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August 16, 2010

Revisiting my great grandfather, David Childs.

Filed under: Australia — Tags: — Dr Roger KA Allen @ 4:11 pm

On Sunday, 24th November last, another of Brisbane’s pioneers, and one who might be said to be one of the landmarks of the Australian wine trade in Queensland, passed the great divide – viz., Mr. David Joseph Childs, of Toombul Vineyards, Nudgee, Brisbane. He was born at Stringstown, near Bridgewater, Somersetshire, England, on 25th March (Lady Day), 1844, and arrived in Queensland (then known as Moreton Bay, NSW) in January, 1849, with his father and mother (Mr and Mrs. Thomas Childs), in the well-known sailing ship “Fortitude”, from which Fortitude Valley takes its name.

Quoting from “The Australian Tropiculturist and Stockbreeder” of December, 1895, I am indebted to that journal for some portion of the early history of young Childs, who apparently from his earlier years was familiar with agricultural life, his father, Mr Thomas Childs, having been a yeoman of the old sturdy English country stock, farming his own state at Stringstown, and is said to have been attracted by a glowing description given of Queensland by Dr. J. Dunmore Lang.

After arrival, Mr. Childs, sen., settled down to farming pursuits to a farm known as “Beulah”, where now stands the Brisbane Gas Works, young Childs meanwhile receiving his education from the various schools of the day – Scoot’s James’, the Rev. Mr. Mowbray’s, and Mr Carvoser’s. After gaining experience, Mr. D. J. Childs appears to have started what is known as the Toombul Vineyard at Nudgee, in 1866, an ideal place for a home, situated near the celebrated Nudgee water holes, and in the very centre of some of the best land around Brisbane, and which may be regarded as the centre of the pineapple industry; here the deceased gentlemen had resided up to the time of his death, and where his genial temperament and hospitality always welcomed a visitor, whether his mission was business or of a social nature.

The year 1866 is not looked upon to-day as having been an opportune or favourable time for starting such an enterprise, as it is generally regarded as a year of financial disaster; but young Childs once having made a start, did not falter, but stuck firmly to it, and realised the reward of his perseverance later on. Mr. Childs was fortunate, it is said, in his selection of the block of land, which appeared to have been well adapted for the uses of a vigneron, and he gave close attention to the selection of the best vines for his purpose; amongst his favourites it is said are some of the old well-known kinds, such at White Pineau, White Hermitage, Iona, Espar, and Isabe Ilas, but it does not appear that he depended solely on his own production, as his enterprise became enlarged, and he had to draw supplies of grapes elsewhere, notably from the Roma district, which is considered one of best of Queensland districts for the for the growth of vines. Meanwhile, Mr. Childs had acquired a name for his sweet and dry wines, including champagne, and his cellars at Nudgee always carried heavy stocks of all classes of the wines he produced, and he did his full share of pioneering the Queensland wine trade, as with a healthy ambition he submitted his wines to outside competition after he had exploited successfully the Brisbane exhibitions; he also won awards at Earl’s Court and at the Franco-British Exhibition, so that Mr. D. J. Childs may be regarded as the father of the Australian wine trade in Queensland. He is also credited with the invention of what is known as a temperator–an ingenious contrivance for lowering the temperature of the must during its first fermentation in the vats, and it was spoken highly of by the experts of the day.

Coming to the social side of his life, in 1879 he married Miss Lucy J. Deagon, daughter of Mr. W. Deagon, who in those days was a notable of that little “Brisbane by the Sea”, Sandgate, having been Mayor of Sandgate in the year that the railway was opened between there and Brisbane, and I note also that he built the Sandgate Hotel, and no doubt gave his name to the well-known suburb of Sandgate – namely, Deagon.

Mr. Childs was a member of the first Nundah Divisional Board, with which he was connected some seven years. In 1878 he became Justice of the Peace, and the same year he was elected Worshipful Master of the North Australian Lodge of Freemasons, and was elected a life member of the Parent Lodge in 1894, and in that phase of his life it will be sufficient to say “he was a Mason”.

Mrs Childs survives her husband; all the children are living – two sons and seven daughters. His elder son, Mr. W. L. Childs, has made a study of the wine trade, and is carrying on the business under the old name of D. J. Childs. The younger son enlisted in the A.I.F. when only 18 years of age, and was passed, and has been reported wounded on two different occasions, and is now convalescent in England, and his family now hope that it may not be long before they may welcome him back as a “worthy son of a worthy father”.

The funeral of the deceased gentleman took place on Monday, the 25th November, the burial being at the Nundah Cemetery; it was largely attended by all classes of the community.

Source: The Australian Brewers’ Journal, December 20th 1918, page 125-126.

July 14, 2010

Letters from Australia

Filed under: Australia — Tags: , — Dr Roger KA Allen @ 10:56 am

Eleven thousand people turned up yesterday at the annual Mediaeval Fair half an hour’s drive north of Brisbane. It is on again today. Amidst gum trees and paper barks stretched myriads of period bell tents with long pennants flying under threatening skies. Fortunately the rain held off and the sun shone brightly later in the winter’s afternoon, making the knights’ armour more dazzling. The maximum was forecast to be 22°C which is comfortable for a man in armour or a woman in a long woollen garb and head dress.  The air was full of the music from period instruments, madrigals, and jingling bells of Morris dancers mixed with the rhythmic bang and clink of blacksmiths taming red-hot iron with hammer on anvil. Later there was a display of falconry with Peregrine falcons, a kestrel, some owls and an Australian wedge-tailed eagle. During the day there was jousting by knights on horseback and also tournaments between men in armour with damsels in tall coned hats pinning their kerchief on their favourites.

Before their tents and smoking fires were Vikings, Celts, Crusaders, Byzantines, Bulgars, Turks, Saracens, while gypsies in a caravan told fortunes and Celts with displayed silver jewellery and stuff about Runes and the dark arts. There were vendors in tents selling all sorts of wares from furs to weapons, pottery, venison pies and mead and for a while it was not hard to imagine being on a Common in mediaeval England, Germany or in the Holy Land. Somehow the gums trees and melaleucas did not matter as this day revealed that atavistic memory that runs deep in man; the desire to rediscover deep roots in an electronic world where everything seems so ephemeral and superficial. At times I felt like a sane man in a mad house.

Yesterday I woke up to hear another of our soldiers, a Queenslander called Nathan Bewes, had been killed in Afghanistan and a fellow soldier wounded with a roadside bomb. He had bought his sweetheart a diamond only three weeks before and his face was on the front page of the Sunday Mail this morning.  Three of our SAS soldiers were killed the week before in a helicopter crash while on operations once night. The Taliban would know through the Internet, his name and see the details of his family; such is the way of the modern world. They can watch his funeral on television and by computer while his killers dissolve into the anonymity of the Afghan populace where friend and foe are indistinguishable as in all insurgencies and guerrilla wars. It is an asymmetric war, what with the rules of engagement when our troops can only fire when fired upon and men can kill with a mobile phone. The irony is that the American Minute Men did the same against the Red Coats and they called them patriots.

We are expecting a federal election to be called soon by our new prime minister, Julia Gillard, the then deputy PM, who ousted the once diplomat and Mandarin-speaking Kevin Rudd a few weeks ago in a sudden seismic shift by the Labor Party caucus which felt that Rudd was barking up the wrong tree. It happened so swiftly and with such political adroitness, most of us were stunned, but a day is a long time in politics. As our first woman PM, and a former lawyer, she has come across as strong and focussed and with a quick wit, but faces the pugnacious Liberal opposition leader, Tony Abbott who was a Rhodes Scholar and won an Oxford Blue in boxing. It will be an interesting match. Illegal immigration by boat people, greenhouse warming, health, a new mining tax and the economy loom major issues although we have survived the GFC relatively unscathed with a relatively healthy national indebtedness compared to other countries.  However, many people are still hurting and many Baby Boomer doctors will not retire as planned as their superannuation has been decimated by the GFC.

July 14, 2009

A Pythonesque Holiday

Filed under: Australia — Tags: , — Dr Roger KA Allen @ 4:41 pm

Maleny

My holidays are now ending after two lovely weeks at our wooden cottage in the hill country, about an hour to the north of Brisbane. On a clear day we can just see the city lights in the distance, as well as Moreton Bay to the south east with the 1000 feet high sand hills of Moreton Island in the distance, and  Bribie Island about twenty miles away and the Bribie Passage. To the south, between us and civilisation, loom the evocative and always beautiful Glasshouse Mountains, so named by an imaginative Lt Cook in 1770, with their poignant aboriginal stories dating back to the Dreamtime.

My son and his wife and baby son had recently moved into our cottage after relocating from Tasmania and had only been in it a few days when my son rang me in Brisbane to say that the tank water “smelt funny”.  Although he had lived in the Northern Territory and flown extensively all over the Outback as a young pilot, I was not sure if he was just describing the smell and taste of normal rain water which was stored in our 10,000 gallon concrete tank under our back deck.

“No, Dad, it smells a bit like bore water.”  I knew he had tasted and smell of artesian bore water some of which has a sulphurous odour. I also knew that he had a fine wine palate having worked for years running a bottle shop and doing advanced wine tasting courses. I was beginning to fear the worst as a man who is no stranger to the bush, contaminated water and the like.

When we arrived on Sunday morning, I turned on the kitchen tap and could smell what he meant. It was not too bad but it was not normal. We then went down to the tank under our deck and hauled the heavy square concrete lid off the top and with a torch peered down into the six feet deep tank which was nearly full after our record winter rainfall. We could see nothing but there was a definite “pong” whose vapours I recognised but did not let on.

With fears temporarily allayed, I called the plumber who to my surprise answered on a Sunday night and said he’d come over on Tuesday as he had some urgent jobs to do on Monday. That meant a two day wait.  To add to our worries, my grandson who was six months old was sick and snuffly. No one was game to use the shower or the bath as we feared the worst and we had by this time bought drinking bottled water from the supermarket in town.

Dead Python

(On the left – Photo of the dead python and moi, taken by my wife with Cannon Powershot SX1 IS)

On Tuesday morning my wife left me with the children to drive to Brisbane, a trip of about one and half hours in peak hour as she had left one day in her two week holidays to see patients.  The plumber arrived early and smelt the water from the kitchen tap. He sniffed and tasted it like a wine judge and concluded that it was not as smelly as my son had made out. Indeed he though it was fine. With this in mind, I showed him the tank the top of which we reached by a ladder I had at the ready. I again lugged the titan lid off and gave him my long black Maglite torch which we also keep as a weapon for intruders.
“Ah, yes, I smell what you mean, “he said with the air of a detective about to unearth a body. He peered into the gloom and then further afield than we had done. “Ah”, as his voice echoed in the tank. “I see something floating in the distance. Do you have a long stick?”

I had one handy and cut from a fallen bough. I held the torch as the smell and the object drew nearer towards us. “It’s just as you suggested, Roger. It’s a carpet snake and a big one at that.”  For those of you unfamiliar with the word, “carpet snake” read “carpet python”, so called because of its markings which is like that of 1960’s carpet patterns. With a long stick we pulled it towards us until its familiar and nauseating form was in reach. I took the stick and hoping that it would not fall apart with decay, managed to pull it in toto out of the water and with a heavy “kerplop”, it dropped six feet onto the ground below. My words cannot convey the stench and as I gathered it up to take it to my vegetable garden for burial, I came close to being sick. I have a hardy stomach as a sailor in the roughest seas, but this took the cake. I hurriedly buried all eight feet of it in a long trench, fairly deep and out of reach of the frequent visitors to my garden such as nocturnal bandicoots, possums, owls and early morning scrub turkeys.  There was a big lump in the middle which was probably a possum or a big rat.

To digress, about six months earlier, one morning, on opening the back door of our kitchen onto a wooden deck, my wife discovered a big carpet snake about eight feet long happily sunning itself and as result was in no hurry to move despite her fearless and repeated attempts to move on the lodger with a straw broom. She is a brave one when it comes to snakes; a true Gryffindor (viz. Harry Potter). The final result was: LINDA 1; SNAKES 0.  It was this very snake which I think had crawled up the overflow pipe after a marsupial meal and hence into the one-way snake trap of our rain water tank.

Carpet snake(On the left photo taken by me with my mobile phone about six months ago)

When I first met her at her house in the country in 1994, she was wearing gum boots and a string of pearls around her neck (and clothes I hasten to add).  One day just prior, a long green and yellow tree snake had fallen onto her from an overhanging branch while she was carrying a basket of eggs from her chook shed (fowl house) where there was also in residence a kindly old man carpet snake who kept the rats under control.  She dropped the basket and pulled off the snake.  It was scrambled eggs for breakfast that day.

My next task was to empty 10,000 Imperial gallons (about 50,000 litres)  of stinking i.e. non-potable water down a long make- shift  100 mm pipe onto the lawn and down to the stream at the bottom of the garden.  This took six hours with the pump going continuously until 9pm. I was worried the motor night burn out.  As the tank is our only water supply, and in a country where water is precious, and with the tank full after the heavy winter rain, seeing it drain away to dryness was hard to watch.

The next day some men in a big truck with pumps and brushed to clean out the tank followed by the water man who reversed his 25 ton water tanker down the boggy lawn to the tank and unloaded 6,000 litres.  It was nearly midday the next day, when with a tank about half full, I finally reconnected the pump. At last, I thought, I could have a shower and a shave after two days and my family members including a six month old grandson would be able to bathe again. The pump started but as it did, the man delivering the water, pulled out his long brass nozzle only to dislodge the thick, black poly-pipe which went down into the tank from the pump.  It dropped out of site into the depths of the tank.  I could not believe it.  There it lay on the now clean bottom along with the siphon-head at the end which is a one-way valve.  It was beyond reach and the tank lid was a tight squeeze even for a boy and hard to get out of, even for a snake.

Exasperated I rang up the local pump place in town some ten miles away to get someone to come out and fix up the pump. “Sorry, mate” they told me, “We can’t get anyone out there for three days.”

“Expletive”, I thought.

Red bellied snake

Everyone in Australia is your mate and one is usually addressed as “mate” irrespective of rank, birth order or age.  Even the prime minister can be called, “mate” by the more informal of our species. This comes from our egalitarian ideals, being long weaned off the nipple of Mother England and with a certain minority of us being sent here “At His Majesty’s Pleasure”, and “For the term of your natural life”.

“Expletive!”  once again, I uttered.

However If I dissembled the pump and brought it in, they would have a look at it. Being a “Bob the Builder”, I pulled the ends off the pump, disconnected it from the mains, and lugged it off the tank which is under our back deck, into the car and sped off.  I returned soon after with new connecting hoses, complete with fittings and a temporary pump which after some wrenching, a bit of cussing and copious high pressure  jets of water in the face, I had the thing working in no time and as Archimedes once said, “Eureka”.  My wife was still at work and none the wiser. “The water’s back on” I shouted from under the deck, and by this time covered in mud, wet and cold and smelling like a decaying mummy.

The rest is all history….a  new high pressure best Australian Davey pump in the cosmos by the end of the week, more stuffing around with teething problems, pump alarms, flashing  pump warning lights examined by torch light in my pyjamas at 10.30 pm, and a few days we were drinking and all smelt like new.

However the action does not stop there. While out in the garden the next morning I notice a slim, scaly black tail disappear into the hay of our former fowl house (chook house or chook pen for an Australian).  My wife, being a Gryffindor (brave) headed for the hay armed with a pitch fork while I waited around the back door-come-snake-escape route armed with an iron rake and a US Army machete which I keep by my bed at all times.  It was a red bellied black snake about six feet long in the old money.

Death adder

Now it is illegal to kill a snake in Australia, nay even the most venomous ones, and including the red bellied black which are not as lethal as brown snakes or taipans which are very aggressive especially when “horny”.  However, being “relatively lethal” does not compute in my lingo; no politically correct mumbo jumbo for me. On the other hand, we regard snakes around the house as a sign of a healthy ecosystem but sometimes I draw the line as one could kill a child in minutes or for that matter one of our dogs, not to mention what they could do to 10,000 gallons of water and a snake-phobic young mother. Healthy is as healthy does.

I am sure some lawyer, law maker or parliamentarian, when faced with a six foot red bellied black would let common sense prevail. There is a certain law of the greater moral good which should prevail. I once nearly stood on a death adder while hunting wild pigs as a young lad and I was alone and many miles from the homestead in the outback and on dusk. In an instant, I unloaded all 13 rounds of my Remington 22 automatic on the snake as my heart stopped and I nearly unloaded my pants. I’d do it again.

P.S. It is unusual to see so many snakes in winter.

May 12, 2009

Paradise Lost; the Anangu Story

Filed under: Australia — Dr Roger KA Allen @ 4:04 pm

MaralingaI watched tonight in sadness a programme on ABC television about a group of courageous aboriginal women who have written and painted a pictorial book recounting the devastating effect of the atomic tests on their traditional homeland and family life at Maralinga where the British tested seven atomic bombs during the 1950′s. It finished in 1963. They were treated like dogs, dispossessed and displaced from their traditional land and were disregarded when they sought compensation. They did not know white men’s law or speak the slick double-talk of barristers in wigs and jabots; those silks from Sydney or London. The plutonium from the tests will poison their land for another 25,000 years, long after the cockroaches have dispossessed us.

The British government even used servicemen as guinea pigs to crawl through the atomic dust although they denied it at first. The aboriginal was invisible as he was like the shadows. I have seen many servicemen from these tests. Some collected pebbles of cobalt 60 in their tobacco tins. I am no fan of Wikipedia but it will tell you more.

The British also tested atomic bombs in the Montebello Islands off the Western Australian coast. Perhaps they could have tested some in The Wash or perhaps the Isle of Skye? We had a government then which was very pro-British and as the Cold War was in full swing, there were other imperatives.

We were more servile as a nation then. Aboriginal people were treated no better than Underlings by the British and by White Australia. We are guilty too. It is not something I am proud of. They have rights now, and are more valued as people and we are the richer for this. We love their art from the Central Desert which is no desert to those with eyes. The land is their Mother, and not real estate with rates or a coloured rectangle on the Monopoly board. This was the land which bloomed with wildflowers when the skies rained on the red soil and which was the home of many creatures whose spirits they all knew.

We could learn from them. They were the noble custodians of Mother Earth since the Dreamtime. We are the savages, not they. Their sadness will last longer than the half-life of plutonium as their land has been violated forever. The shame is ours.

The book is called “Maralinga – The Anangu Story”. It is a children’s story book in colour and may end up an Australian classic. ($35 Aus). It is available from Coaldrake’s Books. www.coaldrakes.com

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