Bush Life (cont.)

While Margie was off getting educated and doing her teacher’s training, Albert stayed back to work the farm. He never really excelled in any scholastic capacity, but what he lacked in book-smarts he more than made up with farm-smarts. It was as if he possessed an instinctual understanding of the life of plants and our interaction with the earth in which we grow. He knew when the season would break, the best time to plant, and when it was best to leave a paddock to fallow. He was also in possession of a quieting knack with the animals. Tearaway horses from neighbouring communities were brought to him, and within a couple of days they were as placid as the house cow. So Albert wasn’t a great loss to the ivory towers of academia, but he was talismanic to the farm and to Karabup.

Albert left the school when he was 15 to devote himself full-time to farming. Our parents wouldn’t allow him to leave school before this age, believing in the benefits to all of a proper education. But still, before this they had relented to his will and gifted him a small patch of the side paddock to call his own as reward for his childhood. Growing up he was never the type to do things by the book, which often set him at odds with his teachers and parents, even if his unorthodox methods resulted in the same conclusion as the textbooks. Even his plans for his first patch of earth came out of leftfield. Instead of treading the well-worn path with potatoes or onions, he convinced Dad to invest in seeds for tobacco. He had got wind of a rumour that a cigarette company had approached the council with a proposal to set up a tobacco shed in the region. Now whether due to the brashness of youth or through some divine inspiration, he decided that if these rumours were true, it was best to get in ahead of the pack. If things didn’t work perfectly the first time, at least he would have a years experience in growing and handling the tobacco on everyone else. And if the shd proposal fell through, well he’d just have to suffer the consequences.

But any thought of the risks Albert was taking were soon put to rest. His patch of tobacco outgrew the weeds, their leaves unfurling like the pages of a broadsheet on a lazy Saturday morning. Every day after school he walked amongst his crop, and with each passing day ever less of him was visible, until only his slouch hat could be seen above the praising green leaves. He tended them as he would his children; removing any weeds that dared attempt drink his plants’ water; crushing any slugs, snails or insects that dared attempt make his plants a snack.

Across the course of the season the tobacco shed gained the approval of the council and building proceeded with haste. And while the factory wasn’t completed in time for harvest, the company behind the venture set up a tent on the farm and walked Albert, and anybody else interested, through the process of picking, stacking and drying the leaves. So impressed were they by this young kids efforts that they made him a priority grower for the following seasons, and paid him to liaise with other prospective growers in the region and advise them on the best methods with which to grow tobacco. In his first year as a part time farmer he became something of a local legend.