Sepia Saturday: Mallee gardens

A delightful theme photo for this week's Sepia Saturday - children in a garden, a tent in the background. I'm choosing the garden as my theme.

Farm house and garden in Victoria's mallee district.

They were tough in those days. My husband's Uncle Jack grew up in the Mallee district in the north of Victoria where his parents and other family had cereal farms. The 1920s and 1930s were tough times in the Mallee. The farmers had not yet learned how to farm in the sand like they do now so the native vegetation was cleared, the ground was ploughed when a layer of old stubble should have been retained, paddocks were left fallow, overgrazed or planted with seed in years that were too dry, the rabbits were in plague proportions, the summers were very hot and the winters cold. The result was frequent dust storms, failed crops, mouse plagues. It was soul destroying.

So it is surprising that communities developed. Schools and churches were established, football and tennis teams formed, railway lines built, small towns grew, families were raised, people supported each other. Now a lot of those towns have disappeared (I mean disappeared without trace - you can't see that they've ever been there) or diminished, small farms have amalgamated into large viable businesses, the population has decreased markedly, sustainable farming practices instigated.

One of the major problems in those days was water, a lack of water, for stock and people because it rarely rains in the Mallee. Every drop of water had to be carefully used.

Which brings me to this week's theme. All of the photos below are from Uncle Jack's album. I've chosen ones that show the homes they lived in and the gardens that are really potplants in old kerosene tins they tried to keep alive with water that had been used for washing or baths and fences that were built to keep the rabbits at bay. I couldn't have done it. I dips me lid.

Kooloonong Hospital

Sepia Saturday: Mallee

Bring back the hats, I say. Aren't they fabulous? So for this week's Sepia Saturday theme photo I had to go searching through my albums for photos of men in hats. It turns out I have quite a few but somehow one stood out, and it's taking me off on a tangent.

Uncle Jack Larkin has lived most of his 90 years in the north-west of Victoria, Australia. He farmed wheat in an area that we call the mallee. Mallee is dry sandy country that supports mallee eucalypt trees that are short and multi-stemmed. Uncle Jack developed a strong conservation ethic at a time when it was unusual and loved every aspect of his natural and social environment.

Here he is (with folded arms) in the middle of some mallee with a mate and I'm on theme because they're both wearing the obligatory hats. Hats were also essential because the summers in the north of Victoria are extremely long and hot.  They are standing next to a malleefowl nest.

Jack Larkin and a mate admiring a malleefowl nest in Victoria's mallee.

And this is where I go off on a tangent because I'm going to talk about malleefowls. They are astonishing birds.

Malleefowls live in the mallee and are about the size of a large domestic chicken. In winter the male starts to build a nest on the ground. He scrapes out a hole about a metre across and deep and then starts to fill it with organic material - leaves, bark and sticks - gleaned from the surrounding area. He mounds the organic material then covers the whole lot with a layer of sand. After it rains he turns and mixes the material and the female lays two or three eggs which are covered with the material. The birds don't sit on the eggs at all. The male continues to add sand to the top layer as the temperature increases in summer and the rotting vegetation creates its own heat. The remarkable thing is that the temperature of the nest is regulated every day by the removal or addition of sand and organic matter The male tests the temperature with his tongue and he maintains it at a temperature of 33 degrees centigrade. After about 100 days the newly-hatched chicks dig their way out - not an easy job and it takes from 2 to 15 hours! And, after all the effort by the male during the incubation, the adults have nothing to do with them after they've emerged. They're on their own. You can read more about these fascinating birds here.

All of this for two or three eggs.

So there you are. Nothing to do with hats at all, but you can see what others have written about hats over on the Sepia Saturday page.

Sepia Saturday: Rattle and squeak

Curious contraptions. It's going to be interesting to see what my fellow Sepians choose to write about this week over on the Sepia Saturday website. Or maybe they won't write about contraptions at all - it's not compulsory to stick to the topic. Or they might select something else in the photo to concentrate on.

I'm sticking to the contraption theme.

First of all a photo that actually belongs to my uncle, Jack Larkin. He grew up in northern Victoria in the mallee country before WW2. He sure has some stories to tell about the tough conditions in those days, and everybody was struggling to make a living cropping the land. The contraption, below, was created by Jack's uncle. The car's engine was out of action so he converted the car into a buggy.

The next contraption was used on a farm at Mologa in central Victoria. I don't know whether the cart is a standard design or one they've built themselves - I suspect the latter. It has two wheels at the back and one at the front.

Tom Alford collecting firewood with his grandchildren, Shirley and Mary.

Firewood pile

The firewood in the pile at Mologa was for use on the farm in the house and dairy. It would have been Grey Box eucalyptus probably. The firewood below was from various mallee eucalypts and was highly prized because it burned slow and hot, especially the roots. It is still valued for those qualities but is now a rare item because the remaining bush has conservation controls and can't be cleared.

A load of mallee firewood on the Larkin's farm, ready to take to the Kooloonong railway station, to load on a train to transport to Melbourne.

Not sepia but definitely contraptions, although I think they should properly be called sculptures. Several years ago we were in Basel, Switzerland and visited the Tinguely Museum. If ever you're in Basel don't miss it. Jean Tinguely makes quirky pieces probably categorised as metamechanics. It's a noisy museum because the pieces aren't static - they squeak and rattle and shake and boom, they groan, flop and rotate. Some are small, like the two below, and some are huge. We loved it all.

And then we went to a fountain in the centre of Basel where Tinguely sculptures have been installed to great effect - same deal plus water, so they splash and squirt as well as rotate and rattle and squeak.