Rifling through the family archive air tight chest recently I came across the full double centre page of the Mackay Mercury's 1949 Year Calendar and my mind wandered back to my parents' life at that time.
In 1938 my father had pioneered Lot 33 Plateau Road, Crediton on the Eungella Range part of the Great Dividing Range 60 miles west of Mackay, Queensland. As required by his lease, he had cleared the land and established a successful dairy and when war came he supplied milk to the USAF base in Mackay.
At this time my mother was working in Sydney at a pottery business and when the war came, she along with a group of friends joined the Land Army for the duration of the war.
After the war my father went on a working holiday where he met my mother in Batlow where a friendship grew into engagement and marriage in Sydney at Easter 1947.
Between their engagement and marriage my father went back to his farm and built a family home with the first septic system of the district and so they settled into a dairy farming routine.
Their diaries are interesting reading. My father's spells out in detail the development of his farm from 1938. This can be read:
My mother's diary which starts at the birth of their first child, my older brother, details the more domestic realities of life on a dairy and in a farming community. This can be read:
The second part of her diary continues with life on the farm and my birth and this too can be read:
Mackay
Mackay (on the coast at the bottom of the range) was the major centre of focus for the Crediton farming community. The market for their produce was Mackay, and the purchase of merchandise from farm machinery to groceries was in Mackay.
The Mackay Daily Mercury newspaper was centre stage for the entire region including the Crediton farming community, and the annual year-round wall calendar – printed on a double-page spread of the newspaper - was a welcome 'free-bee' for all the households in the district.
There are some helpful and interesting pieces of information added to the usual information about dates and moon phases.
There is a section detailing -
population of Mackay and the regions around the city;
property values in and around Mackay;
a fascinating section entitled 'District Statistics'
information on the sugar and dairy industries
the weather, and
listing the public holidays throughout 1949.
As I reflected on all this, I realised that even today, regional and rural newspapers and many local business houses still provide an annual wall calendar in this same mould, that in reality not much changes.
Yes, we have more advanced technology in a wide range of areas, but there is an underlying 'sameness' as revealed by this 1949 year-round wall calendar.
Today, each year I get a full year A4 size calendar and print it, laminate it and place it squarely on my office desk. I refer to it constantly. My wife Delma has one too for her craft desk.
This "sameness" has a familiar ring to it. There is a sense of comfort. There is a sense of security. It seems to me that the Gospels had this in mind speaking of this essence of Jesus being the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Dr Mark Tronson is a Baptist minister (retired) who served as the Australian cricket team chaplain for 17 years (2000 ret) and established Life After Cricket in 2001. He was recognised by the Olympic Ministry Medal in 2009 presented by Carl Lewis Olympian of the Century. He mentors young writers and has written 24 books, and enjoys writing. He is married to Delma, with four adult children and grand-children.
Mark Tronson's archive of articles can be viewed at http://www.pressserviceinternational.org/mark-tronson.html