Wednesday, February 19, 2025

Living off the fat of the land

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Ian Osborne, Denmark Historical Society, Denmark Bulletin

The 1922-established Group Settlement Scheme aimed to avert an annual loss of £940,000 to WA from the purchase of butter, preserved milk and cream, cheese, bacon and hams from the Eastern States.

Settlers were placed on the land in groups of adjoining blocks so they could share the infrastructure and services installed before their arrival and the load of land development work thereafter.

The Scheme began with groups in the Manjimup district, followed by others between Busselton and Augusta, at Denmark, Northcliffe, and the Peel Estate south of Perth.

The Groups around Denmark were at Carmarthen, Somerset Hill, Harewood, Kentdale and Tingledale.

We were butterfat producers on our old farm at Carmarthen, milking a small herd of dairy cows, sending our cream into Denmark and using our left-over, or ‘skimmed’, milk – still highly nutritious – to feed pigs and calves.

The milking shed was the beating heart of the farm throughout the 1950s and ‘60s.

It was a place of work, warmth, electric light (a 32-volt system), the hammering of the milking machine and the bellowing of cows.

The milking shed dated back to the great fire of 1937 with jarrah poles brought in from the bush, split rails erected on end for walls, and an almost flat, rusty roof.

Roofing iron served for many years and was never thrown away. The old nail holes had to be mended before the iron could be used again.

Dad would lay a piece of one and a half-inch pipe on the ground and put the corrugation with the holes over the pipe.

Arthur Goodison
Arthur Goodison with bull (‘Crantock Napoleon Maltopiece’) and cows, Tingledale, 1925.

He then opened a shotgun cartridge and took out the BB-shot it contained.

Placing the shot in the hole in the iron and using the pipe as an anvil, he flattened the lead shot into the hole.

The result was a neatly-filled hole and no mess or bother.

Like most things on the farm the yards were homemade.

All the boys learned the art of blacksmithing with the old anvil, bellows and tools that had been brought to Denmark by my grandfather from his Ravensthorpe mining days.

And like everything else my grandfather did, the yards were made to last.

The uprights were 8 feet long and a foot across, with mortised holes about a foot long and 4 inches wide to put the rails into.

The gate hinges with pins and double-ended knuckles were made of 2-inch steel and were all forged in the blacksmith shed on the farm.

Marcus Aurelius said that discipline beats motivation because things will ebb and flow if you are at the mercy of your motivation.

But if you’ve decided in advance that you need to do a hard thing, when the time comes you just remember that you made a commitment.

That’s how it was with milking cows – every day the routine was the same.

Dad would be first out of bed to walk ‘under the opening eyelids of the morn’ to the cowshed to get things started.

He would light the copper to heat the water he needed to wash the cows’ udders before milking and clean the separator parts when it was finished.

After getting off the school bus in the afternoon I would grab a slice of bread with jam or golden syrup and head over to be part of the hullabaloo and lend a hand where possible.

On weekends I could also go there in the morning.

I enjoyed taking an enamelled mug of cream off the separator (no concerns about blood cholesterol levels in those days), a mouthful of bran or pollard, and a dipped finger of molasses to hold off the hunger pangs before breakfast.

Milking began when the cows, hunched and runty, and waiting in the yard in the grey morning rain, were let in.

They always came into the shed in the same order, coats steaming in the sudden warmth, lifting their tails and shitting on the concrete floor.

They went to their stalls, were penned in, and started eating a bit of clover hay mixed with pollard and bran from the feed box in front of them.

Their udders were washed with warm, soapy water, the milking cups were attached to their teats, and the milk flowed up and along the clear glass pipes and into the separating machine next door.

Our milking machine set-up was a 2 hp Sundial engine and McCormack-Deering separator.

The McCormack-Deering had a greater capacity than the old Viking motor and also a power pulley which ran off a shaft driven by the engine, allowing us to milk the cows and separate the milk at the same time.

The separator used centrifugal force to separate raw milk into cream and skimmed milk, and two ‘mouths’ – one for the butterfat and the other for the skimmed milk.

The butterfat content in the skimmed milk was able to be reduced to less than 0.05 per cent and the cream was up to 40 per cent butterfat – as close to complete separation as is physically possible.

When the milk stopped coming through the cups, Dad would sit on a three-legged stool, rest his forehead against the cow’s flank, and ‘strip’ the rest out by hand to extract the last precious gallon or two.

After a lifetime of milking by hand he was an expert and had the wrists and forearms to show for it.

The jets of milk quickly spanked out and fluffed up a foam of bubbles as they larupped into the bucket.

The churns full of butterfat from the afternoon milking were stored overnight in the dairy next to the house, then taken to the front gate with the fresh cream from the just-completed morning milking.

The full churns were collected by the milk truck and taken to the Butter Factory which had been built in Denmark by the Great Southern Butter Co. in 1926.

The skimmed milk was tipped into kerosene-tin buckets, mixed with pollard and taken to the pigsty, which had to be a fair way from the milking shed for hygiene reasons.

The buckets had fencing wire for handles, which cut into little hands.

The mash was poured into the troughs with potatoes and lumps of pumpkin.

The pigs lurched up out of their mud baths, grunting and snorting like – well, like pigs – to gulp it down.

As the midwinter sun rose over the Porongurups and the icy lemon sunshine slanted across the milking shed floor we started cleaning up.

The manure was shovelled onto a pile to be taken away and dug into the vegie garden.

The remaining hot water was tipped onto the concrete floor, and we swept away the last of what the cows had left behind.

Drawing off a billycan of milk for our daily use, we walked back to a house as cold and silent as a stone.

The Denmark Museum is located at 16 Mitchell Street and is open Tuesdays 2-4pm,
Thursdays 10am-noon and 2-4pm and Sundays 2-4pm.

Denmark Bulletin 21 November 2024

All photos courtesy the Denmark Historical Society.
This article appeared in the Denmark Bulletin, 21 November 2024.

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