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| About the author
About the books |
Growing Up Country © Scot Gardner 2005 There are some
great things about bringing up kids in the country and some mongrel
challenges that come with it, too. We bought the girls an old Mitsubishi
Colt and after a few days of supervised belting up and down the hill, they
basically taught themselves the finer points of avoiding wombats,
wallabies and trees. The front’s stoved in now after an altercation Jen
had with a stringybark. Apparently it darted out in front of her and she
hit the skids but couldn’t avoid the collision. Nobody was injured, if
you ignore the ding in the Colt. My mum taught
me and my brothers first aid for snake bite then let us loose on the bush.
You learn to respect fire and guns and ferrets. They all bite if you’re
not careful. My kids aren’t interested in going bush like we did.
They’d rather watch DVDs or play on the computer or whatever. Now I
sound like my nanna … in my day … Just being that
little bit further from the shops means you’ve got a few more minutes to
think before you blow your pocket money. Often that’s all it takes to
see the nonsense in owning a third mobile phone just because it’s cool.
Impulse buying doesn’t work as well if you’ve got an hour or six of
think-time before you get to the shops. And at home you
can chuck your tantrum or your hissy fit at volume eleven without
disturbing the neighbours. Or practise your bagpipes or have a shed party
with a dozen swags around a glowing 44 gallon drum. As the girls
got older, living out of town got even keener. There were all the trips
for sporting glory and the parties and boyfriends. We didn’t get too
many midnight callers. The dog would have given them away, anyway. Lookout
… there’s a fox in the chookpen. Sometimes they go stir crazy with the
simplicity of life in the scrub and they want all the lights and the
action. Yeah, and sometimes they come home to hide from the world. Bryce is only
nine so it’s a different story for him. It has always been hard to keep
the clothes on him but that’s not really an issue around the farm.
Getting ochre-dusted bum cheeks from tearing around on the dirt pile or
being hammered by warm rain doing a nuddy-run up the driveway during a
thunderstorm. And I tell you what, when that rain comes and the driveway
turns into a watercourse, it’s tempting to get your gear off with him
and splash about. Very tempting. |
