Over My Shoulder

Chapter 10—Cooranbong

While living in Grandma’s home in Granville, Mabel and I heard much about a nearly fifteen-hundred-acre tract of land that had been purchased for the purpose of establishing the Australasian Missionary Training School. One day early in July (midwinter in Australia) Father and Mother and Grandma boarded a northbound train, taking Mabel and me with them. We were on our way to Cooranbong, a village situated on the borders of the new school property. OMS 79.1

Mother’s family, the Laceys, had moved over from Tasmania and rented a cottage in Cooranbong village, so that they might be near the school when it opened. They invited our family to share the cottage with them. This we were glad to do. OMS 79.2

Every morning at about five o’clock Father and Grandma walked across a plot of grass to an old hotel building that temporarily housed about thirty young men who were beginning to clear the school property. Mabel and I and the young Laceys often went with them to listen to Grandma’s inspiring talks of faith and to hear Father discuss plans with Professor L. J. Rousseau, the director of the school. OMS 79.3

The young men had come to work up credit for their future schooling. During the daylight hours they worked on the land, grubbing out trees and stumps, clearing away underbrush, draining swamps, building roads, fencing land, and preparing a site for the school buildings and ground for orchard and garden. OMS 79.4

The old hotel building served temporarily for both dormitory and classroom. In the evening, with the day’s work finished and supper out of the way, school books were brought forth and the hotel dining room was transformed into an institution of learning. It was an inspiration for Father and Grandmother to talk to those young men, who were so eager to gain a Christian education that they were willing to work hard for it. OMS 79.5

Grandma decided to make Avondale her permanent home. She bought forty acres of forest land adjacent to the school property and moved onto the grounds, so that she might supervise the erection of her home and the planting of an orchard. A small cookhouse was built, and a number of tents were set up to accommodate the workmen, as well as herself. Mrs. Maude Camp was engaged as cook. OMS 79.6

After a stay of a few weeks at Cooranbong, Mother and Father returned to Granville to get ready for the move to Avondale. Mabel returned with them, but I stayed as a companion for Grandma, and shared her tent. I remember sometimes waking in the early mornings and parting the curtains that separated my corner of the tent from her living quarters. I would see her sitting in her armchair, with a lapboard across her knees, writing by the light of a kerosene lamp. OMS 80.1

There were many interesting things for a 13-year-old girl to see and do. It was fun helping Maude Camp serve meals in the dining tent. It was even more fun to drive around the countryside with Grandma when she went to order supplies for the carpenters, or fruit trees and berry plants for her orchard. At that time Grandma was 67. She would often let me drive the horses for her, and I thought it great fun. OMS 80.2

Once we went in search of a good cow. We purchased Molly and brought her home and turned her loose in our enclosed pasture. A task that I remember with much pleasure was going with Grandma to get Molly at milking time in the evening. I would let down the bars that served as a temporary gate to the pasture enclosure, and we would walk down the path toward the school site. Then, at the sound of the bell around Molly’s neck, I would shout and flourish my stick to start the cow moving, while Grandma stood on the path calling, “Co, Boss! Co, Boss!” OMS 80.3

October 1, 1896, was a truly notable day in the history of Avondale College. Money had been loaned to Grandma for the immediate erection of some buildings. A gathering was called for the purpose of laying the foundation stone (which was really a brick). Grandma White with pleasure took the trowel and performed the task. As she looked around on the downcast countenances of the group before her, she said happily, “Cheer up, children; this is a resurrection, not a funeral.” OMS 80.4

Building operations on my grandmother’s house progressed slowly because of the extreme hardness of the wood with which the carpenters were building. But on Christmas Day she, with two or three of her helpers, moved into the unfinished home, which was named Sunnyside. OMS 80.5

The remainder of our large family arrived a few at a time, some by train and some by wagon, bringing furniture and livestock with them. We four girls—Edith, Nettie, Mabel, and I—had glorious times roaming the woods together, chasing wallabies (a small species of kangaroo), transplanting ferns and wildflowers from the forest to our home gardens, and wading in the pond. OMS 81.1

After living in Grandma’s home for a few weeks, Father, Mother, Mabel, and I set up housekeeping for ourselves in a small building intended ultimately for storage and laundry. We were barely settled in our temporary living quarters in time to welcome our twin brothers. When we were presented with two babies instead of the one we had expected we girls danced for joy. Mabel gave away both of her dolls and promptly assumed the roll of nursemaid, giving me scarcely a chance to look at the twins, Henry and Herbert. It was fortunate that I had other interests or there might have been friction. OMS 81.2

Fanny Bolton, who was returning to America, gave us her riding pony as a parting gift. Myrtle trotted along so fast on her short little legs that even riding bareback was almost like floating through the air. Mabel and I spent many a pleasant afternoon exploring the countryside, sitting astride Myrtle. OMS 81.3

One day Edith and I went for a fifteen-mile horseback ride with Iram James, Grandma’s farm manager, who was getting some choice grapevines for planting in her vineyard. He told us not to take lunch, and we wondered why. Arriving at the vineyard, we were invited to enter and eat all the grapes we wanted. They were a delicious variety, much like the California muscats. We were glad then that we had not filled up on sandwiches. OMS 81.4

Grandma’s orchard and garden thrived. One of the first things she instructed Mr. James to do was to clear, fence, and fertilize a piece of ground and seed it to alfalfa. This would contribute to the health of her cows (she now had two). We could drink all the good, rich milk we wanted, and we could eat all the oranges and other fruit we could hold. OMS 81.5

Once a week, on bake days, we would gather dry fuel from the woods and make a hot fire inside the Dutch oven that Grandma had ordered built from brick and mortar. When the coals were red-hot, we would rake them out and wipe out the oven with a damp mop. Then in went the bread, thirteen or fourteen large pans at a time. When the golden-brown loaves came out we would have six or eight apple or peach pies ready to go in, and while they were baking we would slice up two or three loaves of bread ready to pop into the slowly cooling oven when the pies came out. With bread, zwieback, pies, and an abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables, and milk from the farm, our two families lived well with little trouble or expense. OMS 81.6

While our branch of the family was occupying the storage—laundry building, our weekly wash was done at a pond on the lower end of the property. Mother initiated Mabel and me to the task. After a few weeks’ experience we volunteered to take over the entire responsibility for the family washing. OMS 82.1

First the white things were scrubbed and put into a big copper boiler. While they were boiling we scrubbed the coloreds, rinsed them, and hung them on the line. Then we would suds, rinse, and blue the whites and hang them out. Sometimes the clothes got an extra long boiling while we watched, fascinated, as a mother platypus that had her home in the pond gave her babies a swimming lesson. OMS 82.2

When our chore was finished Mabel and I would race home, for we knew a good dinner was waiting for us; there was always something extra on washdays. OMS 82.3

Winter was coming on, so Father rented an eight-room house in Cooranbong. The place was known as the Convent, because some nuns had once lived and worked there. Mother’s brother Herbert and his wife, Lillian, came to board with us. After completing their education at Battle Creek and Healdsburg colleges, respectively, they had been appointed to teach at the Avondale school. Lenora, one of Mother’s younger sisters, joined us and shared the housework. We also cared for an old gentleman in his 80s who was in the custody of the school board. So we had quite a large family. Besides this, our house became a sort of wayside inn for itinerant ministers and a place where council and committee meetings were held. Not infrequently it was necessary to add the kitchen table to the one in the dining room in order to seat all our dinner guests. There was plenty of work for all of us. OMS 82.4

Mother’s time was occupied largely in caring for the twins, supervising the home, entertaining guests, and sewing for the family. Lenora and I shared the household duties, taking turns with the cooking and general housework. It was there in that old convent building that I received my first schooling in real work. OMS 83.1

The rough, unpainted board floors required frequent scrubbing. Our ancient wood-burning stove on which we did our cooking and baking had a crack across the top. How that stove smoked as we stuffed in the green eucalyptus wood that Father salvaged from the clearings on the college grounds! OMS 83.2

Dishwater had to be carried into the house in buckets from a well outside. It was heated on the back of the stove, and the dishes were washed in a pan on the kitchen table. On bath day two corrugated iron washtubs were taken upstairs to the bedrooms, and warm water was carried up in buckets. Other housekeeping operations were performed on an equally primitive level. OMS 83.3

Mabel’s responsibility was caring for the lighting system of the establishment—fifteen kerosene lamps. Every day they had to be trimmed and filled and the glass globes washed and polished. Frequently, just about the time Mabel was well started on the task, she would be attracted to the front door by the shouting of teamsters and the cracking of whips. With a lamp globe in one hand and a towel in the other, she would stand and watch the line of bullock-drawn lumber wagons, loaded with logs from the mountains, pass by the house. There were usually two or three wagons in the procession, each drawn by a team of twelve or sixteen bullocks. Down the road they would come, past the grocery store, the blacksmith shop, our house, and on to the sawmill a few miles down the road. Lamp cleaning waited until the excitement was over, but before dinner time the lamps all stood in a row on the kitchen shelf, waiting for members of the family to carry them to their respective rooms. Mabel was happy at the completion of the job for there was nothing else for her to do the rest of the day but play with the babies. OMS 83.4

While we were living at the Convent, a tent was pitched nearby for a month-long teacher and ministerial institute. Some of the village people came out to the evening meetings, and after the institute closed Elder George B. Starr gave a series of Bible lectures particularly for them. I remember how energetically I practiced the hymns selected beforehand, so that I might have the honor of being organist on our portable four-octave organ. On several occasions after the discourse, Father gave a short, friendly talk, telling the village people about the school we were planning to establish among them and inviting them to send their young folk there to obtain a Christian education. OMS 83.5

Constable Berry, at the police station a few rods down the road from the Convent, told my father that he could not have chosen a worse place in which to establish a school. Just over the mountains, he said, there was a community of 250 descendants of three convict families sent out in the early days from England. Some of them had settled in Cooranbong, and he warned us that nothing was too hot or too heavy for them to carry away. We found this to be true. Food prepared for Sabbath dinner at our home and set in the milk house behind the Convent disappeared overnight—dishes, pans, and all. Marauders scouted as far as Grandma’s orchard and vegetable garden. Provisions were stolen from her shed. OMS 84.1

I might say, in confirmation of Grandma’s common sense, however, that she instructed her farm manager to secure a vigilant watchdog. Tiglath-pileser was a terror to evildoers. But he was never kept near the house, lest his barking frighten children or interfere with the coming and going of visitors. OMS 84.2

In spite of a serious shortage of funds and a period of national depression, work on the Avondale school estate continued to make progress, under the competent management of Metcalf Hare and the help of students attending the industrial night school. Grubbing out those mammoth trees with mattock and spade was no small task. Many were the blisters produced in the process before the stumps were gone, the underbrush cleared away, and the land broken open by oxen and plows. OMS 84.3

The school sawmill continued to operate faithfully, transforming trees into timber for the erection of school buildings. When there was an interruption in milling operations because of shortage of money with which to operate the machinery the sawmill team joined the other industrial students in the ever-present task of clearing land, plowing, planting, cultivating, and setting out orchard and vineyard. OMS 84.4

The outgoing mail to America carried frequent appeals from Grandma to conferences, churches, and old acquaintances for money with which to advance the school project. Our father and Elder Daniells visited the young churches in Australia and New Zealand, appealing to members to invest in the school, either by gifts or by loans. They promised that when school was opened it would no longer be necessary to send young men and women across the Pacific to obtain missionary training in America. OMS 85.1

For months building was delayed for lack of money. Then Grandma arranged to borrow some money from Mrs. Wessels in Africa, and with this the buildings were begun. When the funds arrived, plans were immediately made for the laying of the cornerstone before Grandma would embark on a trip to Sydney and Melbourne for camp meeting. OMS 85.2

By this time Cousin May Walling had returned to America, and Sara McEnterfer, who had been detained by illness when Grandma’s party left for Australia, now joined the working staff at Sunnyside. When Grandma was at home, Sara would take her for a ride in her horse-drawn carriage nearly every afternoon. In the homes they visited they sometimes found distressing cases of sickness. Many of the patients they treated made such a rapid recovery, under proper diet and treatment, that it was soon a matter of common remark that Adventists knew how to cure the sick and that they were always ready to help those in need. It was hinted that perhaps their religion was not as bad as some of the ministers and priests had intimated. Little by little the people became our friends. Thieving ceased, drunkards became sober, pipes were discarded, and real conversions took place. OMS 85.3

On Sabbath afternoons students went out from the school on bicycles, holding Bible studies in homes scattered throughout the surrounding forests and villages, or conducting branch Sabbath-schools. If an audience could not be gathered on the Sabbath day, then a Sunday school would be held. Grandma would release some members of her office staff and send them out with her horse and carriage to assist the students in conducting Sunday Bible classes. OMS 85.4

Every week a group of students took a rowboat and paddled four miles down Dora Creek to conduct Sabbath school and church service in a rented cottage in a fishing village. It was there that I taught my first class of rosy-cheeked, barefoot children. OMS 85.5

At Martinsville I had the fun of helping to clean and whitewash a discarded henhouse and equip it as a Sabbath school room. It was a little crowded, so in fair weather primary and junior classes recited outdoors on the grass. We knew that angels of God were as willing to meet with us in those humble surroundings as in the most splendid cathedrals and churches. We were happy. OMS 86.1