My first home

My first home was the farmhouse at Lubeck,where I lived with my parents, and later my sister, Loreto, for the first nine years of my life. 

It was a typical Wimmera farmhouse with timber walls and a steeply pitched iron roof, and verandahs all round. There was a big cypress hedge at the front, concealing the house from the road, and providing shelter from the hot north winds.  At the back was another hedge, of boobialla. 

Here’s a plan –

I remember the detached wash-house, with a wood fired copper, and twin cement washtubs. Here Mum kept all the old Women’s Weekly magazines, which I loved to read (especially the Mandrake comic strip).

The house had a big formal dining room, hardly ever used, and the kitchen – maybe all the rooms - had walls and ceilings of pressed tin, painted dark green on the lower half. Loreto and I shared a bedroom at the front of the house, next to Mum and Dad’s room. There was a sleepout off their room, but I don’t think they ever used it.

On the south verandah was an old tin bath, the kind on feet, which kept us kids cool on hot days.

 There was linoleum on all the floors, softened by a central rug in the sitting and dining rooms, and smaller mats beside the beds. Linoleum was washed and polished on hands and knees, mostly Mum’s, but occasionally mine as I grew older.

We lived mostly in the kitchen, though an open fire made the small sitting room cosy on winter nights. The dining room was rarely used, unless there were visitors. It was home to Mum’s piano, and she played it occasionally, but less and less as time went by.

The kitchen was where everything happened – there was an easy chair by the stove, where Mum sat to feed us as babies, and the radio (battery powered) was here too. Everyone listened to the radio – especially the news, and the local footy results being read out on a Saturday night. 

The toilet was a good way from the house, no septic tank, just a “little house” built over a very deep pit, and supplied with squares of newspaper strung on a nail. And a bottle of Phenyle.

Mum built a lovely garden at Lubeck, aided in that sandy soil by lots of chook manure, Dad was already a keen poultry farmer in those days. A local labourer was employed for weeks to do the heavy work of laying out the garden, barrowing all that manure, raking out the lawn, and building the obligatory ‘rockery’. I remember some of the plants on that rockery, Dutchmans’ Britches, and Pincushion flowers.

There were lots of dahlias in the garden, and probably “gladdies” too, as my Uncle Jack Curley was a keen breeder of these.

And the sweet spring-flowering Buddleia which still grows in our family gardens today, is descended from that first garden, and was probably even then a cutting from a neighbour.

We had no electricity, though some farms had windlights. The storekeeper in Lubeck ran a generator which lit the township, his name was Edwards (known as Dowy, so perhaps he was Welsh) he used to turn the generator off when HE went to bed, never mind anyone else… But we lived about a kilometre out of town, and relied on kerosine lamps and candles for lighting. At first we had a Coolgardie safe on the back verandah to keep food cool, later there was a kerosene fridge. 

Dad played tennis, and sometimes I went with him on Saturday afternoons, everyone ‘took a plate’ for afternoon tea, and of course it was a point of honour to supply something nice. There would be a lace edged and hand-embroidered doiley on each plate – Mum had dozens of them. One of the ladies made the best chocolate hedgehog slice I’ve ever tasted, very dark and rich, with a hint of something – sherry, maybe? I’ve never been able to make one half so good.

In November 2007, Loreto and I visited our old home for the first time in nearly 60 years. It was changed very little, though freshly painted – and the big cypress hedge was gone. We could still discern the remnants of Mum’s garden, and the old ‘sheep tree’ still stands out the back by the wood heap.

It’s still a family home, on a working farm, and Max and Margaret Maher have lived there for forty years or so. In Dad’s day the farm was the standard 640 acre block, Max now runs 5000 acres. The story is the same all over the Wimmera, small farms have been amalgamated into huge acreages, and most of the farmhouses have disappeared.

We were very pleased to find that our old home had survived, and was obviously well loved and cared for.