The Forgotten Children (17 page)

After breakfast the horse and cart were taken to the back of the kitchens and the cart loaded up with food scraps to be taken up to the piggery and boiled up in the big coppers. We had to return to the dairy by about eight-thirty, or risk the wrath of Begley. On most mornings I worked by myself in the piggery while the other boys in the dairy gang cleaned the yard, washed the milking equipment and fed the poddy calves.

At the piggery I cleaned out the sties and boiled up the food that would be fed to the pigs the following day. There were two big coppers. I lit the smaller one for the food scraps from the village kitchens and in the bigger one I boiled up wheat from the silo with the meat offcuts and guts from the sheep killed in the slaughterhouse behind the dairy.

The dairy gang killed twice a week, on Monday morning and again on Thursday morning, usually ten to fourteen sheep in each kill. We rarely killed lambs: the Fairbridge diet was overwhelmingly old mutton. Fairbridge kids used to say that the lambs had either two teeth or four teeth, and an old sheep had a full mouth, but at Fairbridge we killed them only when their teeth were broken and falling out.

Again, at the slaughterhouse we received little training. You learnt to kill from the more experienced, older boys in the gang. The first time, the most senior boy put the knife close to hand and pulled the sheep over on its side. I had the job of holding the sheep’s rear legs while he pulled back the head of the sheep over his boot and plunged the knife into the throat, cutting outwards, then breaking the beast’s neck. I was surprised there was so much blood and totally unprepared for the strength of the sheep. It kicked its rear legs free as I rolled around in the blood on the floor, trying to hold it down, while the older boys cursed my incompetence. By the time I regained control, the sheep stopped kicking and fell silent, dead.

Lennie Magee also remembers learning to kill the hard way:

David Eva recalls being the new boy in the slaughterhouse:

We cut off the lower legs while the beast was still lying on the ground, then hung it on a hook, ‘punched’ (skinned) and gutted it, and cut off its head. The heart and the liver were put in a bucket and the remainder of the guts sat in a big pile on the floor until they were picked up – with great difficulty, usually by the boy considered to be the least competent of the gang – and taken in a wheelbarrow to the manure heap. The same boy would cut open the intestines and empty the grass inside them onto the manure heap. I would pick up the remains and take them across to the piggery to go into the big copper. The sheep’s guts would slop around in my wheelbarrow like giant spaghetti as I wheeled it across the road to the piggery. No one ever seemed to come up with a better system of picking the sheep’s guts up than by the armful, with slippery intestines sliding through your arms and down your legs.

The slaughtered sheep hung in the hanging room next to the slaughterhouse overnight. The next day the beast was sawn up, wrapped in meat cloths and laid in the back of the dairy cart to be taken down to the village kitchens, where the meat was butchered by one of the boys on kitchen duty.

On about my second day on piggery duty I was filling a bucket of water and, feeling dog-tired, I leant on the tap for support. Unbeknown to me, Begley had crept up behind me. He kicked me between the legs, up into my balls. As I lay writhing in the mud he grumbled something about going to sleep on the job, then wandered off. I had never met Begley before this incident but knew of his reputation from the other boys and wasn’t surprised.

We usually finished in time to walk back down to the village, wash up and have lunch with everyone else in Nuffield Hall. Two of the boys in the dairy gang had the job of getting the cows into the lucerne paddock before the afternoon milk, but the rest of us could have a nap for an hour or so. On one of the days when I was ‘on cows’, I had herded the cows into the lucerne paddock before the afternoon milking and laid myself down and dozed off. I was woken abruptly by Begley kicking me in the head. Fortunately he was wearing rubber Wellington boots.

At three o’clock we had to start the afternoon milking, which took a couple of hours plus clean-up time. We didn’t get back to the village before dark, always after everyone else in the cottage had finished their tea. Although hungry, I was almost too tired to eat. I had been working for nearly seventeen hours and would be lucky to get six hours’ sleep before Goofy woke me again to go and find the cows for the next milking.

Another tough roster was working in the village kitchens. A paid cook lived in small quarters behind the kitchens and supervised the work of two trainee boys in the kitchens and two trainee girls who worked as waitresses for staff in the dining hall. The trainee boys started before the rest of the village was awake. They were responsible for ringing the village bell, which was outside the back of the kitchens.

One of the first duties each day was to ‘riddle’ the big Esse slow-combustion stoves that operated twenty-four hours a day. The boys rattled out the overnight ash, opened the dampers and put in more fuel so that breakfast could be prepared for almost 200 people.

One of the two trainees had to slice some 200 pieces of bread for breakfast, before two of the secondary-school-age children came to use the slicer to make the sandwich lunches for the children who would be going to school.

The second trainee boy on kitchen duty would move the five-gallon saucepan from the back burner, where it had sat overnight, to the hot plate. He would boil the water and add salt and oats to make a huge tub of porridge. In the early days, Fairbridge used grain grown on the farm for the porridge but some time in the 1950s began to buy cheap oats from Wright Heatons store in Molong. The oats came in big flour sacks and were invariably infested with weevils.

Around 5.30 a.m. the cook would come in to prepare the breakfast for the staff, visitors and the trainee boys. After breakfast the trainees confronted a mountain of washing up. Then most of the morning was spent preparing and cooking lunch, which usually involved hours of peeling potatoes and butchering meat.

Despite the long, hard workday some of the boys liked the kitchen roster, including David Eva:

The vegetable garden wasn’t a bad roster and I worked there during one of the summer holidays when the gardener was Kurt Boelter, husband of our cottage mother. The roster was fairly civilised. At the morning bell we went down to begin work in the garden, where Boelter, an early riser, was already working. We came back up for breakfast in Nuffield Hall with everyone else, and were permitted a mid-morning and mid-afternoon break, at each of which we got a big mug of tea with milk and sugar, which was something of a luxury at Fairbridge. We returned to the village for lunch and finished work in the afternoon in plenty of time for a shower and the evening meal with everyone else in the cottage. We also had Saturday afternoon and Sunday off to play sport, go to church and have a free afternoon like everyone else.

Much of the work in the garden involved ploughing, planting, using the rotary hoe to keep the beds clear, watering, weeding and finally harvesting. We grew many crops, including potatoes, turnips, carrots, pumpkins, cucumbers, peas, beans, cauliflower, cabbage, spinach, tomatoes and corn. For many years all the ploughing and clearing was done entirely by a horsedrawn plough, but in the mid-1950s, following his visit to Fairbridge, the Australian governor-general, Sir William Slim, persuaded the Ferguson Company to donate a tractor. But Boelter felt that the plough drawn by old Blossom the horse did a better job and continued using it until he left the farm in the early 1960s to return to Germany.

Over the years there were a number of garden supervisors, most of whom the kids thought were okay. But in the early 1960s Ted Roach, an awful character, came to Fairbridge and became the village garden supervisor while his long-suffering wife became Canonbar’s cottage mother. Roach was the opposite of Kurt Boelter. Ill-mannered and perverted, he would grab at the boys’ genitals as a sick joke that made us all feel dirty and uncomfortable. He would sit at the Canonbar dining table for the evening meal with filthy hands that he had not washed since coming up from the garden, and roll and smoke cigarettes at the table while we were eating.

The trainee boys usually spent their last few months at the farm school working up on the wheat and sheep section of the farm, which was up beyond the dairy and accounted for about 90 per cent of the Fairbridge property. It was here that the trainee boys learnt to drive tractors and trucks, to plough, sow and harvest, and to farm sheep. The sheep required a lot of work around the year, including drenching and shearing; lamb marking, castrating and tail docking; treatment for footrot; scratch immunisation for scabby mouth; and crutching to prevent them from becoming flyblown.

John Wolvey, who arrived as a nine-year-old in 1940 and stayed at Fairbridge for seven years, remembers working on the farm before mechanisation:

At fourteen, Peter Bennett was assigned to the dairy as a trainee, in the days before the milking machines had been donated to Fairbridge:

Peter was to become one of the longest-serving trainees at Fairbridge:

Another long-serving trainee was Stewart Lee. In the later years of Fairbridge, when there were no more children coming from Britain, the younger children were forced to do the milking before and after school. Stewart remembers being so tired at school that an understanding teacher allowed him to sleep on his desk until lunchtime, knowing that he had been up since three in the morning and would have to go back up for the afternoon milking as soon as school was over.

The girls at Fairbridge received an even more limited range of training than the boys. Essentially they were trained to be domestic servants. They too were rotated to different jobs every twenty-eight days: in the principal’s house, the village kitchens, Nuffield Hall, the deputy principal’s house and Gloucester House, which provided accommodation for visitors and former Fairbridge children who were visiting. But the jobs involved doing very much the same things: cooking, sewing, serving food, cleaning, and washing, hanging out and ironing clothes. Much of it was drudgery, as Gwen Miller recalls. ‘Oh, I just think it was plain slavery,’ she says. She feels that the kind of heavy lifting they were required to do – for instance, of laundry baskets full of wet clothes – was inappropriate for young girls, who were still growing. ‘The work we did … really was horrendous for our ages. I mean, scrub, clean. I can remember the laundry because it was so heavy for me and I was never a big girl.’

Gwen Miller and Marina McMahon were both trainees at Fairbridge in the late 1950s. Both remember that the jobs on their roster were much the same, but that their stints in the village kitchen and Nuffield Hall were the hardest. Work in the dining hall started at 6 a.m., when they had to set the big table on the stage for breakfast for staff, visitors and visiting Old Fairbridgians. They also set places with small tablecloths for the cottage mothers at the head of each cottage’s table. In the kitchen, the two trainee girls would set up a tray with a full English breakfast for each cottage mother, and a child from each cottage would come and take it to her.

After breakfast and cleaning up, the trainee girls spent a large part of the morning sweeping and polishing the floor of Nuffield Hall. The hall was so big that after sweeping the floor they would polish only about a quarter of it each day.