I was born in 1925 and I grew up on a station outside Menzies in the goldfields.
My sister and I were enrolled in the Correspondence School for two years. We had a happy childhood on the station. There was no electricity. We had a cow for milk and we ran sheep on the property. My mother was an excellent cook who used what we had in our garden and on the station to make all our meals. They were hard days for our family because it was difficult to sell wool or sheep during the Great Depression. Our self-sufficiency meant that we always had food on our table.
Our lessons arrived once a fortnight from Perth. They were posted to Menzies and then they were delivered on a truck driven by Mr Fields, who also delivered other items that we might need. The Correspondence School was located at the Claremont Teachers’ College in those days. I remember receiving some lovely drawing books from the school and some books to help with my spelling and pronunciation. In one lesson I had to draw a cat and spell the word next to it.
