Chapter 6

Mrs Blakie (Nell) continues:

‘I remember the mobs of Chinamen going from the ships to the diggings, and
calling in and asking for directions. They always had with them one who could
speak broken English. Once they asked for tea, but mother had none for them,
so they sat by the roadside and drank hot water.

They told Jack and Charlie:

“Your father very good man, but your mother no good at all.”

Jack and Charlie always kept Fan and I well in the background by telling us that
Chinaman hated boys but liked girls.

Once a mob of them came by and asked for accommodation overnight, but mother
directed them to some shelter where they could make a camp.  A shower came on,
and they all crowded onto the veranda, and at about 2 am a little woman peered
through the window at them and decided to let them stay there.

Father was away, except perhaps at a weekend from 12am Saturday night to early
Monday morning once a fortnight. Like the Englishmen the world over, our people
planted a garden wherever they went.’

Mrs Barton, also known as Bess has this to say:

‘Now, about Conroy, the sticker up man. He came to our place one day, and begged
food from mother, said that he had men working for him in the bush. When mother
gave what she could spare, he went away across Brown’s paddock and before
he got out of the sight, Sergeant Major Moore and another man called and asked
mother if she had seen a strange man about.

“Why yes,” she said “he has just gone over the paddock.”

We ran up the hill and mother said:

“There he is just going into the flax across to cross the swamp!”

So the men ran after him. A man with a tilted dray came along, so the sticker up
man was marched off to the police station. I don't know about the men in the bush
who wanted the food.

About the Harveys Flat house: It had a big room through from the bar and store
underneath the front verandah. There was very little in the store and bar when
we bought the place.  I can remember a tin or two of biscuits, a few bottles of
soft drinks with glasses, and a few tins of fish.

Not many travellers stayed there, it being too near the township of Outram.
One time mother had a young fellow call Jim Grant stopping in at the house for
six weeks or so. He was from the Taieri and his people had some sheep running
up above us on the higher ground.

He used to play the cornet and we children thought it was great. An old man
with a pack used to stay on his rounds and he had a little dog. Not many others
stayed, mother did not want them, for she had the cows, the fowls and us
children to look after. There was a good stable on the rise with cowshed attached.

About our cats, we had a grey one called “Winky” that used to open the funny
latch on the door. Then there was the yellow cat called “Tom Fisk”.

We went to a picnic and Mary bought a book, and in the first pages there was
a picture of fireplace with a yellow flame, and a kettle boiling and a cat of the
same colour as the flame. I remember Mr Fulton, the magistrate, showing
Mary the book, and it's title was “Fidella Fisk”. I remember so well going to
the picnic, it was a long way and I was little and I was tired.

When I had a prize one time it was a book called “Casper”, and in it there
was a little girl who used to pick up the chips from the woodsman’s axe,
for they lived near the forest. She had a cat called “Winky” . That is where
the two names of the cats came from in the first place.

School fees paid were paid in those days at the Taieri. I well remember mother
tying up the quarterly fees in the boys handkerchiefs. I could draw a plan of the
house at Harveys Flat with the thumb latch at the back door, it's clay floor in
the kitchen, the smokey chimney in the dining room, the two little bedrooms
off the dining room, evidently built on as an afterthought. These contained
bunks fastened to the wall. There were two bedrooms opening out of the
kitchen, and a step up to a wooden floor.

At the front of the house was the bar and although I have no recollections of
another room, but there must have been a bar parlour too for the house that
we lived in at Harveys Flat  was built to be an accommodation house.

There were back and front verandahs, and a house for chaff etc at the front
with it's chaff cutter and horsepower at the back. The latter being very useful
for arranging out the mud pies we made.

There was a harness room and a cow shed on a rise at the side of the house.
In that room we children played on wet days, one of our pet games being
a wild beast show.

Gyp the dog for a lion,  Grey the cat for a tiger, a  hen covered with mother's
emu skin was an ostrich, and I was  sent behind a bag curtain to be a laughing
Jackass. I well remember the fear I had when father said he was going
to bring a pup home next trip but we soon got used to Rover and he lived
to be a faithful friend.