What's in the pocket?

I was about to leave for school and stood in front of Mum with one hand in the pocket of my shorts.

'What have you got in your pocket?'

'Nothing Mum.'

'What have you got in your pocket?'

'Nothing Mum.'

'What have you got in your pocket?'

'Nothing Mum.'

'Off you go then.'

I never made that mistake again. The fags always went in a safe place under the Palmers Channel Hall after that near death experience.

Enemy Aliens in the Family

Following the outbreak of World War 1 the Australian Government declared all Australian residents who had a father or grandfather born in either Germany or Austria as resident aliens whether or not they were Australian citizens. As such they were required to register their addresses with the Government. Because there were too many to lock up the Government pursued a policy of selective internment.

Some of the men were imprisoned at Trial Bay Gaol, a picturesque spot just south of South West Rocks on the New South Wales Mid North Coast. Women and children of German or Austrian descent detained by the British in Asia were also held in camps around Australia.

A significant number of the residents of Lower Clarence Valley (NSW) were German immigrants or descended from them. By definition most, if not all of these, would have been resident aliens and therefore considered a national threat. But no one from this area was interned during the war.

Names like Busch, Englert, Fischer, Giese, Grebert, Hoschke, Kempnich, Klotz, and Kratz live on. Unlike many parts of Australia where many of German descent anglicised their names because of the prevailing anti-German sentiment these families retained their distinctive German names. And when their young men, many, if not all, who without doubt qualified as resident aliens, responded to the Nation's call they enlisted under their German name. I’m sure that if I knew my family history thoroughly there would be more than one connection to these families.

Anton Kempnich was aged 7 when he arrived in Australia with his German parents and older siblings. He later married Elizabeth Davis, the eldest daughter of my great X 3 grandparents John and Johanna Davis. Perhaps part of Elizabeth’s attraction to Anton lay in the fact her Mother was a native of Germany.

John and Johanna’s second child was John Davis, my paternal grandmother's father. John and Eliza (nee Orr) had three children, John dying before my grandmother was born.

Their eldest and only son, my great-uncle Roy enlisted in WW1 and served in France where he was severely wounded, requiring considerable time in England to recover before being sent back to the front. He was one of the lucky ones, not like his uncle George, the youngest child of John and Johanna. George, legally a ‘resident alien’ was killed in action in France on 25th June 1917.

Roy on the right. I assume George is the other. Nana Marsh on Roy's right and Aunty Ethel behind.I assume the girl behind George is his daughter and the woman on his left the one that cared for his daughter when he enlisted.

The tragedy of this is that my uncles, and many young men like them, may at times have been facing their cousins in the opposite trenches. Young men who were considered a risk to Australia because of their German heritage.

But what of Johanna and others like her, men and women who came from Germany and Austria to call Australia home. Their sacrifice for Australia as seen in the deaths and wounds of their sons and grandsons was no less than that of any other Australian parent or grandparent. They may have been born in a foreign land, but the vision they had for their future and that of their children and grandchildren lay in this nation, the land that was now their home. And yes, I am sure they shed tears over the suffering of their German relatives as well, something that probably made their grief more intense than that of other Australians.

Ironically at the same time our ‘resident aliens’ were facing our national enemy the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne was publicly advocating that members of his flock should avoid involvement in England’s war. Now, without wanting to debate the rightness or wrongness of the war, many of those ‘resident aliens’ demonstrated a much greater commitment to what the majority of Australians saw as their patriotic duty than the Archbishop and those who fell in with him. In fact, it could be argued he was working against the national interest.

Today we still have young men and women engaged in conflict on foreign shores. Among them are those who came here as children with their refugee parents, or were born to parents who had arrived here as refugees from those places they now find themselves in. How do we see these these men and women today, men and women who according to the standard applied 100 years ago would be classified as ‘resident aliens’? Is it not possible that like those of former years these people see their future and that of their families in this land and are as committed to those same ideals held by former generations of Australians?

My Hunchbacked Nana

Nana with Neville and Aileen

Nana came home with a bottle of pills from the chemist. She opened the bottle and counted the contents to make sure she had received what she paid for. Strange? Well I thought it was weird, but Nana’s life had been much harder than anything I have ever experienced.

Nana’s father died before she was born, leaving Granny with two young children and another on the way. This was towards the end of the 1890s, before the days of social security when widows and their children depended on the support of others to survive.

For a while - I don't know how long - the young family lived in a slab hut with a dirt floor on the property of Granny's brother-in-law Lavender, known affectionately as Uncle Lav. A few years after they married Nana and Pa bought the farm adjoining Uncle Lav’s and Nana lived there until after Pa died. It was only a short walk along the creek bank to pay what were frequent visits.

It must have been around 10 kilometers into Maclean and Granny would often walk the distance carrying eggs or chickens to sell.

Nana spent her 12th birthday in bed with a pillow on her bottom to keep a space between it and her head, such was the condition of her spine. The family always believed she had suffered meningitis but not long before she died - well into her 80s - the doctor said it must have been something else. Whatever it was she was not expected to live at the time.

The disease left Nana with a significantly deformed back. As an adult she suffered what were then known as nervous breakdowns occasionally requiring treatment in Sydney or Brisbane. I often wonder if this was not a result of her childhood illness.

Nana lived through two world wars. Her brother Roy was seriously wounded in France where their uncle was killed in action. Her cousin Winnie Davis, a nursing officer, died a prisoner of the Japanese in WWII. Then there was the depression and the swaggies moving around looking for work and other support.

Nana and Pa raised two children, Dad and his sister Aileen. They lived without electricity or the telephone until well into the 1950s. And Nana was a farmer’s wife, not housewife. There is a real difference. Nana was a partner in the family business, one to which she contributed her labour to support its viability. She milked cows, fed pigs and planted cane when it was largely manual labour. She helped work the fields, bred chickens and sold eggs. And, like many women of her day she kept a vegetable garden, made her own bread and butter, preserved fruit from the orchard, boiled the copper and kept house without those things we take for granted today.

Nana was part of the generation that backed Sir Robert Menzies for over 15 years, from the end of 1949 until his retirement in 1966. Despite the very real threat posed by communism they voted down his attempts to outlaw it. The Colombo Plan, launched in 1951, enabled Asian students to study in Australia and proved valuable in opening up our relationships with Asia and contributed to the end of our White Australia policy. Foreign aid to South-East Asia was part of his Government’s strategy to combat communism in the region.

The Menzies Government accepted refugees from the war-torn countries of Europe with all the language and cultural difficulties that entailed. Australia was the sixth country and the first outside Europe to ratify the Refugee Convention in 1954. Menzies considered, in the light of Japanese attacks on Australia in WWII, it was possible that one day Australian’s might become refugees and a sense of reciprocity lay at the heart of international law.

With the memories of the War and Japanese atrocities still fresh in the minds of voters Menzies paid his first visit to Japan in 1950, one that lead to a full resumption of trade with our former enemy in 1957.

Nana, I am certain, knew little of international affairs, economic theory, free trade, protectionism, and all those other ‘important’ things that affected her life. But she was not uniformed. She read the Daily Examiner and listened to one of the two radio stations available on the family's battery-powered wireless - one being the local commercial station in Grafton, the other the ABC. This was before social media, post truth, alternative facts, and false news. Without these she may well have been better informed than we are today.

She could never forgive the Japanese for an atrocity associated with her cousin Winnie. Winnie was evacuated from Singapore on a ship carrying mainly nurses and the wounded when it became apparent the Island was going to fall. The ship was sunk by the Japanese and the passengers attempted to find safety in its lifeboats. The mainly women passengers in one of those boats - not Winnie’s - on finding land were marched back into the sea by the Japanese and machine gunned.

Yet despite a childhood of poverty, her significant disfigurement, the hardships of two world wars and depression, she supported Menzies and his vision of compassionate engagements in the wider world, especially with our near neighbours.

My First Job

The earliest memory I have is of the day Dad took delivery of a new grey Ferguson tractor. Mum was in hospital for the birth of my brother, but the tractor is the dominant memory, obviously the more significant one.

A largely unused road ran through my grandfather's farm. It was raised to allow use during floods. The tractor was unloaded from a truck that was backed up to the raised road. As far as I can remember Dad still had that tractor when he sold the farm around 40 years later. As the years passed he also purchased a couple of Massey Ferguson 135s.

There is another memory that is almost as old. That is of Dad harnessing horses to a trailer to carry harvested sugar cane to Palmers Channel where it was loaded onto a barge to take it to the sugar mill on Harwood Island.

Cane cutters at work

In those days cane harvesting was very labour intensive. The harvest was always preceded by the cane fire. Burning helped clear the outer leaves from the stalk, cleared some of the weeds from the field, and no doubt sent any vermin, including snakes, scurrying.

Cane was cut by a gang of cane cutters who moved from farm to farm during the harvest season. A good cutter could swing his knife through five or six stalks at a time. The cane was laid in rows behind the cutters. From there it was loaded onto the trailers for transport to the cane barge. Neighbouring farmers helped each other with this task and it continued this way for a while after tractors replaced the horses.

It was not only hard work, it was hot and dirty. The cane was covered in ash from the fire and this left the workers black by day’s end.

The next change came when Dad’s cousin Alvin, who lived on an adjoining farm, purchased a Fordson Major tractor fitted with a front-end loader. Working row by row, the loader would scoop up a load of cane, reverse, move behind the trailer in the next row, place the load on the trailer, and repeat the procedure until the trailer was full.

Toft loader fitter to a caterpillar tractor. This replaced the Fordson Major. 

The front-end loader gave way to a Toft loader made by the Toft Brothers of Bundaberg. At first this was also fitted to the Fordson Major but the tractor needed modification. The driving position was changed to allow operation by the driver facing what normally was the rear of the tractor. The advantage of the Toft was that it allowed the cane to be lifted and then swung to the side, allowing it to be loaded onto the trailer travelling alongside. The cane was still cut by hand and the farmers continued to help each other haul the cane to the river bank.

Transferring the cane to the barge

Now the full process is mechanised with the cane being loaded directly into trailerised bins and transported by road to the mill.

It was in the cane fields I had my first paid employment. Harvest time often involved Saturday work. I can’t remember if I was 13 or 14 at the time, but cousin Alvin hired me to work as his ‘stalky’ on Saturdays.The job description was simple. Walk behind the loader and pick up the cane stalks that had been missed or dropped by the loader and throw them onto the next row. I did this until I left to start my apprenticeship at Wagga Wagga.

I loved watching the derrick man. He maneuvered the load to where he
wanted it. Then he threw a cane stalk at the catch to release the load.

Alvin was a good boss and I really enjoyed the work. While I was only a boy I was treated and felt like one of the men. There was no Mr. Davidson or Mr. Ellis. It was George and Eric. I am relatively certain that for a Saturday’s work I was paid two pounds, but even if it was only one pound (two dollars decimal) it was good money for a kid in those days. As a benchmark, when I joined the RAAF my first weeks apprentice pay was something like $12 or six pounds