I have found inspiration for my writing in my own family. My grandparents and great-grandparents were brave pioneers in Australia's outback.
Some years ago I tracked down my Great Auntie Em, still alive, in her late eighties, her faculties as sharp as ever and I began to record the stories she knew of the lives of her mother and her sister, my grandmother.
The stories Auntie Em told me were truly inspirational, though to her, there was nothing remarkable about them. She told me about their daily lives as pioneer women in the mid-north and far-north of South Australia.
Let me share a few with you ...
Photo
Courtesy Advertiser Newspapers
My great grandmother raised twelve living children and ran a farm near Port Augusta in the Flinders Ranges, South Australia. She rose before dawn to milk the cows, churn the milk into butter and take the butter by cart to Port Augusta. Then she would return home, put the twelve children through their lessons and spend her day working on the farm. During the droughts, when the farm could not pay, the men went to work as bullockies, leaving my great grandmother in charge of the entire farm. When the drought became severe my great grandmother took the girls out to help her strip the leaves from the wattle trees with a great big knife, in order to feed to the cows. Eventually the trees were bare and there was nothing else to feed the stock, so my great grandmother took her great knife and slit the throats of each beast in turn - her entire herd - rather than see them suffer a slow death. She was a tough compassionate woman, small like myself and when she unloaded the stores for the farm she would carry a seventy pound bag of sugar under each arm.
When my grandmother and my Great Aunt Em were teenage girls on that farm they wanted to go to a dance in a small town on the other side of the Flinders Range. Their mother needed the cart for work on the farm, so my grandmother and Great Aunt Em decided to walk to the dance. They left in the morning after they had milked the cows, carrying their dancing dresses over their arms. They walked all day, going up over the Flinders Range to reach the dance in the evening. After dancing all night, they changed back into their walking dresses and went back over the range by moonlight, arriving home in time for the milking of the cows.
They were strong, hardworking women blessed with good humour and a love of life, just like the heroines of my best selling novels.
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me if you like to tell me some of the great stories and romantic
adventures of your forebears.
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