Photo Essay: Memories of Wyreema -- Paddock and Sky

Paddock and Sky

Rich black soil of the Eastern Darling Downs. Uncle Percy said that you should stick to the black soil because it would stick to you. Dad said that when it was wet it would stick like shit to a blanket. As a small child one morning I opened the back gate and set off for the dairy on my tricycle. I only went half a yard and I was hopelessly bogged. No worries I thought and decided to walk but when I took a couple of steps my shoes were captured and I was left bare foot in the mud. I cried. Sooky little townie kid.


You can see the power poles on the horizon. That’s where the road is. To the left is Wyreema and the other way takes you to Southbrook. The road is bitumen now but in the old days it was just the black soil packed flat and smooth. The car’s tyres sang their pleasure and up ahead the mirage made water on the road – but always up ahead never to be reached. When it rained these black soil roads were all but impassable. Only the cream carrier’s truck could plough its way ahead. He collected the cream and delivered mail; huge tank loaves of bread; and massive parcels of meat, wrapped up in many layers of newspaper and tied up securely with binder twine. If the cream carrier couldn’t get through no one could. I saw him as a demigod, master of country roads.

The sky: because all the horizons were wide and flat, it was more massive than what I knew back home. It was hard to ignore. The grown-ups were always looking up into it: to tell the time Dad told me and I suppose to guess what the weather was going to do. On the farm the weather mattered.

Look to the heavens

if you must, but don’t forget

the black earth below.