The Sausage Tree by Rosalie Medcraft Page A

home from work. Other times we were very lucky and he didn’t notice them at all.
    We would follow him inside hoping he’d left some jam sandwiches or cold black tea that he took in a glass cordial bottle, and trying to create a diversion, we’d offer to unpack his bag. Why we were so keen to eat dry jams and wiches and drink cold black tea is still a mystery. It couldn’t have been because we were hungry because we always had plenty of food to eat.
    One day when we opened the lunch bag we saw a strange item in there. Dad had found what he called “blackfellow’s bread” in the bush. We don’t know how he knew about it as it was not eaten as general bushmen’s food. The bread had a brown-black outer crust and the inside looked like an off-white sponge cake. The bread is a fungus and is usually found at the base of a rotting tree. We are not sure what species of tree he found the bread under, but we thoroughly enjoyed eating every scrap.

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Our resourceful Dad
    Mum was a very good cook and Dad’s garden kept us supplied with lots of fresh vegetables. He grew everything we needed in our large back garden. The first of the spring vegetables to be ready were the broad beans, but before they were fully grown and to make a change from cabbage, Mum picked the tops out of the stalks and boiled them up for greens. The last pickings of beans Mum cooked in a delicious curry sauce. When we had a surplus of grown beans we had to pick them, pack them in bags and send them into town to the vegetable market. How we came to hate that garden.
    For extra income Dad planted two large beds with carrots and parsnips, which when grown were sold to the vegetable market in Launceston. When Dad deemed the time to be right and the seedlings were barely out of the ground, we had to crawl along the long rows and “thin them out” to make more space for the ones left to grow. Unfortunatelythat wasn’t the end of it as until the vegetables were ready to pull, we had to keep the rows free of weeds.
    The worst part of the saga was when the vegetables were ready for market. At least once a week, before we went to school, we pulled the carrots and Mum dug the parnsips, and then we washed them under the cold water tap until they were clean. When they were dry enough we carefully packed them into sack bags, and using a bagging needle and twine, sewed the tops together and placed them outside the gate ready to be picked up by the bus driver who delivered them to the market. We did this in the winter time and our hands were red and blue with the cold by the time we had finished. The last thing that we did was to hang a red flag (material tied onto a stick) on the gate post as this was the signal for the bus to stop.
    Dad’s excellence as a gardener was widely known and during the summer people came from miles around to purchase his lettuces which he sold for sixpence each (5 cents). Dad would go into the garden patch early in the morning, select the lettuces that were ready to cut and cover them with a damp sugar bag to keep them from going soft in the sun.
    When Dad planted the vegetable seeds in his garden we would set about building a scarecrow to frighten the birds away when the little seedlings came through the ground. We would try really hard to make sure our scarecrow was as lifelike as possible but hardly ever succeeded. We dressed our masterpiece in clothes from the ragbag and proudly stood her in the garden. It is debatable whether or not she served her purpose but while we were busy creating our scarecrow we weren’t getting into mischief.
    Dad was a good provider and worked hard for his large family. When he was camping away on the mountain he spent many hours making snares to catch possums and walked many miles to set them, as well as traps to catchrabbits. Sometimes when the weather was too wet the sawmill closed for a while, which meant no work, no pay so the meat from the game was a