THE PIONEER HOMESTEAD

We sat around the big scrubbed pine table in the kitchen of the homestead, mum and I and my brother, laughing and tossing words like confetti, then stirring and regrouping them to make a poem. Little by little as the rhyming phrases grew we decided the poem should be written as if it was the homestead itself doing the talking, and this became the first verse.

“I’ve stood on the banks of the Buckinbah,

for more than a hundred years.

I’ve watched the folk as they come and go

Seen their joys, their hopes, their fears.”

The Buckinbah was the name of the river which flowed nearby, and the homestead was built of convict made bricks in the first half of the 1800’s. It was a grand home, with a wide verandah overlooking a semi circular lawn surrounded by flower beds. A central hallway connected the main verandah with a rear internal courtyard, also edged with narrower verandahs all looking inward on a paved square.

During construction a well had been sunk in the courtyard to provide water if the house was under siege. In the early days there had been a strong fear, whether justified or not I don’t know, of the savage looking spear carrying aboriginals in the district. In addition to the well, special recesses had been built into the roof from which the men-folk could further protect the home by rifle fire if necessary.

A single row of rooms surrounded the courtyard. These were the kitchen, housekeepers room, dairy, games room, guest quarters and so on, leaving only an easily defendable single narrow arched exit way to the outside world. Our fascination with the construction and early history gave rise to the next two verses of the poem.

“They built me of brick in those far off days

to guard against attack,

from the flying spear and the boomerang

of the savage roving black”

“The children within my courtyard,

played under a watchful eye,

lest they should stray where danger lurked

with no one to heed their cry”

As the housekeepers daughter I spent a lot of time in that courtyard - when I wasn’t at the local school or helping mum with other chores. The school was just one room with one teacher who taught all the different grades at once. I didn’t have a horse when we lived at that station so I mostly walked the four miles to school. The only ‘local shop’ was near the school too, and sometimes when my dad was visiting I’d walk the four miles home from school only to be asked to go back to get some ‘baccy’ (tobacco).

Before and after school there were lots of jobs to help with. Very early each morning the power generator was started up and that was the signal for the house to come alive. Then I had to get more coal for the slow combustion stove in the kitchen but that wasn’t hard because the coal ‘cellar’ was just a few steps down through a door at the back of the kitchen. Feeding the chooks and collecting eggs was a good job. Then there was the wiping up and putting away of the plates in the big wooden plate racks in the corner of the kitchen.

The pine kitchen table was scrubbed regularly with gritty grey sand-soap. And most nights after the dishes were washed and put away I would have my last job of the day, ‘damping down’ the washing. Tablecloths, sheets, all had to be spread out on the table and sprinkled with water, folded & sprinkled, folded and sprinkled again, then rolled up into tight neat little sausages. That helped the dampness to spread evenly through the linen overnight so that next morning it could be ironed using a series of flat irons heated on the stove.

Generally the main part of the house was a ‘no go’ zone for me though I tiptoed through more often than I should when the owners weren’t home. I remember a wooden phone box hung on the wall of the hallway. It had a black bakelite earpiece and a handle on the side of the box. It was a party line shared by a few properties in the area. Depending on whether you wanted to ring the exchange or one of your neighbours, you picked up the handpiece then made a number of short or long turns on the handle. Naturally you only picked up the phone when you heard the ringing pattern which belonged to you.

Mum used to do the cleaning and the polishing of the beautiful antique furniture, including the big polished table and sideboard in the dining room where the owners and their guests ate their meals. And there were guests aplenty as well as the owner and his adult sons almost permanently in residence. When the daughter came home from college there were more guests than ever being entertained at tennis, polo, clay pigeon shooting, and grand dinner parties.

The evening meal - guests or not - was nearly always a roast of some kind which was served on a huge platter surrounded by decorative salad garnishes, and the vegetables were served in separate covered silver tureens. The owner always carved the meat at the table and gravy was served piping hot in a silver gravy boat. Mum was a great cook and frequently cooked huge batches of biscuits which were stored in tins in the wide corridor style pantry which separated the main dining room from the kitchen. My mother, or ‘Stevie’ as she was called fondly by the owners, was absolute monarch over her territory which included the pantry.

I recall a humorous ‘contest of wills’ between my mother and the adult sons who loved her biscuits. On their part the object was to raid the biscuit tins in the pantry without mum knowing - and on mums part of course the game was to make sure they didn’t get away with it!

I loved the old-fashioned gardens at the homestead. In one side garden there was a trellis hung with abundant cascading purple wisteria. On the other side a row of stately pine trees provided shelter from the wind and in the shaded gardens nearby there were fairy like pink tamarisk bushes, and huge beds of purple violets. It always seemed a loved and happy house - and a very human one despite its age and grandeur, and I spent many happy hours there trying to visualise the earlier generations of occupants and their lives. Being fortunate enough to live in such a beautiful home - even if it was on the sidelines - was probably the origin of my later interest in antiques and history.

The history of the homestead we could only try to imagine when we wrote the last two verses of our poem.

“I remember the drought when the cattle died,

and the Buckinbah ceased to trickle.

But they struggled on, those pioneer folk,

‘til the reaper passed with his sickle.

“The pine trees they planted and tended with care

like sentries on guard are still standing there.

What tales we could tell to folks near and far;

The pine trees, and I, and the old Buckinbah”

ã Lynda Cracknell