Tag: 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!

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!