Back when I was a child some farmers still harvested the wheat using a harvester towed behind a tractor. It had a bin into which the wheat grains would go as they trundled through the paddock. When this bin was full the farmer would drive over to the bagging area, usually near the boundary fence away from the crop and unload the wheat into bags. The machine had two chutes on the sides with hooks and a metal loop to hold the bags. Once full the bags would be stood side by side for someone to come along and sew the tops before they were again loaded onto a truck and taken to the railhead or stacked in the farmers shed.

Bag sewing was my mothers job, I was nothing more than a little tyke back then and I’d toddle along behind Mum as she went from bag to bag with a bagging needle and string.

After the bags were sewn my brother would bring the truck in and load the bags onto it. This was done by hand, manual using bag hooks and muscle strength. Not good for anyone’s back same as shearing, but that’s another story for another time.

These full bags weighed between 150 and 180lb each. That’s around 70 to 80kg in today’s metric weight.

It was 1965 or 66 when the farmer my family harvested for purchased a fuel driven bag loader. Of cause my brother challenged the machine to a bag loading race, winning by one or two bags but his back paid the price, never the same again after that day.

The good old days, hard old days, whatever you want to call them, the memories are more entertaining than the memories of this industrialised, technology driven world we live in today.