DESPITE SOME of the dramas and eccentricities that surrounded me during the war and early post-war years, they were generally very happy years.

A focal point of that happiness was Gala, a mixed farming property at Quamby Brook, south of Deloraine, farmed by my widower grandfather (Pa) and then unmarried uncle (Bob).

I left Gala with Mum when she remarried in 1946 but returned to the property for most of my Christmas school and university holidays, and some others, through most of the fifties until the property was sold.

Especially during the war years, it was mostly a time of great affection — but not without admonishment if I deserved it — along with support and encouragement in reading books, understanding the farm and the broader world around me, enjoying sport and the natural world and, perhaps above all, being urged to respect the needs and sensitivities of others, whatever their circumstances or station in life.

For part of that time, especially for most of the war years, our only motor vehicles were an antique truck and a Fordson tractor. The options to visit town — which was Deloraine, some ten miles away – were the school bus and the local bus, both of which were of arguable road-worthiness in contemporary terms; the lorry, when we had one and it was operational; the tractor, used only very rarely off-farm; a draught-horse and dray, used occasionally; and Kit, Minnie or Prince the hacks. Often it was hanging on like grim death behind my mother as she rode Kit or Minnie to town, half the journey being along a rough bush track and the other half on the edge of a gravel road.

It wasn’t until after the war ended that electricity came to Quamby Brook, or at least to Gala. Prior to that we lived quite happily — because we knew nothing else — with mantle lamps, kerosene stable lanterns, candles and the light thrown by an open fire. All cooking was undertaken on and in a wood-fired iron stove/oven, together with the perennial kettle on the side of — or hanging above — the open fire, as well as one on the side of the stove.

Indeed, the stove was the site of one of our few domestic dramas during the war years. I was about four years of age when, as was the post-dinner routine, I was expected to take a dipper half full of hot water from the top of the stove, proceed to the very elementary bathroom on the back verandah and wash my face and hands, clean my teeth and then say good night to Pa and Bob before Mum took me to bed on the verandah.

In winter, this ceremony involved a cloth-wrapped brick, which had been heated in the oven, being taken as a bed-warmer. On this particular occasion, at round 7 pm, I stumbled as I took the dipper from the stove and spilled a litre of boiling water over my right thigh. Mum grabbed my pyjama pants and pulled them off – along with some skin – then quickly sloshed what seemed like a gallon of mercurochrome over my thigh.

Deloraine on horseback

While all this was going on Bob headed for Deloraine on horseback to get the doctor who arrived about an hour later. History and family legend rather than my memory, records that after inspecting the damage and supplementing Mum’s treatment, the doctor turned to Mum and observed: “Well Margaret, you can at least be thankful that his fundamentals escaped damage.”

In many respects it was a somewhat spartan existence at Gala in those times but this was not only because of the conditions — no electricity, no gas, no telephone and necessarily self-sufficient in meat, fruit, vegetables and dairy products — but also because Mum was pursuing one of her recurrent obsessions. Through this period it was the positive obsession of hard and healthy living.

Despite occupying a four-bedroom house, three of the four occupants — Bob, Mum and I — slept on the extensive verandah right through the year, including the frosty winters and my cut lunch, once I was sent to school, was known then as the Oslo Lunch and was the sort of stuff that presumably nourished Norwegian fur trappers during their winter months in the Arctic Circle.

This pattern was continued when I was sent to school in Deloraine — initially for a year at the kindergarten and then at the Deloraine Area School the headmaster of which was a Mr Marshall the daughter of whom, Roslyn, ultimately became Lady Green, wife of one of Tasmania’s most respected governors. The school lunch was still the Oslo but could at least be traded for a marble or two with those sufficiently gullible and also partial to fruit, cheese, milk and heavy brown bread and peanut butter sandwiches.

One of the engaging features of life in those days at Quamby Brook was the closeness, predictability, rhythm and uncomplicated simplicity of life. Above all, it was a very seasonal existence. One looked forward to spring and the rush of growth and vivid colour, summer and cutting and baling hay, autumn with its still soft days and the bottling of fruit and then winter with sharp frosts, soft quilts and the cat on the end of the bed, close to me and the hot brick.

The closest neighbours were the Youds, the Moroneys and the Kennedys, the Youds being the family that produced some of the greatest axemen in the history of that fine sport. Merv and Doug Youd were champions by any measure and Ray, only a year or so older than me and at school at the same time, was another champion. I think the only daughter was Margaret, a delightful person who, at far as I know, still lives in the Deloraine area. The father of these children, Albert Youd, was a quiet and gentle man who spent some of the winter months alone in the high country, trapping possums for the skins, and often worked on Gala during the summer harvest period.

Italian Prisoners of War

Melba Kennedy, Basil Kennedy and Dick Maroney also worked on Gala from time to time. Some of the older boys from these families enlisted when war broke out. Legend had it that if any two of these three families were at odds with each other — and occasionally all three might be involved — the tiny Quamby Brook school closed down for the duration of the brawl, perhaps for two or three days, because there were only about three children apart from the Youds, Maroneys and Kennedys at the school.

The school was closed for good a year or so before I commenced my schooling.

The other relatively close neighbours were Mrs. Bye who ran the post office at Quamby Brook — a village of less than half a dozen buildings — and Tommy Burns and his family who had a dairy farm on the back road to Exton, on the southern side of Gala, the brook being a boundary between the two properties.

Further along the Exton road one of the properties that bordered Gala on the eastern side was owned by Jack Badcock, a fine Sheffield Shield cricketer for South Australia, who toured England with Bradman in the 1938 Ashes series.

One of the most significant features of war time on Gala — and one which I recall with immense affection — was the Italian connection. During World War II many Australian farms were, if they chose to be in the scheme, allocated Italian prisoners of war.

We had three during the war, two of whom lasted only a short time because they were judged by the relevant authorities — in consultation with Pa and Bob — to be incompetent or otherwise unsatisfactory. The third, however, was with us for some three years and became very much part of the family.

His Christian name was Rafaele and he quickly determined that life on a farm in Tasmania was infinitely preferable to doing Mussolini’s mad bidding in Abyssinia. He was amiable, intelligent, interested in the farm and a good worker. He had a comfortably equipped hut adjacent to the homestead and within a few months of his arrival he was cooking an Italian Sunday lunch and enjoying it with us.

I can still recall — albeit not with precision — a few lines of a song he taught me that he used to sing while picking oranges on the lower slopes of Mt Vesuvius in his native Italy. While with us he was able to keep in touch with compatriots on farms in the Deloraine area because, being a prisoner of good behaviour he was allowed to visit or receive visitors on Sundays, the day off.

When the war ended he returned to Italy, married his childhood sweetheart and returned to Australia to purchase a farm in Victoria’s Goulbourn valley and raise a family and, from all accounts — according to Bob who contacted him — prospered.

It is a nice, warm story and one on which I look back with great fondness. It was an important part of my childhood.