A REMARKABLE LIFE
“ … I’ve helped dig holes and chop down trees and ride rough horses …”
Behind her 91-year-old eyes sparkle a young and lively spirit.
Her voice still bubbles with enthusiasm and the long years have not dimmed a mind of its great and terrible memories.
As she shuffles along on her walking stick – frail, thin and crowned with snowy hair – one can sense even now the young and vital woman in her, twitching with energy and an inexhaustible capacity for plain hard work.
She is excessively thin. Strong, blue veins protrude through the almost translucent skin of her hands and arms, with brown mottled spots showing clear against it. The voice is expressive, often affected by emotion. The eyes are unashamedly honest and direct. When angry, her eyes flash indignation, and pain is always lurking just beneath the surface.
Nowadays she lives in a hostel for the aged, in South Australia. Occasionally, she re-visits family in Alice Springs, a town she has known from her droving days in the outback.
“You wouldn’t know it to look at me now,” old Mrs Elizabeth MacRae smiles, “but in my time I’ve helped dig holes and chop down trees and ride rough horses.”
All with a clear, steady smile of pride and achievement.
Asked to return to her early life existing on poverty-stricken sheep farms of South Australia, the smile slowly fades and a deep disturbance rises from the depths as deliberately repressed images once again emerge to haunt her.
“Oh, dear,” she sighed, her voice suddenly agitated. “I was hoping you weren’t going to ask me about that. It was terrible … All the farms, the land, were owned by the banks. As the cheques came in, they took the lot and left us with nothing much to live on.
“It was a hard time. We lived on rabbits till they came out our ears. But hardship is good for you, too, you know, because if anything good happened to us we really appreciated it. If someone showed you kindness, you always remembered them for it.”
Elizabeth MacRae, at the age of 30 or so, married a Scottish farm worker who she humorously describes as “the town drunk.”
“Everyone said I was wasting my time marrying a man like that. He was always drunk, staggering home up the steps – one forward, three back down again – and I used to go out and help him to his room.
“He turned out to be the most wonderful husband a woman could have. From the time we got married, he never touched another drink for the rest of his life. He was just lonely, out here all by himself from the old country, and the only place he could get any company was at the pub. You couldn’t have met a nicer gentleman. He was kind and steadfast and wasn’t afraid of hard work.”
This was in the middle of the depression. Thousands of bread-winners across Australia were forced out on to the roads, carrying their swags and living on “sustenance” payments, the equivalent of the modern unemployment benefit.
“We lived only on what we could scratch off the farm. About the only thing we didn’t eat were the crows. It was all rabbits and kangaroos, things like that.”
As the bank owned the land, the MacRae family did not dare kill a beast that was, technically, not their property, or they would have been evicted, even gaoled.
The babies started coming. There was little money. Therefore no doctors. Or a midwife. Only husbands were there to assist wives on their impoverished farms.
“Most of my children were buried around the house,” Mrs MacRae stated as a simple matter of fact. “I’ve had that many children who died, I honestly can’t remember how many there were over the years. My husband, Don, had to bury them. He didn’t want to do it. But there was no undertaker. He had to do it. They were all born dead or they died afterwards. It was hard …”
Only three of her children survived.
During this grim period, the old lady said, farming families were turned off their small blocks if they failed to meet bank repayments. No sympathy was shown. They were bluntly instructed to pack their few personal possessions and leave the property that had gradually broken their hearts.
“We were sometimes asked to caretake the little farms after the people had been evicted,” Mrs MacRae recalled. “When we were cleaning the wells, we often found the whole family down there. The father had shot his wife and children, then himself, and all their bodies were down the well. All shot. There, down the well. We had to clean it out …”
Mrs MacRae, tears springing into her eyes, recalled: “It wasn’t just one or two. It was practically on every farm. We’d find them on farm after farm. They couldn’t bear to leave their land … I can’t stand to think about it now … It was dreadful …”
Managing to remain on their farm, the MacRae’s were visited by the scores of swagmen tramping the bush roads in search of a crust or work.
“We always shared whatever we had,” she recalled, “and it wasn’t much. They were worse off than us, the poor chaps. They hardly had boots on their feet.”
Some of the professional swagmen, however, did not impress her at all. On occasions, after sharing bread with them, she would later find their crusts left behind on the ground.
“That used to make me very angry,” Mrs MacRae said. “With those crusts I could have made a pudding or something, and those wasteful men just threw them away.”
As World War 2 erupted, and much of the male population enlisted. the women were left on their farms to milk cows, chop wood, mend fences, and tend to all the chores of maintaining an existence for their families.
“It was pure slavery,” she revealed. “We were always up in the morning before the sun and we didn’t get to sleep until it was nearly midnight.”
In the midst of it all, there were the ever-begging swaggies and famished neighbors. A nearby family had 11 children.
“They were always knocking at our door with their hands out for something. You couldn’t turn them away. Thank goodness, the Lord always provided for us.”
Later in life, when the MacRae’s were in their 50s, Elizabeth and Don undertook what must have been one of Australia’s last major cattle drives across the Nullabor Plain.
With horses, a good dog, and only one drover to help them, they picked up 600 head of stock at the Midland stockyards, north of Perth, and tailed the mob across to South Australia, spending more than a year on the track.
“We only lost one cow,” she beamed proudly. “Isn’t that wonderful?”
Elizabeth rode a horse all the way. They had no truck. No waggon. They carried all their supplies on horses. Sleeping on the earth. Finding water along the road. The three drovers lived on damper and stews.
“Water was the main problem,” she said. “The cattle would smell the water first and they’d head for it. We’d follow them to the creek or whatever it was. At first we tried to stop them, but they’d just keep on going. That’s how we lost that one cow. She got stuck in a bog by a creek and we just had to leave her there. It was a wonderful experience. I hope I never have to do another one, though.”
Being old does not worry her in the least. She thinks her senior years have been the best of her long life.
“I am completely spoilt now,” she says. “People shouldn’t worry about their first grey hairs. That means you are about to start the loveliest time of all.”
How does she view today’s world and its people?
“I look around and can see what is happening. Some of the parents don’t seem to care what happens to the young. They are not showing any example. They do not care enough for them, so they are growing up crooked … It’s rather sad, really.”
Always her conversations retreat to the harshness of the depression years that so firmly formed her values and philosophies, the nursery of her very extraordinary life.
Mrs MacRae mused: “Sometimes we were so broke, so penniless, we couldn’t afford to put in an order with the grocer. But that wonderful man used to supply us with things, anyway, and tell us to pay him when we could.
“I kept all those bills and dockets and I tried to pay him back when we got on our feet. But he refused to accept it, he pushed it back. He was a real Christian. I wonder if there are still people like that around today …?”
-B.J.C.
