Apple Suite - by Danielle Wood
ISLAND | ISSUE 161In a collaboration between Island and the ‘Ten Days on the Island’ festival called ‘If These Halls Could Talk’, ten selected Tasmanian writers were paired with ten halls or notable buildings around the state, responding to place through creative literary works. This piece is one of the ten, which are all published in full on this site.
At the Glen Huon Hall, you could stand in the hall proper and listen. Lay hands on the dark timber dadoes until they offered up murmurs of nativity plays and meetings, presentation nights and weddings, funerals and cabarets. You could study the square holes cut high into the hall’s back wall, watching until specks of sunlit dust began to recall the flickering beam of Gone with the Wind, or perhaps How Green Was My Valley. Or you could take off your shoes to better feel, through the Tas-oak floorboards, the echoing vibrations of once-upon-a-time dances, like the one when the locals dressed as characters from Dad and Dave for their very own ‘Snake Gully Ball’.
But then again, you might not. Instead, you might take the door that leads through into the narrow length of the supper-room, where the Upper Huon History Society meets on a Monday morning over tables laden with home-made lamingtons and jelly-topped slices, and where, on the tight-pressed walls, the district’s history appears in a gallery of black-and-white photographs. You’ll see pickers and picnickers, returned servicemen and brides, young buildings all raw-planked and surrounded by saplings, hay carts piled high, blossom-filled vistas – a hundred thin slices of once-upon-a-time light displayed in deliberately mismatched frames. ‘Aha,’ you might then whisper, partly to yourself and partly to the hall, ‘now you’re talking ...’
The Apple Queen
It wasn’t my idea to enter for Apple Queen – I didn’t think I was good enough – it had to be someone who knew a bit about apples, the district – deportment, too – I was seventeen and working in the office at Nettlefolds – my mother took me to Soundys up in Hobart for my outfit – a grey two-piece suit, knee-length, and a pale blue hat – that was for the Friday, for the judging, when they asked us what we knew about the industry, about our interests, about our future – afterwards we went back to a house in Cygnet to dress for the ball – my dress was made by a woman in Huonville, organdy and lace with as much material in the skirt as she could manage – we girls were all laughing and joking and nobody seemed to care who won and we were all saying ‘I don’t think I’ve got a chance’ – at the ball I danced with Neil – he would be my husband, you see – Saturday was the big day when it was announced – it was a complete shock, I just walked forward and Bev who won the year before was standing there with the crown and I knew her so that made it easier – the organisers just took me over then, and I just did whatever I had to – there was a parade around the Cygnet Oval, twice around, with floats and tractors and I was sitting on this great big swan with feathers made out of tulle – sitting on that swan I was a long, long way up and there was a bar to stop me falling out and I was waving but at the same time hanging on for dear life – that was the 13th of March, and there were 13 contestants and I went to Sydney for the prize on April the 13th so maybe 13 was my lucky number – I went with a chaperone, of course, and we stayed in a hotel in Potts Point and when a photographer came to take my picture for the paper, I was still in bed with my hairpins in and he said ‘don’t worry, we’ll just take your picture sitting there with breakfast in bed’, so he did, and I was glad I’d taken a nice nightie with me – when I came back people were happy for me, and I felt proud – I wasn’t one to show off – I was just happy to be the Apple Queen.
Harvest
Out back’ they called it – people’d say things like, ‘I’ve been out back, picking’ – not all families employed pickers – sometimes it was just the family themselves that got all the fruit in – but on some orchards, there were huts out back and the pickers came, and kids, too – there was a man came once a week with groceries, and the pickers booked their groceries up against their wages so whatever they ate got taken off their cheque at the end of the season – the kids used to love the harvest – after the day’s work was done they’d spend the evenings swimming in the dam – but the edges were real steep and it was hard to get out again, so they had ropes tied off to the wattle trees so you could swing in to the middle, then use the ropes to haul yourself out again – I’d go out picking for the day with the whole tribe of my kids, and the baby in the pram, too – if the baby cried, one of the bigger kids came running – I was usually up a ladder – not that people knew it at the time, but I got men’s wages because I could do the high laddering work – the trees were bigger and taller in those days, not these little trimmed things you see nowadays – getting down those ladders with fifty pounds of apples slung round my middle, I had to brace my knees against the rungs to get down again, I can tell you.
Sunday School
Why was I there? – can’t say I remember exactly, but it might have been that Mum was in the hospital with the new baby – but I do recall the smell of beer and my dad’s scratchy cheek and thinking, so this is ‘Sunday School’ – Mum never liked it, not one bit and she’d never have let me go if she’d been around – I remember other Sundays and the way she fixed her face when she looked in the mirror to pin on her best hat – the one she got with the money from the small fruit picking – raspberries, you know, and black currants and loganberries – she always used to say those paid for our school shoes – anyway, she knew it was no use saying anything to Dad about ‘Sunday School’ – like a lot of men, he lost his faith in the war – and I suppose she knew that he worked hard all week so if he wanted a half day with his mates drinking at Gus Brown’s shed, well that was between him and God – the shed was right there on the top side of the road – sometimes they even sat right on the roadside – Gus’s sons were there too – it was just beer mostly – they didn’t keep it going all day, it was only the mornings, I suppose because they didn’t want the women getting too shirty – the sign? – what does it mean? – what, you can’t tell? – well, I’ll tell you – it was a bit cheeky – we’ve got a few different denominations here in Glen Huon, you see – quietly now, cause there’s one of them sitting right behind you – lean in – bit further – Perch of Fleas and Lice – do you get it? – it rhymes – Church of Jesus Christ – and underneath? – the ‘Satterday sinners of the Cult of Bacchus’ – do you see? – latter-day saints? – there was no malice in it – they were just having a laugh, really.
Factory Days
You’ve got to remember that the harvest lasted longer in those days – nowadays the apples get picked and put straight away in cool stores, but back then we picked and re-picked – so the factories ran from about April right through to August or September – I worked there from when I was fourteen, but there were kids who worked there younger than that – kids used to come on the bus right after school and get dropped off at the factory about four o’clock and they’d come in and take over their mother’s shift so their mum could go home and get the tea on – you worked an hour on the peelers and then an hour on the trimming bench – once you’d trimmed off the last of the skin you had to put the apples on a conveyor belt, stick them down on these forks, right down through the core – and off the apples went to the cookhouse where they got stewed and put in those tins – great big tins, six and a quarter pounds whatever that is in metric – I liked it when I got to work in the cookhouse, especially in the winter because it was warm in there and steamy, too – in winter it was freezing, sometimes the apples were all frosty when you handled them – the thing about the hand-peeling machines was that you had to use your left hand – I thought I’d be smart one time and use my right hand and I nearly took my pinkie off – it was a happy place to work – all us women, we all knew each other and we talked when we could, although we worked hard – what about? – oh, boys, I suppose, and our knitting and what we were going to do on the weekend – our lunch times were three-quarters of an hour so we could leave early of a Friday afternoon, but the problem was that we liked to listen to this radio show in our lunch break – Step-mother, I think it was called – and that went for a full hour – but after a while we got our boss interested in the serial – loved it, he did, in the end, and somehow our lunch breaks stretched out a bit.
A Crate Romance
One of the things about Glen Huon in those days was that you could always get work – there was the picking, of course, and the apple processing factories, but there was also timber milling, and someone had to make the boxes for packing the fruit – the apples got wrapped in tissue paper first – the labels were works of art back then – but something I’ll never forget about apple boxes was the story of this man from Glen Huon – it wasn’t always easy to find a mate around here because everyone knew each other and more than half the people were related to you in one way or another – and the story goes that he slipped a note in with a load of apples – maybe more than one load, who knows? – the note must have said something about how he was single and looking for a wife – anyway, this note was read by a girl in Germany and next thing you know, he and she are writing to each other – after a while she set off from Hamburg I think it was and made her way here on a ship – via Fremantle – stepped off in Hobart, and she was pretty in a sharp kind of way – although the way I heard it the marriage only lasted a couple of years – maybe she was serious about him at the start, or maybe she never was – maybe it was just a bit of an adventure to her, to get married all because of a message in the bottom of an apple box.
The Tree Pull
In spring when the apple blossom was out, it was so beautiful we used to take a mattress off one of our beds and put it in the back of the ute – we’d lie there in the back and just drive around, taking it all in – then some bloke on the other side of the world signed a bit of paper and wham, our apple industry was on its knees – our fruit used to get shipped all the way to Europe – then in 1972 Britain joined the Common Market and started getting fruit from just across the Channel and overnight our apples weren’t worth Jack Shit – it wasn’t the orchardists who wanted to pull the trees out, but they knew they couldn’t afford to keep them in the ground with the cost of all the spraying and everything – the government paid compensation but we never knew when they’d come with their machines and they turned up at our property right on harvest time and I’ll never forget how we ran down the rows of trees ahead of the dozers trying to collect the last of the fruit – they’d supported our lives for years, those trees – and then there they were, the old varieties – Yorks, or Cleos, they were called – big, yellow apples, just bloody beautiful – Cox’s Orange Pippins, Scarlets – those good old trees just lying there with their roots in the air – heaps of the fruit ended up on the tip and piles of apples spilled into the river – they floated away, these drifts of apples – fruit that used to be the pride of the Apple Isle just bobbing down the Huon.
Small Town Life
Quite honestly we’re lucky to even have a hall, the place has been under threat that many times – community halls are a high-cost item for local councils and plenty of times the place was on the verge of being pulled down – it wasn’t until we got the money for the renovation, the one that was finished back in 2014, that we started to feel like the place was safe – we’ve always had to fight to prove that the hall was needed – Glen Huon doesn’t have any shops anymore, no service station, so there’ve been plenty of times the Hall Committee’s had to go cap in hand to other communities and ask their businesses to sponsor us – it’s personal, though, and that’s why we do it – the hall’s a part of us – our mothers used to make supper for after the cricket matches on the park, sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and we kids were always begging for the scraps – we used to help our dads polish the floor before the dances – the council wanted to build some little meeting room to replace it but what we wanted was our hall – a place to have big gatherings, where we can bring our community together – dinners for the senior citizens, free when we can manage it – we’ve fought hard to make the hall pay its way – we’ve had to be outspoken and we haven’t always been loved for it – you see it happen in other small towns when the school goes, when the hall goes – that’s why we fought for it, because without our hall we might turn into one of those ghost towns – we could all just drift apart – nothing left to hold us together. ▼
Author’s note: Only one of these monologues, ‘The Apple Queen’, is ‘voiced’ by the person in the paired photograph. The other monologues are inspired by the general subject matter of the photographs and include recollections from multiple sources. Poetic licence was also involved.
Photo details:
‘The Apple Queen’: Valda Woolley, who held the title in 1953
‘Harvest’: taken at the Bender family property ‘The Oaks’, showing Phyllis, Fred, Maurice and Betty Bender (back row) and Colin and Tommy Jenkins (front row)
‘Sunday School’: taken in Gus Brown’s shed and featuring Gus Brown (back row, third from left) and Jack Brown (far right, front row)
‘Factory Days’: taken in Herb Brown’s factory in Glen Huon
‘A Crate Romance’: crate-makers Harril Helm (left) and Harold McQueeny (right)
‘The Tree Pull’: district of Glen Huon, taken by Hobart photographer HH Bailey
This piece appeared in Island 161 in 2021. Order a print issue here.
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