Country Girl

Our Fathers Cleared the Bush: Remembering Eyre Peninsula
by Jill Roe
Wakefield, 2016, 249 pages, $29.95
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You’ll Be Sorry: How World War II Changed Women’s Lives
by Ann Howard
Big Sky, 2016, 368 pages, $29.99
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The Eyre Peninsula, a vast plain of golden grain, golden fleece, golden grass, scrub, and not many people, is one of Australia’s less glamorous destinations, but unlike some who have reached the top, academic historian Jill Roe presents her rural homeland with affection. She likes the undistinguished scenery, the people—many of them her friends and relations—and the solid industriousness.

Our Fathers Cleared the Bush is part personal memoir, part short local history and part reflections on Australian history and those who have written about it. Roe is Professor Emerita of Modern History at Macquarie University. She is especially known for Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography. (The My Brilliant Career novelist was another farm girl.)

The Eyre Peninsula is the western half of the arable land in South Australia, cut off from the Adelaide side by the huge sea indentation of Spencer Gulf. Although graziers were there as early as 1839, farmers, including Roe’s grandparents, began moving in only towards the end of the nineteenth century. Roe was born at Tumby Bay, north of Port Lincoln, in 1940.

Her memories are chiefly of the decade after the Second World War, before she left for school in Adelaide in 1955. Old-style farming was giving way to the more mechanical age. Children milked household cows into buckets by hand, and walked or went by horse to one-teacher schools where isolated teachers taught them. (Teachers often boarded at a farm house.) Draught horses still pulled ploughs, harrows and headers. Farm people spent the evenings by kerosene lamps and went to bed by candlelight. They travelled in canvas-topped cars on execrable roads, but there was a social buzz in little townships now often deserted, where visitors arrived and left on narrow-gauge railway lines now confined to carrying grain, if they are still there at all.

Going to church was a social event—as well as being simply what people did—as with local sport and the agricultural shows. Young Jill, last of four sisters, loved the animals and collecting the eggs the chooks laid where they wished, but was not so keen on milking cows or picking up kindling wood for the kitchen stove and the big log fire that warmed the living room in winter. It was an economic, comfortably sized farm during good times on the land, but life had its sadness—when Roe was fourteen months old her mother died of TB.

The outside world occasionally intruded. The Queen visited Port Lincoln in 1954 and the Redex Trial car cavalcade starring “Gelignite Jack” Murray passed through a few months later.

Roe gives the impression of finding the Peninsula a bit less welcoming on trips home in recent times, if immeasurably more efficient, convenient and less remote. The deep-sea fishery has done wonders for Port Lincoln. The tourist industry, hardly conceivable sixty or seventy years ago, is looking up, with the lure of uncrowded beaches, good fishing and the oysters of Coffin Bay, Streaky Bay and other bays, and travel so much quicker and cheaper.

The style is the unsentimental no-nonsense of a veteran academic historian but conveys warmth and affection nevertheless.

Ann Howard’s You’ll Be Sorry is mostly made up of extracts from interviews or other recollections by 150 women who served in the wartime women’s auxiliary forces. First published in 1990, it evokes memories especially of the camaraderie of the years behind the lines assisting the fighting troops and the mixed reflections on returning to sometimes duller or frustrating lives when peace came.