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Walking to school
Living in the sticks when I started school aged five I had to walk over three miles to school and home in the afternoons. It was a long way for all us kids to walk. I wasn’t very happy about it. For the first few weeks I would walk a little way and stop, mum would follow me and smack my bottom each time I stopped so I got going again. This happened for about the first mile, then I got sick of being smacked so kept going. Walking home was better as I couldn’t wait to get home so walked as quickly as I could. I soon learnt not to dawdle as the older kids got sick of waiting for me and would leave me behind, which was quite scary for a five year old. We mostly walked along the dirt road, rarely saw a car as only three families in the district owned a car. The last part of the walk we sometimes cut through a paddock, sometimes there was a bull there which made us run for fear of being chased by the bull. We would play in the creeks, climb trees, sometimes build a fire and boil a billy of tea and drink it, pick fruit from my grandparents orchard and eat it, on our way home. We often came across snakes, several times there was a carpet snake crossing the road stretching from one side to the other, we were so scared it would eat us, we would get a run up, jump over it as far as we could and keep running So it didn’t get us. There was a blue tongue lizard lived in a log we passed every day, it always heard us coming and came out to greet us morning and afternoon, we had a chat to it, it was very quiet, must have grown used to us. As we grew up in the country we walked to school most days for the whole of our primary school years. By the time we went to high school we were living on a farm closer to a town and caught a bus to school.
