Life in the early 1960ies

Going past the Hughes Park homestead on Sunday and thinking about it today, I thought it may be of interest to mention the fact that when we took on the position of manager in January 1960, there was no mains electricity in the managers house. Only a 32volt diesel generator plant which was too heavy for me to start and the batteries never held much of a charge. So Harry would start the engine for me so I could use the 32v washing machine but it would stop long before I finished and would have to do the rest by hand. The Big House, as the homestead was known, had no electricity at all and relied on carbide gas for their lights. Mind you , they had six servants to do all the work but all the same, it would have been most inconvenient. The owners, Mr and Mrs Duncan-Hughes, used to come up from Adelaide for the summer months and would arrive early in January. Their household goods, silver, linen etc would arrive by goods train and was collected by horse and dray from the Watervale station. That was till we arrived, because a small amount of our furniture was on the same train and Harry engaged the local carrier to bring everything to our place and then to the Big house. Mr Duncan Hughes thought this most extravagant and shook his head, but when everything was delivered and brought in before morning smoko and cost about 5 pounds he was delighted. Previously it would have taken three men and two unwilling draught horses all day to collect and deliver the goods. So we started married life with a few second hand bits of furniture and a lot of enthusiasm. We rode our horses over from Anlaby where Harry had been overseer and had left the horses, Ben a fine 16 hand stockhorse and my little 14 hand mare Girlie till we had settled on Hughes Park and needed them there. Hughes Park is a very hilly property and all the mustering was done on horseback. It was a drought in 1960 and feed very scarce so we would have the sheep feeding on the roadsides to help them through till the rains came. The first shearing we did in September the wool bales increased from 95 the previous year , to 110 bales. We also got the top price for some bales of AAA merino fleece that year in the Adelaide wool sales.Mr Duncan Hughes was so delighted he gave all the station hands a bonus and rewarded Harry with  a sizable sum of money which my dear husband thought the station could not afford at that stage and halved it.