During the 1930's, 40's, 50's and 60's the main form of mass night-time entertainment in small country towns was provided by the local picture theatre.
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Nyah West is a small town that came into being during the first few years of the 20th Century.
It is built around the railway station on the line laid into the Mallee desert country just a few miles west of the Murray River. The rail was constructed as an alternative means to the paddle-steamers for bring the wheat harvest to the grain export ports along the coast.
Nyah West is built, in fact, right on the cusp where the irrigated grape and fruit blocks separate from the much larger square mile Soldier Settler blocks that were given to Soldiers recently returned from the Great War.
There are about 100 houses in the town, plus 20 or 30 shops, a school, a Police Station, a Bush Nursing Hospital, a hotel, 3 or 4 churches and a Government Water Commission Office. There is also a Picture Theatre.
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1944 was a year of deep, deep drought. Accompanying the rainless skies were the strong westerly winds; the combination whipped inches of top-soil off the denuded mallee plains and dumped it in inconvenient places.
There is a goods train due in this morning. On the up-run it will have a few empty 25 ton carriages; 10 or so will be dropped here...shunted quickly and efficiently, by an ancient wheezing brown coal fired steam engine, onto the side-track that services the wheat silo; the remainder will continue on to the end of the run which is just one more station 15 miles further to the north.
There is a need to patrol the track. Heavy winds in the past 48 hours has moved a lot of sand, and it will certainly have accumulated in the shallow cuttings in sufficient quantities to have covered the tracks where there is no protection from corrugated iron wind-breaks.
He is out of bed the moment the alarm clock begins its jangling call; dresses quickly in the dark and moves into the small kitchen. The chip fire is putting out heat in a minute, and already the cast-iron kettle has commenced its fizzling song. There is time for a quick cup of tea, and the kettle can boil a second round of water for the thermos flask while he blows into the cup to remove some heat from the brew.
She is heavily pregnant, and sluggish at this early hour; she stays in the bed, but welcomes the cup of tea he brings to her.
"Back about two" he says.
"Alright" she responds.
He pads silently through the house, in woollen socks. He sits on a step at the back door, and carefully pulls on his railway-issued steel-capped boots; up-ends each boot and taps it twice against the step to remove any spider that might have taken possession in the night. The light is just turning to grey dawn; now he can see that sizable sand-drifts have appeared in the past 8 hours against the side fence...a few weeks more of this and the fence will have disappeared.
"Today will not be a picnic" he remarks inwardly; "out of town a mile or so, the tracks will be under for sure." Just now the breeze is light, and there is not much sand in the air; a good thing too, as air-borne sand can be abrasive like sand-paper at the fifteen miles per hour the motor trolley cruises at, when on an inspection run.
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"Knew his trade for sure...there is a plough he built under a tree behind the house..."
"Storey....hmmmmm! I knew a man by that name many years back...Charlie....yes....Charlie....that was his name."
The old man, patriach of a well known mallee wheat farming pioneer family, pushed his sweat-stained, wide-brimmed farmer's hat back off his forehead and scratched at a sun-induced cancer spot near his hair-line. "Old Charlie...probably your grandfather I suppose...knew his trade well. He could smith anything; there is a plough he built under a tree behind the house even now."
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There are a couple of buildings in the backyard. One building is quite substantial; it serves as the outdoors washing-house...complete with wood-fired copper for heating water and boiling seriously soiled clothing...and as Dad's tool-shed
Just inside the door, and to the right, there are two axes. The heads are not quite the normal shape; it is as though the normal smooth taper to sharp edge has been broken off two-thirds of the way along and what remains has been filed into a rounded edge. Pressed into each head is the identical inscription "Plumb. 2 lb".
He is a smart kid; likes attending the small, single room, unlined weather-board State [government] School; enjoys using the School's nine-book library, reading Boy's Own Adventure yarns and flipping through the two-volume, leather-bound Concise Encyclopaedia to find line drawings of exotic animals and plants.
His Dad dies soon after a joyless fiftieth birthday...some say it was from an alcoholic binge brought on by his depression from realising he has not made much of a go of providing for his wife and four kids...and that makes for a big problem. He is the youngest child in the family; older brother and eldest sister have married, and moved away to concentrate on the effort of raising their own families; other sister is described as "not quite the full two-bob", and she is still with Mum but not contributing to the family income in a positive way.
He is 12 years old; small, but strong, he takes local labouring jobs, as he can get them; weeding vegetables at the market gardens along the river; picking stone fruits and grapes in-season; salary is small, but it helps. As soon as he can, he collects together a little cash and buys a second-hand push-bike. Now he can roam wider for work, and usually keeps himself fully employed. He acquires a reputation for reliability and diligence...a useful epithet in a land of itinerant no-hopers.
A couple of years of this life has been ok, but now he feels the need to stay closer to home...Mum is not a young woman any longer, and could use a strong back about the place on a more regular basis. There is not much local work on offer.
There is something, though, that might be worth a try. The "Big Smoke" is just that; Melbourne, 250 miles south and east, is a large ,sprawling city of 500,000 people. In winter it can be a cold place, and so every house has an open fire-place for burning wood or brown coal for warmth. The most favoured fuel is the mallee root...the extremely hard, knarled root ball of the dwarf eucalypt trees that virtually cover the whole of this huge desert area in the north-west of the State.
Well...did cover it; immediately following the First Great War, the whole of the mallee was surveyed into mile square blocks and offered to any takers prepared to roll down the mallee scrub and try their hand at growing wheat. Rolling...dragging a massive steel rolling-pin, connected by chains to two teams of a dozen or more stout clydesdales...broke off the eucalypts at ground level, leaving the root ball just below the surface. These roots [called mallee stumps] were a source of great pain to the would-be farmers; they were rot-resistant, white-ant resistant, removal resistant, plough busters.
For ten years or more after rolling, farmers continued to turn up large quantities of mallee stumps, often at the cost and inconvenience of a broken plough. Then they had the unwelcome expense of paying labourers to journey about the paddocks, collecting the stumps which were then piled high and burned in colossal fires.
Farmers whose square miles were close to the railway-line...constructed mainly to transport the expected huge yields of wheat from the fields to the ports of Melbourne, Geelong and Portland for export...occasionally earned a little "tea" money by trimming mallee stumps to fire-place proportions, stacking them into idle rail-carriages and shipping them to Melbourne where middle-men wood merchants sold them off as premium hearth-wood.
He thinks he might try his hand at this game; there is plenty of stump country close to Mum's house at the railway siding; too far to ride daily, but certainly close enough to be reached on a day-off every other weekend. He has transport...a bike...he has a little cash and so puts down a deposit of two new, good quality "Plumb" axes, a calico tent and a roll-up mattress.
It is not hard to find a frustrated farmer who will allow him on his land, and who will take removal of the accursed stumps as sufficient payment for the salvage rights. Once a month he can hire a dray and horse team for two days to transport the trimmed stumps from the paddocks to the railway siding.
And so, that is what he does, for about 2 years.
This is not an easy life for a fifteen year-old. There is the work; mallee stumps are heavy, odd-shaped and hard as metal; the axe is just as likely to bounce off the surface as to penetrate; if there is penetration, the axe is just as likely to weld itself to the dense, twisted fibres of the stump as it is to shear off a useful piece of fire-wood; if the stump separates it is just as likely one piece will jump at the assailant and strike a vengeful [temporary] crippling blow to a bare shin as it is to settle harmlessly nearby on the recently ploughed soil.
The hard wood, and its concealed veins of mallee sand, take their toll on the lightly tempered steel of the axe heads; every second day, the edge needs a touch from a file; over a couple of years, the head assumes a new shape.
Then there is the isolation...
[....to be cont]
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