. I was a spectator shaking with shock. I did my best to help Dad lock in Jessie, but I felt useless. Everyone was screaming except Wal who sat on the veranda steps crying.
Dad told me to stay put and look after Wal and the farm while he and mother took off down the drive way and turned left onto the track to Beech Forest at full flight.
Father on the reins and mother in the back with Frank. Mum kept Frank alive by holding him face down in the jinker with the remains of his right hand pointing towards the sky with her rolled up apron wrapped around the stump to hold the blood in. Dad drove flat out into Beech Forest, his son’s life depended on it. Hurtling over the bumps in the log road, the jinker was sometimes 4’ in the air. Jessie excelled, dad said she had never galloped that fast in her life.
With some good fortune, one of the two resident town doctors, Dr Backhouse, was quickly located and summoned to the Post Office where he immediately operated on Frank on the front counter. Frank was extremely weak by the time the Doctor arrived, his life was very much in danger due to the large amount of blood he had lost.
News flew around town that “Frank Hall has shot his hand off” and the locals gathered for a grandstand view through the Post Office window. It seemed the whole town had turned out to witness the event. Through some act of God or good modern medicine, or maybe a combination of both, Frank survived but his future as a farmer had taken a severe hit. The shattered remains of his hand were removed at the wrist, leaving him with a stump. Years later he would have a two-pronged hook fitted.