The fires we once knew

I have a spot on the side of the road at my place – many people would call it a nature strip – where I burn off the fallen trees and branches and heavier prunings.

There is a sandstone rock there, set up on its edge at just the right height to sit upon, and that is no accident. It is all environmentally bad now, I daresay, but this afternoon I had a small fire going, my backside firmly upon the rock, and I remembered all the fires that lit up and warmed our lives all those decades ago.

I remembered Mum cooking on the Lux stove and I still wonder how she judged the temperature for cooking on the top, or in the side oven.

Somehow she always got it right. I remembered the hatch in the wall beside the stove where the firewood came indoors. There was a woodbox there with a hinged lid and we brought the wood down to it in armfuls from the woodheap – we don’t have those any more, either.

I remember that stove for the warmth than the food prepared on it. After a long winter’s walk up from Longwarry State School, along the railway line and often in the rain, we set our shoes and our clothes to dry, staying near the heat for as long as we could, trying to delay the next cold task, bringing up the cows.

After the milking, in winter, we’d wash up the vat, the cooler and the buckets with hot water from the boiler in the shed (really just a big copper – there was another one in the washhouse, which also served to warm the bathwater) and hurry inside, hands and arms warm and everything else very cold indeed. There would be warm bricks on the stove to arm our beds.

There was no electricity at this stage so that stove was about the only source of heat most days. It was unbelievably important that it be lit early in the morning and not allowed to go out before bedtime.

I remembered Grandma’s little house down behind the cemetery in Drouin, where she cooked, as often as not, over an open fire. There was a stove there in that tiny kitchen, and she used it, but as often as not she cooked on the two iron bars across the open fireplace beside the stove. There was even a hook on a swinging arm, where the big billy could be swung out over above the flames.

I remembered the campfires we had when Dad took us fishing up round Omeo and Benambra and on the Seven Creeks out of Euroa toward Gooram, and the long nights of storytelling that went on around those fires. I believed every story he told us, too, and so did my brothers. When we got older and realised many of them were exaggerations and embroideries, the realisation cost us something. Sometimes we would walk up into Hiscock’s bush, where someone years earlier had built a small concrete weir and we’d have a picnic together. That picnic would usually involve a fire and potatoes baking in it. We’d take them out, crack open the baked, blackened shells, add butter and eat them out of the shells with a spoon.

It sounds very basic now, but I can taste them even now.

I remembered the big fireplace in our Longwarry dining room. We called it the dining room but it was rare that anyone actually ate in there, except for those wonderful Sunday evenings where, after a hearty lunch at Grandma’s, where lunch included vast amounts of meat and vegetables and desserts as suet puddings and jam roly-poly and spotted Dick, we’d have no room for a proper tea. We’d all sit close to the warmth toasting bread, buttering it and spreading it with a sugar and cinnamon mix Mum made up. We’d talk. Afterward Mum might play the piano, or Dad his violin, or sometimes both. A man with enough of those memories is a lucky man, and I am.

Speaking of toast, does anyone dare say that toast tastes half as good cooked any other way than over an open fire? Of course it doesn’t. If you’ve never tasted that flavour you should make a point of doing so.

We had bigger fires when clearing the bush. Every tree would yield fence posts and rails and firewood, and then the rest would be piled and burnt as soon as it was dry enough and safe enough. We cleared that bush by hand, with a tree-puller, saws, axes and the maul and wedges. It was hard work and we must have disliked it at times, but the memories are still good ones.

The biggest fires of all were the bushfires that came over the hills and threatened our place, but we only ever had one that got right onto the farm. It crossed to the railway line and then burned eastward. Luck was with us.

The day was still and the little creek channelled the fire into a narrow neck where it was little more than a grass fire and we stopped it with wet bags. It was a close call but we felt a great sense of not just relief but of having had a victory.

My wife grew up in Iona, down on the flat behind Garfield and she remembers farmers burning off the dead tops of the potatoes. We never grew crops that needed burning off, so I missed that one. Of course, the fire that most farm kids remember best was the bonfire on November 5, Guy Fawkes’ Night, in the good old bad old days when children were still allowed to have adventures, before we became a nation of timid and obedient people, when there were still larrikins about the place.

Wood of all sorts was gathered for a month or so. Car tyres, when there were any, were added. These bonfires were not concerned with environmental cleanliness, but with fun and celebration, with drama and adventure, with fireworks of magical colours.

We had to work hard at it all at times. We had to cut wood. Drag it or cart it to the woodheap (every farm had a woodheap, or woodpile, words we no longer use much), cut it into shorter lengths and then split it. It had to be carried to the woodbox just outside the wall that held the stove. We had to gather pine-cones and kindling, and even collect spilt coal from the railway line. It was hard work at times, and it was necessary at the height of summer and in the dead of winter.

We don’t have to work at it now. We can simply switch on the ‘warm’ or the ‘cool’. We don’t have to cut wood or carry it, or clean fireplaces. We don’t have to gather together in front of the fireplace or enjoy the heat from the kitchen stove. Life is easier now and that makes it better. Or does it?