Bega Pioneers' Museum has countless files on people and places. This one was written by Len Spindler about his life in the Valley. This extract is set in the mid-thirties.
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BY NOW we had five girls, so we moved to Bega to live in an old house under the bank near the convent school.
Eva and the kids and our bits and pieces of furniture were carted to Bega by truck and I walked the cow.
I trained the cow to crawl under the top rail of a fence into a vacant block for grass and would go out at night to steal lucerne for her.
I finally sold her to a butcher for 10 quid and I never owned her. John Darcy had lent her to me for milk for the kids.
In some ways life was easier in town. The house had gas lights, and you had to put a shilling in the meter, but often had to do with a candle in a bottle if you couldn’t spare the shilling.
We had a few pigeons but couldn’t keep them in town so we gave them to Dot and Jim. They killed and ate them.
About once a month we went to the pictures for sixpence.
Bean pulling started then at Ottons and nearly every weekend I’d load the kids up in the old A Model Ford, which I borrowed after Eva’s father died, and be out there by daylight.
They would work all day, as I wouldn’t go home before five. It was damn hot too, up to 110 degrees some days.
Stan Reeves, Lionel Woods and I were among the top pullers.
The top pull was 20 bushels which was about 400 pounds – a lot of beans for one pair of hands to pull in one day.
We’d arrive home tired and filthy and the kids would fight to get the first bath and get up the street to spend their money.
We hadn’t been in Bega long when I got a job at the sawmill.
I worked on the “handle” turning No. 1 bench and was later moved to “tailer out”, the second key man in any log mill, then on to the “twin vertical” breaking down saws which were seven feet long.
We handled logs with a girth of up to 12 feet and over. With a one and a half inch steel rope and steam winch I could put a log almost anywhere.
The best benchman I ever saw was an Aboriginal called Dick Dark.