We're in Nyngan, on the Bogan River, and home to "the Big (fairly unimpressive) Bogan". The Wangaaypuwan people are the traditional owners of the land. Nyngan is also where I spent the first six years of my life. Back then "bogan" was just a river, not an adjective, and there wasn't a statue of one in town. I haven't been back since we left so this post is a bit of a self-indulgent stroll down memory lane. Despite being so young when we moved away I do remember a bit about our life here, but I'll just share some of the good bits.
My father was an Anglican minister in those days. My parents had emigrated in 1960 and after a short stay in Bathurst, where I was born, my father was posted to Nyngan. It was a very big diocese and having driven today from Cobar I have no idea how he coped travelling the dusty roads for hundreds of kilometres to see all his parishioners. This was before cars had air-conditioning (or suspension), and the vinyl seats inflicted third degree burns to your bum and thighs every time you sat down. The roads were corrugated, unsealed red clay and dad's flock lived up to 100kms away in every direction. And he loved every minute of it. But I don't think my poor mother ever recovered from the culture shock. We kids were oblivious and I remember happily bouncing around those dusty roads in the back seat of the car with my big brother, playing I-spy to pass the time, while dad dodged pot-holes and kangaroos on his way to see someone in need of pastoral care. If memory serves this usually involved a long yarn over a cold beer.
We had a fancy white Ford Cortina that dad won in a competition to write a jingle for Kellogg's Cornflakes. It was the envy of the town until he drove through a plague of grasshoppers in the middle of summer and returned to town with dead bugs baked onto the car like flies on a wedding cake. One of locals at the bowling club told him to soak the car in Coke to get it clean again. It was never the same after that.
When the time came for us kids to go to school, dad (Anglican minister, remember) decided that we'd get a better education at the Catholic school rather than the local public school. Seriously, I have no idea what he was thinking. But off we went to be educated by the interminably grumpy nuns at St Joseph's, who were unimpressed about having a couple of Anglican ring-ins in their school. My brother's older than me so he started school first. I missed him so much I'd follow him as he walked off to school each day, and I'd stare forlornly through the window of his classroom until the nuns, tired of shooing me away, let me sit in class with the big kids. I don't remember how long it took for me to realise that school wasn't the fantastically exciting place I'd imagined, but I found better things to occupy my days and left him to it.
By the time I started school, some clever bureaucrat somewhere had decided that all primary school children should consume a bottle of milk each day, presumably to improve their health. Or something. So little gold-capped glass bottles of un-pasteurised milk were delivered to the school each morning. Nobody seemed to have considered refrigeration though, and by the time the nuns made us drink this incredibly nourishing stuff at morning recess, it had been sitting on the asphalt and in the hot sun for several hours. It's a miracle none of us died. To this day, I can't stand the taste of milk. I blame the nuns. And the nameless bureaucrat. Perhaps now my friends will understand why I have a ridiculously small amount of the stuff in my morning cuppa.
When we hit town this morning, I dragged the Labs around town and pointed out some of the old haunts. They were about as impressed as the nuns. I managed to get a photo of St Joseph's school without being arrested; and one of the house that I'm pretty sure we lived in. A funeral was taking place at St Mark's Anglican Church so I didn't bother the bereaved with my iPhone. Hopefully more photos, including one of the unimpressive bogan, will follow if the Labs, Loretta and I aren't blown away in this Antarctic wind.
Wow! What a story! Thanks for sharing it Barb! I loved the milk; largely because I was always able to get to the cold bottles that hadn't been left to wallow in the sun! Mind you, winter in Canberra saw many of them freeze over and I reckon frozen milk is about as nice as milk that's been sitting on hot asphalt for many hours!