Our farm was really three farms, one each run by my father and two of my uncles, Jack and Charlie. Our part of the farm was a dairy farm. Dad had ongoing back trouble, and, dairy farming being a fairly labour-intensive operation, he engaged sharefarmers, whose job it was to run the day-to-day aspects of the farm: milking the cows, feeding them, and so on.
As I was growing up, most of these sharefarmers had children around my age. This was, I now realise, probably a deliberate choice: I was an only child, we lived at the end of a mile and a half of dirt road, and there were no other people nearby, so having an instant supply of playmates across the road was a way to drag me away from my Matchbox cars, Lego, and football statistics and into some approximation of a normal, healthy childhood.
On most dairy farms, a sharefarming arrangement requires the sharefarmer to supply his own herd of cows, which is quite a significant capital outlay. And, perhaps, a tractor or two as well. Then they share the income with the owner of the land, and split the expenses. And do all of the work. At our place, it was a bit different, and this perhaps attracted the young families we mostly had. All you really needed to work for us was the shirt on your back. We supplied the land, equipment and cows, and paid the expenses, but we gave the sharefarmer a smaller share of the income, one-third instead of the usual half. Meanwhile dad (and myself, later on, during school and university holidays) was responsible for repairing fences, tracks and water pipes, ensuring the soil was fed, and other structural-type jobs. It was a good set-up for the sharefarmer, who was able to save pretty much all of his income (we even supplied the house, rent free), while dad was able to devote much of his time to playing bowls, having afternoon naps, and visiting every known chiropractor in South Gippsland and beyond.
What this meant was that, after three or four years, most of our sharefarmers were able to buy their own cows, and went off to a bigger farm, or had saved up enough to buy or lease a farm of their own. So they didn’t tend to stay with us for too long. Especially if they were any good. Dad had a weakness for helping out the hard-up and luckless, if it appeared that they knew something about farming or seemed keen to learn. Early on, he took on people straight from the boat from Holland; and also (before the sharefarming days, when all he needed was a helper) “boys” who had been in trouble of one kind or another and whom the authorities recognised as being in need of a good break. It didn’t always work out. One or two of these boys left at the first sign of hard work. Mum and dad once received a barely literate letter from one of them some time later, by which time he had again fallen afoul of the law. The letter was more or less an apology to my parents for letting them down, and ended with the heartbreaking sentence “I really love youse.”
The early sharefarmers were mostly Dutch. The first ones I can remember were the Hoffstedes (and I am, possibly, misspelling some of these names, or even getting them completely wrong). They seemed to be with us almost forever, although when you are four years old forever might have been a few weeks, or maybe a year or two. They had three children, including a daughter, Natasha, who was my age, and who for many years, even long after they had moved away, I considered to be my best friend in the whole world, and the girl that I was going to marry. We kept in touch with them for several years. When they left us they moved to a farm near Tullaree (home to the locally famous legend of the Lady of the Swamp), which you could actually see from the back corner of our farm, and yet was quite a drive to get to. We used to regularly visit them on weekend afternoons, when my overriding concern was to get home in time to watch “The Banana Splits Show”. They moved to a succession of farms up on the Murray River, near Swan Hill, and were last heard of running a motel or caravan park somewhere on the New South Wales south coast.
There were the Rendens, who had a son called Eric, who was also about my age. All I really remember about them is Eric’s mother, in her strong Dutch accent, calling him “Eeric”, causing him to suffer the nickname “Earwig”.
There was Noel Brooks and his wife. They had a daughter whom I can barely remember at all. She was known as “Cheeky” but I haven’t the faintest idea why.
There was Gerry Santamaria, who as I understand it was the nephew of B A Santamaria (not that I knew who he was). Gerry was probably the best sharefarmer we ever had, and I think there were tears at our house the day he said he was leaving. Gerry went on to become a professional sharefarmer, and won the prestigious Sharefarmer of the Year award on at least two occasions. But Gerry had no children so I wasn’t that interested in him.
There were the Nabbens. They had two older boys, and two adopted daughters who were a bit younger than me, but whom I played with nevertheless, despite being much more interested in hanging with their brothers. The boys were into things like David Bowie, and this was around the time when I had just started to migrate from football magazines to music and “teen” magazines, so I was desperate to pick their brains. Not long after they started working for us their oldest son, Theo, went off to University, a mysterious place far away which led him to grow his hair long, wear second-hand clothes, and (reputedly) ingest substances. This turn of events, I later realised, had a lasting effect on my mother (Theo was always such a nice boy until he moved away), because when the time came for me to head off to University, and embrace my own counter culture (in my case, record-shop counters), and start cutting my hair short and wearing second-hand clothes, she naturally assumed that I was sliding down the slippery slope to drug addiction and vice.
There was Jim Byrnes, son of a local farmer, who had big ideas and an uncanny ability to destroy any item of farm machinery, in new and highly inventive ways.
The last in the line were Ron and Ruth Alcorn. Ron was almost completely deaf, something of a disadvantage, you would think, in a job that involved quite a lot of precision machinery, the first sign of trouble therewith usually manifesting itself in unusual noises. But my father, true to form, was prepared to give Ronnie a go, and was soon able to talk to him just as well as he could communicate with anyone else (dad had infinite patience, and never felt the need to say much apart from what was necessary for the job at hand). And it turned out to be a spectacularly successful arrangement. Ron was a great worker, not prone to going out and socialising, and he was not likely to be moving to another farm in a hurry. New cows were bought, along with a larger milk vat and new machinery. The business could have gone anywhere. Except that dad fell sick and died, in short succession, and for reasons too complex to really explain and even now too hurtful to think about, it fell to me to tell Ron’s wife that they had better start looking for another place.
But one particular sharefarmer looms larger in memory than all of the others put together. His name was ... Dennis.
[to be continued]
