Other than trapping rabbits and mining my father tried his hand at farming usually buying bush blocks that needed clearing. Dad was a timber cutter by trade and he’d turn his hand to this whenever things got difficult and money was short, clearing paddocks for farmers as well as his own block of land. We’d cut down the trees, pull the stumps with a tractor, those that could be pulled out and for those to big and to well rooted Dad would blow these with gelignite and gunpowder.

Of cause the result would be a paddock scattered with numerous mallee stumps or whatever kind of timber being cleared. My mother would drive the truck around the paddock while Dad and my brothers loaded the stumps. I was only a little tyke back then and rode in the truck with Mum. Once the load was full she’d drive the truck across the paddock where it would be unloaded near the fence line. The stumps heaped into a pile to be later burnt when dry, sometimes farmers would use them to build windbreaks or fences.

They weren’t only good at clearing the land but also good at creating fire breaks around their property. I can remember my father cutting a swathe around a 100 yards width inwards from the boundary fence and this would be maintained yearly to prevent fire from jumping across the fenceline. Something you don’t see around the farms of today.

Hard days but good days, you have to admire the old pioneers and how without the use of modern machinery they opened up this land into what we have today.