§2. Burns Road

Life began for me in a five-room house on a bushland farmlet two miles from the small mountain township of Springwood. 

As it is with youngsters, relative poverty had little meaning. With a full belly it was but a playful adventure of discovery. However, parents Bonnie and Gilbert Voysey might have felt themselves at world’s end, having brought their little family of four young children into such dire circumstance.

The house workings were beyond primitive. Bon and her daughters were effectively living in the 19th century. 

At this time such amenities were missing from the houses of a large proportion of regional and inner city poorer families. But Bon and Gil were both raised in relative middle class luxury and must have been rather shocked to find themselves not only members of the working poor, but in one of their houses. Australia had long considered itself a classless society. It nevertheless comprised poor, comfortable, and wealthy classless people. 

Water came from a tank and during dry spells, if it wasn’t empty (God forbid), water pressure fell as the level sank. Kerosene was needed to keep the Hurricane lamps alight. Ice had to be delivered by truck for the ice chest to keep food cool. Just cool, mind, not cold. Where did it come from, and who went into town to buy it, walking two miles (three kilometres) along the potholed dirt road to shops and carrying it back? There was otherwise none, apart from passionfruit and milk from a sick cow. These are but small facets of household management at the Springwood Manor.

Memories of these times for me is a series of static images. I was five or six when we moved away to West Pennant Hills, and even memories of there are a vague patchwork. Fortunately my eldest sister, Janice Kay Voysey (hereafter called “Jan”), has vivid accounts of my first home. Her full account is in the next section, The Eldest Sister, from which the following is taken:

The farmlet was two miles from the township, being a mile south down the Great Western Highway and then a mile along Burns Road. I think the property was nine acres on the last block of Burns Road. The house was set on about four acres of cleared land. There was a lane off Burns Road providing vehicle access to the furthest border of the cleared land and the house was set there. We gained walking access to the house through an opposite border set on about three of the lightly wooded part of the four acres.  

We had no  electricity, so hurricane and gas lamps lit the house at night and a wood stove in the kitchen burned wood continuously. The living room, adjacent to the kitchen, had an open fireplace on the other side of the kitchen fuel stove.  At one end of the kitchen was very small bathroom with a wood chip heater for heating the bath water. The chip heater was a metal cylinder the shape of a pot-bellied stove.

Off the living room was Mum's bedroom and to the opposite side of the living room was our bedroom, with your (Phillip's) cot and a three quarter bed in which we three sisters slept. The front door was in the living room and opened onto a small verandah. 

Near the back door, from the kitchen, was a small water tank for the house. There was also a large turpentine tree, which dozens of cicadas loved to draw their new wings, covering the stringy bark of the tree with shells. 

Down the yard through the pergola a path led to a shed with a wood-burning copper and concrete tubs where mum did the weekly wash and afterwards we took a good dip. Behind the shed was the outside toilet - quite a scary stroll at night, or day for that matter. Not a place to linger. Snakes. We cut up newspaper for toilet paper.

There was no hallway, and no books that I can recall, but there was a radio in later years. And there was no fridge - just a meat safe, a mesh-covered small cupboard with wet Hessian bags draped over and around it. Later came an ice chest, and Jim the iceman delivered huge rectangular prisms of ice at least once weekly. Kerrie and I took turns to collect our billy can of milk a half a mile towards Springwood where the milkman left it. ~ Jan Voysey.

There were bushfires, during which houses on mountain ridges surrounded by bushland were not the best place to be.

The problem with living in this region of NSW was the bushfire season. My first fire was terrifying. The sound of the fire roaring up the ridge on which we lived was a new experience. Mum grabbed Kerrie, who was still a baby and had to be nursed, and instructed me to follow her through a bush track on our 9 acres to a place where we could meet up with the fire brigade, which couldn’t get any closer because there was fire between us and the brigade truck. I took one look and ran back to the house. Poor desperate Mum, she had to hand Kerrie through the flames to the firemen and run back to get me, and then hand me through the flames, and then get through herself. ~ Jan.

I too witnessed a fiery threat up close, aged 4 or 5 years. An inferno of flame, roaring as it consumed fifty foot eucalypti across the lane beside the house. That was my first encounter with the Great Australian Bushfire. I don’t recall fear but surely reflected the terror of those around me. That excludes the house that apparently had survived many more and had begun to think itself invincible. Made of the cheapest materials - asbestos cement sheeting and corrugated iron roof - that humble dwelling did not willingly wilt before radiant heat! 

Perhaps I was so young that I was mesmerised rather than terrified, because for me the smell of a Eucalypt bushfire evokes an Australian ambiance, blue distant hills, tree-lined rivers and hot dusty days in old wooden classrooms. And since that moment I’ve not been exposed to the horrifying fury of such a fire, only sampled the smoky aroma from the distant safety of suburbia.

Speaking of burning wood…

The homestead depended on wood burning. That required trees to be felled, tree trunks sawn by hand into short logs, those logs split into pieces, and some of those more finely divided into wood chip. The wood must be dry in order burn, which means cutting next year’s wood this year. Sawing trunks into logs - this is 1946 - required a giant bushman’s saw that was most effectively wielded by two strong fit adults. Logs can only be split into sections by swinging a heavy axe, or a maul, down hard. Or, and this is far greater fun, tapping a steel wedge into the end of the log (somehow) and laying into it with a sledge hammer. The inevitable slight miss will launch the wedge on whichever direction takes its fancy. Axes, mauls and sledge hammers are by definition and function very heavy. Axes are sharp enough to remove a foot should it bounce off the wood on its way down, which it’s ever prone to do.

The reason for this wood chopping tutorial is to remind you that if the husband is away and wood runs out, the fuel stove can’t cook food, the fireplace is cold and so is the house (it might be snowing), the wood chip heater can’t warm the bath water, and the copper cannot sterilise faeces-soaked nappies. There’s no “cold wash” laundry detergent, only greasy soap that doesn’t do much in cold water. 

Picture a ten year old girl splitting logs for her family, her mother and three younger siblings. Alone for weeks at a time, they became heroically self-reliant. 

When Dad was away I was in charge of the firewood because we had a fuel stove in the kitchen, a large fireplace in the lounge room, and wood chip heater for hot water in the bathroom - and the copper to boil and wash clothes. Dad would leave some split logs for me to chop into smaller pieces. Sometimes I ran out of logs, so for the large hungry fireplace I remember feeding long dried saplings through the front door, across the lounge room floor into the fire. As to the chip heater, every night we would gather twigs or there’d be no warm bath. ~ Jan.

Reluctantly I must conclude this account of the Springwood home by returning us to that unhappy subject of Bon’s state of mind. 

She was, I suspect, at the “end of her tether” as they say. I don’t think she was at breaking point or anything near “a nervous breakdown” - using that awful phrase that was fully in vogue then. I would describe her as frustrated with barely suppressed anger, and overwhelmed by a sense of despair. And possibly feeling entrapped, seeing nothing ahead but years of child-raising and housekeeping in these most primitive conditions imaginable. As she thought back, there might have been no joy to be found in the birth of the three girls, who arrived on her husband’s schedule during endless wartime disruptions, and continuous relocations that most reasonably should have ceased with marriage, after the long torment of a nomadic childhood. Probably most distressing were her husband’s chronic ailments during the war that week by week had grown ever worse during his wartime service.  

If you find this a bit dramatic then maybe a witness will help. Daughter Jan experienced it during her earliest and most tender years:

Mum wasn’t happy at Springwood. She hated the poverty and the remoteness. Dad was away working with her father, Grandfather Foran, for long periods of time, and her brother Phil was killed just before war ended. Mum was depressed I think, and frequently lost her temper with us, and by the time Lynne and then Phillip (early 1947) came, I think she was at her wits end. I was largely responsible for my siblings’ behaviour, and if things went wrong I had to answer to her.  She became physically and verbally abusive towards me.

This sad aspect of our family story finds a little more context in chapter 2.4 The Elder Sister when Jan tells of her years at Richmond and Springwood.

Bon Voysey’s “tether” fortunately had no end, and despite her glaring motherhood failures during this time, she carried stubbornly on. She was a strong-minded and resilient woman who knew that things could only improve... well, surely they must?