Jim McGilchrist Oral History - Transcript One

Date of Interview: 13 August 1985

Place of Interview: Nambour

Interviewer: Annie Wall

Transcriber: Heidi Scott

Tapes: 2

Image: Eudlo District Fruitgrowers' prize winning display at the North Coast Show, Nambour, 1956. The display was designed and assembled by Mr and Mrs Jim McGilchrist of Eudlo. [Picture Sunshine Coast]

BEGIN TAPE 1/SIDE A

Jim was born and grew up at Eudlo.

AW: I think we’ll start by asking about your father Alexander who selected land at Eudlo. What brought him to Eudlo in the first place?

MCGILCHRIST: Well he came out, he was a gardener, a professional gardener, he served his apprenticeship at Stirling Castle in Scotland, and of course the prospects for any real advancement in those days in Scotland were fairly bleak. My father and his two brothers decided to immigrate, and they came out by sailing ship, which took them just on six months to come. They arrived here at a time when the Queensland Government at that time was – they weren’t renewing the vast cattle leases that actually encompassed the whole Maroochy Shire. They were then dividing the land up into what they call agricultural farms these farms were becoming available to new settlers, on certain conditions. And that’s how he came to select the farm – they were known as selectors – and that’s how he came to select the property in Eudlo in 1886.

AW: Do you know why he specifically chose Eudlo?

MCGILCHRIST: Well he’d been right up to Townsville, through Queensland and I don’t know for what particular reason, but the three brothers decided to settle in the area down here, and that’s how it came, I don’t know of any other reason.

AW: Right. And so he got his selection, and what did he have to do on his land then to retain that selection?

MCGILCHRIST: Well there were conditions laid down that they had to make certain improvements, and they were given a time limit to make those improvements. They were required to fell a certain area, and clear it with the idea of planting crops, maize and other crops of that sort. They were required to do certain improvements such as fencing, build an abode of sorts; they were usually slab with shingle roof, and then a shed. And in a period of time, usually about two years a Government inspector came around to see that they’d actually lived on the property, that they had made improvements valued at a certain amount, and if they had fulfilled all their requirements well then they were given the deeds, freehold title.

AW: And it was about a hundred and sixty acres was it?

MCGILCHRIST: Yes, it was a hundred and sixty acres.

AW: And the two brothers they were there with him then, so the three of them were working that one selection?

MCGILCHRIST: No they each had a selection.

AW: Oh right, so they helped each other?

MCGILCHRIST: Well that was the way, everybody helped at that time because they were very, very primitive conditions and if one wanted the loan of a horse well he borrowed it from his neighbour and this sort of thing, because you had to, you were inter-dependant because you were so isolated. And there was the pioneering spirit of course.

AW: Yes.

MCGILCHRIST: That was the all important thing.

AW: Right. And were there many other selectors also in that area, at that time?

MCGILCHRIST: Well they colonised to some extent. The Presbyterians or the Scotsmen, they tend to colonise out in the area where my dad took up his selection. Well then on the other side out Ilkley way, they tended to come from, as the name would imply they tended to be more from England. So they did tend to colonise in their former nationalities you might say.

AW: And how did your father meet your mother?

MCGILCHRIST: Well my father was married twice, and his first wife came up, this was well after they had established a home of some sort, a slab hut with shingle roof and so on, and he’d married her previously and she came up by Cobb and Co coach. There was a very large Moreton Bay fig grew on the southern side of Eudlo, which I remember it well, but unfortunately it’s not there any longer. And the coach used to pull in bringing the wives and sometimes the children, and the settlers that had been up there years, sometimes two or three years previously and had virtually hewn out a slab hut with shingle roof and some place for them to come to. They would come in and there was quite a family gathering on the day the coach arrived with the wives and family from Brisbane, and then they walked on out to their selection, and that was his first wife. Well he had a family then of five and they lived on this selection. His first wife died and they lived on the selection from that time until my mother came to teach school, she was the third schoolteacher that taught in the Eudlo School and she came in 1903. They sort of gradually got together and eventually I think it was 1907 they were married. So my mother was my father’s second wife.

AW: Yes, and then they had five children?

MCGILCHRIST: Yes.

AW: So your father actually had ten altogether?

MCGILCHRIST: That’s so, yeah.

AW: As he already had the young family, by his first wife, did he instigate or was he one of the first instigators in starting the first Eudlo School?

MCGILCHRIST: Well the history Eudlo itself is wrapped up around the names of my father and his two brothers and other identities.

AW: What are the other names, can you remember?

MCGILCHRIST: Well there were Cramb and Gerrard and other names.

AW: Right. And did they sort of get together then and form a committee?

MCGILCHRIST: Well they started off as far as the school was concerned there was no moves to establish a school until after the railway line went through. Course that was the big event that changed, just changed the whole social and commercial structure.

AW: Right, and when was that?

MCGILCHRIST: Well that went through Eudlo in 1891. It started off being built in sections from Brisbane in the 1890’s and eventually it went through this section here. They had access then to Brisbane both for the markets for their produce and also access to goods that could come up, which previously had been light goods that brought mail and so on would come up by Cobb and Co, but there was no real freight transport. Any items that they wanted that couldn’t be brought by Cobb and Co, they were brought by a small boat up the Bribie passage, and they used to walk from Eudlo down to Caloundra to pick up might be corned meat or an axe handle or whatever it might be. That was the way… And his first crop that he grew on his property was maize or corn, as everybody knows it as. But he didn’t have any means of doing anything with it, of processing it. So he set out, he had a friend that lived at Maleny and you’d know how far Maleny is from Eudlo, so he set out early one morning with a half a sugar bag of maize and he carried it up to Maleny to his friend who had a, it was like a corn cracker, but it grounded it into coarse flour. And he carried it on his back, back to his place at Eudlo, and that was how he made damper out of corn flour. Those sort of things went on.

AW: So it was a full days walk to get the flour to make the damper?

MCGILCHRIST: Oh yes.

AW: Yes, it’s not as quick as running down to the shop is it.

MCGILCHRIST: And then every two weeks or so when this small boat came up the passage, they’d go down and get corned meat or whatever they wanted. That was another one of their outings; they used to walk from there down to Caloundra.

AW: Can we get back to the school now, we sort of side tracked there a bit.

MCGILCHRIST: Oh yes, the school, when the community gradually started to expand after the line went through, and of course the number of children became, there was an increase in the families that came. They set out first of all to build a church, but the fact is, as I mentioned before the community was divided between English and Scots, and the couldn’t agree about building this church. So they decided then to form the Eudlo Public Hall Company, and they set out then to build a public hall, because they had no meeting or entertainment or anything else. And they set up this company and they started off mainly by volunteer labour, they started off to build this hall. They got the hall partly built to a stage where they used to have a function in it, but then they ran out of funds and they couldn’t go any further with this hall, which incidentally was built almost on the bank of the Eudlo Creek, on the old Gympie Road, it was on the Coach Road. So then the pressures to build a school because there was so many new families coming to the area, they decided then to approach the Education Department to see if they could trade off this half completed hall as a school. So the history of it’s all there, they made this approach, they formed a School Committee, and they made an approach, and John Cramb was secretary and my dad was Chairman of this Committee along with his two brothers were on the Committee. And they made the approach to the Education Department to see if they would accept this as a provisional school, this partly completed hall. So John Cramb the secretary, he sent down quite a glowing account of this building, of what it was constructed of, and the size and the windows, and all the full description of it. And in due course an inspector named Scott came up to have a look at it, and he was apparently a man, he was fairly critical of this building. So he inspected it and sent a report down to the, well took a report down to the Department, and he among other things, he said it was too close to the railway line, it was too close to the creek, that it lacked various amenities and so on. And in his opinion they were more interested in trying to get rid of a building that they couldn’t pay for than they were at establishing a school. Because it was so close to the creek and so close to the railway line the Department turned the proposal down flat. So the next move was to acquire some land further up the hill, this is still up the Old Gympie Road, which is now known as School Road, and they acquired an acre of land from Westaways. They offered or made the proposal to the Education Department that if they shifted the school up there, would they then sanction it as a provisional school. And in due course this happened, they did shift the school about, oh it would have been 150 yards up further up the hill. And this building that was once the hall became the school. And that was when the history of the school started. My mother as I said was the third teacher; she started teaching there in 1903. But at that time the people, the residents didn’t have the luxury of having a spare room on there, they were mainly slab dwellings with shingle roofs, and they never had the luxury of having a spare room. So the only place that my mother could find board was with a blacksmith named Duncan at Mooloolah. And she used to board there and ride a pony to Eudlo to teach school and back each day.

AW: How far would that be in miles?

MCGILCHRIST: That would have been, where Duncan’s, it would have been four miles each way. Well after a time there were people that feature quite a lot in the humorous history of Eudlo. They had a slab hut out on the western side of Eudlo, about a mile from the town up on what’s part of the Highlands Road now, and eventually they built a spare room on their place and my mother moved up and boarded with them. And there was quite a lot of humour started off. The lady of the house she was a very amply proportioned lady and the husband was only about half her size, and she was totally liberated to the extent that she though nothing of giving him a belting with a stick if he didn’t measure up you see. So she was a thoroughly liberated lady even in those days.

AW: Right. Now you were born in 1920, the youngest of five.

MCGILCHRIST: That’s right.

AW: And you had two brothers and two sisters.

MCGILCHRIST: Yeah.

AW: Then you went to the Eudlo school, that would have been what, ’24, ’25 you started?

MCGILCHRIST: I started in, well the beginning of ’25.

AW: Right. And how did you find school life?

MCGILCHRIST: Well the first thing we had of course, we walked two and a half miles to school, and we never thought anything about that because there was no option. At the time that I started school there had been a new school built because – bearing in mind it was 1901 when this first school was built – but there was another school built, not very long before I had started so it must have been in the early ‘20s, it was quite a respectable building. But the old school, the original school was still in the corner of the school ground, and I remember it very well. My sister went to school in this original school, and one of the normal things that happened was the shingles had shrunk and they had holes, you know, gaps in them. And every time it rained the school Mam used to order the children to pick up their books and all forward into the corner because that was the only dry spot in the school. So she said that was the usual performance when it was raining heavily. But that school was still in the corner of the grounds when I went to school, but I never went to school in that school it was a new school at the time.

AW: And how many children would have been there when you were there?

MCGILCHRIST: Well it was a one-roomed school of about I suppose there would have been forty at the time we were there.

AW: Right. And what sort of ages did they go from, four or five up to…

MCGILCHRIST: Well right up until, we normally talked of leaving school at about thirteen or fourteen, but very often they left the State School at twelve, and went via train to Nambour which had the original high school here. At that time there was a domestic science class for the girls and a rural school class for the boys as well as high school sections.

AW: So that’s what you did there?

MCGILCHRIST: I left the State School at twelve and because that was in the time of the depression and we were, skills on the farm, of being able to weld a chain or mend a harness or something of that sort was considered to be far more valuable to you than having an academic qualification. So we along with my other brothers, that had been there before, we attended the Rural School and learned all sorts of rural crafts.

AW: Can you give me some specifics; you mentioned to me tin smithing and blacksmithing. Did you learn all of those or did you concentrate on one?

MCGILCHRIST: No, you did a curriculum you might say of… there was blacksmithing, tin smithing, leatherwork, woodwork, milk and cream testing, a little bit of animal husbandry and things of that sort. But mainly crafts that you needed to maintain a farm, you know all those sorts of things, where you set to work and mend some harness or you could weld a link in a chain or you could make a horseshoe or all those sort of things they were all that we learnt at school.

AW: The teachers that were teaching those skills were they teachers or were they professional people that did blacksmithing and whatever that came into the school?

MCGILCHRIST: No, they had both. The sciences you might call them, milk and cream testing, they were done actually by Department of Education teachers, the woodwork teachers were actually cabinetmakers that came to the school. The blacksmithing, he was the greatest character of all times he was the Yandina blacksmith, named Stan Redsell. And he came from Yandina once a week to take the blacksmith course, and I’ve still got some very vivid memories of old Stan and the things that he would teach you. He was an excellent blacksmith, but he also had a sense of humour and he was always out to take a rise out of you, you know if you weren’t wide- awake.

AW: Like what?

MCGILCHRIST: Well we were being inspected or visited you might say by the Governor this particular day that I remember, that was Sir Leslie Wilson. And he was accompanied by his daughter and she was a very likeable girl, and she was shaking hands with the teachers of course, as she went through and Sir Leslie was inspecting everybody. And of course when she came to the blacksmith shop, old Stan, he rubbed his hands around the bellows and got them all filthy greasy and then shook hands very heartily with her of course, and her little lily white hand was absolutely covered in grease by the time old Stan had finished.

AW: She didn’t have gloves on?

MCGILCHRIST: No, no. And then they just turned to go away and he pulled out a piece of welding metal, if you put water on an anvil and put a piece of welding metal, well it’s actually sparking welding and then clout it, it make’s an ungodly bang that nearly frightens you out of your wits you know. And of course this was his parting (Laughs). So anyway that was the sort of fellow he was.

AW: Was Mr Vernon the Headmaster then?

MCGILCHRIST: Yes, he was.

AW: And were the two schools kept separate, the high school and the Rural School?

MCGILCHRIST: Oh yes, they were quite separate. But actually the three sections, the high school it was run as a separate entity and so was the domestic science. It was the rural section for the girls you might say where they learnt dressmaking, cooking. We used to raid their ports on the way home, you’d see them very carefully carrying their port on the side, and you’d know they had something good in it, so as soon as they’d put it down, we’d open it to see what they had in it. And then the Rural School section for the boys, it was run quite separately.

AW: Did the children intermix at all?

MCGILCHRIST: Oh yes. Not so much with the high school but with the two sections of the Rural School, the domestic science section and the rural section. In other words, well we used to come on the same vehicle, we’d come by the same train and sit in the same class and mix quite freely, but we didn’t mix so much with the high school.

AW: Did they feel that you were lesser persons because you were only doing the rural course do you think?

MCGILCHRIST: Well I suppose there was some sort of social strata, or pecking order if you like to call it in those days because the high school students, the only people who could afford really to send their children to higher education in those days, were firstly the bank managers and school teachers and the shop keepers, and mainly the doctors, professional people. But very very few of the people from the rural areas could afford to do anything but learn the trades that would assist them in their future life on the farm. And that was the reason why there was a difference, I don’t know if there was anything other than the fact they just came from different backgrounds.

AW: Yes, yes. Now you were telling me you went by train to the rural school, can you tell me about the train?

MCGILCHRIST: Well there was a free train provided by the State Government of course. We used to walk, as we did pick it up in, boarded in Eudlo and disembarked here in Nambour, walk out to the school, and then walk back again in time to board the train and go back home.

AW: And it would pick up children all the way along?

MCGILCHRIST: Right down to Glasshouse, I’m not sure how far down it went but I know they used to come from Glasshouse Mountains.

AW: Well they would have an early start to the day. What sort of time did you start?

MCGILCHRIST: Well we used to leave home no later than a quarter to eight, but usually about half past seven we’d leave home and either walk or run and made sure you got in to catch the train. Because in seasons such as the strawberry season we always had jobs to do before you left to go to school. You’d either be getting trays ready for strawberries or you’d be doing something, and you always had one eye on the clock and one eye on what you were doing, and you used to, very often you’d have to run the whole way to the train, or to school to get there on time. But that was only what everybody else did.

AW: That was part of it, yes. What about family holidays and did you have those in your young life?

MCGILCHRIST: No, I don’t ever remember us going together for a holiday. When things improved, well early in the 1920s, things did improve a little then, that was prior to the depression days, and my dad was one of the few that was able to afford a motor car. This was the first car we had was a 1924 Overland, and we were able to go for a trip down to Maroochydore, probably every second Sunday or something of that sort. And that was the family outing, but as far as going away and leaving the property for a week or a fortnight, well that was never ever done what I remember.

AW: And when you went to Maroochydore then for these family outings, you’d take a picnic lunch?

MCGILCHRIST: Oh yes, the only thing that was at Maroochydore at that time was Weir’s Store, where you could get ice-cream in the cone, either a penny ice-cream, or the threepenny ice-cream in the cone. But you could get hot water to make tea, but you always took your billy with your tea in it and all your sandwiches. Because there were no bitumen roads in those days and it was quite a feat to go to Maroochydore and have a swim, and if you were very venturesome you’d go along to Alexandra Headlands. But there were no, it was only a single sand track from Maroochydore to Alexandra Headlands, and there was bush on both sides the whole way. Sometimes if you got extra venturesome you might go along to Mooloolaba. But to go from home to Mooloolaba and back in the day that was quite a big day.

AW: Would you go up over Buderim?

MCGILCHRIST: No, no we’d go down the Maroochydore Road and through Maroochydore to Alexandra Headlands and then to Mooloolaba that way.

AW: Yes, right.

MCGILCHRIST: But the roads were pretty primitive and it wasn’t very often that you went that far.

AW: Well now you left school when you were thirteen that was about 1933.

MCGILCHRIST: That’s right.

AW: And the reason for that was that the depression, or could you have gone on?

MCGILCHRIST: No, at that time we were required to work the family farm, that was the only you could stay in existence.

AW: Yes, yes, so you left school. So then it was the depression, how did that affect your family?

MCGILCHRIST: Well it didn’t affect our family as badly as it did others. Because there were people, see when you’re on a farm you were able to provide at least your basic foods, and we were getting some income from fruit growing. We did have some income and we did have a place to live and we did have a reasonable food supply.

END SIDE A/BEGIN SIDE B

MCGILCHRIST: So basically we weathered the depression a lot better

Because it was quite the common sight to see the swaggie as we called them – the fellow with his bed- roll on his back – walking up and down the roads looking for work or, walking from one police station to another to qualify for his sustenance, because they were given either a small amount of money or a voucher.

AW: We were talking about the depression Jim, was your family ever in a position to offer work to any of the men that were on the roads?

MCGILCHRIST: No, they weren’t in a position to offer work, but we did offer them food if they’d come around and ask for work and we weren’t able to give it to them, we invariably sent them away with some food of some sort, a loaf of bread of whatever we could afford.

AW: Yes, yes. And as children did you find it difficult?

MCGILCHRIST: Well we’d very often take extra lunch to school, at least we did have enough to eat, and there were other kids that were coming to school, they used to walk a lot further than we did, four or five miles some of them. And they wouldn’t even have, they’d have just dry bread, they wouldn’t even have treacle on the bread. There were people much worse off than we were, and we appreciated that of course. Didn’t probably realise when we were kids how well off we were, but when you think back and think of what other people had and what they didn’t have, well, we were quite well off.

AW: Yes. Now tell me about the farm. You had strawberries and pineapple and citrus, how was the farm managed, you didn’t have machinery in the early days so it was all done by hand? Can you tell me how that was done?

MCGILCHRIST: Well it was done by hand and by horse-drawn implement as much as by hand where you could. All the ploughing was done by a single mailboard plough and eight-inch mailboard plough.

AW: Mailboard?

MCGILCHRIST: Mailboard, that’s as distinct from a disc plough. You see plenty of them in the historical museums now. If you want to know the details of it, the mailboard plough, it picks it up by a share and rolls the whole, rolls the soil upside down. Whereas the disc as the name implies, it merely scarifies it, it doesn’t really turn the soil upside down. So it was all eight- inch mailboard ploughs pulled by usually two horses. Then if you were doing light work in among weed control, you had what they called the scuffler that was a thing with a wheel in front and a bracket of tyres behind, well that was a one horse job, you could use a single horse. And those sort of jobs, but then there was weeding, harvesting and all that sort of thing was done by hand of course because they couldn’t do it any other way. Bananas was an interesting way of doing it, to plant a fresh patch of bananas, we set to work with what we call grubbers. I don’t know what you call them now, but they were mattocks, we always called the mattocks. And you’d grub the soil up, turn it over, because firstly it had too many logs and stumps and stones and things like that you couldn’t plough it. So you just hand grubbed it and then you planted the suckers and it was all hand cultivated. There was no way that you could use implements of any sort in the banana patch because of the logs. There was no clearing done, you just felled the timber and planted the bananas in among the logs and stumps and so on. So it was in those days bananas were all hand work, and when you think back particularly up the Mooloolah River Valley and up towards Bald Knob all those hills were all bananas in those days, and they were worked on very steep country and they were all worked by hand.

AW: Right. But a lot of that country wouldn’t allow machinery anyway because it was so steep.

MCGILCHRIST: That’s so. But as we’ll come to in a later period, the cultivation or the various practices now have changed the character of horticulture to a point where you just can’t compete in this country, you just have to go broad acre farming in other areas.

AW: Well what about the soil itself. Did you add fertilisers in those days?

MCGILCHRIST: Well the main source of fertiliser of course, it was a religion in those days, when you were growing crops, strawberries of course we planted them every year, but we did save some of the plants to reproduce your own runners. But the major area that you planted each year was planted with runners and part of the process or religion was in rebuilding your soil in between crops was to plant over crops, cow peas and punapeas and legumes generally. And they were ploughed in and then re-ploughed, and your soil was always worked thoroughly. And at least one cover crop ploughed between.

AW: So the cover crop was really used purely to add nutrients to the soil?

MCGILCHRIST: The cover crop was the main source of your fertiliser. But then we did use ordinary, well as we call them MPK fertilisers now, that’s the complete fertilisers. We used those, we had to use those to you know supplement what you’d put in by cover cropping.

AW: And where would those come from, you get those from Brisbane?

MCGILCHRIST: Well no, we got ours from what was known as the PMB in Palmwoods. It’s now known as the QFS, but it was known as the PMB because it was Palmwoods, Montville and Buderim. It was a Co-Operative Society that was run by the, and it supplied those three areas. And we got our fertiliser from we went to Palmwoods and got it, what we required. You could get it up by rail if you wished but then you had the problem of accounts and paying for it and so on, so we always got ours from the PMB.

AW: And well leading on from that what about pests and pest control, what would you use?

MCGILCHRIST: Well in those days of course we had sulphur was our main miteaside that was for spider mites, and it was also used for white louse on citrus. So it was one of our main miteasides. We used the old copper sprays, which haven’t changed a great deal as a fungicide. We used bordo, which we called it then, but it was virtually a copper spray. And then we had what we call derris root, it was and insecticide made from derris root or derris dust, it was about the only insecticide we used. And then of course we used mineral oil, the white oil on citrus as an additional miteside.

AW: Do you feel that the pests and things were worse or not as bad as they are today? I mean do you have to spend, do you think as much then as you would today?

MCGILCHRIST: Well the whole cultural practices have changed. We didn’t have as many and as varied pests and diseases in those days because the areas were isolated. But then again we didn’t have the same ease of, or the same selection of chemicals, nor did we have the same means of application. At the most we had was a knapsack, a four- gallon knapsack that you put on your back, or in the case of when we were a bit bigger in spraying citrus we had a forty-four gallon barrel on a slide that we pulled by a single horse, and it had a very large hand pump. And that was my job to stand on the slide and hand pump along while brother sprayed with the single nozzle spray on it with a hose. But when it came to spraying strawberries, well it was done with a knapsack on your back, as it was the only way you could do it.

AW: Did you ever wear any protective clothing or that sort of thing? Were there warnings about using certain sprays?

MCGILCHRIST: No. See there were no warnings primarily because we weren’t using any of the very toxic chemicals that are available now – the organic phosphates- chemicals of that type were unknown then you see. Sulphur has a very low toxicity, so’s copper, white oil is only a mineral oil which wasn’t regarded, it still isn’t regarded, it’s very low toxicity. And derris fruit and derris dust that was the black leaf forty, or whatever you like to call it, it was a very low toxicity rating as far as an insecticide was concerned. So apart from doing very foolish things and putting your hands in it, we never took any precautions, we never wore masks or anything like that.

AW: Now packing cases for your different types of fruits.

MCGILCHRIST: Well they were usually cut locally. There was always a case mill in every horticulture area as we called it. And they prized the timber, flooded gum they were always made of flooded gum. The case mill that was an industry in those days – there was quite a big case mill at Palmwoods and there was another one at Eudlo. Sometimes growers would even cut their own, they’d have and old truck or something, they’d jack one back wheel up and put a belt on and take a tyre off and put a belt on it and run a saw, and they’d cut their own cases. And then strawberry boxes, well strawberries were marketed in trays in those days they were a tray about two feet long eight inches wide with a partition in the middle. And they were guaranteed to contain not less than two and a half pounds of strawberries. And later they were naturally they were very difficult to cut with an ordinary circular saw and keep them smooth enough to put strawberries in, and later the ply mill started to cut the trays and they were a much nicer tray, but they came up from Brisbane. But otherwise citrus or pineapples, banana cases, which banana cases and pineapple cases were one and a half bushels in those days, and they were very heavy to handle, and the citrus case was a bushel case but they were all cut locally.

AW: Yes. Did every grower use a standard size, or were people using different sized cases?

MCGILCHRIST: Well they were required, there were standards supplied although they were not quite as religiously policed as they are now, because when growers were cutting their own cases they could vary a little but generally there was a size required, a standard size. There was a bushel and a half which was used for pineapples and bananas, and when you get a bushel and a half packed with single bananas, it’s a mighty heavy thing to lift. And citrus were, they had three different shaped cases for citrus. There was the Australian dump, as they called it, that was a flat case I suppose it would be fifteen inches by about eight or nine inches, the end would be, that was the Australian dump. Well then there was a Canadian dump which was almost a square end, was almost about a foot square. And then there was the old flat packer as they called it they packed mandarins in. It was a very much bigger on the side because it only had one or two layers of mandarins in because you know they weren’t as robust as the other fruit.

AW: Yes. Well you were saying that the cases, a bushel and a half of single bananas would be very heavy, how would you transport that then from your packing shed, or wherever you did your packing?

MCGILCHRIST: Well you’d load them on to, depending on what your means of transport was, whether it was a dray or spring-cart or in our days we were fortunate enough to have an old utility that we’d cart it in. But a bushel and a half case of bananas packed as singles weighs about a hundred weight.

AW: So two of you would lift it?

MCGILCHRIST: No, no, oh no.

AW: Just one.

MCGILCHRIST: Even when I left school I could still lift a case of bananas and a case of pineapples.

AW: Right. Now you were also telling me about the old tractor that you had on the farm, was that in those days?

MCGILCHRIST: Well that was a little bit later on when we started to expand a little and got a little bit more modern in our ideas. And we decided to go from horses to try ourselves out with a tractor. And the first tractor that we had was what they call a Canadian model, Fordson; it was on steel wheels with spikes on the rear wheel. And it was before the days of magneto, it had the coils, and anybody that knows anything about old Ford motorcars or trucks they’ll know that the old Ford coils, they were four little individual electro-magnetic controlled buzzers. And each one supplied the spark for each separate spark plug and as you turned it over by hand you’d hear these things like little hornets buzzing in the box as you went along. And every once and a while of course they’d get a bit of dust under the points and you’d have to pull up and get out and clean these, the old points on them and so on. So that was our first tractor and it would have been about a 1927 model.

AW: Right. Did you find that the depression, it must have effected the economy of the district, in that you were mostly fruit growers. Were you able to sell all the fruit you grew and did you band together to try and cope with this situation?

MCGILCHRIST: Well the first question is the fruit was, at that time of course the line was well established and the markets were established in Brisbane, the old Roma Street markets were established in those days. And you were able to usually dispose, we sent a lot of our strawberries to Sydney, and you were able to sell them, but the price you got back sometimes you know it was barely enough to cover expenses, but you just had to take it and that was it, and you just had to live on what you got. But the depression certainly did, it was reflected in the prices you received.

AW: So people wouldn’t have walked off their places then because they were probably better off there?

MCGILCHRIST: No, no they just stayed put they had nowhere to go anyway. And apart from rolling up your swag and walking up, tramping up and down the road there was no where else to go, and they just stayed put and made do with what they had.

AW: Did it take long for the economy then to recover towards the end of the depression?

MCGILCHRIST: Well it was only really starting to become buoyant in 1934, and 1935 it was starting to come good. In 1936 it was, I remembered one of the real boom times, and from 1936 until the beginning of the War things were pretty good. They’d picked up a lot, and a lot of people had motorcars and generally we lived a pretty good life.

AW: Did you have many social activities in those days in Eudlo, sort of community type activities?

MCGILCHRIST: Oh there was, we had a cricket team, tennis team, well a couple of tennis teams and cricket, there was those sort of things, and then there was the good old dances of course every – I don’t remember how frequently but they were always well patronised. The dances – that was one of the social events of the time. Of course then there was always church, that was part of the society too, went to Sunday School and Church at least once every Sunday. Then there was organised sports, but that was just at the beginning of inter-school sports when I left school. Generally the sports were just two cricket teams picked from the school itself, you know, and one would play the other. But we had just started to become involved with inter-school sports where Mooloolah would come up to play Eudlo, or we’d play Woombye or Palmwoods or whoever it might be and that was at the beginning. But it was only when the school could afford to provide some sort of transport, there was no transport provided at all. And it was only ever on Saturdays because we never had any half a day off to play sport.

AW: Your brother and sisters they were all working there on the farm too at that time.

MCGILCHRIST: Yeah.

AW: So you were quite a large family living there?

MCGILCHRIST: Well when your handling there’s a lot of hand labour in, well there still is, but there was a lot more in those days.

AW: Yeah. So your sisters as well then were working on the farm?

MCGILCHRIST: Well my eldest sister, she could do anything that a man could do on the farm. She still can as a matter of fact although she’s almost eighty. And she could handle a horse just as well as anybody else could and do all the things, and probably she was the best strawberry picker of the lot. And the usual practice was that the team of us would start picking strawberries as soon as you could see in the morning and when we had a certain number picked, well then mum and my eldest sister would go and start to pack and then we’d keep bringing them in and they’d keep packing them. And then you had to close down in the afternoon, make sure you got in time to catch the rail, well that was when packing finished for the day.

AW: Sounds like most of them were very long days.

MCGILCHRIST: So that’s the way it happened. But we never thought anything of it I mean most people were doing the same thing. We always felt that we were a lot better off than the people on the dairy farms because they had to work seven days a week the year round, well at least we did get some time off.

AW: Your crops didn’t all mature at the same time so having three different or four if you had bananas as well, that would make it divided up into the year fairly evenly wouldn’t it?

MCGILCHRIST: Well there were times when some, the winter crop the pineapples would clash with the strawberries, well then we’d leave the women folk probably to finish off packing or picking strawberries and we’d go and start picking pineapples that were a bit heavier. Or else if we were doing bananas we’d be doing the bananas while they were doing the strawberries.

AW: Right. How were the pineapples dealt with then in those days as growing and…?

MCGILCHRIST: Well they were, there wasn’t the consciousness of soil conservation to begin with. They were planted in quite a different pattern to what they were, usually just in blocks. But nowadays they’re planted in banks so that they can. You know they’re very conscious of contour banks and track plans and things on the plantations and also they’re planted in certain widths of the mechanical harvesters and sprayers and so on. Well there wasn’t any of that in those days, of course everything was done by hand and it was just a matter of you looked at a patch and said well that’ll make a good patch of pineapples and you just planted it. And that’s just the way it went and all you had was a headland to give you room around each, right around the outside, but that was all you had the rest of it was just a block.

AW: Right. Where did your plants come from?

MCGILCHRIST: Well usually they came from somewhere in the district. You either had your own plants or you saved your own tops or sometimes you might go outside to another area and buy a few thousand. The come down by rail, you’d bag them in sacks and they come down by rail and you’d take them home and plant them. But generally you saved your own plants, unless you were expanding very rapidly.

AW: So how would they plant it?

MCGILCHRIST: Well they were just simply it was usually a two man operation. If you were planting suckers they had to be trimmed and chopped back, well that was one operation. You get your suckers ready or if they were buttons, they’d be pulled off or if they were tops, but they were always bagged in ordinary size sacks. And then one, you’d just run a piece of fencing wire along as a line to guide you. And you planted one row on each side of this, so we planted in double rows. And one would go along and lay them out and the other one would come along with a short handle hoe and plant them, that was the way you planted them.

AW: Right. And what about harvesting them?

MCGILCHRIST: Well they were harvested either, some of them planted the rows wide enough so that they could take a horse and slide up each row. Some of them actually used wheelbarrows and others used baskets or anything that you could hang on your arm. Depending on how close you planted them, and then after the first year of course the plants start to fall over and you could only walk through them. So you could only go through them with a basket and have the basket on your arm and when you got to the end of the row you’d just put them out in a big heap until you finished picking the patch. Well then if they were going to the cannery they’d be topped on the spot and packed in crates, which is a bushel and a half. And otherwise if they were going to the market, they were the ones that you’d select them out and take them into the packing shed.

AW: Did they last longer than a year or were they replanted each year?

MCGILCHRIST: No, they were about the same as they do now; you get a plant crop and a return and sometimes a second return, but usually…

AW: What do you mean by return?

MCGILCHRIST: Well a plant crop is when you plant the crop and it comes with its pineapple, well that’s the plant crop, when you break that off they’ll start and grow suckers and there’s two or three suckers come up. Well when you pick the pineapple that’s your return crop, much the same as sugar cane. Now if you leave them to come again instead of the original plant you started with, that came into three suckers, well those suckers will come into another three suckers. And so the plantation gets very dense, you get more pineapples but they’re smaller so that after the second return the whole patch is just so dense and the fruit so small that you just break those up and use those as plants and start off again.

AW: So once you break it off and use it as a single again you can then go back to getting the bigger fruit?

MCGILCHRIST: Yes, that’s right. Well then it becomes a plant crop again. Well you can either plant, if you were sending to the cannery and you were snapping the tops off you could plant the tops, they take a bit longer but they do make a good plant, they’ll still use them.

AW: Yes. Well now when were you sending fruit away to the cannery?

MCGILCHRIST: Well the history of processing fruit, pineapples in this area, it goes back to the very early 1920s. Now they had an arrangement, we did have the Committee of Direction, that was a grower’s organisation, which was set up under the fruit marketing or the FMO Act, they call it. The Fruit Marketing Organisation Act.

AW: Is that what we call the COD?

MCGILCHRIST: That’s what we call the COD now, but the COD was the administrative organisation that was constituted under the FMO act, that’s the Fruit Marketing Organisation Act. That act was set up in 1920. And the COD was an organisation that was in two parts firstly it was the grower’s organisation. In each growing centre they had a, what they called, a Local Producers Association. Sometimes it was called the Fruit Growers Organisation, sometimes it was Fruit Growers and Progress but whatever it was called it was a Local Producers Association under the FMO Act. And it was then designated into electorates and the electorates they elected their representative and eventually this is how the COD was governed by the grower’s representatives that went right through and sat on the COD Board the same as it is at the present time.

END SIDE B/TAPE 1

BEGIN TAPE 2/SIDE A

MCGILCHRIST: But as well as being an organisational set up it was a marketing set up. It was given the authority under the FMO Act to market, to supervise marketing. Well, they didn’t have a great deal of authority when it came to marketing because we had no control over the processing side of it all, although we had administrative control we had no physical control. And we had a group of canners operating in Queensland, at that time they called themselves the independent canners and they had some questionable ethics as far as the way they mislead growers. Because there was no option but to send fruit to the independent canners we had the independent canners, this was prior to the War and how they unfairly manipulated the growers, I think that’s what we were getting at.

AW: Yes, that’s right. So we’ll go on from there then.

MCGILCHRIST: You see they would paint quite a rosy picture of future prospects, and they’d get the growers to plant, you know, excess, extra fruit. And then of course when it came on the market, when it came into production the canners would say. “Oh well sorry you know we haven’t got the contacts that we though we had, and we can’t take the fruit”. So it’d all go on the fresh fruit market and they’d be sitting there, waiting for it, and get it for virtually nothing. That’s the way they manipulated the growers, they got their supplies very much cheaper than cost of production even.

AW: Where abouts were these independent canners situated?

MCGILCHRIST: In Brisbane.

AW: All in Brisbane. Was there one here in Nambour?

MCGILCHRIST: We did have a - in the very early days – we had a cannery in Palmwoods, and then later we did have another illegal cannery in Palmwoods.

AW: An illegal one?

MCGILCHRIST: Well it was a cannery, you see the FMO Act, and the cannery agreement was an extension of the FMO Act. In other words it did have a legal standard because it was part of an act, it was an extension to a statute. And under that Act it gave the COD the right to direct all fruit grown for processing to certain canners, to organise the distribution of it in other words. Now if the canners, if an independent canner set up and he wasn’t prepared to abide by the agreement, the canner agreement, the other canners were abiding by well the COD were in the position to say well you don’t get any fruit to process. Now if they went to a grower because the COD, under the FMO Act, had this right vested in it, the same as the sugar industry has got certain controls vested in the Cane Prices Board, the COD had the right to say, “we won’t supply you with any fruit for processing”. Now if he went to a grower and bought fruit that was outside the FMO Act that was an illegal act. And this did happen and in the end he was told that he could either have fruit from the COD under the same conditions as the other canners had got it, otherwise he didn’t get any fruit at all. And they persisted in buying fruit and some growers persisted in selling fruit, and in the end the only thing we could do was to take them to court.

AW: And when would that have been?

MCGILCHRIST: That was just after the War that happened.

AW: Right. And what was the action? What was the decision?

MCGILCHRIST: Oh well they just closed down, they couldn’t continue. The could take their canning operations into New South Wales if they wanted to and buy fruit across the border, there was nothing to stop them doing that. But they couldn’t set up and process here in Queensland because of what we call the direction, the COD direction they had the power to direct fruit.

AW: Yes.

MCGILCHRIST: And it was the only way that, I mean we were the growers that were supporting it, it was us, the growers that were doing it, because we’d already been through this problem with independent canners prior to the advent of Golden Circle Cannery. And there was no way that we were going to see the situation redevelop. We had control of our own industry and we were going to keep control of it. And that’s what it amounted too.

AW. Right. Well can you explain to me now about the certificates and the growing?

MCGILCHRIST: Yeah. Well it was a co-operative cannery that was set up, we never ever asked the Government for a dollar or a pound as it was in those days, but we did ask them for a guarantee.

AW: This is the Golden Circle Cannery?

MCGILCHRIST: This is the Golden Circle. See prior to the War we were at the mercy of these independent canners, and the world demand for our product was such that the canners they were really reaping some marvellous profits, and they weren’t really passing on the fruits to the growers at all. But we did have an agreement with them, that we would supply them with fruit under this direction. And it wasn’t until 1947 that that agreement expired with the independent canners and that’s when the growers were free to build their own cannery. And the very first thing we did was build our own cannery. And we asked the Government for a Government Guarantee, we never asked them for any money, and the growers themselves agreed as a co-operative cannery that we would each purchase certificates. And this is the way the cannery was financed, and it was financed, eventually we never took up the Government Guarantee. That Golden Circle Cannery has never had one-dollar Government assistance, never. It’s been self-supporting right throughout its total existence; all we had was a Government Guarantee to allow us to build the cannery in the first place.

AW: Yes.

MCGILCHRIST: That’s all we’ve ever had. Now the certificates, because we could see that this Golden Circle Cannery was going to be a big money earner, a big profit earner, and the profits were going to be returned to the growers. We had to safeguard this thing against a take over because one of the independent canners was Henry Jones (IXL) and he swore that he would spend a million dollars to break the COD, to break the control that the growers had over their own product. And so we set up the Golden Circle Cannery on certificates, and they are not shares, they can never be offered on the share market, they can only be transferred with the express permission of the Cannery Board, and they can only under certain conditions. And that is that there sold to a bona fide producer, and the other condition is that if you buy a cannery certificate as a bona fide producer you have to supply that quota one year in three. If you don’t supply it one year in three well then the Cannery Board has got the authority to buy it back from you at face value.

AW: The Board is made up of growers?

MCGILCHRIST: That’s right.

AW: And mainly growers from this south- east Queensland area?

MCGILCHRIST: Well we did have a second cannery that we built at Yeppoon, when Yeppoon area, it expanded very rapidly but eventually it wasn’t a paying proposition and they found it was more satisfactory to bring the fruit from Yeppoon down and process it in Golden Circle than it is to run a second cannery. But that was the reason why we set up the Golden Circle Cannery. Now Jones, when he found that he couldn’t get his own way we virtually had control of our own industry and we had control of the independent canners, because under the direction, the COD directed where the fruit grown for processing would be processed. Each canner applied for a quota and he got the quota that he asked for but he had to pay a price for it. And that price is what we call the FISCC price; it’s the Food Industry Sugar Concessional Committee, it’s an arrangement, we are the biggest single consumer of sugar in, we are the sugar industries biggest customer in other words. So we had an agreement by buying bulk sugar in enormous quantities, they gave us concession and that was called the Fruit Industry Sugar Concessional Committee, FISCC price. Now anybody that wanted to avail themselves of sugar at that price had to pay the grower the base price for his product, otherwise they couldn’t get sugar at that price, they had to go and buy it on the domestic market at X number of dollars dearer. So this kept the canners honest and it kept everybody honest. But Jones, when he found that he couldn’t get his way here, Henry Jones, that was when he went to South Africa, do you remember? He sold up all his processing facilities here and took his capital to South Africa. But at that time South Africa was still part of the Commonwealth and he was entitled to Commonwealth preferences. But when they, well kicked South Africa out for one of the better word, Jones found that he was out on a limb again because he was in a hostile country, well the rest of the markets of the world were hostile to him. And he found then his golden era over there came to an end and eventually things got so bad as far as growing pineapples, the unrest in the country he couldn’t get all the cheap labour that he wanted. There was so many disruptions to the industry that he brought back his capital and he started to still carry out his threat to break the industry by planting pineapples at Elstonville in Northern New South Wales. And he planted four million plants in one plant – one planting there. And he still intended to beak the COD one way or another. Well then they found that the climate and general conditions at Elstonville weren’t as good as Jones thought they would. But now he’s a real threat because he’s got on the right side of the Chinese Government, he doesn’t need his capital all he wants is his expertise. The Chinese Government are absolutely falling over themselves to welcome him because they’ve got more country in China that will grow pineapples than we’ve got in Queensland. And all they want is the know-how over there and they’re prepared to provide him with everything load on if he’ll grow pineapples over there. And now we’re starting to get Chinese pineapples imported into Queensland.

AW: Which isn’t good for the local industry at all is it?

MCGILCHRIST: Well it’s not good. But the simple fact is that I don’t know how much time you want to know, but I’ve been in industry politics for a long time and I wrote a letter, well I used to write feature articles for the paper for many years. And I did one on the fact that horticultural crops are regarded by the Foreign Affairs Department as an expendable commodity, in other words they’ll trade it off one against the other. And now well we’ve got a situation now where they’re prepared to take Chinese pineapples in hope of selling China some sugar.

AW: Right.

MCGILCHRIST: Now this is where the trade off comes. If they can sell New Zealand some Holden motorcars they’ll take all the New Zealand tomatoes. Because there’s Vanuatu there’s any number of places where these countries, they came to Australia looking for the know how for a low capital high labour intensive industry, because that was the resources they had, they didn’t have capital but they had labour over there. We were good enough to show them how to grow paw paws and how to grow passionfruit and all these labour intensive industries. The next thing they’ve got a surplus production and they want to sell it back to us. So the Foreign Affairs Department said, “oh well, we’ll take your whatever you’ve got there, if you’ll take some of our manufactured goods”. And this is where the horticultural industry is an expendable commodity as far as Foreign Affairs is concerned, but they won’t admit it, but that’s the way it is.

AW: Yeah. Right, well we’ll get back to you again for a little while. Was it ’39 you enlisted?

MCGILCHRIST: That’s right.

AW: And you and your brother-in-law were the first three…

MCGILCHRIST: From the Maroochy Shire, yeah.

AW: From the Maroochy Shire to enlist. And you were away then until about ’45?

MCGILCHRIST: Yes, I was away a fortnight off six years actually. I went in to camp on the 22nd October and I came out on the 14th or something six years later.

AW: When you got back to this district were you welcomed back?

MCGILCHRIST: Oh yes, they had a Farewell and Welcome Home Committee. They gave us a farewell and the same committee or virtually the same committee, welcomed those who were lucky enough to get back.

AW: And was that a big social event?

MCGILCHRIST: Oh yes, it was. The send off, it was quite a soul- jerking thing really and well so was the welcome home.

AW: Yes. And I believe they gave you a watch or something when you came back?

MCGILCHRIST: Oh yes.

AW: Oh that’s great. And did you find it hard then to settle back down into farming – you sent back onto the farm?

MCGILCHRIST: It was a complete change, it was just as bigger change as going into the army, because having been used to a certain standards of discipline for the likes of six years, you can’t just throw it all off in a day and not feel some loss and some respect and some freedoms that you didn’t have before. The fact that you had to set about and seriously think about what you were going to do. You realise, see, you have an attitude when you’re in the army, particularly if you’re in areas of high risk combat, where you don’t really concern yourself too much about the future because you don’t know whether you’ve got a future or not. So you tend to live day by day, but when you suddenly come back to civilian life and say well now I have got a future and I’ve got to start to think about it. And this is where the big psychological change had to take place. But a lot of the ex-servicemen couldn’t come to grips with this, they still wanted to live in civilian live and still live the same irresponsible sort of life, not worrying about whether they had a future or not saying well somebody else can look after me, like they did in the army, somebody else is going to pay my wages. But that didn’t happen, and they found it difficult to come to grips. And it took some time to re-adjust.

AW: Well how about you personally?

MCGILCHRIST: Well I was fortunate because I had something to come back to. And my eldest sister, and my parents had kept the farm going and it was still there to come back to.

AW: Right. So you came back.

MCGILCHRIST: That’s where I did have an advantage.

AW: So you went straight back in then to working.

MCGILCHRIST: I did and unbeknown at that time I had a stomach ulcer and I did have problems with a hangover from malaria and eventually I had to go away from the farm for a while, because I couldn’t carry on, couldn’t work. And I was away for some time, that’s when we got married and we came back. When did we come back to the farm? ’51. Well from then on we farmed it.

AW: Yes, right so were you and Flo there together on your own then?

MCGILCHRIST: Well my parents were there, my father died, well they both died there actually. They stayed there, but we were there. From then on we were there by ourselves.

AW: Yes, so that was in the fifties then you were there?

MCGILCHRIST: Yeah.

AW: And that was when you started to change over to all citrus, or had that process started before you went away?

MCGILCHRIST: Well it had been in my mind since before the war, that I wanted to grow citrus. And that was when I set about to change things. And we grew other crops like strawberries, and pineapples and bananas as an interim only, and as each one ran out, I was planting more citrus right through.

AW: Why did you fell that citrus might be a better line to follow?

MCGILCHRIST: Well, the first thing was I could see that you could mechanise it, you couldn’t mechanise a lot of other crops. And secondly that it was a more permanent thing. And thirdly it was just something that I liked growing, I liked doing, whereas I didn’t like growing strawberries, I never every liked growing strawberries.

AW: So when you say you grew citrus, was that a combination of mandarins, oranges, lemons, or did you specify in one?

MCGILCHRIST: Yeah, Well I specialised in Washington Navals. For one thing, Washington Navals are not an easy thing to grow. I mean joppers and the common type or seed type oranges are fairly easy to grow, and some mandarins are easy to grow. But it’s always the way, the highest priced product is the most difficult one to grow, and if you want to really make some money, you grow something that has got a fair price tag on it. And that was why I found Washington Navals I could grow them successfully, whereas a lot of people couldn’t because of the soil type and the property we had was ideally suited to growing Washington Navals. And I had about two thirds of the production under Washington Navals the rest of it was only seed type and mandarin. But that was the main reason why because it was purely a good commercial proposition.

AW: Right. Was there a big change then in the fifties in growing citrus to the way it was during the depression when most things were done by hand or horse and slide? Did you find big changes?

MCGILCHRIST: Well you had to because the cultural practices were different, the problems were different and we had to have bigger spray plants. We had to have, we changed over from what we call cultivation to non-cultivation, this was one of the big changes that took place.

AW: Why was that?

MCGILCHRIST: Well, firstly, continuing to cultivate soil in high rainfall areas is a very bad cultural practice because you get sheet erosion and you get soil erosion, your soil is exposed to the very high temperatures in the summer time which doesn’t do it any good. And the heat reflected from bare soil is terrific in the summer time. All those practices tended to point that clean cultivation was bad, a very bad practice, so we changed over from what was known as sod culture. Instead of tilling the soil we mowed it, and eventually the mulch returned by mowing counter-balanced the nutrients being taken out by the sod itself. There were a number of advantages, the obvious advantages, the first one as you didn’t have any further problem with soil erosion, it didn’t matter how heavily it rained. Secondly your orchard was much cleaner, you didn’t get the problems with dust and a lot of diseases that were generated by the dust. And you didn’t get the problem of trying to harvest fruit in the wet and get bogged and all that, everything – there’s just so many advantages. The irrigation, we found out that the irrigation was much more satisfactory, you didn’t require the same amount of water, and there was just so many advantages.

AW: When you say mowing so that you had cut grass, were you growing anything specifically or was it just normal grasses?

MCGILCHRIST: Well I did start off to plant a certain type of grass through the orchard that I wanted. But eventually nature will take care of itself and the fact that you’ve fertilised, broadcast fertilised and mow, one type of grass will flourish and one won’t. And so eventually it came to be virtually all couch, because it didn’t matter whether you wanted to reverse it or not, I planted a lot of matgrass through the orchard, because I wanted matgrass but matgrass doesn’t like nitrogen. And so the couch does, so we ended up with couch.

AW: And the couch was enough then to help put the nutrients back in?

MCGILCRHIST: Oh well we’d broadcast fertiliser the same as we broadcast dolomite. But it had changed from hand fertilising – we used to go round – to broadcasting it, because without the continuous root pruning from cultivation, the roots spread right over the top of the soil. And you had your citrus trees feeding over the entire area of your orchard instead of just round where they weren’t being continually pruned off.

AW: The knowledge that you speak with about this form of cultivation, was that gained from reading or from advice from other people, or just sheer experience?

MCGILCHRIST: No, I think we could probably thank Bill Agnew, who was the Senior Horticultural experimentalist in the department here at the time. Because I don’t know whether Bill brought this practice from elsewhere, but he was the first one to advocate it in this area. I can well remember going to the first field day at an orchard in Palmwoods, and Bill explained to us he had a small area of an acre or so under sod culture on this orchard. And he explained to us the advantages and disadvantages, and we were a bit disbelieving the fact that this wouldn’t detract so much from the moisture, and the plant nutrients and so on, that we were a bit sceptical as to whether it would be effective. But anyway we decided to try it and after the first year we found it didn’t work very the first year because the soil hadn’t a chance to balance itself, to accustom itself to this new method. And certainly the trees required extra fertiliser and extra water, but after the sod was established well that’s when the benefits began to show.

AW: And did other growers in the area follow those lines too?

MCGILCHRIST: Oh yes, eventually I think you’ll find that it’s accepted right through now.

AW: Were you one of the first?

MCGILCHRIST: Oh well, I would have been one that attended that first field day that it was every shown to us.

AW: Now you’ve always been involved with growers and the C.O.D. and things like that, tell me about the Maroochy Fruit and Vegetable Growers Council, how did that develop and why?

MCGILCHRIST: Well now the Maroochy Fruit and Vegetable Growers Council, it’s one of those creatures that’s created by circumstances. The organisation set up under the F.M.O. act, that’s the C.O.D., it’s a semi-statutory body, and in that respect it’s got certain powers but it’s also got certain limitations because it’s like any quango. Politically there’s areas that they can’t become involved in, they can’t criticise, administrate or make public statements or anything of that sort. They have to accept their limitations. And it became pretty obvious to the growers in this area that we needed a voice outside the C.O.D. because there were things that needed to be taken up politically, that needed to be taken up with the local councils on growers behalf, that the Local Produces Association couldn’t handle because they were constituted under the F.M.O. act. And so a group of far sighted growers called a meeting with the idea of forming an association drawn from the affiliated organisations in the Maroochy Shire, or the L.P.A. Association. And so that’s how the Maroochy Food and Vegetable Growers Council was formed. We were formed to basically, voice growers, we were there to lobby government, to voice growers opinions in areas outside the authority of the C.O.D. We didn’t ever intend to involve ourselves in matters that were C.O.D.’s domain. We intended and we did very successfully, we lobbies Governments – Federal and State and Local Governments. We’d made our views known on very many occasions, very successfully too I might say. We’ve got two actual parliament in Queensland.

END SIDE A/BEGIN SIDE B

MCGILCHRIST: We lobbied Governments, Federal and Acts of Parliament in Queensland that was due entirely to the Maroochy Fruit and Vegetable Growers Council and to our continuous lobbying to have these things brought about.

AW: And what were they Jim?

MCGILCHRIST: Well one was the A.C.D.C. Act, that’s the Agricultural Chemical Distribution Control Act. The other one is the Stock routes and Rural Lands Protection Act. Then there was the big battle we had to maintain the subsidy on imported nitrogenous fertilisers, we had a two year battle and finally won that one against great odds. There were matters like that, that at one stage we were known as one of the most effective lobby groups in Australia. As their research officer I’ve made countless contributions to the paper by way of feature articles, I’ve spoken on the radio, and put growers views, and generally advanced growers interests.

AW: Did all the growers support you? Or did you …

MCGILCHRIST: You’ll never get all growers to support, because their individuals. You see as affiliated organisations, they were represented by organisations but that doesn’t necessarily mean that every grower has exactly the same opinion, but it’s taken by consensus or to use this famous word. It’s a majority decision and that was the way that the Fruit and Vegetable Growers Council operates, and it still does operate that way.

AW: Right. And it was started in 1955, so it’s been going thirty years.

MCGILCHRIST: Thirty years now, yeah.

AW: And you and Grandvill Parker were the …

MCGILCHRIST: Well Grand Parker was the inaugural president and he’s been president ever since. He’s the only president, there were two of us that were original members and that’s Gran and myself.

AW: Have you been research officer all the time or most of it?

MCGILCHRIST: Well I have been their only research officer, it wasn’t until we’d been operating a few years that we began to realise that we did need a backup research service, so I ended up with the job and I’ve been it ever since.

AW: Right.

MCGILCHRIST: I did take one good lady an economists named Ann Sanders, she made some outrageous statements on Macquarie Network one day, about some growers and I picked it up and I made a tape in reply to it over 4NA, and it was replayed through the Macquarie Network, that was one of the things that we did.

AW: Yes. Now I’d like also to talk to you about the Rural Fire Board, and bush fires in your area. Why was the Rural Fire Board set up?

MCGILCHRIST: Well prior to the Rural Fire Board set up, we always had the problem of bush fires. And collectively we used to gather wherever the fires threatened, and there were many things that we could see that needed to be done, but somebody had to say, do it. Somebody had to have authority. And until such time as the Rural Fires Act, there was an Act, but nobody had the authority to say, we’ll start and back-burn here, or we’ll make a fire break here. Nobody had that authority, and anybody who assumed that responsibility also assumed a liability, that if something went wrong they could be sued because they had no protection. And it was because basically to protect those people that were already doing the job, to set up an organisation that did have authority and to name certain officers, and invest in them certain authority under an Act of Parliament, that was the first thing that was required. So that you did actually have the authority to say that this will be done and we’ll do it. Now the other point about it is that under the Rural Fires Act, anybody attending the fire is covered by workers compensation. So that if you or your equipment is taken to a fire and if you’re injured, or if your equipment is injured, you can claim. And that’s a big thing, in the way of protection that we never ever had before.

AW: Yes. Well so did you have a public meeting in Eudlo to get your own group going?

MCGILCHRIST: Oh yes. Yes, it was as a result of a public meeting. We did have this embryo brigade operating, but it had no authority of course. And when this Rural Fires Act was introduced we had called this public meeting and the first person required of course is a warden, and that warden is invested with some far reaching powers. And it’s not easy to get somebody that would accept this roll because it’s quite responsible, and they can get into a lot of problems when they make decisions about back-burning and things of that sort. Well then they set up this Chief Fire Officer, he’s the chief of the Brigade itself. The warden is not part of the Brigade, but he works very closely with the Brigade. Well then there’s the first, second, third and fourth Fire Officer, they are selected because they live in four different sections of the area of the Rural Fire Board, where-ever the Brigades area is designated, well then they used to pick an officer. And when the fires in his territory he’s the one that had the say on what will be done and what won’t be done. He directs where back burning will take place, and generally takes control of the situation.

AW: Was back burning always done where possible?

MCGILCHRIST: Well it’s the most effective weapon that you have. When you get a very bad fire the efforts that man can do to change the course of things is relatively minor. If you’ve got bad conditions, if you’ve got a hot day and a bad wind, and you know there’s very little you can do. You can take equipment and water and save a building, but the only real way that you can change the direction of the fire is by back burning, burning fire breaks along roads and so on so that you make the fire eventually burn itself out. So that back burning is probably the most effective weapon that you have. And you must have people that understand how to back burn.

AW: That’s right. What about your equipment,where would that come from?

MCGILCHRIST: Well most of it is owned by members of the Brigade itself. They’ll bring a truck or used to take a tractor, mine with big spray plants, three hundred gallon tank with water, we’d take that. Others will bring knapsacks and the trucks with drums of water on and pumps, you know all sort of, the equipment that’s owned by the Brigade members. You are able to buy certain tools, knapsacks and things through the Rural Fires Board, at a concession price. But our brigade, we used mainly the equipment owned by the members.

AW: Yes. Did you wear things like hardhats and protective gear?

MCGILCHRIST: We didn’t in those days, no.

AW: Do you remember any bad bush fires in that area?

MCGILCHRIST: Oh goodness yes. We had one, the worst bush fire that we attended, we went out on a Thursday morning, out towards Sippy Mountain, and we finished we ended up back burning to finish the fire off on Sunday up on, nearly up on top of the Blackall Range.

AW: Good heavens. What would that have been? Would that have been in ’57.

MCGILCHRIST: Can’t really remember when that fire would be.

AW: So about ’56 or ’57?

MCGILCHRIST: Yeah.

AW: And if a fire went through a citrus orchard, how long would it take for the trees to recover if they did?

MCGILCHRIST: Well that is one of those questions I would have to qualify by saying it would really depend on the extent. If they were merely scorched the leaves would have just fall off, and the next year the wood wouldJ come out with young growth, and there mightn’t have been any scaring. But if the bark itself was badly scared the tree probably wouldn’t be worth trying to restore, you’d be better off to dig it out and replant it.

AW: And did that happen.

MCGILCHRIST: Oh yes, it happened in quite a number of cases.

AW: And did it happen in quite a number of cases.

MCGILCHRIST: No, we lost only a matter of a very few trees. We had some of them scorched up the side but they did recover. But we only ever had that happen to it once, next time we had very very wide fire breaks right round our orchard, and we made sure that we were always were careful to do preventative burning in the winter time, and make sure that there was no vast mass of timber dry material there to burn. But a lot of people never ever learnt, every year you’d always find somebody that should have taken precautions. That’s why the fire brigades will always be needed.

AW: And did you find with your Rural Fire Brigade just members of the community would help as well, or was it basically just the Brigade itself?

MCGILCHRIST: Oh no, generally the members of the community. There were a few that would always stay at home and let somebody else do the job. But generally when you get a tight net community like we had down there, they were very good supporters. There was very few people that wouldn’t pull their weight.

AW: Jim, when you sold your farm in 1978, was that a hard decision to make not having family to carry on?

MCGILCHRIST: It was one of the hardest decisions we ever made. It was a sense of loss, apart from wondering you know, how you were going to cope, it was just suddenly walking away from a whole like style, something that you’ve spend your life building up. And there were just so much of us up in the plantation and everything that we’d built it as a show place, it was very hard to walk away and leave.

AW: Well I’ll think we”ll leave it there, thank you very much Jim.

End of Interview