I spent my first 10 years living on the State Research Farm. My father, James Murphy, was an agricultural scientist out of NSW specialising in irrigation. He worked his entire career with the Department of Agriculture, assisting in his later years with the Soil Conservation Authority.
My mother, Maureen (nee Bartels), worked as PA to SRF manager Dave Wishart as a young woman before assuming a motherhood role to seven children. Her father, Leo Christian Bartels, was an agrostologist who was widely known for his work at the farm. Her brother Frank also worked there, much of his work focussing on underground water supplies.
We lived, initially, from 1956, on the Princes Highway, adjoining the immediate north of the farm’s central precinct, in one of four houses on a site now occupied by the Werribee Police Station. The petrol station across the road survives but it’s very different today.
Our neighbours were the Fagan and Dixon families. Dad hopped the back fence to walk across a paddock to work from a base upstairs in what was a laboratory and, earlier, a lecture theatre. He worked as an extension officer for many years, which regularly took him all over the State, often for days at a time and anywhere from Warrnambool, Hamilton and Casterton in the west to Shepparton, Rochester or Numurkah in the north.
Dad played with and captained the SRF cricket team from the late 1950s into the early 1970s. He was a fast bowler with at least one hat trick to his credit and a batsman who occasionally managed to knock up a couple of centuries.
We had snakes in the back yard and my first dog, Blackie, was killed by a bait. We had a woodheap, outside laundry and flush toilet, dirt driveway, almond and cherry trees. I ran through the glass front door when SRF mum Doreen McLeod and her daughter Anne came to visit. Over-excited, I was tearing about and turned left instead of right. Horror movie stuff for Mum, I was covered head to foot in blood, copped 30 stitches in my arms and forehead.
I caught a bus to school at St Andrew’s PS from the petrol station. It took me up to North Road, turned into the Farm and picked up kids at the end of Richardson Avenue, proceeded down to Wattle Avenue for more pick-ups – Acciaritos, Di Gregorios, Jurys – before making its way to Werribee High, Deutgam Street’s Werribee Primary and over the river to St Andrews. Sometimes it travelled along Duncans Rd, other times around the north end of Tower Rd. Ron Miller was the regular driver in my very early days. I was delighted to recognise him at my Dad’s funeral many years later.
When I was six, in 1963, our then four-child family moved into the last house on South Road, next door to the Banfield family; John, Margaret and son Chris. Life became much busier now we were in the farm’s township proper. More houses, sure, but a couple of brooding bulls over the back fence, an irrigation channel with frogs and tiger snakes, oak and elm trees to build huts in, pine trees to fall out of, as Peter Ward did, magpies to swoop you, sheep across the road, sacred ibis in the paddocks, mushrooms too, and in the distance the sound of cars and trucks on the new Maltby Bypass while trainer planes from the Point Cook RAAF Base buzzed overhead.
Bread was delivered daily, milk too. Large moths populated the outdoor dunny, strawberries growing behind it and the laundry, snakes found their way under the house, stray cats arrived with kittens and ringworm, a willow tree offered handy Robin Hood bow-making opportunities, the woodheap offered hours of fun chopping timber and kindling for the household fireplace.
Lots of new kids to play with, fixed-wheel bikes, plastic combat helmets, bullroarer wooden rulers on string, flying Scotsman tennis balls in Mum’s old stockings, bird nests to raid of their eggs, hay-band to nick from sheds and build hammocks in trees, culverts to crawl about, a swamp to gather tadpoles and cattails, a soaring water tank to climb, workers quarters, sheds and haystacks to explore, a playground of swings and slides, footy and tennis games, back lanes with pumpkins, peppercorn trees with caterpillars and cocoons, willy wagtails, gold-finches …
The resident families I recall, this was between 1963 and 1966, were Murphy, Banfield, North, Melican, Ward, Bourke, Bartlett, Fry, Leach, Macleod, Balshaw, Robinson, Mackenzie, Pywell, Pearson, Frith, Bagot – there were a few others but I had pretty much zip to do with them, they didn’t have young kids, and can’t recall their names.
My brother Terry and I joined up with neighbour Chris Banfield to explore the farm, building huts, climbing haystacks and burrowing down into them, fooling around at the silos, collecting birds’ eggs that we blew the yolk out of via pinholes and kept in shoeboxes of cotton wool, roaming about the swamp, checking the cricket ground, chasing lizards in the channels at 10A. we spent a lot of time in an oak tree over the channel on South road, which we equipped with 4×2 timber steps nailed to the trunk to assist our climbing and hay-band hammocks to lounge about on and watch proceedings below. Mick Pearson upended himself one time in a hay-band hammock, and was left hanging upside down until we mustered his sister to come help in the rescue. Parents were kept in the dark.
We had a free rein few kids get these days. It was a rural environment, wide open spaces which we got around on bikes or by foot. Farm workers were about in utes, on mowers, in cars, between labs and offices and workshops. Overalls or Fletcher Jones check blazers and ties were the uniforms of most men on the farm.
For several years, I acted as scorer for Dad’s SRF cricket team, which played in a local competition. I spent a good bit of time in the grandstand at Chirnside Park. It was a good team, a premiership team, with players including Dad and names such as Cooney, Melican, Doolan, Lang, Carraill, Boyes, Robinson, Richards, Cullen … and my brother Sean, who occasionally played as a very young tail-ender who no-one could get out – consequently he amassed a batting average he still claims at 100-plus.
As a young teen, I played in the SRF U16 cricket team but at 13 years old wasn’t well equipped to stave off the onslaught of speed bowlers such as Laverton’s considerably older Kirk Norton. We played at the SRF cricket ground off North Road, opposite the quarters, and Soldiers Reserve, Galvin Park but despite some talent eslewhere in the side didn’t manage any great shakes during my brief time there.
Living on the farm was a bit removed, a couple hundred yards of Sneydes Road paddocks only really, from the township of Werribee without really being removed. We were in town every day for kindergarten, school, shopping, visiting relatives. As young kids, though, riding my bike over the Princes Highway, and into town, was strictly taboo. Still, I managed to do what other kids did for pocket-money – scour the side of the highway for empty bottles. This was in the days before Norm and campaigns like Keep Australia Beautiful. Coke, Tarax, Marchants and Schweppes bottles were all worth money, threepence a pop mainly, and people simply tossed them out car windows when they were finished with them. The place was a mess but it was gold to kids. Beer bottles were about tenpence a dozen and not really worth the effort. The cash went into licorice cigarettes, choochoo bars, chocolate frogs and aniseed balls.
Another collectible were matchboxes, whose colourful covers offered an array of images for kids mad on amassing stuff. Marvel and Disney comics, stones and rocks, Look and Learn magazines, clumps of wool, snake-skins, cocoons, bird nests, drop-tail and blue-tongue lizards … all sorts of stuff was on offer across the farm. I scissored out and collected comic strips from the papers, which I used to learn to draw: L’il Abner, Modesty Blaise, Garth and the likes from The Sun and The Herald.
Farm Christmas parties were great events for kids. My earliest were in a large white shed beside the manager’s office, where we fronted up in pyjamas, dressing gowns and slippers. Later efforts were in the ‘new’ quarters built at the top of North Road between the ‘old’ quarters and the tennis court. Similarly, the annual Guy Fawkes bonfire night on land between the shearing shed and the cricket ground, where a mighty blaze and fireworks had us in raptures – and the dogs in the adjoining kennels out of their minds. Next day was always a salvage exercise, retrieving dud crackers for their powder and inventing new ways of blowing up things.
Different days and for us the biggest thing was often as much as a trip to my grandmother Jeannie Bartels’ home in Werribee’s Austin Street off Market Road where another wonderworld keep us enthralled with things of that 1960s era and the attendant history of its preceding decades.
The house was a rambling weatherboard more than a hundred years old and replete with a lifetime’s memories of cousins, aunts, uncles, Christmas dinners, birthday parties, juvenile tree-climbing and exploring, old outdoor dunnies and dunnymen, horse-and-cart milk deliveries, sprung beds with heavy printed quilts, a glorious wooden latticed nursery, wood-heaps, briquette-heaps, brightly coloured paving stones, chimneys purpose-built for clambering up to the roof, loquat trees for Tarzan swings, a Kookaburra stove, radios that played 3AK and 3XY …
Ripping up old linoleum in the laundry, I’d find my old comic strips – precious learning tools for a kid then bent on sketching for a living. A sleepout beside a bay-windowed verandah was repository of everything from ancient magazines, photos of mysterious relatives and foreign school uniforms to paintings, chamberpots and cobbler’s lasts. The air was heavy with mothballs. Roaming about took us down across The Ford on Cottrell Street, the huge metal railway bridge over the Werribee, Squires grocery shop, the briquette yard on Tarneit Road, the weir up past Glen Devon …
When Mum found herself having another baby, back in Wandene or the ‘new’ hospital in Synott St, that whole Austin Street mindset came to live with us when Grandma stayed over to look after us on the Farm.
This article appeared in the booklet Out on the Farm (2023), produced by the State Research Farm Community history museum
