The early days at Thornton

When my mother and father married, Dad worked the family farm at Thornton, up the Laidley Creek Valley, so the big old family home was divided into two dwellings with Grandma and Aunty Dolly (Dad's oldest spinster sister) on one side and our growing family on the other.

I like to tell people my parents were so impressed with me, the oldest, that they decided they’d like a dozen of me. But the truth is my dad comes from good Irish Catholic stock and the change that swept through the world with the introduction of birth control was not felt in our household.

Mum wasn't Catholic and she never took any part in Catholicism but she played her part as the wife of a good Catholic and made sure we were raised Catholic. She attended our baptisms but that was it. She didn't darken the door of the church again until her children started marrying. She never forgot that when they had married, the ceremony couldn't take place in the main body of the church (because she was not Catholic) in front of the altar but in the sacristy, a side room where the priest and altar boys prepared for mass. That rule changed over time but Mum's resentment never did. She might have been a quiet, gentle soul who never argued but she never changed her mind either and she never forgot an injustice.

But first, the early years about which I remember so little and a few of the stories that have been told ...

For the first five years of my life we lived on the family farm, in half the house we shared with Grandma Ward and my maiden aunt, Dolly. Back then Dad was the farmer, who always smelled of soap when he came up the stairs into the house, having stood, winter and summer, under a trickle of cold water from the tank at the back of the house.

(We lived on the far side of the house pictured below which doesn’t look much different from how it was back then.) We passed this house whenever we went to my maternal grandparents on holiday. It had a number of years where it was much changed and looked sadly neglected. It made me happy to see it returned to its former glory in 2014. 

I remember Dad waving from a horse as he set out to muster the back paddock, up in the mountain at the back of the house, Dad walking behind the huge old draught horse with the reins around his neck, ploughing a paddock in a cloud of dust. The draught horses were Blossom and Nugget, almost twice as tall as Dad with hooves big as dinner plates. Dad just bossed them around like they were puppies and at the end of a long day fed them large bales of hay.

As a farmer his day started at sunup with the milking and finished at sunset.

Dad in his footy player days. Dad with a broken ankle in plaster, him laying on his back on a bed with me sitting beside him, a baby either Esme or Peter, on his tummy and Mum cutting the plaster off his foot, objecting, not wanting to do it. Her repeating, “No, Andy.” And him insisting his ankle was better, he could play that afternoon, telling her those scissors were useless, to get a knife. And her flatly refusing to do that. I’m sure my siblings will recognize that man, although his footy boots were but a distant memory by the time most of them arrived. He always had time to have a youngest climbing over him, while remaining a tough, tough man physically. And more than a little impatient.

Did he ever say how old he was when he left school? Trish thinks it was in Grade 6 or 7 and her memory is pretty good. So he would have been 12 or 13. He certainly valued education and made sure each of us received as good an education as he could afford. After his schooldays ended, he worked on the family 999 acre farm. They milked cows, grew potatoes and corn, watermelons, pie melons and pumpkin along the rich river flats and lucerne for the dairy cows. Beef cattle were kept on the mountain at the back of the house.

A couple of stories Dad told me of his childhood come to mind. There was no money for toys when he was a child. During the school holiday he and his younger brother, Terry would break into the school shed and “borrow” the cricket bat and ball to play with over the holidays. They then had to repeat the exercise to return them before school resumed.

Grandma always told her children never to play in the creek. Of course they did and on one occasion Dad was bitten by an eel which he thought was a snake and thought he was surely going to die. He couldn’t admit to his mother he’d been disobedient, so took himself up into the hills and hid in a cave, waiting to die. By sunset he was feeling hungry and pretty sure he was going to live after all and went home for dinner.

Dad was 14 when his oldest niece was born.  Before she died, she recorded and left the family her memories.  She described Dad as a young man - handsome, tough, strong, a good horseman, a more than competitive and competent footballer, cricketer and tennis player and a tireless worker.  A good dancer, his hair was bryllcreamed to shiny, neat perfection before he ventured out for a Saturday night dance.  She tells how one Christmas, she received a wind-up monkey which turned cartwheels on a frame.  Dan and Terry almost wore it out playing with it, toys were such a novelty to them. 

On the farm everything was done by hand. Seed was planted and eventually the potatoes hoed, picked and bagged, corn cut, lucerne scythed and piled into stooks which were then forked up onto the dray to go to the hayshed to eventually be made into chaff and bagged. A far, far cry from farming these days.

Dad mustered the mountain and back paddocks where water was always a concern and he was constantly fixing the windmill. The cattle were brought to the house paddock to be dipped, branded, ears clipped and other unmentionable things done to them. He had to empty the outdoor loo and always have a clean pan ready for visitors and he kept the woodboxes full for the wood stoves of both households.

When he was about 14 he cut off his little toe while chopping wood, took the wood upstairs and gave the toe to his mother. Grandma put it in methylated spirits in an essence bottle and one of the first things my older cousins would do on our visits was check the bottom drawer of the sewing machine to make sure it was still there – it always was! I wonder when they threw it out.  There was no trip to the doctor, Grandma acted as the midwife for the local community and knew about looking after wounds, he said. 

Although it was quite a while before machinery was used on the farm,the Wards bought their first car in 1929.  It was a Rigby.

Dad's father, Dan, was an infamous driver.  Being blind in one eye did not help him.  He constantly drove into drains so when Dad (Andy) was about 17, he was made the family's chauffeur.  He would drive Dan into Laidley for supplies.  The would stop at the Mulgowie Pub for a drink on the way home.  Dan would order a rum.  Andy would order a ginger ale, with a wink.  The publican would automatically give him a beer.

This went on for a couple of years.  Eventually Andy decided he should get a driver's licence.  Licenses were optional in those days.  He went into the Laidley police station to apply.  The sergeant looked at the application form and said, "So you're Andy Ward, the good footballer.  No need for a test.  I've seen you driving around for a couple of years.  I'll write out your licence now."

When the Second World War II broke out Andy’s younger brother, Terry wanted to join up but he needed his parent’s consent as he was under 21 and Grandma refused to sign the papers. He put his age up and joined the AIF (Australian Imperial Force) anyway. Dad also joined up in the January of 1942 (2 Reconnaissance Battalion). However, Grandma found it impossible to manage the farm after Grandpa died (later in 1942) and wrote to the Army requesting that Dad be released to come home and run the farm.

Dad was with his battalion at the railway station waiting to be transferred to North Queensland for jungle training (prior to being posted to New Guinea) when he was told to “fall out” and, after the train had departed, leaving him alone on the platform, was told he had been demobbed and was to go home.

Farming was an essential service, the people and the soldiers had to be fed. Aunty Maisie (Dad's younger sister) told me he was “dirty” with Grandma for about 10 years because of that. He felt Terry should have been sent home as he was the younger but Grandma insisted it be Dad as he was the good farmer. I know he thought that he hadn’t done his duty and fought for his country. He felt that keenly.

During those war years Dad played an integral part in his community. Their home was the last one on the telephone line up the valley. If there were any urgent messages for farms further up the creek, it was Andy’s job to saddle a horse and gallop up the valley with the message, day or night, hail or shine. Telegrams were rung through to his home and no-one wanted to be the one to deliver those telegrams. Mum told me how the farmers further up the valley would hear Dad’s horse coming at a gallop, sometimes in the middle of the night, and they would freeze in terror, praying he wouldn’t slow at their place, breathe a sigh of relief when he galloped on by, then be hit by guilt that they had been spared (this time) but one of their neighbours was about to suffer. Of the 22 young men of the district who served overseas (most in New Guinea) during that war only five returned. 

Good news never came at night! And then later they would hear Dad’s horse slowly making its way back home and guess by the time between his coming and going who had received the telegram and wonder if another father/son/brother/friend was missing or killed in action.  In such a small community Dad knew all the men in the district, I can't imagine how hard that must have been for him.

I would call that doing your duty but when we spoke about it that day after Esme died in 2006, he looked solemn and sad as Mum spoke but said it was nothing compared to what “the others” did. He never marched in the Anzac Day parades which were a big deal in Brisbane, he felt he had no right to, but he made sure we attended the memorial services and appreciated what others had done for us.

All through the war Dad was a member of Australia’s home guard – the Volunteer Defence Corps (VDC) a part of the Australian Military Forces.  'Dad's Army' as Dad called it, most of them were veterans of World War One who were by then too old to enlist and a few young men like Dad who had been demobbed.  They must have had a roster for duty.  Of course, the front-line forces were given the best weapons and equipment, Dads Army had to make do with improvised weapons.  They trained in guerilla tactics and devised schemes for local defence.  Dad's lot patrolled the beaches (on horseback) between Coolangatta and Noosa.  We learned in school how two VDC units in Western Australia did actually help defend their towns against Japanese air attacks.

In the farmhouse the big black wood stove was always lit and provided meals and baking as well as heating the water for our baths. The rain water soaped up beautifully and we would itch for a long time after our shared baths. Mum said that could have been from the caustic soda in the home made soap or the fact that there was so little water in the bath to rinse the soap off our bodies properly. The rule was one kettle of hot water to 2 kettles of cold. Water had to be carried from the tap in the kitchen to the bath tub.

Butter was made by hand.

Monday was traditionally washing day and nearly did take all day. A fire had to be lit under the copper to heat the water, clothes were soaped, scrubbed, boiled in the copper, put through the mangle (two rollers that squeezed water out of clothes) that had to be operated by hand, soaked in ‘blue’ (to whiten bedclothes and white clothes), rinsed and put through the mangle again before being hung out to dry. Laundry day could be dangerous – accounts of deaths resulting from burns caused by the fire under the copper or the boiling water inside it appeared in 19th and early to mid 20th-century newspapers.

Mum's first electric washing machine came after we moved to Nudgee.  It was called a Trayway. There was an agitator that was fitted over one of the pair of washing tubs under the house (no more toiling away out in the sun) and an electric wringer between that washing tub and the next tub of rinsing water. We often had to help with the washing, lifting the clothes from the water and feeding them through the wringer which would stop if the clothes coming through were too thick.  That wringer had a habit of drawing our arms into it if our fingers which were guiding the clothes got too close.  Luckily, it also stopped when the arms got too thick.

Later on Mum progressed to one of the very first washing machines to arrive and used this one for many years.   I remember my girlfriend, Marie's mother having one long before Mum did and thinking it was a bit unfair, she only had three kids to wash for.  There would have been at least 6 of us by then, probably more.