When I was a wee gal holidays meant heading down to The Shack. Actually there were two shacks. There was the blue shack with the flat roof and the boat parked in the vast front yard. And there was the other shack with the outdoor loo and the little balcony. Both were perched on a steep little hill, looking over the little bay that is Tinderbox.
The blue shack was where my grandmother (Icky) and my grandfather were based for the holidays. It was home to a constant stream of extended family every school break. It seemed quite big back then, but of course it was actually quite modest. It had a fifties kitchen counter and vinyl stools. It had an open fire. It had cute bedrooms with anodised lamps clipped on to the bedheads and shelves. It had a mantelpiece stocked with treasures found on the beach and elsewhere. It had piles and piles of old comics, old Readers Digests and lovely musty old books. There was Tuppaware. There were board games (Trouble, Chess, Monopoly). There were dead flies scattered upside down along the ledges of the vast front windows. Wood was piled up under the side stairs. Once Terry caught a snake in that wood pile. The bed spreads were chenille. The wooden chest in the back room was full of sand and buckets and spades. (Sometimes we played totem tennis.) There were colourful fly strips out back which lashed the back door when it was windy. There was warm milo with skin on the top (yuck), hot water bottles at 7 'o'clock, a tiny bathtub and a couple of huge water tanks out the back. The cricket was on the telly and the phone hardly ever rang.
The other shack was right next door to the blue shack. The family bought it much later. One family would stay in the other shack for a period, while everyone else shared the blue shack, or drove backwards and forwards from town. I loved it when we stayed at the other shack. That meant that the whole family was on holidays and Mum and Dad hadn't left us with Icky and Poppa. Not that I didn't like that, but it was nice to be all together, you know? Dad played Neil Diamond way too loud. Mum trawled through a big pile of magazines and shared her Camembert with me. It was cosy. The bathroom was bigger in this shack and the rooms seemed fancier, maybe just because they were newer to me. The little balcony meant you could sit outside and watch what was happening on the beach from afar. You could also yell out to cousins and aunties and uncles if they passed. And you could eyeball any strangers who drove up the hill sight seeing.
The barbed wire fence between the two shacks was cut in the middle with a rug thrown over the lower wires, so the kids could climb over and shortcut down the driveway to the beach or next door for a jaffle or a pikelet. The grass was crunchy and a golden kind of green and served as a stage for my cousin and I, or somewhere to light a bonfire, or somewhere to whack the Totem Tennis or play cricket. Geraniums, Red Hot Pokers and Agapanthus were dotted around the house and near the front fence. We drank Icky's homemade ginger beer from colourful anodised cups and waited for the egg and bacon pie to come out of the oven before we slathered it with sauce and scoffed the lot.
Both shacks backed on to paddocks full of sheep and in the far distance was the road that snaked scarily up to town again. You could hear the cars coming from a mile off. There was an old fort somewhere up near the road too and you could see all the way to Bruny Island when you stood up there. There was heaps of sheep poo everywhere which was quite disgusting. At the far end of the paddocks was a little cliff down to the rocks and the sea. Sometimes we climbed down there with our backpacks and our fishing rods to catch leatherjackets.
If you ventured past the back road you would reach a dam full of eels. Blackberries grew everywhere (or were they raspberries?!) and we picked ice-cream containers full and took them back to the shack for pie or crumble or jam. Once I found an echidna there, but there were heaps of rabbits too.
Our holidays were spent with our cousins. There were babies and toddlers and kids and bigger kids. It was busy and noisy and fun. People came and went all day and there seemed to be a constant stream of delicious things to eat. We took thermoses and sandwiches down to the beach and walked around the rocks or rowed out to the speed boats. The water was so very cold, you couldn't swim for long, but you could always turn the rocks over next to the boat ramp and fill your bucket up with seaweed and little crabs.
What were the holidays like for you? Does this sound like your childhood or are you from somewhere else, and did something else?
xx Pip
NB :: I wrote this post to try and win a holiday... but actually I don't really mind if I don't. It was just pretty nice to remember the sheep poo and the blackberries again, to be honest. Good luck to the other Top 50 Bloggers :: they are all deserving of a holiday! My money is on Rhonda!
