In retrospect it should have been a rather surprising parental proposition: become a business partner – and by inference a friend – of your sister’s former boyfriend.

But my father had a bee in his favourite floppy cotton hat, about buying what was mostly a bush block on the remote Rose River, one valley to the east of the King.

And both parents reckoned I needed a partner to do it with which was certainly sensible.

At the time I knew Chottie, at her instigation, had broken up with Geoff while they were residents in Deakin Hall at Monash University. At the time I didn’t know that it was quite bitter and in was several decades later that Chottie told me, Geoff had burned all her love letters.

The reason Geoff’s name had come up as a strong possibility to be involved in our pioneering enterprise, was that he yearned at Monash to be a farmer and instead had ended with an economics degree and a teller’s job in NAB’s North Melbourne branch.

I don’t remember first meeting Geoff but we got on well and were both keen to face the challenge of turning useless bush into vibrant farmland. We were quite different though: he all extrovert enthusiasm, me a painfully shy and diffident 23 year old.

In mid-winter 1966, we took over the farm and launched into milking 40 odd cows, inherited from the previous owner. At the same time we prepared to plant potatoes in a new to the farm enterprise on its rich river flats. We were flat out and so it went for the next six and a half years.

I was the one who knew farming and Geoff was the one who knew people and particularly young women who seemed to swarm into the valley. A year or two later, we’d each acquired more knowledge in the other’s specialities and were spending time with two kindergarten teachers based in Everton, who were also good friends. Convenient too because we only had one workable ute.

It was a huge growing up phase for both Geoff and I; to clear trees we bought a large second hand bulldozer and learned to drive it and in Wangaratta, thanks to a grandmother’s inheritance, I learned to fly.

By the early 1970s the farm was going well and we had added cattle and sheep to the enterprise. But a major kerfuffle in my family’s finances meant the farm had to be sold.

After a couple of years Geoff married and became an accountant while I tied the knot too and joined Stock and Land as a journalist. But we drifted apart and didn’t really start being connected again until three or four years ago.

That happened because Deakin Hall celebrated the 50th anniversary of its founding and Chottie and Geoff found they could at long last put their emotional differences behind them and attend. As a result they and their partners have dinner in Melbourne every Grand Final eve and I have been drawn in too, sometimes with a partner, to the same celebration.

So come Friday night, we’ll enjoy a not too boozy restaurant meal and Geoff will again I’m sure, tell me that the Rose River period was the most enjoyable time of his life. Me too - probably.  
​

David Palmer
September  2018

​A girl in one port was enough

​To say that for quite some time I felt like a fish out of water where sex was concerned is perhaps a bit confronting.

I was painfully shy well into my 20s, so was not good at even talking to girls, in the quiet corner of Western Victoria where I lived.

Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s my parents never talked to me about sex, even about birds and bees. I suppose they thought that growing up on a farm where there were horses (no stallions though) thousands of sheep, hundreds of cattle and tens of thousands of rabbits – before myxo at least – that I would be observant enough to realise their numbers were not getting bigger by themselves.

But not being that observant anyway, I was blissfully unaware.

My two years younger sister and I spent a lot of time riding horses and I remember once when I was 13 or 14, that we rode past a bull impregnating a cow and I asked her what was going on. I think my sister giggled and tried to explain. But I’m not sure I really got it. Naivety with a capital N.

By then I’d been at a boys’ only boarding school for four years and in reality I think we were all pretty naïve.

At one point when I was about 12, the headmaster spent some time telling us, that it was just not acceptable to walk around with an arm around another boy’s shoulders. I don’t think we knew why, but no doubt looking back, that directive was to ensure that none of us became gay. To this day I don’t know how many of us were, but I’ll ask at a school reunion I’m going to next month.

Much later, in fact in year 11, the headmaster was horrified to find that our year had not received any sex education although it was supposedly on the syllabus.

But I hadn’t advanced much in the sex awareness stakes on my own account either. I was excruciatingly shy which didn’t help and I didn’t start to get over that until I was well into my 20s.

Being a mid WWII kid, I had few contemporaries to socialise with in the quiet heart of the Western District I went home to after school. Then I jackerooed on a fairly remote Riverina sheep property and from there landed a job helping look after Hereford cattle being exported to Chile.

Aged 24, I was still a virgin when we landed in Chile. But the two other Aussie blokes I was with, although not verbalising that a bit of sex was high in their priorities after a month at sea, suggested we go to a brothel in Concepcion, the port where we landed.

One of the other blokes now lives in my street, but I don’t think we compared notes much then and we certainly haven’t since. Perhaps the time has come. To me it was a revelation but what I really remember is being advised to hide my money in my shoes. Good advice, because although the young woman demanded and probably deserved more than I gave her, she didn’t suspect I had more.

But the brothel visit was a oncer, because although the three of us lived together in a flat in Santiago for another three months – we were showing Aussie cattle at Santiago’s annual show – the subject of visiting brothels did not come up again.
​
However it was a turning point for me. No longer did I feel like a fish out of water, where sexual relations were concerned anyway.

Elvis Presley, singing Wooden Heart played loudly at 1am, marked the start in 1961 of my year as a jackeroo on Coonong, a Riverina Merino stud.
   The melancholy song, played at full blast, came at the end of a one day 700 km three leg train journey from Terang to Melbourne, Melbourne to Tocumwal and Tocumwal to Bundure, a request stop on the line to Narrandera.
   Certainly the country side was little different at either end; treeless volcanic plains with 700mm of annual rainfall at Mortlake to a practically flat and treeless but drier and hotter 430mm rainfall spot in the Riverina.
    My last leg was on the Red Rattler, an antiquated but picturesque diesel rail motor, which ran up and down the line every day.
    I and my newly acquired sheep dog who was accompanying me, had been picked up by the station overseer, as it seemed everyone else normally on the property, was playing tennis or just playing up in Urana, the nearest town. It had and I think still does have a legendary tennis club.
   The situation was that I would be paid five pounds a week and live with five or six other jackeroos, around a flywire enclosed verandah, near the homestead.
   A cook came in every day to provide breakfast. Lunch was usually cold mutton for making our own take out lunches. The cook provided dinner at night which was usually based on meat from an old wether grazed on saltbush. A taste memory to savour and never boring.
I had previously worked on my family’s farm during holidays and fulltime for a year after I left school.
   We had Corriedale sheep, Hereford (beef) and Shorthorn (dairy) cattle as well as a bit of cropping.
   But that was on about 750ha and Coonong stretched across more than 17,000ha.
   I could ride most horses, drive tractors, cars and trucks and undertake most maintenance tasks reasonably well.
   But I’d not had a sheep dog before and in my time at Coonong I never really trained my dog to do the things I wanted it to do.
   Interestingly, I discovered two years ago at a Coonong jackeroo reunion, that Ken “Biscuits”Arnott, one of my fellow jackeroos, had nonchalantly without checking, sent his dogs into a shed to flush out 30 or so rams and they had left about a dozen inside. That got everyone in a panic for a while and embarrassed Ken no end.
   Meanwhile I had supposedly mustered a 5ha paddock near the homestead and managed to leave half a dozen sheep behind, which bugged me until 2015 when I heard Ken’s story.
   When I went out on a horse I nearly always carried a transistor radio in my saddle bag so I’m not sure I was all that well fitted to big station life.
   In fact I’d only gone to Coonong because my uncle was a great friend of Coonong’s manager in WWII and my parents thought it would be good for me. But during the year I wouldn’t have spoken more than 100 words to Mr Smith and in retrospect neither I nor the others, ever had a meal in the cavernous homestead.
   As a result of the wartime friendship, two of my cousins had preceded me to Coonong and it is strange now that I didn’t ask them what to expect.
   One cousin Oliver, too young to have a driver’s licence, regularly ferried people and goods 150 km or so to and from Wagga Wagga.  No one had thought to ask him if he had one. So in today’s terms of stringent occupation health and safety regimes, we were pretty laid back.
   Twelve months after arriving in the antique and picturesque Red Rattler, I left Coonong on the same conveyance, but continued on to Narrandera.  From there I had a sleeper on the night mail train to Sydney, where I met up with my family to help look after cattle we had at the Easter Show. In the harbour city I was a ‘new boy in town’ too.

 
David Palmer,
February 2017
 
 650!….