The big distances between rural properties makes the supply of services very difficult. The telephone line goes zigzag from property to property and if one line drops out, the whole lot drops out. The same with electricity. It is not like in the cities and suburbs where everyone is provided from a main phone or power line going through the streets.
Even though we were within 170km from Sydney, many properties did not have power connected and used solar energy backed up by batteries. To get main power connected would cost $40.000 for just a single pole.
We had 5 poles on our previous farm and I was so sick of drop-outs that I would regularly inspect the poles. The main problem was drop-down insulators. They were a device that would allow electricity to drop out during violent lightning, preventing the burning of cables or power poles.
These insulators were at an angle so that gravity would allow them to drop easily out of their clamps. When they did, I used to phone Country energy and they would come with a huge grapple stick and push the insulator back in their clamps while standing on the back of the truck.
Sometimes a farmer would switch on a huge electric pump from miles away and that would then cause a surge with the whole area out of power again.
It was all very rural and this is why you finally just go for line-dancing at the local art school to eat a home- made muffin, shuffle your RM Williams and donate to the VFB of NSW. The noise and the fiddle would somehow calm the whole of rurality and that’s how power failures became accepted and part of the parcel, almost to the point where one was expecting it when things were going well for too long.
I, as you would all imagine, was hopeless at line dancing which calls for some kind of spontaneity or letting go, an ongoing life- long task I am still working on. Even Peter Garrett’s dancing is a Nureyev ballet compared to mine. So, I would normally bide my time and only join in when most were too intoxicated to notice my bizarre effort at line dancing.
To think all those lessons at Phyllis Bates back in the late fifties or early sixties with Cha, Cha, and Foxtrot would have left some kind of elasticity.
It seems like yesterday Svetlana and I were still doing the Lambada.
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
Pingback: Line dancing at Brayton « Oosterman Treats Blog
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BTW why does your piccie of ‘line dancing at Brayton’ look a shot from ‘Dawn of the Dead’ or ‘Attack of the Killer Zombies’?
😉
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Hi ‘Shoe! Nice to see you’re settling down… glad you didn’t actually get lost… and good to see you back at the Pigs’ too!
😉
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Thank you asty. Hello again. Literally, perhaps we can have a conversation one day that is not all over the place. Seriously, I have so much reading to do to catch up where I was reading the Pig’s Wall that I am likely to pop up wherever.
No doubt you too. Incredible we both moved house following hard on the heels of Gerard and Helvi.
I love this style Gez uses to write a story. The word ‘pastiche’ came to mind so wondering why I checked its meaning. The better to understand mine. 🙂
‘Hodge Podge’… is one. I like that because I was thinking on how therein in each written in this way there is inference, of another story unknown to the reader. An intrigue. Like a tickle. It reminds me of how a stroke of paint can mean so much or … in a poorly conceived approach to painting … so little. I lerv like anything what is not said so subtly, next to nothing. It tickles my funny bone.
Mention of ‘Svetlana’ is a classic: “It seems like yesterday Svetlana and I were still doing the Lambada.”
Talk soon, Dave. Need to buy a can of peaches and buy some string. 🙂
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Hello dear piglets! And think only yesterday I walked more than a country mile doing a country thang, got lost cutting cross country that converted in seering midday heat into a fenced enclosure that allowed me go no further and a compound of industrial machinery. Imagine my delight there was a person… two… more … utes. I waved and hallooed as one does above the noise of the local radio to the nearest and soon I was convinced the dearest. One gazed round casually, looked nonplussed at the sight of a sun reddened tallish woman with wild hair and a pained expression waving to him from t’other side of fence…and bent his head in return to a task out of sight to my fixed (and unblinking) gaze. “Oh,” he said when he assembled – finally – a mate to protect him, approached the perimeter and addressed me through the fence when I halloed again, “Bus? the BP? Sure. Mm (waving his hand in vague circles behind him) over there a half a k.”
“How do I get out of here?”
“That’s easy. Go over there. Climb over the fence.”
“It’s barbed wire on the top and it’s too high. And I’ve got a bad back.”
“How did you get in there?” he asks looking puzzled behind that experession of ‘nothing-surprises-a-country-man-much’. His silent mate maintained his expression of youthful ‘can’t-wait-to-get-to-morning-tea-to-tell-them-about-this’.
I retorted, “I followed the road. According to directions. Discovered there’s three tracks. None of them labelled “the walking track”. I took the wrong one.”
Anyway, I walked back to town having seen through the fence as I followed my path back the bus … sail past down the highway.
The POINT is…I was traumatised and while I prepared to walk out again to the library so as to email the relevant ports of call in the next town I could not keep my appointment times for the day, I turned on the radio to distract me and twiddled the tuner off the heavy rock playing on the local station. A beautifully unembroidered country voice it seemed broadcasting from another regional centre said, “The rules are as follows for the country dances that will be demonstrated today.” And proceeded … by describing what was going to be demonstrated …to puzzle me as much as the chap was back at the enclosure how I got into his neighbouring paddock.(I forgot to say I untwisted the wire holding the gate closed into it …and closed it behind me again by re-securing the wire, of course!)
I found the sound alone of the announcer on the radio so refreshingly soothing … describing the rules and variations of ‘the scottische’ first up … and rivetting for being unusual to my experience of what one can hope to hear/see? demonstrated on a radio. But the sound of the slightly wavery country band to all intents and purposes playing ‘by ear’ was, secondly, totally diverting. I gleaned this was a competition between country bands. Thirdly… this is the REAL point … the second tune that was played was as familiar to me as the shades in my mind’s eye of the greens and browns in the linoleum square of the living room when I was a child. My mother played the very tune banging her foot on the floor and the piano peddle simultaneously and the piano rocking in simulation of ‘her day’ playing for ‘the dances’ in ‘Garnet’, her brothers on the fiddle and the bush bass.
Seriously weird to hear thus for the first time in my life … in that circumstance of physical and some emotional depletion … a simulation of something I had never understood to its full extent…my mother’s skill as a country dance band pianist.
🙂
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Ah, finally, you are back. So good to see and read you again.
Be careful of fences, especially the barbed wire ones.
The poor kangaroos, they often got their front feet over but those large hind feet sometimes used to catch the top wire. They would topple over and their feet would get caught on the wire below it. This ended up with one or both their feet getting twisted by both barbed wires. The harder they pulled the tighter the wire would get. Sadly, this would cause death. Blood poisoning!
Your mother played the piano?
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Good to hear from you, ‘shoe. Are you still sneaking peaks at the internet through public libraries, or are you reconnected to the grid permanently?
You had mentioned previously that your mum was a piano teacher, I think? It is a weird moment when we realise that our parents weren’t the staid, conservatives that we thought they were when we were kids!
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…keep your sandshoes on when walking in those snaky paddocks, Sandshoe. Good to hear from you!
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Sands, youz back!
Misstya gal!
Whens the next piece coming? (Not that I didn’t enjoy this one, mind!)
Good ta c yez alive and well.
Merv, give the girl whatever she wants. Put it all on my poker.
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How lovely a chorus of voices. There is not a day goes by when I do not think of you all. And Lehan. I think of Lehan every time I walk the country roads or need a tradesman or the sun blazes down after a storm cloud has scudded over. Reading Lehan’s wonderful pieces has recently strengthened my understanding I have moved from my area, my districts, from its customs. Each time I see a plant I do not recognise, need the technical know-how to prune a bush, need to go to the hardware store, do not comprehend something that is said, remember I am a new face in town, I think of Lehan.
“Well,” says the bloke in the hardware store (who I think is a handsome man) after I have rushed in the door and as I cheerfully offer a few words buying last minute before closing time a small saw, to spend my week-end blissfully happy sawing, “Must run. Have to get home to my very lovely wife.”
People get married frequently because they cannot abide the life of being single. However, being single is a learning curve like none I have experienced and gets no easier to tolerate as I age.
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I am struggling a bit with computers. It seemed to me easy peasy but my laptop is failing me and needs to go to the shoppe to be fixed or somehow replaced. It turns itself off with now alarming frequency.
Today I came to the library especially to finish two pieces I have been writing, the second episode of ‘The Castle’ and a joke I found I had written a long time ago but needed editing. Both have aborted when trying to save them. Sorry I am late and I am longing to share some pieces with you, piglets.
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From that point of view, I mean. Being single. The undiplomatic comment.
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I have to learn how to time the library visits better so I am not half way through a sentence and getting politely turfed out.
My mother is an interesting subject I think for an extension of a poem I wrote inspired by her upbringing … as a couple of you were asking about my references to her playing the piano. I’ll get back to that. 🙂
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Were you dancing when you took the photo, Gez?
When I first came to Oz, our school, a boys’ school, used to hold dances once a month. By the ripe old age of 13, I was well acquainted with all the Greek dances, as well as pretty much all the Latin and European ones of the time. The tango, the waltz, fox trot, the cha cha, etc so I went to the first of these dance nights at my school, with confidence and hormonal anticipation… though, such anticipations were greatly tempered at the time by my fear of a “caught-ya-sinning-God.”
But I knew nothing of barn dancing and line dancing. I had never seen any movies that had scenes with them.
I could not make head or tail of either of these exercises. What were they about? What were these kids doing? Sorry, kids, and their parents who would often push us or drag us onto the floor. You go this way, then you go that way, then your turn around and then some other girl appears before you and then you…
And line dancing? What? What? What?
By the second dancing night it occurred to me that though the school was mostly attended by Greeks and Italians, there was no Greek nor Italian to be seen anywhere!
It was one of the cultural activities that made me wonder if Oz was on another planet.
Then came footy and dog’s eyes with dead horses and beer along with Bob. Bob Santamaria that is.
My stomach still feels like it’s churning cement whenever I see these… dances!
Let undo my belt and dance the Zorba, mate!
What?
What?
What?
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LOL, ato, you can sooo funny…
I never been good in staying in or on lines, so the line dancing was not something for me, sometimes I was even going against the line, I have to do my own thing.
Still those nights were fun, friends, good food and drink, and lots of laughter!
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Yes, Santamaria was something wasn’t he? Talk about being anti-left. He would be furious if he knew the amount of latte sipping that is going on now.
The line-dancing is of recent times. I never knew it existed but I liked watching it, especially in large sheep-shearing sheds with all the family including the kids. Dad would get drunk and momentarily forget the drought or another failed crop.
European type farming in Australia is so hard, I am amazed that there are people doing it. At the end of their lives they have paid for ever updated machinery and chemicals. Most live in very modest circumstances and are really doing it so tough.
Like you I learned the Cha, cha cha, the Fox trot, the Samba etc. I used to buy whole booklets of tickets to Phyllis Bates dancing school in either George or Pitt Street. At the time there was an over supply of bachelors, including Italians and Greeks. Many Finns from the Mount Isa mines, Slavs from the Snowy mountains scheme who would inevitably have a certain flair and far quicker feet, superior to my rather reserved Dutchness..
Anyway, one rather tall and attractive dancing teacher took a kind of shine to me, at least that’s what I have told myself throughout the years, and directed me to take her into my arms while dancing. I had to keep dancing while keeping a hardcover book tight against her chest. The book was not allowed to fall.
The book’s title was Marcus Clark’s …… For the Natural Term of his Life.
At the time, on the way home by train to Revesby it gave me great moments of joy, even euphoria, not that that was her name. I have forgotten her name but not the book against her breasts.
Yes, by all means let us join in a Zorba. ” Dance did you say, dance?”
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Ato, Ato, Ato, I must tell you how I thrilled to the sight of the Greek men dancing in Rundle Mall in Adelaide in the 70s, when I first saw this wonderful art of balance and dexterity, elegance…the proud flick of their scarf as the leader of the bunch provided that braggadocio twirl of that fabric in the air. That is how I recall it. The Mall was exciting to me coming then from Norther Queensland where I had certainly done and seen a lot of dancing, but not from the greek culture and neither classical or traditional.
Howzis that when I returned to Adelaide after first living there and then some years away, I discovered that Rundle Mall had been filled with every conceivably useless commercial artefact and construct and carelessly designed stall and stage and work of sculpture until there was no room I instantly wondered for this physical attraction that brought the streets alive on the week-ends.
What could people do on the week-ends in this limited space I wondered.
I grieve for what I have learned from that moment of wondering what and how and where … it is an abandoned in my experience generally source of towards the late afternoon dark and uninhabited built corners and has become dangerous. I certainly saw no dancers on my forays through the area glancing from left to right to check my security and no evidence of their having been, no scraps of fabric, no wisp that had been left behind. To tarry is to be begged to not serenaded or enthralled. The area broods on its memories. I think.
Sorry to mix up my images. I wanted to say there it appears there is no longer in that once civic place room for the dance.
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Had the same problem with the drop-down insulators Gerard. Thunder and lightning and kaboom – drop down. After meeting with Country Energy employees at around midnight twice in the same month, I yelled across the paddock (in the rain) – we must stop meeting like this. I think we need a new transformer! Two months later they installed a new one. It serviced three properties but we were (still are) the closest and I could use a torch to ascertain if the insulator/s had dropped and then know if it was just us or a bigger problem somewhere else.
Tried line dancing a couple of times and was told I did it well. But it was boring and you can’t have a conversation as it requires too much concentration. Yeh, a cha cha or a rumba anyday.
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Yes, exactly. I always thought it was boring and the band almost always consisted of an old and totally bored out of their brains looking bunch of country western men.
Still, it always raised money for a new fire hose or pump. I remember going to the Goulburn Workers club to some Country Western Evening. The ticket was $ 10.-. All night there was this little boy dressed as an adult in a suit. All very cutesey. He kept on singing Pat Cash songs, all at a high pitch and with no let ups. A lot of the people there we knew somewhat, so we didn’t want to appear as sooks. We got up a couple of times and then, while clapping for another Pat Cash song, we walked out backwards, ever so slowly. We could still hear ‘The Ring of Fire’, when we reached, with enormous relief, our car.
On the twelfth of March we are booked to see Opera at Pearl beach. Keep your fingers crossed they don’t break into an encore of an’ Ol Man’s River’
or something from Oklahoma!
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I was thinking who was Pat Cash – the tennis player didn’t sing as far as I knew. Johnny Cash, Gerard ! Hope the 12th March is a fine night weather wise. Later in March we are off to see Spamalot – quite a contrast to the subject under discussion.
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Yes, Vivienne. It is Johnny Cash. I am getting sport and art mixed.
I love his music.
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Ironic, isn’t it? We have people in the Hunter valley who live a stone’s throw from those big power factories, yet rely on solar, wind, and generators, rather than pay the 30, 40, 50 grand for the luxury.
As for dancing, you’re much better sticking with something that involves actually getting your grubby mitts on the girl, you know, cha cha, jive, even the waltz. Who knows what could happen after a night of close contact and rhythmic movement?
Then again, there’s zumba!
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You need very long arms to get around Svetlana’s voluminous girth!
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But that can be illuminating as well because the girth causes the mirth and shake it baby, shake.
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Those fat-bottomed girls!
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