Remembered By Heart: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing by Sally Morgan Page A

atthe homestead, the sort with flywire around it, and a big shallow dish full of water on the top and he overflowing all the time on to the cloths hanging down all round. Keep it cool, all the meats and things, nice. Butter and things wouldn’t go bad. We used to wash it inside all the time, keep it clean, put the new lot of stuff there. Might be four shelves that all the different foods got to be on. Meat in there, and whatever vegies you’ve got for use, from the garden.
    Some of the older ladies, they were there too, teaching us. We used to make the soap ourselves — washing soap — from fat. The boss showed them how to do that, and now we used to watch them doing it, all the old ladies. We used to melt the fat — sheep fat, rendered — and put it all in a big tub, like a big bathtub, but specially for the soap. Let it get a little bit cooled down. We mixed caustic soda in water, half a four-gallon bucket, mixed it with the melted sheep fat, and we had to stir it up till it got hard like custard. We leave it for a night then. In the morning we come back, and this big thing’s set now. We had a table with a wire in the middle, and a rail, and we cut it all in slices — long ones first, and then we turned it around and cut it in little blocks. We used to make about forty in that one tub.
    We used it to wash clothes, the old people’s clothes and the bosses’. We never had washing powder like today. When we were washing, we had a washing board — the glass one — we scrubbed it on that. Then they used to boil the clothes in the copper. When you put them in the rinse,you put the blue in the white rag, leave it in there, let him stop and make the water blue. It’s good, rinsed out all the smell of that soap. Face soap, that you wash yourself with, he used to order that one. We used to get the round one, nice smell, but you can’t get that one any more.
    We had irons you put on top of the stove — you might have three. You used one, and put him back to get hot, and you used another one. We only had that one, nobody had electric one. We used to iron the clothes for the two bosses there, Len Smith and Walter Smith, and my father Alex Stewart.
    Walter Smith taught us to sew and cut dresses. Say you wanted to make a dress, he used to show us how to fold the material, and where we had to cut, and where we had to put the waist and things, and the hem on the bottom, and the collar. He’s the one that taught us. He had no wife. For the bosses, we used to just sew all the buttons and things. In those days, we never had elastic, they only had buttons. We used to sew the buttons, and even a broken shirt that might have got ripped when they were galloping and chasing, we used to sew that. He used to teach us to sew them, patch it up. Any old clothes, get a patch and patch it up. Whatever thing, it had to last for a long, long time, because there was no shop there. Every bit of thing we had to look after them. Not like this time, wasting everything, just going in the dump.
    And we used to sew for the old grannies. We used to look after them grannies. Every time when they needsomething, we might get a material and make a dress for them, or skirt, whatever is. Sometime we make a blouse, but most of the time they like that shirt belong to the men.
    Whatever men and women and girls and boys that were working, we cooked food for them all in the homestead. Bread and things, we used to bake it in the homestead. We cooked one lot of meal for everyone, white and black, and he used to carve it all. Put them all in the plate, even the meat and everything, cabbage or carrots, whatever we got. We used to have a dish to take it home, never sit down there. We used to put it all on the dish and go and give it to the men waiting, might be in the big boughshed there. The men were only there for might be twenty minutes and they’re off again, see.
    But in the homestead, we might be the