Going Back Home

25/7/2019     

    A while back I went “home”, a journey I’ve felt I needed to do for some time - y’know, that “going back home” thing - back to where you had your beginnings. My eldest son tagged along because - well, I suppose because he likes to travel, loves the bush, and we don’t get a chance to do stuff together very often. It was a great trip, for both of us.

    Most of us have a "home town".

    Your home town is where you began, your starting off point to where you are today, that place where you were - probably - born, and possibly where a generation or two before you were born, and maybe even where you still live. And it could be a village, an outer suburb, or a big city precinct, but it's bound to be that place where you spent a big chunk of your formative years, and so holds a decent collection of - I truly hope - really good memories for you. The place that features heavily in any re-telling of your youth. That place. Part memory, part myth.

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10^th to 13^th Sept 2017

    My home town is 600 kms north and west of this city where I've lived for much of my life. It's a sheep-wheat town that was carved out of South Australia's Eyre Peninsula mallee country in about 1900, where the tallest things are the bulk silos and the streets were designed back when they needed to be wide enough for a full bullock team with dray attached to be able to do a U-turn.
 

    If you're curious, Google Map "Wudinna" (pronounced Wood-na) and have a look. It may not be the prettiest town you've ever seen, but trust me, it has a heart as big as the landscape it's in.

    Wudinna's population today is about 500, but it's surrounded by big farms that have been steadily getting bigger since the Depression, as leavers sell up and their places are amalgamated into the stayers' holdings. And bit by bit fences have come out and the paddocks have become bigger and the tractors and seeders and headers have become bigger and every successful young bloke today is computer canny and hooked to the satellite. And it's one of those "central" towns, made that way by it's position and by modern vehicles and some decent sealed trunk roads, and has - sadly but inevitably - sucked in the people and the shops and the stock agents and the post offices from the surrounding small towns in all directions.

    And, typically, it's a town where a family name counts.

   My grandparents on both sides were part of the tough 1910-1920 breed of pioneers who opened up Central Eyre Peninsula (always simply "The West Coast" to South Aussies) to agriculture, each settling on an allotted 1,000 acre block of scrub, set up only with a Government "catchment" roof with no walls but two water tanks and a bank loan. A block that was never really going to be large enough. With snakes, bushfires, and bull-ants big enough to carry off the kids. And more rabbits than people.

    My dad arrived there as a 6 year old - walked cross-country most of the way behind grandad's dray - and my mum arrived with her parents as a 12 year old. My parents were married there, wrestled a few precarious seasons from their own relentless and unforgiving scrub block until World War II changed all of our lives, and my elder brother and I were born there. Grandad's photo hangs in the Shire Council - he was Chairman for many years - and as there is for all of those pioneering families, there is an Edmonds St in the town, and an Edmonds Rd that runs long and straight and dusty out in the big block country.

    But, all that alone still doesn't make it my personal home town. I actually only spent my first 3 years there before the war - grandad's farm was eventually taken on by my dad's younger brother, and my mum's family farm went bust in the Depression - but this town and this district was always home base to all of us. It was ingrained in every member of my family on both sides. It was where we "came from". It was the keeping place of all family mythology.

    And even though I became a city kid, for me the "home-ness" of this was continually reinforced by regular holidays on grandad's farm, and on my mum's sister's farm "just down the road a way" from it, and where we lived for a year when I was 12-13. And in 1965 I bundled up my own young family and went back to live and work in the town for a while - Field Serviceman for the local Chamberlain Tractor Agency was the second best job I ever had. And being "Jack Edmonds's lad" (which actually got me the gig in the first place) was cultural currency. Sounds corny but as I said, out there in the bush things like that count! And still do.

    The last time I was there was about 25 years ago, which was also the last time I saw my dad. After many years of living in the town, he had a home way over in Shark Bay in Western Australia by then, but we arranged to meet up at a big local reunion, one of those "Back To" things designed to bring in all the expatriate sons and daughters of the land and to give everyone a chance to catch up with uncles and aunts and cousins, with mates he grew up with, and with blokes that I went to school with. A chance for everyone to once more touch "home base".

    So, this week it was time that I went back, one last time. And I know it's the last time, as the last family members recently sold up and "we" don't have a foot-hold any more. And geez - it's a bloody long drive! God I'd forgotten how long and straight and at times deadly boring those blacktops can be out there. Deadly boring except when the wildlife comes bounding out of the scrub at left field doing 40kph when you're doing a steady 110kph. And then they dither! Right in the middle of the highway. Never been so grateful to the bloke who invented disc brakes! Stood the Ford on its nose and prayed and thanked the Lord and somehow managed to not have a very large 'roo arrive through the windscreen. How you forget. The semi-trailers barely notice the thump on the roo-bar but a small sedan often comes off a bad second.

    As someone once said, a good travelling companion halves the journey, and I had one of my best mates with me for the trip, and we fell into the local (only) pub late afternoon, gagging for a beer. Publican and one farmer at the front bar - that thank God hasn't changed a jot (maybe except for the big Fox-Sports TV screen!) - they eye you up and down, I intro myself, drop the old family name, and we're in like Flynn! Within ten seconds we were "locals". And I was back home.

    When you've been away for a long time, and the only members of your family who are left are in the town cemetery, "going home" is always going to be just a nostalgia trip. And I'd given myself only two days - plus a day's drive each way - to do this, and didn't actually have anything that looked like an agenda. I just needed to "go home". One more time.

    We did the run up the line the first morning, but ducked into Pygery ("Pie-juh-ree") on the way, never much more than a siding with wheat stacks and a Post Office, but was the rail-car drop-off point for the Edmonds' farm in the old days, always had a sense of connection in family mythology. Only the wheat stacks are still there, but it's probably been a long time since they saw bagged wheat and elevators and sweating 'humpers' in today's bulk handling world. But the local lads (presumably, after a long liquid lunch?) have come up with their own tourist attraction. One definitely worth a Highly Commended.

    On up to Yaninee ("Yan-nuh-nee") to visit my mum's dad's grave there, but was quite shocked to see how the town had shrivelled up to just about nothing in the last 20-odd years - now not much more than the silos, the roadhouse, and what looked like one remaining occupied house. I remember it as once being quite a lively little town, catering for a heap of local farms and a modest clutch of district services. The only thing that looked as good as ever was the pair of netball/tennis courts, resplendent in their new artificial green-tops.

    My dad actually started school in Yaninee, and it was the local railhead and gathering place, held many a lively Saturday night dance, and was also the nearest town to my mum's parent's farm. Sadly now all gone. Town and farm. My mum's dad died not long after dragging most of his family over here in the mid 1920s, from a great little mixed farm in Adelaide’s cool and well-watered Mt Lofty Ranges, a move that never really enthralled Grandma to start with, but then leaving her with five daughters and two sons (aged 8-21) to scrabble a living out of 1,000 acres of scrub and roughly cleared paddocks. They were tough people, but the Depression finally finished them off.

    The cemetery hasn't changed, not even sure there's been any new residents. The last time I was here was with my dad, and he walked up and back too, exactly the same as I found myself doing, paying respects to all those familiar district surnames. And that one enigmatic grave way over in the far corner, on its own, he never did tell me what that was about. In time I made up my own story about it, for my first novel, as I did with so many memories - and myths - I've collected from these parts.

    Next stop was my uncle's old farm that we (mum, me, younger brother, two younger sisters) lived in for a year about 1950, when I did half of Year 9 and half of Year 10 in the Wudinna Area School. A great year to become a teenager, fell in love with a new country girl each term, learnt to ride a horse, drive the ute, work the tractor, shear (but not well), and pitch hay, back in the days of stooked sheaves – damn hard work! Uncle said cousin and I could do the pitching but he'd do the stacking, up on the big high-side dray, because stacking was a science. Pitching just needed muscle. Geez - dust! And cocky-chaff! Itched like mad. But uncle said it'd make men of us, went on supervising from on high until I pitched up a very large and very irritable snake. OMG you've never seen an uncle dance so well!

    This is their old place today ("Ellimatta" it was called - the homesteads all had grand-ish names, mostly uncertain extracts from the local aboriginal dialects), but godknows how we all fitted into it, as my uncle/aunt had six kids of their own! Really poignant, walking around the ruins, relating kid-stories to my mate as we went, especially pointed out the remains of the yards where I raised the pigs that - I always like to say - paid for my first car a couple of years later, back in the city. Ah, I loved those pigs.

    Back out on the road, reminiscing about waiting for the school "bus" (just a flatbed ute and a metal canopy thing on the back with two bench seats), and a passing local pulled up in his farm ute, as they do, ostensibly to say g'day but really doing the local version of Neighbourhood Watch.

    Dropped the password of the family name and soon we were catching up on people past. And as it turned out, we were related by marriage anyway. Still, go back one or two generations and most of the locals are. And so good to be out there on a long dirt road again (called "Edmonds Road"!), leaning in a farm ute window, and talking about old times and neighbours and crops and the season. And the size of modern day plant. Geez they're big!

    Long lunch back in the pub, and spent the afternoon walking the town. First stop the cemetery to put flowers on my dad's mum's grave, on my uncle and aunt's, and on the older brother I never knew. Keith only lasted a day in this world, and as we all went to live in the city a few years later when Dad enlisted, Keith never had a marker. The Shire Council put one on each of those without stones many years ago, but sad to see that even that was gone. My little bunch of flowers looked - what? - not sure what. But the Council has assured me they'll replace the marker, which is something. Mum always said that for two weeks after Keith died she put flowers on the wrong grave, as Dad got the sites mixed up. One of those stories that mothers tell over and over, never quite able to put it to rest.

    The next morning I was up early – I always am - and walked the town as the sun came up. I love walking the streets of a small country town as it wakes up, but this one especially. A chance to soak it all up, to embrace the feeling of "memory", and yep, stand a while outside the district hospital, where I first drew breath. And then pay homage to the new Pioneers Memorial out on the highway, a striking bit of local granite that, along with all the other hard-working farmers, carries my family's name.

    But, the house we lived in when I worked here in the mid-'60s is gone, not one sign of it ever having been there, even the great old athol pine out the back yard is gone. World's best climbing tree. And the town garage I worked for is closed, now only a bit of a museum piece I was told over a few long beers. The two blokes who owned it are still around, but they just shut the doors when they retired, only go over and drag out some hard-to-get part occasionally (and whooo, a great '48 Chev I could see in the workshop). And the Area School is now five times as big and has nothing I recognise. But hey, the town air is still the same. And the voices. And the stories they all gave me. I'll settle for that.

    We went "outback" after breakfast, on the way climbed Mt Wudinna (second biggest Aus granite monolith, after Uluru) one more time - geez the old tendons twanged! - but how good was that view! Lordy lordy I do so love the view out over that endless country, all the way out to the Gawler Ranges, out where the agricultural lands end and the station country begins. It gave that great sense of having taken the roof off the world and, unlike the city, there was nothing but a full hemisphere of endless sky.

    Long run out on the Paney Station road, hoping the track from it to the salt lakes was open to 2WD, but no such luck. 20-odd years ago when I was out there last we had to dig the Mazda out so, as much as I would've loved to visit out there again, where we once had picnics and ran wild and picked native peach (quandong) in season, today’s older and wiser heads prevailed.

     So we headed out further where the road cuts through never-ending scrub and saltbush, across a series of old salt pans and up and down and up and down over endless ancient sandhill "jump-ups", to the start of the station country at the first cattle grid. And where the roadside sign says "SIGNAL ENDS". Sure enough, the mobile phone died on the spot!

     On the way back, concentrating on not getting off the shoulders on one of the salt pans, and suddenly WHAM! - a bloody emu barrels out of the scrub and broadsides us at a goodly rate of knots and two blokes simultaneously make about a foot of daylight under their backsides! Geez that got the old adrenalin going! Stop and inspect for damage - they're big tough birds - and thank the lord seem to have got off scot free. (Only when I came to wash the car three days later did I find the two thousand dollar dent! Which I tell myself can only be seen from certain angles).

    We detoured out to Pildappa Rock on the way home, one of those "wave rock" granite outcrops that neither of us had seen before, and yep, well worth the extra kms and the climb to the top. The bonus was the absolutely brilliant view of the "Blue Sturts", those mythical bumps that were ever out there on the edge of my thirteenth year, and also of my mum's teen years, for her about the only redeeming feature of those tough and farther-less times.

    Well, that's about it. I've touched "home", one last time, refreshed my memories and my connection to where I began......

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