The Good Old Days: Margaret Sendall, Burren Junction

“When I was about three we moved to ‘Cryon'. As I can remember it, we always had everything we wanted. We had home-made clothes and we always had enough to eat. If I went out went with my father on the horses, we’d have to take our lunch because the place was spread out a bit. We used to take it in our saddle bags wrapped up in newspaper and it would be a meat sandwich, a jam sandwich and a hunk of Mother’s brownie. We’d have a canvas water bag which hung over the horse’s neck. We’d have our quart pots and boil our quart pots and make tea out in the paddock. Sometimes we’d get water out of the dam or a bore drain.

“It was one of my jobs, every night, to run up the dairy cows and lock the calves up in a pen overnight. My father would milk the cows in the morning. Quite often we separated the cream to make our own butter. We didn’t have very much in the way of refrigeration, the first refrigerator I can remember was called a Hallstrom and it was powered by kerosene burners. It was alright in the winter and in the summer, if you were very careful, it kept your milk okay.

“We used to kill the sheep late at night, hang it in a great big meat safe and cut it up early the next morning. I think Mother generally salted a lot of the meat. We didn’t have electricity, we had kerosene lamps. The only hot water we had for baths came through a chip heater. We pailed water into the heater and it had a tap on it to run the bath. If you put too much wood in the heater the water would really boil as if it was going to jump out of the bathroom. Mother used to have a bath first because she was usually the cleanest, then the kids would bath and then my father would finish up. We only had rain water, no bore water. Years later there was a dam put down and we could pump water up from the dam using a windmill to run the water up to the house, but generally we only used rainwater for all the bathing and cooking. Every now and again the water would taste funny and it would end up being a dead frog in the tank, but we were always quite healthy. We chopped a lot of wood for the wood fire and the stove itself was also wood fired.

“My father only had 4500 acres, we had just sheep, no farming. Nowadays no one could live on that in this area. If you had a bad year, say a drought year, usually then you had two or three good years to follow; whereas now it seems to be the other way around, you have four or five bad years and one good year.

“I suppose it was a pretty tough life, I can remember droughts and feeding the sheep. I don’t think as far as that goes it’s changed a lot. For lamb marking and those sorts of things all the neighbours would come and help and we’d go and help them. It was just the way we did it, now everyone has contractors that come and do it. We didn’t have our own shearing shed, we used to take the sheep to another shed, but in later years we got our own shed.

“A wooden box of vegetables used to come on the train every week from Mrs Headen in Sydney. There wasn’t much in the way of fruit and vegetables locally. Bread was sent out too. In Burren in those days there were three grocery stores, a cafe, a butcher, a couple of petrol stations, the Pilliga Pastures Protection Board (it was quite a big office), there were about five stock and station agents, a hospital and a fully equipped garage.

“It was very rare that we went out, I guess it never worried me because I didn’t know any different. We had a very happy childhood. I went to boarding school at 13. I think they felt I needed a bit of taming down, I was a bit of a brumby. The school work didn’t worry me at all - I loved the school work. I’d been schooled by correspondence and from the time I could read the lessons, I’d do a week’s work in half a day and then I’d be outside the rest of the week helping out on the place and riding. I had two brothers but I had a lot of time by myself. I suppose I’ve always been able to find something to do myself. Children these days are fascinated that there was no television, instead we made mud pies and built cubby houses and climbed trees. We went rabbit trapping. We all had our jobs to do, we had to feed the chooks. I can remember being 9 or 10, having a huge yard and I set up every chook that went broody and hatched masses of chickens. Kids don’t do that these days.

“I lived at Cryon until I married and went to Rossmore Station. It belonged to my Aunt and Uncle, and Strath was transferred to Rossmore as manager. In due course Strath and I got together. My Aunt and Uncle were very fond of Strath and we were managing and classing the stud right up until we left in 2002. It was a fairly well-known stud. We got to the stage of selling almost 1,000 rams per year and then a lot of people went into farming and sheep numbers went down. We weren’t selling nearly as many because people had gone into cattle. In the end we had been there 45 years.”