Oral History Interview Part Two.
Conducted by Belle Brown in 1986. Edited
Floods:
Mrs Rout: That was all our money gone. Fences and all, and some of the sheep drowned and then the ones that were on a little island - later on we went down to have a look and they were bellowing at us and we couldn't get to them, and I'm crying ....
I think that one big flood when we lost so much, fences and that, it widened that river that goes through the - that could take the water along…..Got rid of a lot of trees there.
The biggest floods we had - oh well, there was floods in the early days too, but the - the biggest flood was in 1955 I think. That was the really big one.
I had 13 paddocks and there was only 2 on the place that didn't have the fences washed out. Because we got the river and the creek right through the joints, you see.
But we took up another block and we put - put all dams about 1000 and 1500 yards but now they've made 'em all about 2-3 or 3000 yards, see. There's a terrible lot of dams meant to hold a lot more water where in the early days that all used to go through, even in the - there wasn't many - well there was no big dams till after the war.
Once the second war was over and the big machinery and that - look at the thousands and thousands and thousands of acres was cleared.
All that I cleared on my place I cleared with an axe ......Just about. Rolled down a little mallee, but most of it was cut down with the axe.
How many acres did you have on that first property?
1100. 1100. 1100 of the best acres in West Australia.
They got 6000 acres now.
Gairdner River, we got one at Gairdner and one more down towards the hills.
There was one lot there that was 3000 acres of scrub, in between where the road goes to Albany and the old road went down to Cranbrook, the real old road that used to go from Jerramungup down to the railway at Cranbrook.
I think it was called the Jerramungup-Cranbrook road.
Come through, through Sandalwood there somehow. Come up through there across the river down to Sandalwood.
(pretty close to the Stirlings?)
Yes. Got a wonderful view.
(Close to the Amelup service station Ian took up a 2000 acre block near the Old Cranbrook Road, there was a little school there, near Smith’s)
Arthur: we didn’t go on picnics to the Stirlings until the kids had grown up, we went a few times when relatives came from over East)
Wildflowers:
When we first come here - the first Christmas we had here, we come down,
Bert (Rout) and his family like, and us, we come down to the gold holes - nice and cool down there see, from up country, and went down there and we went on through and they came asking for volunteers to go and look for a child that got away.
I don't know whether you know when you come round this side of the hills, there's Cooper's place in there.
Oakdale they called it, didn't they?
And they had a big picnic there, a lot of them, and one of the little girls - 5 or 6 years old or something - she got away from them and - oh, they missed her and she was lost of they - so we went home and they wanted some hay for the horses, because there wasn't many cars about - anyhow cars was no good out there - and some of them were bringing horses down, and they got the black trackers - anyhow they found her the next day, dead, with both eyes poked out with the scrub.
They said she was sitting on a log or something and her Grandfather said to her "I want to sit there" and with that she took offence and jumped up and run out into the scrub and of course she got further ... Didn't miss her for a while.
Wildlife:
Mallee Hens, Kangaroos and Rabbits. Dingoes too. When the dingoes were around we used to have to yard out sheep every night for a long time.
Mallee hens are gone. Once the mallee's cleaned up they're gone….when you first fenced, all the animals com up agin' the fence, see - especially if you had fenced out the waterhole or something. Only saw a couple of emus.
Porcupines! We called them the porcu - no, this little anteater - I often see them ….talking about they can't find them now, and another one was here in plenty was delgites.
They burrow. They burrow, they're a cross - what are they? they're something like a little wallaby I s'pose. I don't know if they live underground.
And another one that used to be here when we first started were field mice, hundreds of them….but where that block of Ian's - see that was all cleared all around at or most of it was for some years, and this hunk of timber, some of it was pretty thick, mallee hens nests built up that high - took us 15 to 20 years cropping to get it .....to get it all out..... to disappear altogether.
Hundreds of eggs laid in there you know.
….the bloke that used to go to school with us when we were at Borden, he used to go round and collect all the - he used to keep himself in eggs just about on the mallee hens' nests out of there - he was working on Pasloe's, not far away from it.
He'd know how long they'd been in there. They'd just lay them and then cover 'em up, and then they come back and they heat it, scratch it down if it's too hot or cover it up a bit more .....
They used - dingoes were pretty bad. A long time ago they used - you had to yard your sheep at night.
We had a trapper - Bundy Weir - for the dingoes) and the mallee hens used to be a darned nuisance, used to set the traps off all the time.
The Poison Block:
That block we cleaned up where lan is now, it was a poison block. Nobody would touch it, it was all fenced out.
And there's no other country, like, round us and - When I was share farming with Mal Milne he said "I'm going down", he said, "to the Lands Office tomorrow." And I said "While you're down in there put in an application for that 3000 acres up there." I said "You got a map, can you see if you can find the numbers of it and that?", and he said "Yes", so he put it in and they - I put it in for lan - put it in Ian's name though, and they wrote back and said I could have 1500 acres of it but they wouldn't let me have any more.
And I said "Well I don't want 1500 acres if I can't get 2000." I said "3000's a good block here.. Soon as you get under that you're battling. You can't handle it, you've gotta go share farming or sometning to make a living." And so they give me 2000 acres but they advised me to put it in my name instead of his. So we got that. We cleared that up.
Poison! You've never seen poison like it!
(Clearing it was) quite easy. So long as you know - that's box poisons, all box.
Oh we cleared it, pulled it down with the bulldozers. We got the first 600 acres done with the bulldozer and then we done it all ourselves after that.
We used to clear up so much, 600 acres we cleared in the first place, and then we burnt it, we got enough fire to burn it and then we pegged it and we walked over it and pulled all the poison, which is a lovely job!
And then we put all the sheep we had on that paddock. Only lost about two sheep doing the 2000 acres.
ust by doing it that way.
