GOOD WOMEN

Evening Star, Issue 21810, 28 August 1934, Page 14

GOOD WOMEN

MAKE GOOD FARMS As we lead our well-ordered suburban lives, dealing with homes and children, or the daily journey to the office, with its simple variations and yet its general monotony, we watch our neighbours with feminine curiosity comparing their daily round with ours, says a writer in the ‘ Sydney Morning Herald.’ How often nave we not watched a neighbour with three or four tiny children and marvelled at her calm efficiency and skill? Her tidy house, her well-managed table and kitchen, her dainty meals, her children’s fresh print dresses in summer, and bright knitted winter woollies. Wc have watched and felt we could never attain such heights of organisation. And, indeed, they are amazing, these busy mothers! What of the country woman coping with just the same problems, but with no gas stove alight at the striking of a match, no blaze of electric light and heated iron for the pressing of a button, no hot and cold water for the pressing of a tap, no corner store for the last-moment requirements? Hers is the chopping and carrying of kindling wood, and the fire which “ goes out on you if the back is turned, the daily lamp cleaning and filling, the heating of water over the stove or in the temperamental chip-heater, the carrying (very often) of buckets of water from the ' tank, for in many an outback cottage water is too precious to lay on by tap to the kitchen sink, for a tap invites possible waste of the precious fluid. And, very often, instead of the momentary rush to get the children ready for school, and .the quiet of the house when they arc gone, there is the long-drawn-out responsibility of supervising daily correspondence school lessons, wilich must be watched over bv mothers! “In addition to all this, many country women are managing producing side-lines on their husbands’ farms, and for the sidelines the woman’s help is all important. Sometimes, indeed, she alone can turn the scale between comfort and disaster. “Show mo a good farm and I will show you a brave woman who lias made it possible,” said a country man of fifty years’ knowledge of the life, fno truer word was ever spoken 1