AustLit
Gosh. One of my favourite memories would be the weekends spent playing for hours on end at the clay hole. Well, that’s what we called it. It was, in fact, a large clay deposit that was excavated for making pipes and ceramic ware. (This is a flash way of saying “making toilet bowls” and some Queensland readers may remember those toilet bowls with the word DINMORE stamped at the top. The source of these bowls was our playground.)
The clay hole was at the end of the street where my cousins lived, tucked away in the bush. It was a child’s delight.
Mum and I would catch the train to my Aunty’s place, which was a place of absolute joy for me. It’s not that I was an only child but I was much younger than my brothers and sisters and they were long past playing. My Aunty’s house was loaded with cousins who I could play with all day long.
We’d play hide and seek and one of my favourite places to hide was under the bunched up dry clothes on Aunty’s bed that had just come off the clothesline but hadn’t yet been folded and put away. If you were really careful, breathed lightly, didn’t move, and made sure no part of your body was sticking out you might just be able to stay hidden long enough so that you weren’t the next one “up”.
If you did get caught in your hiding place, we had a system where one of the older cousins would draw an imaginary snake trail on your back – ‘snakey snakey on your back, which finger did I point with?’ Guessing which finger would determine whether you were counting to 100…200…300…400…500.. by 5s, whilst all the other kids ran and hid. Counting to 500 by 5’s always gave you a longer time to hide.
We would do cartwheels all over the back yard and the next-door neighbours’ yard - I remember being really pathetic at this - or we would spin around with our arms out until we fell down dizzy.
We spent a lot of time walking on fences, challenging our balancing skills and we sometimes took this game down to the cattle yards near the Ipswich railway station. It was there the cattle were corralled before being taken to the abattoir. We’d walk on the top rail, usually an iron rail from an old railway track. It held our feet much better and had no splinters.
We’d play long into the night, and as it got later someone JUST had to see a moogi. Next minute, we would all be running and screaming from the moogi. Our mothers would growl us to calm down saying, “’ere you fellas, knock off now!”
My Uncle had made a veggie patch that took up most of the yard. The veggie patch was born out of necessity because he had a big family but there is no doubt he was green and organic before his time. There were tomatoes and cabbages and lettuces and so much
more. My favourite was the apple cucumbers. The ones with the white skin. You don’t see them much anymore. I would sit in the patch with a salt shaker in one hand and the cucumber in the other; munching away, a little bit of salt with a little bit of cucumber.
At the end of the veggie patch was a big mulberry tree. Sometimes Aunty would send us up the tree to collect mulberries for a pie. Sometimes we would forget about the pie. Next minute Aunty would be throwing clods of dirt, bombing us out of the tree because we were taking too long or we had plain forgotten the reason we were there in the first place.
But the clay hole was the best. Walking down the road we’d cut into the bush and find a brand new magic land every weekend. The tractors that had been quarrying during the week had re-shaped everything by cutting into the hills for the clay. We would run across the hills, our legs cantering like horses, one curled handheld up as if we were holding the reins, the other hitting the horse (our thigh) as we cantered along. If you wanted to go faster you’d hit the horse faster and you’d be speeding along on that horse careering through the air! It makes me weak to think about that now. We were all so fearless! Sometimes we’d realise, all too late, that a hill we’d had played on the previous weekend, where we had run up one side and down the other, had been shaved in half. Arms and legs would go flailing and we’d bust out laughing. Talk about cracked…
We’d explore in the bush all day long, making cubbies that were our homes. Sometimes the white kids from the next neighbourhood would enter our turf. Then It Was On. We would take the soft clay and make small balls, jam it on the end of a stick and chase each other around, ambushing each other, flicking our sticks so the clay balls would fly off and whack the other kids’ bodies to make our mark.
Sometimes we’d stay too long and Aunty Mary would march down to the clay hole and round us up. The minute we saw her coming through the bush we’d try and run around her and beat her home. But it made no difference. We never worked it out how that ol’ girl always beat us home, but she did every time and then we’d be in trouble.
Half a century later, I find myself in that neighbourhood again, to park and ride at the same railway station, on my way to work. My cousins are still my best friends and sometimes we reminisce about these times…at the clay hole…growing up.
Image credits:
ArmchairBuilder.com
armchairbuilder.com/resources/how-to-build-your-own-home
Link to image Licence:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode
Tracey Bunda's family are the Ngugi/Wakka Wakka people. Her career in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander higher education began in 1986 at the Gippsland Institute in Victoria. She later became the convenor of the Weemala Centre, Australian Catholic University, the Director of the Wollotuka Centre at Newcastle University and the Director of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Higher Education at Ngunnalwal Centre at the University of Canberra. Associate Professor Bunda was appointed Director of the Yunggorendi First Nations Centre in Flinders University of South Australia in 2005. She later became Head of the College for Indigenous Studies, Education and Research at the University of Southern Queensland.
Tracey has been chairperson for the Research Ethics Committee, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and also the Indigenous Tertiary Education Policy Committee of the National tertiary Education Unit (NTEU). In 2004 she gave the Duguid lecture 'Self Determination : Actualising the Space' and in the following year she was the keynote speaker at the Indigenous Higher Education conference in Queensland. In 2005 and 2006 Tracey held the positions of Secretary and Treasurer of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association and during that time she was also a member of the National Indigenous Higher Education Council.
Tracey was a member of the AustLit Advisory Board and and advisor on the BlackWords project in its establishment years.
In 2019, she moved to the University of Queensland to become Director of the ATSIS Unit’s academic team and convener of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies major in the Bachelor of Arts.
Image credits:
ArmchairBuilder.com
armchairbuilder.com/resources/how-to-build-your-own-home
Link to image Licence:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode
Photograph of Tracy Bunda by The University of Queensland