Country amusements and metho rockets

I fear that my blog has been all a little too "girly" of late, with love stories about curtain-shopping and dish-washing and crocheted hat displays, so I thought I would balance that out with a slightly more rugged post of what I spent the rest of my time as a teenager doing. The photo here is of a typical Sunday afternoon in the surrounds of Tamworth, where I grew up. This particular Sunday afternoon we were on a farm out at Ogunbil. I am not in the picture because I took it, but that is my older sister. The church I went to back then (which was fantastic, I have to say) ran "Koinonia" groups on a Sunday afternoon, which involved the church getting together once a fortnight in smaller groups which met for lunch, followed by a bible study and then afternoon tea. The kids, who had sat through church, because they didn't hold to running Sunday School during the church service, got to roam free during the bible study portion. So, when we were out of town (and a good many church families lived out of town) this usually meant piling onto the back of truck, doubling up on quadrunners and motor bikes or just setting off on foot into the paddocks and the hills, where we'd just wander about looking for pigs, fixing the odd fence, throwing the odd cowpat at an unsuspecting someone (very strictly dry cowpats only allowed), doing weird-style jumps we made up into the “bombing hole”, or if it rained we'd muck about in the hay shed and do somersaults off the top into the loose hay or set up a vault of hay bales, or some such other thing. They were great days! And some of these guys were some of the truly "wildest", and yet the most responsible, people I have yet to meet. The guy second from the left in this picture, Matt, was particularly known for being a good shot - and could apparently shoot a snake from across the paddock. And yet, just in case you stereotype my friends, I will tell you about some of the others in this picture. It really disturbs me when I hear Sydney people refer to country folk, and say things like "hunting, shooting and fishing", in a donned boof-head voice, as though they had no class or “culture” (by which they mean one particular culture only), no additional skills, and nothing much between their ears. This is my soap-box for today! The fellow on the left, roaring at the sky, is Glendyn Ivin. He made a very poignant little short film, based on a childhood moment from Tamworth, called Cracker Bag, that won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival in 2003. Now he's in Melbourne working on a feature film. The guy in the middle, Campbell, holding the fencing wire, is one of those people who are truly good at everything: academia, athletics and all things sporting, art, music, skateboarding, farm stuff - you name it, he excelled in it. And not just at a small-town scale either. He came down here to study at UNSW and did an honours that was awarded first in Australia. Now he lives in Sydney, where he likes to discuss theology and philosophy, and has THE biggest coffee machine I have ever seen inside a person's house, with temperature and pressure gauges and a separate pump and so forth, so he can do coffee with the best of the city's coffee snoots. In his spare time he's turning an old warehouse in Newcastle into an art gallery. So, yes, they can hunt and shoot and fish, but they can do that on top of the rest of the talents and “culture” of most. Anyway, soap-box ended. Back in those days I was nick-named "Mountain Woman", by the guys, because I was usually out there trying to keep up. I don't recall that I was ever out to prove anything, I just always liked the outdoors and physical activity, and thought that what the guys were up to looked like fun. All of this wild fun was had without any streak of rebellion - and in fact, many of the farm boys were heavily relied on and trusted by their parents to get things done. The time that I was involved in mischief it was largely my idea. I was on a different farm with a friend of mine, Amy, who lived on this farm and had her own tom-boy streak. We wandered off down the paddock, as we usually did, and just poked about. Down in one of their lower paddocks was a really old house. It was essentially completely run-down, with the floor boards all gone inside and the windows missing etc. But it still had the old corrugated iron tank on the stand in the old yard. I looked at that tank and thought, you know, it could be fun to roll across the paddock inside that tank. So, how we managed to knock it off the stand I don’t know, but before too long we had it sideways, then we jumped inside and started running, like mice in a cage, and pushing till we worked up some momentum up and went crashing across the paddock screaming and yelling along the way. When we finally came to rest somewhere we looked and there were all the adults on the verandah up at the house, having been drawn outside by the great racket, staring down the paddock at us and what looked like a tank come to life, and a ute was headed our way with dust flying. The thing is, the farm owners had been just about to give that tank, which was actually in fairly good condition, to someone to use, and we had completely ruined it. Amy’s dad was seriously displeased!

Anyway, something else I learned from the wild guys above, I think on a day when Campbell had injured himself and couldn’t lead the paddock adventures, is how to make metho rockets. I thought this was very cool back then, so, at the risk of being arrested for something or other, I thought I would describe how you make a metho rocket. All you need is an empty plastic two-litre milk bottle, metho, matches and something sharp to make a hole. You then make a hole, about a centimetre in diameter, in the middle of the plastic lid of the bottle (that’s probably the most “dangerous” part). Next you pour a little metho into the bottle (and I mean only a LITTLE) and swill it all around till the whole inside of the bottle is wet with metho, but then you tip out all the excess metho, so there aren’t pools of it still in your bottle. At this point you should have the lid on the bottle. Then, without delay, you just lay the bottle on it’s side, light a match, hold it in front of the hole (and you only need to hold it in front of the opening of the hole – don’t poke it IN the hole) and wait ... sooner or later, if you haven’t got a dud, there will come a very cool whooshing sound, and the bottle will fly off whatever it was on and shoot through the air (and bounce off the walls if you happen to be inside). And there you have a metho rocket! It soon runs out of propulsion and isn’t going to cause anybody a serious injury, unless you’ve done something seriously wrong.

So, that’s what I did during some of my teenage days, and just went home in the evenings and wrote love stories, read Bronte books, did cross-stitch and learnt crochet.

And I thought I'd better add a disclaimer: the writer of this post will be in no way be held responsible for any injury caused during construction or use of the described amusement.