Before the mechanisation of farming it was a rather labour-intensive business and my grandfather employed several men who lived on the property with their families in houses provided for them - a type of tied cottage system.

When I was small there were three such families living and working on my grandfather's property, as well as a man who used to come in every Saturday morning to chop up the week's supply of wood for the Metters stove. He headed a family with numerous children fathered by both him and his brother. One of the youngest boys was in the same class at school as my brother and the stories which my brother brought home from the "show and tell" sessions in Grade 1 used to both amuse and horrify my mother and grandmother.

Up by the front gate there was Bert and his family. Bert was the dairyman and he and his wife managed the cows, milking them twice daily and separating out the cream; my grandfather did not have a city milk license and sold the cream to a butter factory. I doubt if the hygiene of the dairy would have passed muster as it was a simple open shed with three bales for the cows and was sluiced out with buckets of water. I don't remember the cows' udders being washed but I'm sure that happened as that would have been a basic requirement even in a very basic dairy.

Bert had three sons. We used to play with them occasionally but it was not really encouraged. When the middle son was born his mother wanted a girl and he grew up with a gender identity crisis, being dressed as a girl - hopefully only until he went to school. He is the only one of the three whom I came across in later life. He had made good and was in charge of the dress-fabrics section of the largest department store in Adelaide.

Then there was Herb who lived in a very pretty cottage which was, sadly, gutted in the 1952 bushfire which burnt out much of the property. We used to join the men during their smoko and Herb always had a bottle of cold tea from which he drank. He was always cheerful and we loved him dearly. I later found out that it was not actually cold tea in the bottle. Herb was an alcoholic.

He had a son and two daughters. His wife must have died as there was never any sight or mention of her. The son and one of the daughters had a drinking problem as well and one morning the son was found floating face downwards in a neighbour's dam. The daughters both married and the youngest one, who seemed to have avoided the family difficulty, eventually lived in the cottage originally inhabited by Bert's family, her husband becoming the dairyman for a short time before moving on to pastures greener - he was in trouble with the tax department and left in rather a hurry.

Charlie was Italian by birth but had grown up in Australia. He was younger than the other men and was a bachelor who lived in total squalor in a cottage attached to the stables. We were not allowed to associate with Charlie as, according to my grandmother, he had fleas. Since he lived next to the stables which were full of horse fleas I do not think that he was altogether to blame for this but I suspect that he never washed.

My brother, when he was small, used to play in the stables and was forever bringing fleas into the house. Spots of blood on his sheets were always a telltale sign and my mother used to strip his bed with a cake of wet soap at the ready. The stables, along with most of the outhouses and the fleas, were burn during the bushfire.

When the stable cat, Snowball, gave birth to a litter of tail-less and stumpy-tailed kittens Charlie took the only true Manx kitten, much to everyone's dismay, and gave it to his girlfriend who lived at Bridgewater, several miles away.

How Snowball managed to have a litter of Manx kittens I have never managed to work out but I think that my grandmother had, at one time, owned a tail-less cat named Coal Black Rose. Coal Black Rose was an unusual cat who liked to take herself off for a swim in the creek when the weather got too hot for her. I never heard that she had kittens but Snowball was probably descended from her.

My grandfather owned a disreputable tom cat called Casey, short for Kommon Cat, and he was probably the father of Snowball's kittens. Perhaps he, too, was descended from Coal Black Rose.

The work was mostly general labouring,doing whatever needed doing at that season, but Bert and my grandfather were both very competent blacksmiths and between them they used to shoe all the horses. I have vivid memories of the horseshoes being shaped to fit each individual horse.

During WW2 there was also an Italian prisoner of war, Ernesto, working on the property as it was government policy, rather than incarcerating the prisoners of war, to use them to replace the farm labourers who had gone overseas to fight. My sister and I spent a great deal of time with Ernesto and although he had very little English and we could not speak Italian we somehow managed to communicate with him very well.

After my father took over the management of the property he mechanised everything and managed with the aid of the local stationmaster who used to help out when an extra pair of hands was needed. He and my father were firm friends and the arrangement worked very well. The local station was a junction and Alan became famous as the man who sent the Melbourne Express to Victor Harbour, being momentarily distracted when listening, on the radio, to a test match between England and Australia.