Tag: childhood memoirs

1963-1970 White bread & jam: Changing the recipe

Ingredients
Me
Late 1960’s
Mum and Dad
The house at Barraport Rd

Method:
As the end of the decade began to draw near, I became more aware of my surroundings. But what did I see? I remember the house at Barraport Rd, my home until January 1976.
So many aspects of my childhood return to me as I reflect upon it as an older human being. I find all my thoughts and memories want to tumble out together. I want to share so many of these recollections with you my dear reader. I cannot promise they are exactly as I remember but I feel confident they reiterate and paint the world as I knew it.

Some early memories of Barraport Rd.
My memories include sharing a double bed in the front room with my younger sister Samantha. I remember the washhouse outside where my mother did the washing with the wringer machine and the copper. I remember a mega catch of yabbies by my Pa Hayes and Dad, being cooked up in the copper. Although this memory is enhanced because of 8mm footage.
This tin shed also housed the wood for the kindling. I used to chop the kindling, and found this soothing.
We had an outside toilet with no lights, which seemed like a mile away when it was dark. Even during the day I found it hard to close the door. It really was like a throne sitting there in full view of the road to Quambatook, I was once ‘caught on the job’ and was mortified that I had left the door open. Fear is so cruel isn’t it?
I recall the arrival of the ‘twin tub’ washing machine and the revolution this brought to wash days. I remember my Grandma’s twin tub jumping around the floor of her laundry and watching the amazing spin cycle.
The garden is still vivid in my mind to this day, my Mother was and still is a passionate gardener.The garden Mum and Dad developed at Boort has so many formative memories for me… this garden along with my Great Aunts’ gardens have shaped my passion for gardening. I remember missing the garden terribly when we moved to Werribee. It had provided solitude and peace for me and soothed my anxiety.
The long cyprus hedge, they cut the centre out of it to create a place to sit in the shade, the pomegranate bush, the walnut tree, the autumn ‘yellow crocus’ [not really crocus but looked like it] in a ring around the walnut tree. The may bush and sparaxis, a little oasis of colour and imagination.The cooling shade of a massive pear tree that didn’t fruit properly and we had to pick up the rotting fruit. 😦
These few memories are of an analog era, black and white, seemingly simple and clear cut. But Australian life was about to get a makeover. The recipe was changing! My childhood was being adapted by the impending new decade of the 70’s. The ‘what is’ was quickly becoming the ‘what was’. Did I cope? Probably not very well, but I was swept along like the rest of Australia into the turbulent, inspiring and raucous 1970s. The world was about to really take notice of what Australia had cooking in the kitchen. The recipes of Australian life were finally in colour!

1963-70 White bread & Jam: What’s cooking?

Ingredients:
Me
My Mum and Dad
3 Siblings
The 1960’s
Immigration

Method:
My early years of life continued in relative simplicity. By the time I was 2 and a half I had a sibling. These continued to arrive quite regularly over the next 7 years.
Alas, I remember very little of the 60’s and can only reflect upon the decade from hindsight and history. My early upbringing was certainly a White Australian one.
I consider my parents would be classed as ‘old fashioned’ or ‘conservative’ they were certainly not hippies. So my childhood was based more upon the social ideals and mores of the decade prior to my birth than upon the turmoil and new ideas of the 60’s decade.I was definitely a 1960’s child not a child of the 60’s!
Even though I was being nurtured and raised within this cocoon of old Australia; all around me was the bubbling, stirring, mixing and blending of new and old cultures, new concepts, new visions and the beginning of the cultural, feministic and political revolutions that were to change Australia for ever.

So what was cooking in Aussie kitchens? I was certainly still eating some kind of meat and three vegetables, but a mere 100 miles away, there were Italians, Greeks, Dutch, Chinese, etc families eating their own traditional meals.
And so the incubation period of a new way of Australian eating was commencing right under everyone’s noses.
I cannot tell you how fortunate I consider myself to have been part of this transition.
But then that is another recipe!

White bread and Jam: Recipe ‘Who made me?’

Ingredients:
1 white Australian male [3rd gen]
1 white Australian Catholic female [2nd gen]
Several Northern Victorian country towns
2 Aussie Battler families

Method:
My parents were born into families with ‘crosses to bear’. My Dad’s family was poor and my Mum’s was a single parent family.
Dad was born to a travelling salesman/musician/entertainer/shop assistant/picture show man and a 19 year old woman who had never worked. There was no white wedding dress for her. Dad was born just before WWII began. He recalls bread and jam for tea, listening to the radio serials whilst doing the dishes, going to bed late, being woken up by his mates on their way to the Wedderburn State school because he slept on the verandah.
He was working by 13 years of age for a mechanic at Koondrook, whilst also assisting his Dad to run the ‘Picture shows’ in the local Hall. They lived next to the Hall and ran a little shop selling the ‘Hamburgers’ to the patrons. Pa would also travel around to other local towns showing the ‘film’ for that week or so.
Mum lived with her Mother and older siblings in a small cement sheet house in Pyramid Hill. Her father had died after a long illness when she was 6. Raised a strict Catholic in a predominantly Catholic town she was fairly sheltered until she met the handsome man at the Pyramid Hill dance.
She began her Hairdressing career when her mother rang and told her she had been apprenticed to the local hairdresser. Mum did what she was told!

So take this 20 year old man and add the 16 year old Catholic girl mix well for 4 years and create one daughter.
Place into a caravan for first few months of daughter’s life in the backyard of paternal grandparents.
Father, a farm labourer and shearer but dreaming of better things, his own business.
Mother was still a hairdresser but was on home duties whilst caring for me and Dad!
Both my parents are ‘good on the tooth’ i.e. they like eating! They were traditional white Australian foodies! My paternal Grandma was a plain cook and my maternal Grandma was a good cook.
But what does this mean? Is it worth writing or even reading about? What can be said to link the foods eaten before 1970 in the ‘so called’ typical Australian country town to Australian society as it was?
Does it matter? I think it does.
Maybe simmering away within our culinary backstory is the older version of Australia still being harked back to today… Has our political climate always been reflected in the foods we ate? Bloody oath! Look at what’s cooking in the kitchen at Canberra.
On that note cook this recipe very, very slowly as it may be hard to swallow!

1963 – 1970 white bread and jam

Dear reader,
Ingredients:
1 White Bread Aussie girl(I cannot help this)
1 Country childhood
1 family of 8
1 large extended and close family
Lots of ‘Good cooks’

Method: I commence my story here, a trip into the back story of Australia’s food history.
My life with food began long ago at my mother’s breast. I fed well and found nourishment and solace early on from food much to my self esteem’s and self image’s chagrin.
All through my life food – the good, the bad and the uneatable has played an integral ingredient within my journey through childhood, parenthood, full-time work, trauma and my social life.
It has been my enemy, my counsellor, my friend and my God.
There are so many parallels between food and my life story.
I ponder how we are so ‘in love’ with food shows, and why? What are we missing? Why do we watch and not ‘Do’?
How did we get so far removed from the basic principal of food as nourishment and survival.
What really interests me is how my life changed through our attitudes to the foods we ate in the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s.
What food ‘Big Bangs’, do I remember that still ‘get to me’ today?
Are Australian’s just a bunch of food snobs? Do we really remember our ‘White bread and Jam’ past?
Many of our Mega chefs had affluent or middle class childhoods – their families could afford ‘flash foods’. What about the average family? Making do and using what they had?
I hope dear reader you will continue through this recipe book
of my life.
This blog will bake for up to one week.

0-7 In the beginning….

It all began 8.30pm on St. Joseph’s Day, 50 years ago to be chronologically correct. I arrived quite quickly and with minimal damage to my mother. Although legend tells she received 19 needles before, during or after my birth. *

I was considered very beautiful by my Father, his fear was this beauty wouldn’t last. Being a beautiful baby is often the high point of a person’s good looks. In my case it is probably true.
I was fortunate to be the first child, therefore I received non stop attention of which I remember nothing. My first home was a 16ft caravan in the back yard of my paternal grandparents.
I decided to walk at 9 months, much too early to realise I would be spending most of the next 50 years standing up. Yep, the stupid things you do when you are young.
My Mother entered me in The Sun beautiful baby contest, I was adorned with only a red satin ribbon, I have the photo somewhere. I was a page 3 girl alright but it was the wrong paper. This foray into public nudity was a first, whether it is the last remains to be seen.
Rest assured dear reader, you will not be subject to any visual images of this possible event.
Until next time.

*Note to reader: Memorise the number 19!