On the way home from my Dad's we stopped at a historical museum, I love places like this, do you remember this post.
I have heaps more photos to share tomorrow, but this post is for my cousin.
Karen, do you remember playing on these up in the top paddock of Nana's farm?
And how about this old dunny?
I explained to my children how I had once used a dunny/thunderbox toilet like this. They were horrified. From memory, I used to be horrified whenever I had to use it too. I was terrified of red-back spiders and lets not even mention the smell!
But many years later, after my grandfather got sick and my Nana moved from the big house to the farm cottage, that dunny was just an empty box. It soon became 'the girls' (that included my younger boy cousin, myself and my cousin) cubbie. I told this story to my kids, they looked at me with blank looks. I went on to explain that my older two boy cousins, built us a second level out of the old door that had blown off in the wind, so we had upstairs and downstairs. I continued telling them that we would drag great sheets of corrugated iron to extend our cubbie, two and three rooms would extend our cubbie out the front, old carpet or towels went on the ground and old curtains were passed on for us to use to separate each room. They listened in wonder. After I had tried hard to explain how you could, indeed, make a great cubbie house from this old toilet, Miss Moo Moo asked:
"But who was supervising?"
I couldn't stop laughing, she looked upset at that. I told her no-one needed to supervise us. She didn't understand. I felt so sad that her childhood is so very different to mine. Those days building and playing in those cubbies were the some of best of my life.
I didn't tell them that nearly every time we came to the farm, the wind had taken part of our cubbie house away and it always being adjusted and remade. I didn't tell them that the big boys had a cubbie house made in an old chicken coop that we were not allowed to go into. And I definitely didn't tell them that it was the place where I had my first, and only, cigarette. Actually, it was a cigar, I had two puffs and never smoked again in my life! but that's a story for another day!
Pretty lace in the old restored church at the museum.
