Keeping House

 Annie and Fred returned from their honeymoon to their new home at Lubeck, which they called “Kalang” – supposedly an Aboriginal word for beautiful.

They had very little money, and their furniture was either hand-me-downs from Annie’s family, or bought cheaply at clearing sales. The most valuable item was Annie’s piano, brought from the family home at Minyip. Mum told me that at first, they had a kitchen table, but no chairs – they sat on boxes.

One of the first things Mum did was to set up a Housekeeping Book – a small notebook where she kept meticulous accounts of every penny spent on housekeeping. She felt that, as Dad worked hard to support them, he was entitled to know exactly where the money went. 

She kept up this habit for many years – I have three of these little books, dating from 1939 to 1956 – and they make fascinating reading.

The main management of their affairs she left to Dad - she explained that he was rather diffident about financial matters in those days, and she wanted to show her confidence in him. A decision that would later come back to bite her, as we will see!

The first book begins on February 1^st, 1939, and records, in tiny writing, purchases of bread, meat, salad vegies, fruit, - and the Womens’ Weekly, which cost fourpence!

Before long, there was some income, too, from the sale of butter and eggs, occasionally skins – probably rabbit. Rabbits were a great pest, and when shot, the skins were stretched over an oval frame of stout wire, and hung up to dry. Then they were sold to a skin dealer, and presumably ended up as felt hats.

My parents always kept a cow – or two or three - and the milk was separated, the cream either sold to the butter factory in Murtoa or made into butter at home, and sold to the local store. There was a covered stand for cream cans at the front gate of most farms, and a truck would pick them up, returning the empty cans. Most farmer’s wives made some extra income from cream or butter, and the money was usually considered to ‘belong’ to the wife – who had, after all, milked the cows and washed the separator!

The farms was 640 acres in size, most of it used for grazing sheep – Dad never grew wheat there. He earned some extra income working for his cousin, Ernie Niewand, who had land to the south of Lubeck, and Dad helped with moving flocks of sheep, and also in the shearing shed.

 

But the main farming activity was Dad’s passion – poultry. Beginning with a small shed and a few hens, he gradually built up the flock until he was able to send boxes of eggs on the train to Stawell, and eventually established a hatchery for day-old chicks, also sent off by rail. Dad loved his chooks, and would continue poultry farming for most of his life.

He kept ducks, too, there are entries for the sale of ducks and drakes in the housekeeping book. Some of these would have been sold as breeding stock, but most were ‘dressed’ by Mum, destined for a neighbour’s table.

Dressing poultry is an art – dunking the bird in boiling water for just long enough to loosen the feathers, plucking it, singeing it over a flame to remove any ‘whiskers’, drawing out the innards and cleaning it, then trussing it neatly, ready for the oven. The  gizzard and giblets, and possibly the feet, would be saved for soup. As a farmer’s daughter, Mum was adept at all this, but it was far from her favorite task. Though she said turkeys were worse.

Before long there was a vegie garden , supplying the house, and occasionally some surplus to sell. But water was limited, the house was supplied by rainwater tanks, and there were several dams, fed from a water channel snaking across the country from a reservoir in the Grampians. 

There were two rainwater tanks on the south side of the house, and also an underground tank in the garden. Once, during a thunderstorm, the sudden rush of water was too much for an old & rusty tank, which collapsed – my sister and I thought this very exciting, but Mum cried – all that precious water wasted! To this day, I can’t bear to see a dripping tap.

The housekeeping books continue through my childhood, documenting our move to Geelong, and later to Central Victoria. Mostly in Mum’s handwriting, occasionally in Dad’s, they record the minutiae of daily life – torch batteries and toothpaste, singlets and swimsuits; a unique account of my family’s history.