The Water Bag: Life in the Far Reaches of Australia

By Jenny Kroonstuiver

Jenny Kroonstuiver has lived and worked in most states of Australia, predominantly in remote areas, from the pastoral industry in Western Australia, to Groote Eylandt in the Northern Territory, to the mining towns of Mt Isa and Kalgoorlie. The final stages of her working life saw her working Australia-wide. In The Water Bag she recalls stories from her relatively unusual childhood and many varied careers.

In many ways, her life has been a series of unique experiences across the vast Australian landscape. Often faced with challenges and tragedy, Jenny’s innate ability to value the positives in life and learn from her experiences is reflected in her story telling. She records with delight, humour and compassion many of the colourful characters and experiences which have affected her life.

The Water Bag is essentially a series of stories and reflections, roughly following the sequence of Jenny’s life. She takes the reader on an entertaining journey across the length and breadth of Australia

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Sep 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781923065376

Jenny Kroonstuiver

Born in the 1950s, Jenny Kroonstuiver spent her childhood living on pastoral stations firstly in western Queensland and then on the Nullarbor Plain in Western Australia. She trained as a teacher and spent several years teaching in country areas of the Northern Territory and Queensland, before returning to Kalgoorlie in the 1980s. After a short-lived marriage, she raised her four children alone, continuing to work in the broader education sector. From 2004, she took up a role managing the national training system for the Australian meat industry, a role she held until her retirement in 2020. After publishing several family histories and biographies, this is her third novel in the series of the lost towns of the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia.Other novels in the lost towns of the Eastern Goldfields series: The Memory Chest Nod to the Admiral

Book preview

1. Why the Water Bag?

I spent much of my childhood in the Australian outback where a water bag was the equivalent of a jug of iced water. At the end of a hot day there was nothing better than a cup of cool water from a bag hanging from the tank stand at the rear of the homestead, where we would exchange stories and experiences from the day.

Water bags were made of canvas and could hold several litres of liquid and were hung in open spaces where the wind could cool the water – it was always refreshing. We had a large canvas water bag hanging from the homestead tank stand, used by Mum as an incentive to keep the children from constantly opening the refrigerator. A pannikin hung from a wire hook at the top, and we all used the same cup whenever we needed a drink. No rinsing required. In fact, the only times I remember it getting washed was when someone accidentally dropped it in the dirt.

We also had smaller water bags hanging from the bull bars of each of the station vehicles, so crucial as a water supply should the vehicle break down or become bogged, or even if it just happened to be a hot day. It was part of the daily routine for the station hands to each fill their water bags from the rainwater tank and attach them to their vehicle in readiness for the day’s work.

One of our chores as kids was to fill the homestead water bag each day, filling plastic buckets from the rainwater tank and pouring water into the top of the canvas bag. Forgetting to fill the bag meant punishment.

Water bags seemed to empty remarkably quickly, especially to we whose chore it was to refill them. On hot, dry days with strong easterly winds, evaporation seemed to lower the water line before our very eyes. As kids we developed the remarkable ability of being able to drink without noticing that the water line was getting very low and the bag needed to be refilled, apparently hoping that a good fairy would do this before it was our turn.

The water bag is such an integral part of my childhood, that it seemed appropriate to use it as the title for a book about my life. Like the conversations across the water bag at the end of a hot day, this book began as a series of scattered stories and reminiscences, first published as blogs. As more and more people read and commented on the stories of my unusual childhood, I was urged to bring them together into a book. So, here it is.

2. Remembering western Queensland

I was seven years old when we left western Queensland and headed west to start up a new sheep station on the Nullarbor Plain, so I do have some scattered memories of life in Queensland. Those early memories are like a series of disconnected snapshots, and I have no idea why they are so resilient.

My earliest memories are of the overseer’s cottage near Yaraka. This was where Mum and Dad, Ruth and Eric Swann, spent the first five years of their married life. Strangely enough, the clearest memory is not of the house, but of the open-sided external laundry with its cement tubs and copper, and the woodpile at the side next to the telegraph clothesline. This was a long clothesline strung between two poles that looked like telegraph poles, and a wooden prop was used to raise the lines up to a height out of reach of the dogs. On occasion, running or fighting dogs would manage to knock the prop over, bringing newly washed clothing to the ground, and earning the ire of my Mum. Very early in her married life, Mum learned to crack a whip, and woe betide any station dog who came anywhere near a clothesline full of washing.

I can also clearly remember the fellow on the stores truck who called in about once a week – he had several missing fingers and this absolutely fascinated me.

The other memory I have I have of that time is of the Mt Marlow manager’s house, which was several kilometres away, and Mum and Dad were often invited there to play tennis at their regular weekend tennis parties. I remember one day wandering around the garden and was about to step onto a rounded stone near the garden path, when I saw a small carpet snake wrapped around the base. Over 40 years later, Mum and Dad returned to visit many of the sites of their early married days, and I was able to tell them the exact location of that stone. Mum was so amazed, that she photographed the stone and sent it to me.

When I was five, Dad took up a management position at Tatala station, halfway between Charleville and Morven. I have much clearer memories of this time. The crumbling pisé house was only about 100 metres from the Nebine creek, and was a haven for wasps, frogs and snakes, especially when it flooded. It was a chaotic house with extra rooms and a verandah having been added on at some stage. Both the generator room and the overhead water tank were right beside the house, with the wood pile and the dog’s kennels about 50 metres away. The outbuildings were all quite close to the house, and my brothers and I became barefooted warriors as we roamed the area discovering all kinds of hiding places.

This was a well-established pastoral area with many operating stations and I can clearly remember the swagmen who came by regularly. Most of these men were old ex-soldiers who had never been able to settle back into regular life, and they spent their time wandering the outback with swags across their shoulders, often accompanied by dogs. They would knock on the door and offer to chop a load of wood in exchange for some meat, tea and potatoes and, after a few hours, they would head off to the next property.

We were also visited on occasion by travelling salesmen, with their piles of merchandise in the back of an old truck. These were exciting times for we children, usually resulting in rare treats. However, when I look back now, I realise that Mum must have loved the opportunity to do some shopping which did not involve mail order.

The other enduring memory I have is of the leeches. There lived a family by the name of Donkin on the other side of the creek, and I remember during one flood Dad went down to help them get across the crossing. They got the vehicle across OK, but the family had to walk through the water and, when they reached the opposite bank, they were covered in leeches and the kids were screeching as Dad and their parents took the leeches off one by one. We had regularly encountered the odd leech when we swam in the creek, but I had never seen so many in one place.

While we were at Tatala, Dad joined men from other stations in the area to construct an open-air picture theatre alongside the road to Charleville. I can clearly remember them building the canvas seats, threading the canvas onto long poles to make seats that held two or three people. We visited that open air theatre often, and that was where I saw the original King Kong. Years later I returned to Charleville to visit its abattoir, and one of the meat inspectors was a camera operator for that very same theatre, still in operation after more than 50 years.

In 1962, the family packed up to head to Western Australia, a trip that for Mum and the four children would take over nine months as we waited in Adelaide for Dad to establish suitable accommodation on the station. Mum told the story of our challenging train trips, and the stay in Adelaide, in the book They came to Glengallan, but for me it was the ultimate adventure, and probably the beginning of my thirst to see and experience as much of Australia as possible.

Kanandah station is one of three leases, and at the time was owned by the McGregor family from Adelaide. Combined with the other two holdings, Koonjarra and Boonderoo, the whole area was about three million acres (roughly 1,220,000 hectares). Kanandah was to the north of the Trans Australian railway line, while the other two were to the south. Dad had been employed as manager to oversee the development of the sheep station, an experience he described in his book Place in the West. Naretha railway siding was our identified railway link, with Rawlinna being the next along the line to the east. Although there had been a few properties already established when we arrived, the 1960s were a significant period of development of sheep stations across the western side of the Nullarbor Plain.

2. David, Russell and Jenny, Mt Marlow 1958.

Personal collection.

3. Jenny, Russell and David at Tatala, about 1960.

Personal collection.

3. Home schooling

As the Covid-19 crisis deepened across Australia, I listened to psychologists and parents alike bemoan the impacts of ‘isolation’ on children, and the challenges of that to parents and teachers alike.

As station children, this was the story of our entire primary schooling experience. Every fortnight, the mail bag would bring our correspondence lessons for the next two weeks, plus the corrected lessons from the previous period. ‘School’ was conducted at the kitchen table and later at a school house built on the station, and Mum was the physical face of our lessons.

At the time I never really appreciated what a workload this was for Mum. She had reached year 10 herself, before training as a mothercraft nurse and heading off to western Queensland, and now faced the challenge of teaching her own children as well as running the station store, monitoring the Flying Doctor radio, cooking for both the family and our many visitors (and often the station hands when we were between station cooks), and generally managing a household.

Add to the mix four kids who would much rather have been roaming the homestead hill and going on outdoor adventures or heading off with Dad to help with stock work, and Mum really faced a very challenging task. That she managed to maintain reasonably regular school hours and guide us through our fortnightly requirements is a testament to her strength of character (sometimes assisted by the threatening presence of a wooden spoon).

Funnily enough, I don’t remember a great deal about the content of my own correspondence lessons. I do remember the ‘copy book’ where we had to practice daily our cursive writing, and I have flashes of memory of having to learn long division and marking in rivers and cities onto maps using minuscule neat printing. We also had art and craft where I had to learn embroidery, a skill never mastered despite Mum’s own proficiency. Each fortnight we also had a bible story to read and a picture to colour in – that would never wash today!

In all my primary schooling I never met my correspondence teachers who were invisible beings with red pens who wrote a nice letter once a fortnight.

Once we joined School of the Air, schooling became more social, and once a year we did get to meet not only our teachers but also many of our classmates. School of the Air lessons were run for about an hour each day, in addition to our correspondence lessons. We had to call in to announce our presence over the Flying Doctor radio and could hear both our teacher and our other classmates.

School of the Air was a wonderful experience. Not only did it teach us the protocols of using the radio call-signs, speaking only one person at a time, managing poor radio conditions, and using the phonetic alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, Delta etc), but for the first time we interacted regularly with other children of our own age.

It was always a strange experience attending the end-of-year concert where we all came together and put faces to the voices we had been hearing all year. After listening to a classmate’s voice for a whole year, we often had a mental image of what they may have looked like, and it was always a little weird discovering that they actually looked very different to what we had imagined. In later years my nephews and nieces began using computers for their lessons and got to see their classmates as well, but for us the first point of recognition was the voice.

Sometimes we even managed to put on a play. I remember one year one of the very talented Mums, Faith Calzoni, had written an Australian version of The Wizard of Oz for us to perform at the end of year school concert. Every child across the network had a role to play – in our house I was an emu, one of my brothers a dingo and the other a munchkin. Mum carefully drew a ‘stage’ to scale in the dirt out in the yard, and for months we practiced lines as well as our entries and exits. Mum also had to come up with costumes for each of us. Fortunately, she was a great seamstress and managed to create three amazing costumes – mine was even decorated with real emu fathers.

The day of performance came, and in the morning we managed one hilarious rehearsal where, for the first time, we all came together. We had to overcome shyness at meeting all these people for the first time, being on a real stage for the first time in our lives, inhibiting and sometimes malfunctioning costumes, and a dose of real stage fright. I do recall my youngest brother, Russell, the munchkin, hiding under a table on stage for the entire performance.

Somehow it all came together, with the real performance echoing many of the hiccups of the rehearsal, but an enduring memory for all those present. I can even remember my ‘line’ to this day: I am Mulu, the emu.

So, I watched the experience of the Covid home-schoolers with some empathy. For sure, home schooling brings a whole set of new challenges, is socially isolating and confronting in so many ways. But it also brings memories and unique experiences and develops independence and resilience that are invaluable life lessons.

4. The schoolroom at Kanandah.

Personal collection.

4. Gardens drained the water tank

One of my favourite times of year is the first day of spring in the Blue Mountains, where I now live. I never tire of the four seasons, particularly the colours of autumn and the freshness of spring – two seasons which were virtually non-existent in my childhood as winter transitioned to summer, and summer to winter, in a matter of days. I also love the ease with which gardens grow, the plentiful rainfall and the variety of plants.

Gardening on Kanandah station in WA posed a whole different set of challenges. When we moved into the newly built homestead at the end of 1963, the ‘garden’ area comprised compacted dirt and rubble. The sparsity of even native trees and shrubs was a ready indicator of the challenges Mum and Dad were to face in establishing a garden.

Dad had grown up in the Griffith area of NSW, with its plentiful fruit orchards, and his first ambition was to establish an orchard at the eastern end of the garden area. For weeks, loads of soil and sheep and horse manure were tractored in to establish the beds for the trees. The holes had to be dug with an augur, and the banks of the beds built up to hold precious water.

Eventually Dad was able to plant about 20 trees, a mixture of stone fruit, citrus, mulberries and figs, rows of saplings carefully spaced along the garden beds built with engineering precision. Within days the rabbits had reduced each shrub to nothing more than a stick, and Dad realised that if his precious orchard was ever to survive a rabbit proof fence was required.

So began the next major project. Posts were cut, more holes dug with the augur, gates welded, and rabbit proof fencing rolled out to enclose the half acre area to be called the homestead garden. Mum and the kids were tasked with painting the posts and rails white. It was an impressive fence, and over the years proved to be a reasonably effective rabbit deterrent, except when the gates were left open, as they burrowed under the fence, or when they were in plague proportions.

Fence built, Dad tried again with the orchard, this time with more success. Each tree was carefully nurtured, and ‘moving the hose’ became one of the kids’ chores, and consequently a reason why the overhead homestead tank was regularly drained when we forgot to switch off a hose. Over the years we had moderate success with the orchard. There was never an abundance of fruit, and growing fruit trees in poor soil in an arid area with an incredible multitude of birds and pests, was always going to be a challenge.

Mum wanted lawns and flowers, and thus began the next project. Kikuyu lawn was planted on three sides of the house and after careful watering and nurturing, and again regular draining of the overhead tank because of forgotten hoses, the lawns became plush and green. Mum decided she wanted chrysanthemums on one side, and so once again truckloads of dirt and manure were brought in to establish raised garden beds on three sides of the lawned area on the northern side. Again, the banks of each garden bed were carefully built up to hold water.

The chrysanthemums were a remarkable success. They grew into prolific bushes of pink, lilac and white, and were Mum’s pride and joy. In May of each year, at the peak of their flowering, we held a gymkhana which attracted hundreds of visitors, and Mum’s chrysanthemums were much admired and photographed.

Dad had similar success with his rose garden. His father had been a very competent gardener, and roses were a particular talent, and so Dad wanted to establish his own garden. This time heavy clay soil was trucked in, along with the usual mixtures of animal manure (including chook manure as by this time we had a fowl run). Dad had a variety of roses, but the spectacular Mr Lincoln and Peace roses were my particular favourites, and the rose garden was a feature of the homestead flowers.

Mum had a vase which we called the mystic bowl. It was a ball-like glass vase mounted onto a black plastic base, and when flowers were mounted into the base and the bowl filled with water, it magnified the flowers. I loved this vase, and one of my favourite jobs was to pick some of the roses and mount them into the mystic bowl. While these were spectacular, when someone brought home a bunch of Sturt Desert Peas to put in the bowl they paled in comparison. They looked amazing, and to this day are one of my favourite wildflowers.

Dad was not so successful with the wisteria. He had built a patio area outside the dining room and decided that he would trail a wisteria over the top of it. A large old washing machine tub was filled with the usual mix of soil and the precious wisteria planted. Dad nurtured it every day, willing it to climb and provide the boughs of cascading purple flowers he dreamed of. Sadly, after 20 years, the wisteria was still alive but had managed to grow about a metre and had never produced so much as a single bud. Where I live now, wisteria is a weed, regularly needing removal, but I never pull up the creeping tendrils without a feeling of guilt as I remember Dad’s efforts.

The homestead garden was a never-ending challenge for my parents. Water was always in short supply, as was time to devote to the garden maintenance, and the climate and pests were certainly against them. Some plants and trees were surprising successful – the athel pines, oleanders and geraniums were hardy and required little care. The lawns grew plush and inviting, and the chrysanthemums and roses were a fine feature, but projects such as vegetable gardens were tried and abandoned.

Over the years I have lived in the tropics, coastal areas, inland Australia, and now the mountains, and at each location gardening has been a mild passion. I have always appreciated how much easier it has been for me to establish a garden, and as I grow older, I appreciate more and more the determination, hard work and grit Mum and Dad used to establish our Nullarbor oasis so much more.