My daughter calls me ‘Pack Rat’ because I find it difficult to throw anything away.

My parents lived through the grim depression years and I was born as the second world war started in 1939.

My first memories come from our small dairy farm at Wheatvale west of Warwick in Queensland. We saw the long convoys of American troops who passed through our farm on their way to support General MacArthur who was setting up his headquarters in Brisbane. The Japanese were bombing Darwin and their troops had crossed the Owen Stanley Range and were looking across Torres Strait at Australia.

Japanese miniature submarines entered Sydney Harbour. Most of our soldiers were in the Middle East, with thousands dug in like rats in the siege of Tobruk.

We shipped most of our surplus butter, wool, and meat to Britain. Those war years were also the years of ration cards – for food, cigarettes, petrol and clothing. Farmers were forbidden to kill their own livestock for food and everything was in short supply.

On our small dairy farm west of Warwick we produced milk, cream, butter, vegetables, lucerne, hay and crops like wheat, barley and sorghum and raised pigs. Draft horses ate a lot of the crops we produced. Cows got the rest.

We wasted nothing.

We shopped once per week in Warwick, getting bread, meat, and other groceries. All scraps went to chooks, pigs, cats, and dogs. One of my jobs was to protect eggs from thieving crows and chooks from sneaky foxes. I had a fairly useless Crack-A-Jack air rifle to help but I do not remember ever hitting anything. Then I got a single-shot .22 rifle when I was about 8 years old (so when I was called up for National Service Training ten years later, I won a Marksman Badge and was far ahead of most city boys who had never handled a gun before). The crows learned to keep further away.

We seldom saw up-to-date newspapers. Nothing was wasted. Bread was wrapped frugally in tissue paper and Mum carefully removed that precious paper and tore it into squares that were spiked on a nail in our outhouse under the pepperina tree. It was softer on the bottom than newspaper.

Ladies made shopping baskets and vases of paper mâché using wastepaper glued with flour and water. They found pictures from Women’s Weekly for the last layer and then painted it all with clear varnish.
Wool came in big skeins which had to be unrolled and wrapped into balls and then knitted into jumpers and scarves. Clothes were handed down as kids outgrew them, then they were used for polishing lino floors, cleaning cow udders, and finally dog beds.

These were also the years of ration cards.

Bureaucrats wasted time, money, and paper on ration cards – for cigarettes, meat, clothing, and petrol. Everyone took every ration card they could get and then swapped what they could not use for other cards they wanted. My father smoked cigarettes. Mum said he smoked more in the years of ration cards as the fear of shortage made him more anxious to get more cards from non-smoking friends and relatives.

The Warwick Show was one of the highlights of my life. I never came to the Show with much pocket money, so I scoured the showgrounds for discarded soft drink bottles, recovered the deposit offered on empty bottles, and spent the money on dodgem cars.

Time passed – the war ended, my father was killed in a tractor accident, we sold our farm, and my mother and I lived alone in Warwick with no chooks for eggs, no cows for milk, and no pigs for pork and bacon. But we dug up lots of lawn grass for veggie gardens.

On the advice of her bank manager, Mum invested all of our surplus funds from the sale of our farm into new financial things called ‘debentures’. She put our money into three companies. Even though that was 65 years ago, I can still recall their names – H.G.Palmer, Reid Murray, and Latec. All three companies went broke in a credit squeeze and almost all of that money was lost.

To earn some money, Mum did cleaning jobs and I earned a bit with odd jobs, growing vegetables and selling potted succulents. We still wasted nothing. I found that some toilet paper could be used to write on with a fountain pen and I used that to write study notes.

Then Mum started taking in boarders – and no one left anything on their plates.

I never had time to waste – I was either doing homework, digging in our big vegetable garden, mowing the lawn, or studying in the back shed beside the neighbour’s chook yard. I scrounged ‘useful’ stuff from the garbage dump. My jumpers got threadbare in the wicked Warwick winters, so Mum mended them. I was quite proud of my patched jumpers, but Mum felt ashamed if I wore them in public.

My studies paid off and I won an open scholarship to attend the University staying at a student hostel that provided breakfast and dinner. Initially, I rode my pushbike from Taringa to the University. I filched slices of bread from the breakfast table to eat with grated carrots and cheese for lunch. On long weekends, I took the train out of the city and then hitchhiked on the highway to get home to Warwick for long weekends.

At weekends, I often worked at odd jobs along nearby streets to earn a bit of money. In vacations, mining companies offered jobs that gave experience in fields like mining, metallurgy, and geology. I got a job with CRA at Rum Jungle in the Northern Territory. My vacation earnings were not wasted – I bought a second-hand Norton motor bike, which took me to Uni or home to Warwick.

Years passed. I was lucky to marry a country girl who also wasted nothing. Eventually, we owned our own farm.

With no permanent water on our land, we never wasted water – there were no long showers and garden water was rationed. We built dams and drilled bores. The groundwater supply was poor so we installed vacuum pumps for water. Every roof got its own tank. I got a theodolite and surveyed for several new dam sites. The trouble with dams and tanks was – they all go dry together.

Geologists are professional sceptics regarding water divining. But my brother, a house removalist, convinced me there was something in it. So, I learned how to divine for water. I scoured second-hand book shops and other places for dozens of books on divining. And then scoured all over our property for sites to drill water for water. One divined site on a ridge near our hayshed looked a most unlikely site for water – the driller whispered to Judy, ‘I think Viv got his divining wires twisted here.’

So, they started drilling. Dry dust came up the drill stem as the bore went down. Everyone looked glum.

The dust changed from white to brown. Then suddenly, water started to spray up out of the bore. The ‘Hayshed Bore’ was the best bore we drilled on that property. We equipped it with air pumps and it kept a tank full. Then we used compressed air to pump that water over much of the property.

Our cattle and sheep struggled through the Centennial Drought. We were forced to build a big hay shed and buy hay – we also bought an ancient electric-powered chaff cutter. This chaff kept weaned lambs and calves alive in the drought.

Hay came in bales tied with baling twine. Remembering my father turning twine into ropes I could not bear to waste this twine. It hung from hooks on every hay shed post while I pondered how to turn it into useful ropes.

We also bought grain pellets and poultry feed in bags. Most people just slashed the bags open to use the contents, but I could not waste useful bags. I learned to cut the sewn tops and release the sewing twine. These bags were then folded carefully and stored in cardboard boxes. (They got thrown out when we left that farm.)

We built lots of fences to keep sheep in and dingos, kangaroos, and neighbouring stock out. I never wasted fencing wire – it hung from nails on posts in every shed. Heavy plain wire for fence strainer posts, soft wire for post ties, rolls of barbed wire, and many rolls of netting.

This Pack Rat never fitted into the new throw-away society. We saved plastic bags, cardboard boxes, shopping bags and insisted on crockery coffee mugs not plastic throw-aways.

It seems that every generation needs to relearn the lessons of their grandparents.

The world has passed the peak of the Eocene Warming and it is slipping towards the next ice age. To survive the long hungry centuries ahead, mankind will need to relearn the skills of the hunter, the gardener and the Pack Rat.

And make sure to live near a nuclear power station.