A Bush Picnic

I remember, as a child going on picnics with Mum and Dad, in our ute. Sometimes we would have Mum, Dad, and Alex or Mary in the cabin, and Jimmy, Sam and I in the tray of the ute.

On rare occaisions we would go to join Dad, cutting sleepers for the Railways in the Piliga scrub.

Once out there, us kids would be allowed to play around the area. There were few rules; we had to stay within sight of the car, so we would continually turn around and check to see that we could still see it. There had been a little boy lost in the New England a few years previously, and Mum was afraid of one of us getting lost, too.

Dad taught me, too, to check where I was going with a stick. I would wave it in front of me. If a spider web was too tough to be broken by the stick, then I had to find another way around. Some webs were that tough!

One time, Mum was quite distressed. She had packed picnic things, and food for us to eat, but had forgotten the plates! She was trying to work out how we would be able to eat our lunch, just with our fingers. Dad said "It’s all right, I can fix that!" They had quite an argument about it. Then Dad got out his chainsaw, and sliced plates for us from the trunk of a tree that he had felled!

I still remember the taste and smell of the fresh sawdust. I was rapt! I hadn’t imagined that you could just cut plates! Mum was upset and disgusted; the "plates" weren’t clean or what she was used to.

In retrospect, I hadn’t realized how skilled a sawman was my father. He had cut seven thin (2-3 cm thick) slices of timber freehand, just using a chainsaw.

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