James A Cudmore with presumably a cousin, Thomas, are listed as arriving on the Bounty ship ‘William Metcalfe’ on 27th August 1841 at Port Phillip bay, New South Wales. –Victoria didn’t exist then!  Winifred arrived on the steam ship “Golden Era” in Sydney, on 16th June 1855.

A “Bounty” was paid to recruiting agents in Britain to find suitable skilled labour and trades people, and ship them out to Australia. These private agents sponsored the immigrants, and were later reimbursed by the Colonial Government. This bounty system was financed from the proceeds of land sales in the colony. The typical bounty paid was £19 for an adult. The Bounty system ceased in 1842.

Winifred O'Halloran, the seventh child of Daniel and Bridget O'Halloran was baptized at Cratloe, County Clare on 20 August 1824 and came to Australia on the Steam Ship 'Golden Era’ on 16 June 1855.

They were married on the 7th of April 1856 in St. Mary’s Cathedral Sydney, the one that burnt down 12 years later, and made their way back to Victoria, first settling in Ararat then finally settling in Moonambel, about 20km North West of Avoca. They had seven children but only three, Patrick, Michael and James, had any children. Their grave, recently repaired with a new plaque by Joe Cudmore of Griffith, is in the small cemetery there.

Patrick settled in Sydney, his eldest son being ‘Sydney Jim’ who married Josepha (“Effie”) Spohn and settled at 124 Riverview Rd,  Earlwood, where Jim built his house. Michael married Jane and settled in Melbourne. James remained in Moonambel until about 1915 before moving to  Richmond in Melbourne.These three in turn had nineteen children, three girls and sixteen boys to give a great start to the Cuddies in Australia!

James, the 6th son of the original James, who married Marianne O’Donnell, was my grandfather.

The sixth son of James and Marianne in turn was John Joseph, known as Jack, born on the 14th June, 1902 at Moonambel, Victoria. He told me that a half caste aboriginal lady, a Mrs. Richardson, helped his mother at his birth. The birth was registered at Avoca since Moonambel was only a small village. There is still a Cudmore Rd there.

       As was common at the time, my father, John Joseph, the 6th son of James and Marianne, went to primary school in the small one room school in the village. Education consisted primarily in teaching the “three Rs”, that is Reading, “Riting” and “Rithmatic”. Catholic schools added a fourth R, Religion. He obviously did well since he could run the farm and among other things became President of the Lake View Golf Club both of which would require good basic mental skills.

It was a very small school. Dad told me a couple of stories. No insulation so cold in winter, hot in summer. A pot-bellied stove was used to heat the room in winter. They had a lady teacher who didn’t like the cold, so would stand in front of the stove and lift the back of her dress up to warm her nether regions. This meant little heat for the students.

They also had identical twin boys in the class. Both tough little kids. One day one got into trouble in the school yard. Back in the classroom, the teacher ordered the offender out to the front to be punished with a stick to the hand. Instead of crying in pain, the boy started laughing. Teacher: “Why are you laughing?” Boy: “You’ve got the wrong one, it was me brother”.

Dad told me that a common way to get fuel for home fires was for kids to throw sticks or stones at passing steam trains. The train driver would chase them away by throwing lumps of coal at them. These were then taken home and given to Mum for the fire! This may have been in Melbourne, since there was no train line near Moonambel.

A common event in Australia and of course in the Moonambel region were bushfires. Dad told me one, not too serious, went through their area when he was young, maybe ten or eleven. His father and older brothers spent most of a day fighting it with reasonable success. So, by evening they could retire and come back to the house for a rest. However, there was a small problem. One tall tree was still burning and was too high to put out. The danger was that falling leaves or branches could restart the fire. So Dad was given the job of watching the tree and putting out any burning leaves or twigs using a wet hessian bag. Not too hard, but at night, in the dark and alone was very scary for a little kid.

Another story he told me was related to Guy Fawkes day. Guy Fawkes Bonfire Night was celebrated annually by anti-Catholics in the UK and also Australia. The Gunpowder Plot was a failed attempt to blow up England’s King James I and the Parliament in 1605 in an effort to end the decades of persecution of Catholics. Guy Fawkes was discovered in the cellar of the Parliament building guarding barrels of gunpowder.

It was fairly common, especially for anti-Catholics in Australia, to build a bonfire with branches, sticks and even small trees in country areas. Some would use a shay (a two wheel horse drawn cart) to get to the location. When ready, they would go to the local pub to celebrate. After much drinking, they would stagger back and start the fire. This time, however, after it was well alight, they noticed what appeared to be wheels in the fire. It was a couple of their shays! I don’t remember him saying where it occurred. No one owned up of course but those “Roman Catholics” were the top suspects. It was still common up to the mid twentieth century to see “RCs need not apply” in job advertisements.

Another story he told me was about his mother, Marianne. She was Irish and had a strong accent. She also smoked a corn cob pipe. These were usually homemade using part of a corn cob cut to size and hollowed out. Then a cornstalk or similar could be cut to make the stem. This was quite common among Irish country women.

Being on a farm with a cow or two meant milk was cheap, but sugar, having to be brought from Queensland, was very expensive. Thus, when visitors came and it was time for a ‘cuppa’, she would say “I’ll sugar ye, but ye can milk ye selves”. Dad and brothers found trying to imagine milking themselves very funny.

The following was when my father was only six years old and refers to his father:

The Argus, Melbourne, Mon. 14th Sep, 1908

Report: Reef near Moonambel, Landsborough, Sunday.
James Cudmore has discovered a reef near Moonambel, the stone being about 1 ft wide. A trial crushing of two tons yielded 2 oz., 6 dwt. of gold

2 oz, 6 dwt is 2.3 ounces. Gold price now is about $2000 US$/oz. In 1908 it was about $20 US$/oz. The 2.3 oz found by J Cudmore was worth about US$50 or £20 Australian. The basic wage then was about £2 per week, so the find was about 10 weeks pay for a family. Thus roughly equivalent to two months family income now.

The only water supply to the house was a galvanised iron tank outside the kitchen that collected rainwater from the roof. It had two taps, one outside and one in the kitchen. If that water was short, a bucket of water would be taken from the irrigation system channel across the road. This only in summer as the canal bringing water from the Murrumbidgee was closed down in winter. When it was bath time, a bucket or two of cold water was taken to the bath. Then more water was heated on the fuel, i.e. wood fired, stove and added to the bath.

In the really hot weather (well over 40 degrees every day for 2 weeks shortly before I was born) Dad made a shower for Mum. It consisted of a billy with a wire handle and nail holes in the bottom. Mum could then scoop up water from the bath and hold it over her head for a cold shower.

When finished in the bath, pulling the plug drained the water to a small vegetable plot next to the house.

(In the January, 1939 bushfires, when Mum was 7 months pregnant with me, 80 people lost their lives, 3,700 houses were lost and 260,000 hectares (more than a tenth of the state) burnt in Victoria alone)

These were the war years and as a result, most young men were overseas, either in Europe or to the North of Australia. Food was still required, so the “Land Army” was set up. It consisted mainly of young women who would be set up in camps in farming areas. I can just remember Moya, a Land Army girl, who regularly came to our farm to help both my mother when she was ill, and also to do farm work, such as picking the fruit.

In the traditional manner, a woodheap was setup near the original shed and an outdoor toilet or “dunny” in between. Dad always left some chopped up wood available so Mum could bring a few sticks back for the oven.

The dunny faced north to let the sun in on cold days. The door opened inwards so it could be closed quickly if someone came near. Toilet paper was unheard of, so instead there were two options. One was catalogues from city stores. They were made with soft paper and some even had a hole in the corner so it could hang from a nail. The firms didn’t mind, since they knew the customers would read a page before using it. The other choice was newspapers, not as gentle but cheap.

Once I was old enough, maybe twelve or thirteen, it became my job to “Bury the doings”. The toilet consisted of a seat and lid mounted on metal drum with no top or bottom. A metal bucket with a wire handle was on the floor inside it. So, to empty it, I would lift the seat assembly off and the carry the bucket and a shovel to a soft ploughed area in the orchard and dig a hole then empty the “doings” into it. Next shovel dirt over it before returning the bucket to the dunny. The last job was to put some kerosene into the bucket to stop flies etc. breeding in it.

In the beginning, Dad bought a couple of draft horses to help plough the land. I still remember Dad using one horse pulling a long cable with a scoop at the end to dig a hole for a pool/dam in front of the house.

After the hole was complete, Dad started putting fence posts around it. I remember pointing to a spot and saying you need more dirt there, Daddy. The next thing I remember was being inside with Mummy washing the mud off me and Dad scraping mud off his boots. It had rained recently so there was mud and some water in the dam. I had obviously fallen in. I would have been no more than four years old then.

Not long after, when the dam was finished, I remember trying to swim from the bottom step in one corner, back to the top step. Mam and Dad were under the Cedar trees cooling their feet in the channel. So, I called out to them. “Look, I can swim. Dad then said “Now swim outwards to the other side!”.

A distance of about 3 metres. I did and succeeded! Yay.

Up until 1945, Australia was at war with Germany and Japan. The Japanese army was working their way south to Australia. The bombing of Darwin was intense and apparently the army intended to make their way across Australia towards Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne. Dad was too old to be called up but had to join a reserve army. He told me about a close shave for another member. They were practicing by crouching in a trench imagining the enemy was near. The sergeant called out heads down! Dad then saw the man next to him was lifting his head up to see what was happening. Dad pulled him down – just in time, as a mortar exploded, grazing the top of his head with dirt and stones etc.
I remember my mother making sandwiches for us while Dad was away for a day practicing fighting.

Sadly, by that time, Mum had contracted breast cancer. The doctor didn’t recognise it as such until too late.

It slowly progressed although Dad told me that it stopped progressing while she was pregnant with Kathleen but then returned after her birth. I don’t remember any of this, but she always hid her suffering, even from Dad. He would hear her crying softly in pain at night but she would immediately stop if she heard him move.

I remember Kathleen’s first birthday. Mum had made a fruit cake, loaf style, with one candle in it. I remember celebrating with Kathleen in a high chair next to the table.

It was probably the same cake that I remember her making. She had put all the ingredients on the kitchen table measured out in bowls and I saw one bowl was raisins. I asked if I could have some and she answered “You may have a brace”. I of course had no idea what a brace was, so picked up a small handful and asked “Is that a brace?”. I remember her smiling and saying “That’s near enough.” Years later, when I was a teenager, I discovered that a brace was two and that memory came rushing back.

It was only a few months later that she died. I’m told that our Parish priest, Fr O’Dea, the following Sunday, announced that “This week, a saint has passed from our midst”. And I firmly believe he was right. Only two years later, Uncle Mick’s wife, Winifred “Winnie” also died, leaving Aunty Alice to help with both families.

I and Bernie didn’t go to Mum’s funeral. It was decided we were too young to understand, so George Hughes, a family friend looked after us.  It was a cold day, so he lit a fire in the fireplace. Some red hot wood coals would fall out of the fire onto the hearth and I was very impressed how he would pick them up with bare fingers and flick them back into the fire.

About that time, Dad bought a second hand tractor, a Fordson Major. The horses would have been quite old when he bought them and had reached the end of their useful life. He would have taken them up the nearby hill and ended their life with a shot behind the ear from a “.22” rifle he had. I’m sure that would have hurt him, but there was no other choice in those days.

The tractor was second hand and difficult to control. It had steel rear wheels with “spuds”, i.e. metal triangular pieces at intervals around the rim to dig into the ground. The front wheels were also steel but with a steel ridge around the centre to stop them from sliding sideways when turning. Later on, Dad replaced the rear wheels with rubber tyres. I remember him driving on the driveway to the house and saying that it could now be put into second gear! It didn’t have enough power with the steel wheels to do so. When I was eight years old, I started driving the tractor while Dad walked behind spraying the apple trees. The spray cart had a simple one cylinder engine on top. You started it by holding the cylinder valve open with one hand and cranking a handle with the other. When it was turning fast enough, you let go and hopefully it would start. At the end of a row of trees, Dad would drive the tractor around to the next row. I didn’t have the strength needed to turn it.

To drive the tractor, I would stand up and jump on the clutch pedal. I had just enough weight to push it down so I could put it into first gear. Then the clutch would slowly lift me up again, making for smooth starts!

A few years later, Dad replaced it with a Ferguson tractor. These were very light and easy to drive. Dad had gone to a farm ‘open day’ where many tractors were on display. Unfortunately, there had been heavy rain beforehand, leaving the ground very boggy. The big tractors all had trouble trying to tow machinery behind them. The “Fergies” on the other hand didn’t. This was because of their “Three-point linkage”, where plows, grass cutters etc. were held by two steel bars plus a third one with a hydraulic cylinder that could lift the implement off the ground. Thus, if getting stuck, they would lift it up out of the mud and off they went. Also, Dad didn’t need a large tractor on a small farm, so decided there and then to buy one.I of course, loved it and would drive it all day given the chance. The important thing to remember was to switch from kerosene to petrol before bringing the tractor home. “Kero” was cheaper and also always available to farmers whereas petrol was strictly rationed in the war years and after. So the tractor had two fuel tanks, a small petrol one, needed to start the tractor, plus the main kero one that you switched to as soon as the engine was warm. If you forgot to switch back to petrol before finishing, the next time you had to drain the kero out of the carburettor and refill it with petrol, a fiddly process.