Grain Growers
Childhood Adventures in the Grain Bin
Being grain growers kids there were many delights that other kids never knew. One favourite was to play in the grain bin of a truck just in from the field after harvest. We’d climb up into thee bin and wade around in the grain. Each grain had its own characteristics. Wheat is clean and hard and its seed is shiny with a certain nobility. Linseed was interesting though we only grew it for a short time. It would be prone to heliothis caterpillar strikes. We’d get up early before the school bus came and go out to watch the crop duster fly in and skim over the crops releasing its old of insecticide. As the caterpillars attacked the growing plant rather than the mature plant, sometimes it had to be done a number of time through the growing season. A bin of linseed was particularly fun to play in with its oily seed, a flat oval with a hint at one end. Its oily sheen made it softly stick to your skins but only of kids, uncle were to hairy but the son smooth skin of children was a perfect surface for the seeds to adhere to. We would roll around in the grain and get up with linseed mask covering every square millimetre. It felt a like mail of a medieval knight that we so love to impersonate or a lizard perhaps. It became unprofitable on account of the insecticide and too troublesome since the cut stalk of a harvested plant would occasionally be sharp and strong enough to puncture a tyre of the John Deere header. Other people referred to the machine as a combine harvester but for us it was always ‘the header’ and a combine was the machine you used to sew.
Being American, the header used petrol with a different octane rating than the rest of the vehicles on the farm so it meant that there was always the extra job of handling’s 44 gallon drums. When empty they we fun to put on their side and stand on and roll along by moving your feet like a circus act, but they were heavy and if you fell off in front you’d want to make sure you landed on your feet and jump out of the way of the drum that by then could be moving with some force.
Barley was the worst. It has a seed similarity to wheat but its dust mad you itch like crazy. So much so that you’d make yourself scarce when the trucks came in to empty into the silos, because you knew you’d be sent into the bin to empty out the last couple of bags, that’s the way you’d measure grain, though by then bags were only used at seen at sewing time and everything was handled in bulk at harvest, out of the truck. Sorghum could be itchy too though nothing like barley.
Transition from Bags to Bulk Handling and Storage Changes>
Before bulk handling grain was moved in hessian bags. That was in the first couple of years before we got the first header. We used an old tractor drawn Shine Harvester. You’d work until the harvester bin was full then stop and bag off the grain. Granddad or Papa, mum’s dad would come out sometimes and help sew up the bags. The old ford truck had a hydraulic arm for lift the bags onto the truck to about the shoulder height of a man standing on the tray. There was a cradle at one end so the bag stayed in place. The man on the ground would drop a bag onto the cradle and inso doing pull on a leather strap that would engage the hydraulic ram and the arm would swing the 80 kg bag up onto the waiting many shoulders. It was back breaking work. The bags would then have to be unloaded at the shed so that the harvest could be brought in as quickly as possible. If rain threatened the bags would be sewn up and brought to the shed in the light of a kero lantern or two. It was a stressful time. Then bulk handling came in and much of the work could be done by one or two men rather than aa team.
As bags gave way to bulk handling we needed some way of storing it in the shed. My uncle net door built a shed with a bitumen floor and the grain was dumped in a pile. A long auger meant that the pile of grain could be really high. We only played in that pile once. Climbing onto the wheat hill had spread out the grain making it more difficult to load into the truck at delivery time. The message not to do that was delivered in such a way that it became part of permanent memory.
Life as a Young Tractor Driver
As I got older more country was being cleared and ‘broken’ for cultivation. We had a Caterpillar D6 crawler tractor with a small but heavy eight share plow. It was only used for the first plowing. And so in school holidays I became a tractor driver. I hated it the monotony with a vengeance. In winter time the driver was exposed to the weather from a frosty dawn to dark. Dad would come and give me a break at breakfast time, that would give him a chance to see that that every thing was going all right. I’d come back with sandwiched and a thermos of tea packed in a little port, that what Queenslanders call suitcases. It the milk, supplied in a separate bottle was particularly creamy, a blob of butter would have formed on top of the milk by smoko from the vibration of the tractor. An oily slick formed on the cuppa tea but would just fine. Anything would be fine as an interruption to the boredom. One time I was overjoyed when after about half an hour I had completed a round of the paddock, I saw one of the plough disks lying in the paddock. It had broken the previous round and I hadn’t noticed. Once I realised it wasn’t my fault I was delighted that the work would be halted until repairs were made.
As Dad dismantled, welded and reassembled the plough I went on to scarifying on of the other paddocks in preparation for sewing. The relief was short lived. I think I finished plowing the paddock in time to go back to boarding school. “What did you do in the holidays?” “Ploughed!” It’s the was it was.
Navigating Life's Crossroads
As time went on I became more and more disaffected with farming life. I’d become a machinery operator, mostly cultivation. I was away at boarding school for sewing and harvest and cam home for cultivation and grain delivery. When I was old enough to get a driver’s license I drove a truck into town and pulled up at the police station. The sergeant said, “How did you get here?” “I drove the truck,” I told him. “OK, come out and do the test. Drive up the street, truncates around and come back. I’ll stand here and watch.” I was pretty nervous and thought there must be more to it than that, so I when up an extra block before turning around and coming back. On returning I was greeted with, “What took you so long? I said just up to that street!” As so I got my license. I’d probably been driving for six years by then. When I started driving I had to sit on the very edge of the seat to reach the pedals.
By the time I finished boarding school, and contrary to expectations had decided against going to the Lutheran seminary in Adelaide, dropped out of uni and finished year of Technical College I had no idea of where my life was going. I got a job for a short time working for a guy who was erecting wheat silos on farms. He put on a keg for the workers. I got drunk, got pick up by the price riding my motor bike and spent a night in the cells. My name appeared in the court notices a few days later in the Toowoomba Chronicle a few days later and brought to the notice of my father. My brother was sent to fetch me, my father furious and my mother distraught. I was at home, miserable and directionless. Dad started looking at farms in the district for sale. I realised though there was no discussion that his plan was for me to become a father, I was horrified and so got a job on the weigh bridge out at Wheat Board silos at Bungunya in the Goondiwindi region for a couple of weeks until a job came up in Sydney for which I was most unsuited. I took it. Anywhere had to be better so I hitched a ride down south. Mum was mortified, her eldest son going to work in “sin city”. And so my education began anew.
Embracing Change and Discovering a New Path
It took a lot longer to unlearn the old ways than to learn the new and was deeply depressed, disaffected and dispirited. I worked in the city and travelled to lodgings in the North Shore by train. I was shocked by the inexplicable urge to throw myself off the train while crossing the harbour bridge. I had no idea of how vulnerable I was and that it was my social anxiety that was keeping me safe, parallelised by fear. It was a road of trials that I would wish on anyone. I had two years part time to go in the Technical College course I’d begun in Toowoomba. I turned out that New South Wales didn’t have an equivalent course and so decided to go back to uni. Meanwhile, the Whitlam government had abolished university fees and since I’d just got the sack decided to do a Science degree, Botany major. I was still struggling with the idea inculcated from birth that this life was a vale of tears as an antecedent to the main game in heaven. Uni was the real godsend, I started to develop an awareness of deep ecology, and heard the amazing herbalist Dorothy Hall on radio and decided I would do her training. I was desperate for a new outlook on life and her’s message resonated with me on a spiritual level yet was completely secular. The idea that my life was mine to live was beginning to take root even though my personal life was a complete shambles and in an emotional turmoil. My life was mine to save were I to find a way.
