Threshing the hard way in the 1920s

Press, 20 September 1985, Page 10

Threshing the hard way in the 1920s

By

F. R. MARSHALL

It is a perfect summer’s day and the wheat is ready for harvesting. The farmer bids his wife goodbye and climbs into his new combine harvester with the stereo tape player to enjoy a day in the sunshine and to put another 50 tonnes in the silos.

I don’t suppose it is really as simple as that but I cannot help comparing modern harvesting with the way we did it in the 19205. As a youth of 20 I considered myself fortunate to be offered a job one summer on a threshing mill in the Dunsandel area.

Our team was the engine driver, who was usually the boss, two baggies, band cutter, three forkers, straw walloper, water joey and a cook. The 10 men lived and slept in a small whare lined with bunks in fairly primitive conditions, but there were no complaints. We started about New Year with an odd paddock of grass seed and some early oats — easy work, just to get our hand in. The engine driver and part owner planned out the whole season’s work ahead, weather permitting, and threshing wheat out of the stook was the main part of the job. In comparison to the modern harvesting, our’s was wasteful and uneconomic. In addition to the traction engine, mill, and gang of 10, four drays and men were supplied by each farm and we all considered it a good day’s work if a thousand bushels were produced in the daylight hours. These days one or two men on a header would not have much trouble accomplishing that. By the end of February the stooks were usually finished and the remaining farmers had stacked their wheat. This brought on our hardest period of the season. The engine driver would rise at dawn and get steam up to enable us to do a stack before breakfast, a meal we most certainly enjoyed.

The stacks seemed to stretch in a line without end until dusk and when the wheat was finished we moved on to peas, the most unpleasant crop because of the black dust.

At the end of a long working day all we wanted

to do was collapse into bed — all 10 men in a space no bigger than a small bus. Noone bathed and the atmosphere was always pretty high. Fresh air was generally excluded and often someone would light a pipe in the middle of the night, so life in the top bunks wasn’t good. The only thing I can imagine to compare it with would have been below decks in a sailing ship.

However, we must have been tough because I can’t remember anyone being off work because of sickness. The cooks were more to be pitied than blamed. First to start and last to finish, providing five meals a day in a tiny compartment with a red hot stove.

No wonder many were of uneven temper and apt to go on benders. I met several who had been cooks and chefs in high-class establishments.

All through the season the butchers and bakers followed us about and the cook was responsible for the purchasing, with the bills to be presented at the end of the season. After the tucker bill was met I drew about £5O, not a great reward for three months hard, monotonous toil. Being single, the poor returns didn’t worry me unduly but the married men must have taken it hard.

From memory farmers received about five shillings a bushel and as the average crop went about 40 bushels to the acre the return would have been about $l7 a tonne, compared with today’s $260. So it seems to me that with the reduced labour and the much greater yields, wheat farming should be much more profitable these days!