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The Pre-Depression Years
Chapter Three
The Pre-Depression Years
Following George’s request, the Big Brother Movement found him a position with another soldier settler on a wheat farm near Marnoo in the Wimmera district of Victoria. Located about 50 kilometres west of St Arnaud on the road to Horsham, Marnoo is in a wellestablished and highly productive wheat-growing region. George was sent to work for a young couple, who had a wheat farm on a soldier settlement estate and a further two hundred acres that they share farmed.
His first impression was the investment in machinery and horses required to run a wheat farm. His new employer had eight light draught horses, two or three ponies, a pony cart, spring cart, wagon, an eight-furrow plough, a header and a harvester. The farmer needed George to harvest the crop on the share farm, as it was too far away to come home each night, so, while they waited for the crop to ripen, George set himself to learn how to handle a team of horses and operate the header.
Soon after arriving at Marnoo, he was asked to kill a fattened sheep. He had not done this before and did not much like the idea, but he found out that the farmer also had no experience in butchering. The meat was needed for the provision box while he was away harvesting, and he ‘got by and eventually saw it suspended from a tree branch’.
George remembered the provisions and equipment he had to take with him:
Bags of chaff, oats, bales of new jute wheat sacks, hanks of jute string the correct length to sew a bag (five stitches, two turns round the ears, with just enough left to make off), some ointment should a horse get a sore shoulder (no first aid kit), fencing wire to hang the chaff bag mangers on, a 6’ by 6’ tent, wire mattress with fold-up legs, bedding, card table, hurricane lamp, frying pan, billy, small and large saucepan, a cast iron, oval-shaped boiler they said could be used as an oven, cutlery for one, axe, crow bar, shovel, dual purpose hacksaw for cutting meat and metals, just about everything that wasn’t nailed down … a ten pound bag of rolled oats was part of my rations, plus spuds, bacon, tomatoes, onions, carrots, eggs, bread, butter, tinned milk, sugar and condiments, vinegar and a side of the wether … Why the vinegar? Seeing that it was summer they thought the meat might go off just a bit and what you did was wipe it down with the vinegar and you wouldn’t notice a thing.
Two pairs of horses for the wagon, the boss in the seat and two ponies tied behind. One pony pulled the jinker and the other pony, clipped to the bit, ran alongside. I was on the header with three horses and one leading behind making eight in all.
They arrived and set up camp. After yoking the horses to the header, the farmer took the seat for the first cut:
I was told to make sure that as the day changed we weren’t blowing wheat out with the chaff, or leaving too much chaff with the wheat. The hopper became full and was emptied into the bags. We made bag dumps as the hopper filled, going to them several times, then starting another. I was then introduced to the rammer, a sheet metal tube with a top on it like a large canned fruit tin funneled down to fit the tube. The idea was to fill the bag so that it could be just tied off, making one ear and putting in five stitches, then to push the tube to the bottom, filling it with wheat and ramming it up and down in the bag, refilling it as the grain emptied. What a clever idea, but, Oh!, what hard work, one had to keep lifting and working at the bag all the time.
Once he had the hang of it, the farmer returned home, leaving George to camp at the share farm until the job was done. There was no house in sight and no way of getting in touch with the farmer. The pattern of his days was set by the horses – harnessing them in the morning to be ready to start as soon as the dampness had gone from the grain, resting in the middle of the day (not for George, though, there were wheat bags to ram!), feeding, combing and brushing them in the evening.
He soon had the team well trained – after about a week he could get off to check the cogs and the link chains and then hop back on board while the horses kept plodding along. But the days seemed endless, with no company and rarely any passing traffic along the road, and the nights were worse as he had nothing to read except some old newspapers. He would amuse himself by shooting mice with a .22 rifle, or, if it was light enough, he would sew wheat bags.
When enough bags were filled, the farmer came to help George load them to cart to the station. They used a ‘bag loader’, which used horse power to catapult the bags into the arms of someone standing on the wagon, who would stack them. He learnt after a while that the basic principle of loading wheat bags is ‘to keep them moving’. It took a full day to load the wagon and the next morning they set off to the depot. George was amazed at the enormous stacks of wheat bags, all built by hand – no machinery – ‘and that was the good old days’.
Finally, after many wagonloads, the share farm harvest was finished and George returned to the home farm to help harvest a crop of oats. He recalled that ‘the boss drove the reaper and I tagged along stoking, seeking a little job satisfaction in keeping the stooks in a line and about the same number of sheafs in each. When they had carted the sheafs home, George had to build the stack (as the farmer did not know how) and he found this to be a different art from building a stack with grass hay.
At the end of the harvest, George left Marnoo as there was nothing for him to do on the farm. If George’s first assignment had shown him the best of the First World War soldier settlement scheme, his next one showed why it is generally seen as a disaster. In the autumn of 1929 he was sent to work at Liparoo in the Mallee. George took the train to Annuello, south of Robinvale, where he was met by his new employer, Albert Booth, a small, wiry man, who had served in the Navy during the war. They climbed in the jinker and headed west into the setting sun to Booth’s 900 acre wheat farm. The farm was in semi-desert country near the south-east corner of the Hattah National Park, and George observed that it ‘might well have wisely been included in it, as there appeared to be little hope of it ever becoming even marginal wheat country’.8 The country had been subdivided for soldier settlement immediately after the war when wheat prices were high; but prices fell steadily during the 1920s and land that was marginal with prices high was a hopeless proposition when prices were low.
8. In recent years The George Alexander Foundation has given money to the Bookmark Biosphere Project based at Calperum Station in South Australia. This project aims to develop new approaches to the environmental problems of the Riverland and Mallee regions of South Australia and Victoria.
Booth and his wife lived in a typical soldier settler’s house (with a room for George) on an area of red clay pan among the sandhills and Mallee scrub. There was a storage cellar dug into the clay to avoid the heat, and a shed with a blacksmith’s forge, which George found the most attractive feature of the farm. As the rainwater tanks were empty, drinking water was brought from the Murray in a Furphy tank, which was parked by the back door.
The morning after he arrived, George began work. His first task was to prepare some fallow land for sowing. The team of Clydesdales was a ‘mixed lot, not at all well cared for’ and they were,
Swung into position in front of a plough with eight big, curved discs instead of mould boards. This was a stump-jump plough invented and made in Melbourne for this type of country, where there was so much small scrub that it wasn’t practical to clear all the stumps and roots before tilling. The boss took the reins [to introduce me] to multi-furrowed stump jump ploughing. Off we go, with me tagging along with the spring cart picking up the odd stumps that were being pulled out. It was a long circuit. When we got back to base, he asked, ‘Do you think you can manage?’ So, I was on my way – he saw me to the first corner and left me to it. We were supposed to be preparing fallowed land that had been worked to a depth of 4” some months before but sadly the earlier working had blown away and we were in fact turning virgin soil. That was why so many roots were coming out and it was such a rough ride. The discs jumped the stumps all right, but the wheels didn’t. Often a wheel would be in sand drift that had piled up around a stump and I’d find myself out of my seat crashing onto the chains, yelling a pleading, entreating, anxious, ‘WOA!!’ knowing those knife-edged discs would fail to jump over me. I soon found that the team knew that I hadn’t ridden that one and would be stopped before I’d hit the ground. I always went round to the leaders and made a fuss of them.
Each morning George took the team out to the paddock. He spent the morning ploughing and then while the horses had their lunchtime rest, he would go over the new work picking up stumps and stacking them – they were excellent firewood, much better than coal.
The days were long, hot and so dusty. There was not a drop of moisture in the soil – nothing whatever to start growth, but this paddock was the only potential source of income for the year. One just had to hope that it would rain in time to start growth and then follow up a few weeks later with a good soaking.
It took some weeks to complete the ploughing. Ideally we would have been sowing at the same time to make the best use of any slight moisture content, but that would require another eight horses … The acreage was too big for horse-drawn implements – horses couldn’t work day and night.
The field was eventually sown, but sadly to no purpose as rain did not come and the crop failed.
Much of the farm was still uncleared and George helped Booth with rolling and burning the Mallee scrub. He recalled that the clearing:
was done with a bullock team hitched to a home-made roller, which once was a boiler for a stationary steam engine. It was about six feet in diameter and, say, nine feet long. Two railway sleepers formed spokes in each end, a lengthened wagon axle protruded through and was secured to these. Remarkably a tree had been found with a more or less straight trunk and a branch conveniently angled out to span the width of the boiler to which could be fixed other lumps of tree to form the bearings. The butt end was supported on a caster made up from a flat-tyred steel wheel off some other farm equipment. It was an incredible achievement with the limited tools of those days. All the holes for the fixing rods had to be hand done with augers, or a brace and bit. Larger holes were opened up with a red-hot steel rod.
The offset design enabled the bullocks to amble along on the rolled section, the roller being in the unflattened brush. This again was a very slow process as the power source was slow moving and could work only about three hours a day as they had to be let free to feed on whatever they could find out in the scrub which was precious little, then they had to be found again the next day … When found they were led to the nearest dam then meandered slowly back to the roller. The way they moved into their special places and stood while the heavy wooden yokes were fixed was something to see … a biblical scene indeed.
With a good deal of shouting and waving of the extra long whip, they were away. Once moving they hung in and strained in unison at the harder brush or tree, bending down, lunging, even slipping to the ground, with the effort they put in. There was but the one way to go and that was forward. At time we’d have to get to work with an axe before they could get going again. It became my job to go ahead nicking the thicker stems and the occasional trees. Choices had to made. If I didn’t cut deep enough I’d slow or stop the team and this was a no-no. Once this heavy thing was moving it had to keep moving.
After being rolled, the scrub was left to dry and then burnt, with the fires burning for days as the protruding roots were gathered up during the night and added to the blazes.
There were frequent sand storms as the wind raised the ploughed soil across the Mallee. When they saw these great clouds of rolling sand coming from the west, they would either take refuge in the house, or head for the Murray River a few miles to the east. After the storms the house would be thick with fine sand, like red talc.
After several months with Booth, George had ploughed and sown the fallow field and then the newly cleared land, but there had never been the slightest sign of rain. All they could do was sit and watch the sky. He spent some time working for other settlers in the district and then came back to sink dams for local farmers in the expectation that a new channel would bring reliable water to the district.
Dam sinking was quite a challenge for the youth, the man and the horses. We used the new and I suspect experimental scoop [which George had helped make] with a six abreast team. They made a wonderful sight as they wheeled, turned and climbed, hurrying on the down slope and straining on the up. The excavating was done with a figure eight movement that meant, when, say, doing a right hand turn, the horse on the right hand end of the line was marching on the spot and the others had to accelerate at varying speeds to maintain a straight line.
After some time George mastered the complicated techniques of dam sinking with a horsedrawn scoop and Booth then hired him out to work on the channels. These were dug using a scraper pulled behind a two-horse team. He also helped form feeders from the channel to farm dams using a homemade device called a ‘delver’.
It only rained once while George was at Liparoo. He remembers that the Booths told him to go behind the stables so they could strip down and lather up for a wash, but the rain stopped before George was able to have a wash.
Most evenings George whiled away his time playing cards or reading, but there were occasional dances and other social events. Once George borrowed the pony and jinker to take the new schoolteacher to a dance at Cramenton, about 20 miles from Liparoo. It was late when they left to go home and they both fell asleep, with George confident that the pony would take him home. He was startled when he woke to find that it was daylight and the horse and jinker was in a strange farmyard, with a farmer, his wife, and several children inviting them in for a cup of tea. It turned out that Mr Booth had bought the pony from this farmer and the pony had chosen to take them to his old home rather than his new one. At another dance George was told that three local youths planned to rough him up. He had no idea why this was, as he had not met them before. The upshot was that they challenged him to a fight in the local hall. George was extremely fit from his farm work, while his challenger, ‘Nugget’ was bigger but slower. They fought for twelve rounds before Nugget had had enough and threw in the towel.
The wheat crop on Booth’s farm failed completely, but George recovered some of a sparse crop of oats for the horses using a small machine that winnowed as it headed. However, after about eleven months George realized there was no future farming in the Mallee and he and Booth agreed he should return to Melbourne. Booth took him to the station, but said he could only pay him £5 and would send him the rest of his wages when he could. George was not surprised that he did not receive a penny more: ‘I’d got much the same as the farmer – I’d been fed and watered’.9
9 Albert Booth survived on his block through the depression years, partly by going shearing for several months each year and eventually bought his brother's block next door. A detailed account of Booth's farming activities is in the files of the Closer Settlement Board in the Victorian Public Record Office, VPRS 5714, unit 2160.
