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Blogs by Barbara Hartmann King
Coloured Sands Trilogy 10/29/2011 6:42:33 PM
The Town girl became a Country Dweller:
Life at Oakdale – fleeting memories from 1965-1980 – fodder for country novels. I embraced the land as a
young naïve woman. My husband and children were my mentors, my teachers. As the
children learnt the rudiments of rearing cattle, the mustering, breeding,
branding and pest control, the knowledge also became a part of my own
consciousness like that of the children.We lived and breathed the life on
the land and the children really did become my teachers. They followed
their father around like puppies, working like men because they wanted to more
than doing anything else. They listened to the stories from their grandparents
and father and the idioms of the pioneering language were a natural part of
their vocabulary. A calf was a poddy, a chicken a chook, a whirlwind was a
willy willy and so on, with words like smoko, bitser, sheila and cobber. They
listened to stories about notorious neighbors from the early days that were
poddy-dodgers and gully rakers, and the cattle that got away when mustering the
plantations (rented forestry land) were scrubbers.The colloquialisms were part of our language
and essential in writing the epic country novel. The children loved the life of
horses and cattle, like their forefathers three generations before them.
However they also loved motor bikes and would travel on the forestry roads to
visit friends when they reached high school age.
Quote from Helen Keller: “Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.” – Helen Keller ...
