Idyllic
by
Kate Norman

These glorious autumn days with the temperature consistently at 23o C and 24oC, warm nights and foggy mornings, or crisp evenings followed by dewy morning! Delightful, heavenly, divinely sunny days, incredible blue skies and calm halcyon weather excluding equinoxial gales, prevalent during mid March, which to me are almost unbearable. Such is the idyllic autumn season - now seen in rertrospect as the most beautiful season of all.

    Summer at the beach was always the greatest time of year. Oblivious to the heat because of being able to cool off in the water, us children never noticed a heat wave.We ran under the garden sprinkler at home, we took evening picnics
to the river after Dad finished milking the cows. Packing a wooden boxful of cool foods and drink, Mother also provided Dad's thirst quencher; two long - necked brown bottles wrapped in the hessian bag to be staked in the water so as to be kept cold as possible.

    Invariably, we took a fortnight at a beach somewhere on the Mornington Peninsular close enough to home for Dad to 
be able to visit twice a week. We kids slept crosswise on the double bed; Mum and Dad at the other end of the van where the table folded down. Children awake early, spent the day frollicking in the sea, pretend fishing from the pier and playing in the sand - no need for laundry tasks - we
lived in our bathers, ate lunch on the sand under a massive umbrella, returning to swim after the obligatory one hour rest after eating. Dinnertime was absolutely, fantastically, the most luxurious. Fish and chips on the seawall and afterwards a "Family Brick"of icecream, packaged in those days in a cardboard box, served with a tin of peaches. Followed in the darkening hours by ball games, chasey and "murder in the dark". Kick the bucket and release tiggy.
   
However, in my adulthood and losing the first term school holidays to coincide with the Easter break, I felt utterly cheated. Not me but the school children of the future, cheated of those idyllic lazy May days when harvest was done, the rains were still expected, the wind was calmed and kids were free to roam, adventure and explore. Us kids had the whole property to roam. We would pack our lunch and a box of matches.Very basic needs, a potato each, a few rounds of the bread loaf and the obligatory pound of butter. Shorts and tee shirts were farm dress of the fifties, a cowboy hat or a vest perhaps;we'd head off down the track, over the paddocks to one water hole or another.The original sandpits, where the sand had been excavated for buildings, yards and tracks were abandoned and taken up by rabbits and eventually became the waterhole for the livestock. A deep steepsided hole with an amount of black emerald green water was never inviting to us and cattle came for a drink occasionally.We'd collect sticks, from the "three corner paddock" where the gumtrees grew, to build our campfire to roast the potatoes, then spend time laboriously pushing the loose sand around involved in some imaginary play.We each had our own bottles of cordial and eventually the hunger pangs would alert us and the unmistakable aroma of baked spuds would entice us to "down tools" and take lunch. After which, I distinctly remember laying in the full force of the sunshine on the warm sand, closing my eyes to bake my eyelids and picture the innocent fantasies of my childhood.

    We'd sabotage the bunny holes and extended play with vivid imaginings took place in the warrens without ever sighting the rabbits. They were only seen by spotlight much later on in the dark of night. We could wander through the gate further on, struggling to unhitch the wooden droppers and barbed wire gateway enclosures, to traipse through the winter crop of maize grown for the dairy herd, no doubt hunting for that elusive "monster".

    Continuing on from these average- sized twenty-acre paddocks, we might venture to the eighty acre potato field, recently harvested, so, newly turned - over, fine tilth, brown and loamy, to wallow in the luxuriant smell of earth, dust rising as we played, settling in ears and nostrils, making the evening bath a worthwhile cleansing event.

And walk home back via the creek. The original swampland having been severely drained and dried for agriculture and dairyfarming. In the mid twentieth century amidst good, average rainfalls, the drains took the heavy flooding rains quickly out to sea. In between times the creekbed filled with reeds and leeches.

So we'd weave our way through the reeds, never ever dreaming of a snake or danger and having reached home climb up the bank to remove all the "blood suckers". Other days we might head out south to the rise where the eucalypts circled another waterhole.

Here, under the special fragrance of the tall gums we'd gather bark. Undoubtedly, with six siblings  there'd be a pecking order; we'd argue and bicker, talk and ponder and dream or continue on imagining, once again baking our spuds. Invariably we'd need to scrape off a layer of black charcoal before dressing the hot potato in butter, rolling it in bread and gnaw away. Satiated, we'd lay on the edge of the dam, water all dark brown from the fallen bark debris hidden under the surface. Face towards the sky and try to look at the sun. Almost impossible until we learned it was easier to see the circle of the sun through a hole in a  piece of  cardboard, with the sun penetrating from over one's shoulder. However, from memory, I think that included an eclipse of the sun. Still we basked in the warmth, gazed at the blue blueness of the sky, watched birds on the wing and heard the insects buzzing busily over the water.

How good as under ten years of age to think we could rest after lunch!  Sometimes, at the waterhole, we'd stoke up the fire and Mum and Dad would bring a billy to boil tea and Mum would have baked a cake for afternoon tea before Dad began milking again.

    Other times if Dad was ploughing, two of us would walk down to the tractor with ploughman's lunch to share with Dad. We'd stay and eat the bread and cheese and German sausage, "Polony" as we knew it,with hot tea. We'd sit on the rim of the tractor whilst Dad rolled his cigarette then we'd return home at leisure, swinging the basket, probably chatting between ourselves of how we would construct our next hessian hut, tree house or playhouse. We never knew the American phrase of "cubby".

    Our influences came straight from the Enid Blyton storybooks won as prizes in the Saturday Corinella Page. How I would treasure my winnings and cherish those delightful books and sit astride a forty-four gallon petrol drum rocking from side to side, reading, totally absorbed, sunshine streaming down the back of my neck. Rocking from side to side on the back lawn, toes dipping into the cool green grass, first one foot then the other, absolutely transported to the world of gypsies roaming the countryside in their wooden horse-drawn vans, Famous Five and Secret Seven, houseboats rocking under willows and at 4 pm, a tea consisting of luscious buns and milk.

    Our biggest most exciting adventure was to the hole where all the refuse from the household was buried, where all the debris of the family collected. All forms of discarded equipment, bits of fencing wire, tins, cans, bottles, boxes wood and cardboard. Yet another former sandhole, this was the epitome of playhouses.

We'd dig and dig underground houses, complete with chimneys from the newly dismantled laundry copper, with chairs and tables, even lamps.There was a certain element of danger as the sand at some stages would collapse, but usually we instinctively knew where the packed sand was strongest.

    All the while immensely influenced by the warmth of the sunshine on our backs as we planned and designed and decorated our dwellings. Mental states enlivened by the forces of nature, imaginations would promote even more excitement in our play. Hunting through the debris a treasure would emerge to steer the theme on yet another tangent. Little by little we started to haul tools to the Hole to enable us to carry out more sophisticated errections or build bits of furniture.

     It seemed the fortnight of heavenly May warmth was godsent to reinvigorate and strengthen us for the winter season, for we rarely suffered flu colds or the like.