Monday, July 27th, 2020

We still wait patiently for the key news that will re-start the process of getting us into our new home.  The buyer of the Dilston property is waiting to hear that his application for a mortgage loan has been approved before we know that we are clear to go.  We've been told, unofficially, that the approval is finalised but there has to be a signature and a stamp on a particular piece of paper before it is official.  There are just three people in Tasmania authorised to sign that paper and they are all working as hard as they can to catch up with a backlog.

With interest rates as low as they are, hordes of people are applying to re-finance their current mortgages and this has caused a 'temporary slowdown' in the speed at which approvals are given.  We continue to wait.

My writing group topic last week was The Paddock and my mind went straight back to the paddock opposite our first house in Gwynneville.  I have to stop writing nostalgic pieces but I couldn't resist this one last time.  It's not 100% historically accurate but I hope reflects the mood of the time.

There were well over 100 houses planned for the new subdivision which would help cope with the flood of migrants from Europe, and the first row of eight dwellings opened in the middle of 1953.  There was something special about this group: all the others in the subdivision would be fibro with tin roofs and seemed to look inwards but this first group were brick and tile and sat with their backs to the rest, bravely facing north.  They looked fairly substantial but none of them had a garage or even a driveway, foreshadowing what a future Federal Treasurer believed: that ‘poor people don’t drive cars’.

When the dust settled, and the lucky families moved in, they included nine children altogether: 7 boys and just 2 girls.  Gradually, relationships started to develop and, like children everywhere, they assessed their environment and started to take control of it.  The real focus of their interest sat opposite the houses and was, from Day 1, known as The Paddock.  It was part of a working farm but the fences were easily breached and the area offered wonderful opportunities for creative play.

At the heart of The Paddock was an enormous Moreton Bay Fig tree.  The buttressed roots were great for cubby houses, and it was easy to clamber into the lower branches.  In childish imagination, the tree became a pirate ship, or an enchanted castle or a besieged fortress.  One morning in Spring, a fledgling magpie was found under the tree and the girls fussed over it hoping to save it.

Activities in The Paddock were determined by the seasons.  Summer brought blackberries and scratched arms and stained fingers.  Summer was also the time for cicadas; their noisy chorus was almost deafening when the sun shone.  Their names were evocative: Green Grocer, Floury Baker and Double Drummer.  The story had circulated that Black Prince cicadas were in demand for medical research at a laboratory in Sydney and were worth money, so the children collected them in shoe boxes.  Sadly, nobody knew how to get the creatures to the mythical laboratory so they were released back into the wild.

By May, thoughts turned to Empire Day.  Patriotic teachers had filled the children’s heads with thoughts of Empire but the big attraction of the day was the anticipated bonfire and fireworks.  Weeks were spent gathering wood, stacking it carefully, watching the weather, dreading that it would rain on the day.  One year an over-enthusiastic member of the group thought it would be sensible to check that the wood was actually flammable, so put a match to the pyre several hours before the celebration was to take place.  The other children had always been a little suspicious of William anyway, because he was an only child and everyone knew that children who had no brothers or sisters were spoiled.

By September, they could expect to find mushrooms popping up in the paddock.  One of the older boys said that they grew there because of the number of cow pats around but the younger ones didn’t know whether it was just a story.  Eagerly gathered mushrooms were delivered to the mums who were suitably grateful.  However, the mushrooms never appeared on their dinner plates and the mums used to say that “Dad had them for breakfast before he went to work and he said they were delicious,” or “I chopped them up fine and put them in the stew.  It really improves the flavour.”  Sometimes the more cynical children wondered whether they had ended up in the garbage bin or were buried in the compost heap when no one was looking.

By the time the school holidays came around in December, all the children wanted to do was swim.  There was a creek running through the paddock and a couple of spots where there was enough water to immerse a small body or two.  A couple of the older boys built a canoe one year from a sheet of roofing iron retrieved from the farm rubbish pile, but it was never a success – it was unstable and always leaked.

Childhood is a very short part of your life and the children, one by one, moved on to other interests.  The paddock evolved into a new life too.  It is now part of a large University campus.  It was deemed that the Moreton Bay Fig was too dangerous and, with thoughts of the litigation which might occur if a branch fell on to a student, the University authorities resolved it be chopped down.  The creek, too, has disappeared, running now through pipes, underground.

A couple of the original children enrolled at that university in their later years and became notorious for regaling  fellow-students with stories of how it used to be when the ground where they were sitting was just a paddock.  Just a paddock, indeed!