Yearning and learning

Written by Sarah Schultink, age 13

© Willem Schultink

Willem

ThisIsAustralia.com.au

Conversation with my granddaughter.

At our 35th wedding anniversary celebration BBQ at Torquay Beach.
Tabitha is 5 years old.

“Oh hi, Tabitha, how are you?”

“I love you Opa!”

“Opa, you’re tummy’s getting very thick.”

“Opa, you’re getting very very old.”

“Opa, you’re losing very lots of your teeth!”

“Tabitha, you’re very beautiful!”

© Willem Schultink

Willem

ThisIsAustralia.com.au

The bike and the lime pit.

My dad had built a lime pit in front of the house. I don’t know the details of what the lime was used for but I do know that it was for the cement we used for building the house. This lime pit was an above ground structure made of bricks and was about six foot wide by eight foot long and no more than two feet deep. At the time it was about half full of a mixture of water and lime, about the consistency of a slurry. There was no driveway at our house. We didn’t need one, because we had no car. Such a thing was an undreamed of luxury that only wealthy people could afford. Just a grassed area in front of the house that was open to the road. Most of the time. It wasn’t lawn, and the cow was let out on it occasionally to keep the grass down. It also kept it fertilised!

One day I was riding back from school coming down the ‘big hill’ as we used to call it, as fast as I possibly could. I had ridden home from school in Armadale at the John Calvin School in Little John Road. This was quite a ride for a boy of about six or seven years old. The year would have been about 1958 or 1959. I had an old bike that had been restored by my Dad into a rideable condition. I had a carrier on the back with the usual spring loaded clip holding my school case on. It was one of those little brown cases made of compressed cardboard and it held my lunch tin, a pad and an exercise book and may be another book or two.

The ‘big hill’ was a couple of hundred yards on the right of the house, and the ‘little hill’ was in the other direction, towards the railway line. This was in Third Avenue Kelmscott, roughly opposite where the Kelmscott Secondary College is now. Both the ‘big hill’ and the ‘little hill’ were big for us kids on our old bikes and stuff to negotiate, but when we recently visited in our car they seemed insignificant.

Anyway, I came tearing down ‘big hill’ on my bike with the intention of coming racing into our yard and jumping off the bike while it was still going and then running inside. Except this time Dad had decided it was time for the cow to keep the grass short and to keep the cow in had strung a single strand of fencing wire across the entrance to the yard. It caught me across the chest at full speed and I was flat on my back gasping for air wondering what the heck had happened! And my bike went careering on until it hit the lime pit and bounced right in to it. It must have been quite funny to watch but unfortunately there were no spectators at all. After a while I must have regained my breath and then I fished the bike out of the lime pit and washed it off under the tap under the kitchen window. The damage to my school books was more permanent, though! That was the only giveaway to my Mum that something had happened because she was inside and hadn’t seen anything.

I can still feel that feeling of being winded and gasping for air, with that desperate feeling of not being able to breathe, now, almost fifty years later. Years later I was able to calm my mother down when my brother fell out of the peach tree when he was pinching peaches when we were living in Harvey about 100 miles further south.

© Willem Schultink

Willem

ThisIsAustralia.com.au

Strawberry feast!

The gazebo had decided to try to climb the fence! It was 47 degrees in the shade. The bushfires that were blasting across Victoria did not directly affect us here, but the weather certainly did! The wind that had caused the gazebo to try to climb the fence was searing hot and gusting strongly as Luke and I took the gazebo down. The garden furniture was all askew and the strawberry plant in its wooden planter box was squashed by the gazebo and almost falling on to the ground. That strawberry plant had been given to Trudi by Chris, our eldest son, and she was proud of it. The two big succulent strawberries that were ripening into a deeper red were still there and only seemed enhanced by the heat. Trudi came out and took the box and the strawberries and put them on the stone garden edge in the shade of the jacaranda tree. Just as soon as it was secure we all went back inside to the coolness of the house with its airconditioner.

* * * * * *

“Wilbur! Wilbur! Will you look at that! Just have a look!”

“What? What is it? I can’t see … what are you looking at?”

“Just over there, you ninny! Just near the garden over there. Can’t you see them just hanging down? Those red things that we wanted to get last night but they were up too high. They’re right down low now. We could easily reach them just standing on the grass. And they look so juicy. And I so need something sweet and juicy after that hot today. Phew it was hot! Its never been that bad before. I just couldn’t sleep all day!”

“But we can’t go onto that grass! Don’t you remember? That’s where that terrible cat lives. The one that has killed possums before.”

“Ooh yes! I saw that big grey and white cat today. Just before they took him inside. He’s big and scary!”

““No, not him! He’s fat and lazy. The one that has killed a possum before is the old one, the female. She’s old but she’s tricky, and I saw her kill a possum! I saw it myself. I told him not to go in there because the cat and he went anyway and she killed him and I don’t dare to go down there now!”

“Well I’m going anyway. Don’t be a wuss! Those red things look so sweet and juicy I’m going to get them. Anyway, I reckon they’ve got that cat inside and it can’t get to us even if its awake. I’m going down to try them.”

“Careful Sam! That cat, its only small but it can kill .. Samantha, don’t go …!”

“Wilbur, these are so sweet! You should try them. Come down and try them.”

“But the cat, Sam! Oh all right, let me try! Ooh yeah they’re all right too. Ohh, after such a hot day this is beautiful! … what’s up Sam. I haven’t finished …”

“Listen Wilbur! What’s that sound? It’s the cat Wilbur, it’s the cat! I’m going up the tree. That cat killed a possum Wilbur and I don’t want it to kill me!”

““But Samantha, I haven’t finished … its so juicy …”

“It’s the cat, Wilbur, and I’m going!”

* * * * * *

“Isn’t it nice that its cooler today? But lets go and get in the wash before we go to get ready for church.”

“All right. Are you going to fold every bit of wash as you put it into the basket?”

“No, only the small stuff.”

“There, its done. Nice to sit here in the cool morning. But wasn’t yesterday hot? They reckon it was 47.9 at Avalon yesterday and 47.4 in Geelong! That’s the hottest its ever been around here. I read on the news on the internet that there have been some people killed …”

“OHH! Look over there! They’re gone. My lovely strawberries! Some critter has eaten them in the night and there’s only a little bit left!”

Trudi went to pick the remains of her beautiful strawberries and held them out for me to smell. They had the real strawberry smell, the smell of fruit that has ripened on the plant.

“Just smell that”, she said. Then her face lit up “I’ll bet they enjoyed it!”

“Enjoyed what?”

“Just imagine the feast they had after that hot day yesterday! Just imagine the enjoyment they would have had getting stuck into these juicy strawberries.”

“And where was the cat when we needed her?” I said.

© Willem Schultink

Willem

ThisIsAustralia.com.au

Gilgies and boats.

Because our property was in a low lying place, really in the gully between two sandy rises, the council had decided to put a drain for the swamp through our property. This drain always had water in it, and usually quite a bit of water too. Looking back I think the water would have been several feet deep and about four or five feet wide. The water was always brown like a dark tea. There were lots of interesting things in the drain including gilgies and frogs and tadpoles (taddies to us kids). At the right time of year you could find clumps of frogs’ eggs, each with a little dot in the middle. But it was the gilgies that gave us the most interest!

Gilgies are like yabbies or marron. They are bigger than yabbies and smaller than marron, and are like a freshwater crayfish. I know now that you can cook and eat them and they are delicious, but for a Dutch migrant boy who had never seen anything like it in my life I had no idea of that. But we used to catch them regularly. It wasn’t till thirty years later that I learnt that gilgies and yabbies are good to eat, though a marron is better.

Take a Sunshine milk powder tin, which my Mum used regularly, punch a hole just under the top rim with an old nail and a rock, or Dad’s hammer if I could find it, tie a bit of string to it and throw it in the drain. We’d always tie the other end of the string to an old cast iron water meter cover that was lying around our place. Leave it there for a few days and a gilgie would make its home in it. Pull it out by the string and then there’d be a big gilgie in there waving its nippers at you!

The first times we did this we found out that those nippers were sharp and the gilgies could easily draw blood. A lot of little wounds  were made better by a band-aid! After a while we worked out that the way to handle them was to grab them by the body just behind the nippers. Then the gilgie would wave its nippers with complete futility because it couldn’t get to its tormentors and do any damage. But they were then great fun to chase your brothers and sisters with. They all knew from direct experience that those strong nippers could hurt!

We learned a lot from those gilgies, and though we threw a lot of them back I am ashamed to say that there some that we forgot and they just died. We’d discover them days later when we went to play with the tin and it had a fairly strong smell!

The Bible story we were read at family devotions one day was that of Moses as a baby being put into a basket of reeds and floated down the Nile River in Egypt. This was at the command of a cruel Egyptian king or Pharaoh. He was rescued by an Egyptian princess and he became a prince of Egypt. He was trained by their best commanders and eventually led his people out of Egypt and to their own land which had been promised to them by God. Which shows that God does have a sense of humour!

But this of course gave us an idea! Why not take the galvanised bathtub and get my little brother …? So we did. The bathtub was just the right size. My brother did not object. After all, he was only just over a year old and was quite enjoying the excitement. We put him in the bathtub and we floated him down the entire length of the drain from the front fence to where the drain went under the fence to the big paddock. We were just in the process of getting him out when my Mum found us and she was not happy! I don’t remember the consequences but I can’t imagine that we got off lightly. I think we gave Mum a bit of a fright!

© Willem Schultink

Willem

ThisIsAustralia.com.au

To school on the train.

Going to school. Things were different then. When I started going to school we lived in Kelmscott and I went to school in Armadale at the John Calvin School. That was a bit far to walk so I had to go on the the train. That meant that I as a six year old had to walk nearly a mile to the railway station, buy a ticket, which cost sixpence, get on the train, go to Armadale, get off the train, and walk to school. How many parents today would let their six year olds do that? At least getting off at the right station was easy, because Armadale was the last stop in the 1950s.

But my parents really had no choice. We had no car, and in any case Mum never learned to drive. We did not get a car until the family moved to Harvey years later … but that’s another story. My parents quite rightly wanted us to have a Christian education and that was the Christian school that was available and the train was the only way of getting there. It worked and until I learned to ride a pushbike to school a couple of years later that was the way I got to school. Mind you, my seven year old sister also went so we travelled together.

The trains were usually old steam trains with old timber carriages. The carriages were divided up into small compartments with two rows of seats facing each other and luggage racks overhead. Occasionally we would have a carriage which must have been the luxury version in its day, which had a silver was basin. The doors of the carriages were hinged and they opened outwards. You could open them by holding the handle lever and turning it downwards.

There was usually quite a crowd of schoolchildren waiting for the train at the Kelmscott station. When the train was pulling in there was always a rush for the doors to see who could get in first and get the best seat. One day a girl got to the train while it was still moving, grabbed the door handle which turned downwards and her hand slipped off and she fell between the moving train and the platform. I still remember the man carrying her from the railway track back up the platform after the train had moved forward enough for people to get to her. Looking back I don’t think the accident was as serious as it seemed at the time. But it shocked all of the kids at the station. It was a pretty quiet crowd that day!

I used to love those steam trains. When I tell the stories of these train trips to the kids its always accompanied by realistic sounds of the train whistles and the steam working through the pistons and the level crossing bells and the clicketty clack of the wheels on the track. Maybe when I learn the technology I can put an audio track with this story so you can hear it too!

Later came the diesel trains with their distinctive ‘pong’ sound instead of the steam train whistle. I am sure they were more efficient and quicker, but they didn’t have the same romance for me as the steam trains. It was a disappointment to me when the government sold all the steam trains to Brazil in the sixties and replaced them with boring diesels. I still remember the X class diesels with oil leaks running down the sides and thinking ‘These are supposed to be better than the steam locomotives?’ Time moves on and so does technology and eventually the steam trains would have reached their useby date and would have been replaced. But I reckon the government jumped way too early and missed out on twenty years of useful life from those steam trains.

© Willem Schultink

Willem

ThisIsAustralia.com.au

Cows and Bricks.

We had a cow called Silver, a jersey cow. She gave good milk and cream for many years until she was replaced by a younger cow called Bonnie. One day as we were sitting down to dinner Mum said that the meat we were going to eat was silverside, which is a pickled beef. I couldn’t believe it! All during my father’s thanksgiving prayer I was agog, and as soon as the word ‘Amen’ was out of his mouth I up and raced outside to look. But Silver was still in the paddock! So I raced inside and demanded an explanation. Silver is still in the paddock so how come we are having silverside?

Silver was also the cow on which I learned to milk. All you needed was a small stool, a galvanised bucket, and some patience. Sit on the stool, put your head into the cow’s side, squeeze a little milk from a teat on to your hands so that you can wet the teats, and then simply squeeze the teats with a downward flowing motion so that all the milk would be squeezed out into the bucket. Don’t pull the teat because that is uncomfortable for the cow and she will let you know soon enough by trying to kick you, but do it right and soon there would be satisfying squirts of warm frothy milk going into the bucket. Even more satisfying was turning the teat to aim a stream of milk at the face of a brother or sister who was trying to annoy me and got too close. I got to be a good shot after a while! It didn’t take long to empty the udder and to fill the bucket and bring it in to Mum. Most of the time. Sometimes Silver decided that she didn’t like the proceedings and kick over the bucket which made my Dad cross. He would give the cow a thump on the hindquarters with the flat of his hand. That settled her!

Butter making was part of the deal, but we didn’t have a butter churn, so we used an eggbeater! That was hard work and we all had to take turns. Eventually we had butter. I used to love to drink the left over fluids, the whey. There was always plenty of cream, because Jerseys are bred for high butterfat content.

We used to sell some of the milk to friends to supplement a pretty tight budget. Looking back I can see that Dad and Mum struggled financially in those years, and every bit helped. As I got a bit older it was my job to deliver the milk. On my bike, with three quart glass bottles of milk inside a small suitcase – one of those small brown suitcases that we used to use for for school – strapped to the carrier at the back. It was about a five mile ride along Railway Parade alongside the railway line, to deliver the milk, and then a five mile ride back again. Quite something for a seven year old on a clunker of a bike that had been rescued from the tip and rebuilt. But that didn’t bother me. I enjoyed the ride.

I well remember the day when the truck came with the bricks so that Dad could start the main house. It was a blue truck with the bricks neatly stacked but otherwise loose on the truck. Dad showed them where he wanted them stacked and I watched fascinated at these two guys unloading and stacking those bricks. They’d start a row with two bricks laid longitudinally with one end jacked up on another brick laid across. Then they’d lay down a layer of bricks laid across and finish the row the same way as it was begun. Once they had that set up the two of them took off and worked like troopers getting bricks up off the truck and stacking them. They built the stack up to about four feet high and then started another row. They ended up with with four rows of bricks about four feet high and maybe twenty feet long. In no time flat they were finished and the truck was driving away and we kids were climbing on the brick stack. We continued to play on that stack for years as it gradually reduced.

The beginning was digging the foundations. No concrete slabs in those days. Just a pattern of ditches built into the the sand. If you’ve seen the movie ‘They’re a weird mob’ you will have a good picture of the type of construction. It was good that the soil was sandy because it made digging a lot easier. It was just pick and shovel all the way. Then came the bricklaying. And mixing the cement. Nothing as sophisticated as a cement mixer. Not only couldn’t we afford anything like that but we had no electricity connected anyway. So Dad got a sheet of flat tin. Onto it he put the right proportions of sand and cement and mixed it dry. Then he formed that into a circle and tipped water from a bucket into the hollow in the middle. He then went round the circle with the shovel and gradually shovelled all the sand/ cement mix into the water. He kept on mixing and adding water until he had a nice mixture of wet cement at just the right consistency. Dad might not have had trade skills but he knew how to solve problems, and he was always willing to have a go.

Dad wasn’t too familiar with chalklines and spirit levels. He just started laying bricks at one corner and kept going until he got right around the house and back at that corner. This works well for a while, but unless you keep a check on things it only takes a bit of variation in each course of bricks for quite a substantial error to creep in by the time the wall is finished. I reckon he was about one brick out by the time he finished. Which wasn’t a problem for the house. He lined the roof beams up by chocking them until they lined up perfectly. Mum tells us that it was a very sturdy place. This is borne out by the fact that the house still stands today, more than fifty years later, and it has several extensions on it.

The first room finished was the kitchen. Dad had filled the floor area with builders’ rubble, pieces of brick and concrete, and sand. When he had compacted it as best he could he put a layer of concrete over the top. It worked well through the whole house. The reason for the need for fill was that Dad had raised the floor area of the house because of the low lying nature of the property. The kitchen had iron window frames, iron door frames, and a very basic cupboard with a single sink. You may remember the Masonite kitchen sink cupboards from the 50s. It was one of them. And, which was a wonder to us kids, a tap over the sink. Running water inside the house. That was pretty neat! But still no electricity.

© Willem Schultink

Willem

ThisIsAustralia.com.au

Back in the good old days, when the earth was flat!

Daddy! Daddy! Tell us a story!

Its after dinner. Family devotions have been done. Dishes are happening. And the younger children want to hear a story.

“All right! What do you want to hear a story about?” “Tell us a story of when you were a little boy.” “OK, but when was that?” The response was well rehearsed “Back in the good old days, when the earth was flat!”

I have been telling stories to my kids for many years. At first when my oldest, Jess and Chris, were kids, both Trudi and I would read stories to them. And stories stay with children all their lives long. Chris is now thirty two years old and he now has his own copy of ‘Scuffy the Tugboat‘ that he reads to his daughter Ruth. We are on to our third set of ‘The Chronicles of Narnia‘ and that’s nearly worn out. And the number of timers I have read that delightful book ‘Voyage of the Vagabond‘ by Richard Thruelsen and each time they loved it.

But it is the stories of my childhood that they love the most. Each of the children loved those stories. Stories of the house in Kelmscott that my Dad built. Stories of the cow and the calf. Stories of the bushfires. Stories of hurricane lamp adventures to the outside dunny in the dead of the night. Stories of that exciting drive through the cyclone. Stories of my grandmother’s visit from Holland in the 60s. Stories of long pushbike rides as kids to the beach twenty miles away.

Kids love stories, and stories that give them a heritage, a place in the scheme of things they love even more. This is my story, a picture of my place in the scheme of things. Much of it has been told to my children as they grew up. Some of it will be new to them. And for the older ones some of it will have happened since they left home to set up homes and families for themselves.

This is my story …

© Willem Schultink

Willem

ThisIsAustralia.com.au

My life as a kid - growing up in Kelmscott Western Australia.

My earliest memory – or perhaps it is a memory of a memory – is of being in the sick room of the migrant ship Johan van Oldenbarnevelt. I am told that this was on the Bay of Biscay off the western coast of France, an area noted for its rough seas. I was not yet three years old and I remember the colour of the wall of the sick room. Why anyone would paint wall of a sick room on a ship green is beyond me, but that’s what it was. The problem I had was nothing more than simple mal de mer – sea-sickness. That will come up again later …

We lived for a time in an old farmhouse in Third Avenue in Kelmscott in Western Australia. Kelmscott was an outer suburb on the the southern side of Perth, the capital. The house had verandahs around the front and the sides and a corrugated tin roof. There was a driveway on the right which was unsealed and sandy, and to the right of that was a disused windmill and a tank on a stand. Next to the windmill was an old well with sleepers over the top. This well was one of the few places we were never to go. But an inquisitive three year old and his older 4 year old sister found it just a bit too interesting.

Under the sleepers was a ladder and ladders are meant for climbing down! So we did. And the bottom of the well was dry and sandy. And we played there happily for quite a while, while frantic parents were trying to find us. We couldn’t understand what they were all so excited about when they did! But it was made very clear to me that I was never to do that again, and I never did.

The next house across from our place was owned by the den Hollander family. He was a painter and his house reflected the nature of the man. It was an interesting house full of interesting bits and pieces. He used to keep a number of his paintings on the walls of his home. As I remember some of them were paintings of nudes. The style of the house was different than the other houses around – all angles and windows and painted white. Although we only meet them from time to time we still regard that family as friends more than fifty years later.

Between the two houses was the remains of an old car under a gum tree. It was a big black car with a huge long bonnet. Thinking back on it in later years I think it was a Buick straight eight. But it had doors and a steering wheel and leather seats and lots of spiders. What more could a boy want? I spent hours driving that car! After fifty years its still a clear memory.

Church was a big part of life for us then – it still is now. Our family was a migrant family sponsored by the local Free Reformed Church which at that time met in the lesser hall of the Armadale Town Hall in Jull Street. Every Sunday morning at 8.30 or so the whole family would walk to the railway station at Kelmscott. My elder sister and I would walk and my baby brother would be in the wickerwork pram. A short ride on the steam train to the Armadale station and then the walk up Jull Street to the hall. Though I was only three years old I still remember the hall, and especially the singing part of the worship service. They used a lot of Genevan versions of the Psalms. I loved those songs, and I still do now, though now we sing them at a significantly faster pace than then. After a year or two the church moved to the hall of the John Calvin School in Little John Street in Armadale, which was quite a bit further to walk.

The minister was a man named Bruining, a rather imperious man who ruled the place like a benevolent dictator. This was to cause some friction with my family in later years.

My dad had bigger dreams than living in an old rented farmhouse. He already had a job at the local brickworks in Armadale, though this was a fair ride on the push bike every morning. He used to say that it wasn’t the ten miles that bothered him, but the fact that he was riding into the sturdy and blustery easterly wind that came down from the Darling Scarp in the morning, and in the afternoon he was riding into the south westerly sea breeze on the way home! But at least it cooled him down after a hot days work making bricks.

Dad had bought a five acre block of land about a mile or so closer to town. Still on Third Avenue, still on the same side. It was just over the road from a swamp that the authorities were trying to drain, and the drain ran right through our property. This drain was a source of constant delight and adventures to the small boys and girls  who grew up there! This whole area of Kelmscott right through to Westfield is very low lying and should never have been allowed to be subdivided for housing. But it was and in later years there were all sorts of legal problems with compensation claims for flooded houses.

We lived in this house for maybe five years while Dad built it from the ground up. For a man with no building experience, in fact no trade background at all, who worked as a labourer all his life, to build a double brick home by himself – with help from Mum, of course! - is a remarkable achievement! And this while holding down a full time labourer’s job at a brickworks and having to ride his pushbike both ways. Dad was always a hardworking man, and at the age of 62 when he was forced to retire because his body could take no more he was still working as a labourer, but in a meatworks, working long hours. He died comparatively young at sixty nine, simply because his body conked out after too many years of hard work. He never had the chance to rust out because he was worn out.

When we moved in there was only the structure that was there was to become the back verandah. Divided by curtains into a kitchen and bedroom area, and at one end there was a room that would become the bathroom but was used for storage. The room that would become the toilet was the pantry. We three kids shared one bed and Dad and Mum had their own bed. Bathing was done in a galvanised tub which would hold about an eight year old child. We’d start with the youngest and each would use the water. After the kids were washed we went to bed and presumably Dad and Mum had some sort of a bath, probably a ‘half and half’ bath so neatly described by Patsy Adam-Smith in her book ‘Outback Heroes‘

The toilet was in a little timber framed asbestos sheet covered outside dunny twenty or thirty yards from the house right near the back fence of the house block. The receptacle was a large bucket which Dad would empty whenever it was close to full. I don’t remember where he emptied it, but a do remember a large and luxuriant vegetable garden in the sandy soil of Kelmscott!

I do remember the rubbish dump. Dad would take the rubbish every Saturday right up the back corner of the main block, just inside the fence line and close to the Banksia scrub that surrounded our property and that burned so very fiercely when the bushfires came a few years later. There was a slight rise near the back of the block and Dad would dig a hole about four or five feet deep in the sandy soil and tip all the rubbish in the hole. He then covered the rubbish with sand and left the hole till the next time. Next time he would add the next layer of rubbish and then cover with sand. And so on, layer upon layer, till the hole was filled. Then he’d dig another hole.

© Willem Schultink

Willem

ThisIsAustralia.com.au