In last week's story I was doing another trip down memory lane, which always feels a little self-indulgent, but so be it.
I talked abut travelling to and from Longwarry State School from our dairy farm at the railway line end of Hammond Rd.
I also said that we were in trouble if we got home after five o'clock, which was not uncommon. There were many good reasons for children to dawdle on that walk. It was a little under two miles and a little over two kilometres, though we'd never heard of those back in the 1950s.
There were three creeks or drains to cross and each offered different adventures.
The factory drain, which I now know to be called Mackey's Drain, was the first one. Where Bennett St became Edgar's Rd we'd angle right into Boxshall Rd and almost immediately there was the factory drain bridge. We didn't get down to the water here because the banks were dense with blackberries, but it offered some entertainment anyway.
The water was a little "on the nose", as was the factory paddock from which it flowed, on the other side of the railway. There were big native water rats there, and we would stand and watch for them. They are not so common now and I wonder whether there are any left there.
We also sometimes thought we saw eels in the water, but as with most imaginative children, it was usually only one of us a time that claimed to have seen an eel. The others always missed it.
There was a small roadside drain along the railway side of Boxshall Rd and though it was usually dry it supported some dense ti-tree that was home to various birds, and, on occasion a black snake. They were not called red-bellied black snakes back then, just as the brown snakes were just that, not king browns. There was an occasional copperhead, too, very fast and very pretty snakes.
There was a double box culvert about halfway between the butter factory and the railway sub-station, with a creek which rarely flowed and with too shallow waterholes which always had a little water.
These were a great place to catch long leeches with yellow and green stripes running down their bodies. We'd have a jar or a tin and stand in the water until a leech attached itself to a leg, and then pull it off and pop it in the jar. They were quite beautiful in their way.
On the north side of the line was the big waterhole the railways people had made digging fill for the railway embankment. Shortly to the east of our place they were cutting through soft rock and I always wondered why that was not enough fill, but railways do like very shallow climbs and the Longwarry Bank was steep enough, it seems.
That waterhole did have eels but you could not see them for the colloidal clay in the water. We did fish for them a few times but though they were easy to catch they tasted of the mud in which they lived. The eels out in the clean waters of the Tarago tasted much, much better.
The third creek was what is now Cook's Drain, which was news to me. It appears to rise somewhere up near Red Hill and flow down the north side of the line along the edge of the factory paddock, which had raised walls to contain the 'water' it held, and into what I now know to be called Mackey's Drain.
It was a clean little creek with all sorts of wildlife, including echidnas, which were not easy to catch. When we did, we simply let them go again. Dad got quite touchy about hurting or killing things for no good reason. Still, finding an echidna and catching it before it anchored itself in the ground, would guarantee that we'd be late home.
You don't know what smelling really bad is like until you hold up an echidna (carefully) and it piddles on you. You smell like an ant's worst nightmare until you reach some water for a wash-up.
There were blue-tongued lizards, too, to catch and then let go, though we occasionally took one home to tame it. They are easy to feed and keep healthy but there would always, eventually, escape, which was fine. There was a skill to handling them and if you got it wrong they had a bite like a bolt-cutter.
We would look for freshwater mussels in that creek because we'd occasionally bring some back from Ryson's Creek and put them in 'our' creek, hoping they'd thrive.
I wonder whether there might not still be a few there.
There were detours that inevitably used up some of our allotted getting home time. Sometimes we'd go past Beveridge's fruit shop and scuffle through the couple of boxes of discarded fruit that were on the kerb.
There would be peaches, pears, apples, etc, with some bad bits but plenty of good bits, too, and we'd help ourselves.
Sometimes we'd visit the factory and talk to the men making powdered milk there. I have a hazy memory of the powdered milk coming out as a tin, brittle, paper-like sheet, rolled up into rods a few inches thick.
We'd be given a bit to eat on the way home and we'd arrive with sticky hands, feet and faces. We loved it.
Eventually dad started bribing us with books. Every week we got home before five we'd get a new book. Famous Five, Secret Seven, Biggles, the Billabong books – we loved them all, but sometimes our adventures would take just a little too long. Dad was adamant. Five past five was not five. End of argument, and getting it wrong once ruled out the whole week.
There was a reason for the five o'clock deadline. We had to get something to eat, change into our 'yardies' and go down to bring up the cows. Ironically, that took us more than halfway back to the town, but we didn't much mind. Kids walked a lot in those old days.
The cows had to be milked on time. That was another of dad's rules, and like all the others it was not negotiable.
That all takes me back about 70 years, and reminds me that I could once walk for miles, rain, hail, or shine. Thanks for walking home from school with me.