And so I came to the farm, I’d already spent a lot of time there on visits, see the first two pictures, but this was like a homecoming. I’m the little bloke.
Life in the suburbs was quickly pushed to the back of my memory and I was soon a country boy. The rabbit plague was at its height then, and it wasn’t long before I had a trap line which I checked at night with a hurricane lamp, a bit scary for the first time or two but I was soon an old hand. The farm was bounded by the road on one side, and the Newry Creek on the other. In those days before the raising of the weir wall, Lake Glenmaggie used to spill regularly, sending floods down the Macalister and into the creek and all the billabongs on the farm. This kept the water fresh and sweet and the whole waterway and associated wetlands were wonderfully fertile. We only had to tie an empty jam tin to a piece of string, throw it into the creek, and then retrieve it to find it full of fat shrimp and all sorts of other invertebrates. The creek itself was home to water rats, eels and other fish, both introduced and native, and large numbers of Eastern Snake-necked Turtles, or tortoises as we used to call them. We often used to find their nests of eggs in the banks, a small damp patch gave them away. The female turtles use some cloacal fluid in the process of egg laying and sealing of the nest chamber.
Frogs too, abounded in those happy days before the modern decline in numbers and species, every old rail or post lying on the ground was turned over to shine the light of day on the several that were invariably sheltering beneath. They were carefully covered again, I had a great affection for frogs even in those early years. New bird species were being added to the filing cabinet upstairs, a notable one being the Olive-backed Oriole pointed out by my mother, a lifelong bird lover herself. The Whistling Kite too, although we called them whistling eagles, they nested in a big redgum in the property across the road.
The Macalister River was clear in those pre european carp days, we would see eels lying alongside submerged logs, reefy areas where the freshwater crayfish lived, and of course platypus. I’m sure that these would have foraged well up into the creek enjoying a rich and abundant diet of yabbies and invertebrates.
Nightime was for bats, my cousins and I would toss tiny pebbles into the air to hear the bats’ teeth click. One night too we had a visitor from the river, a Brush-tailed Phascogale that came in search of a possible poultry meal, I can still see it on the trunk of the quince tree. This species was considered now probably extinct in the district, but I recently had a report of one from Coongulla, so perhaps all is not lost.
Sadly, although we didn’t know it were were enjoying the last few years of the creek in pristine condition. In 1956 the weir wall was raised and regular floods became a thing of the past, subsequently the clearwater creek where we swam and fished lost its regular flushes and became low and stagnant. The billabongs dried out, the snakes had to look elsewhere for frogs, and eventually I moved on too, but not before going bush to Ben Cruachan for the first time with cousin Bill. That’s Bill behind me in the war surplus rubber dinghy on the creek. To be continued.
Hello to the boys and girls of the Neerim District Rural Primary School and your teacher Ms Mawhinney. I hope you find something interesting in this post, which is based on life on the farm in 1945/46