Australian History: Technology Back in the Day

Eeggg arrr merrr.

Good day people of the present I have woken from my slumber come and teach you about the life I have and how I have lived it. The reason being is that if your society keeps on going as it is with all the electronic this and that, your society will eventually come to a holt as you will turn into robots and not know how to do things for yourself. So to save your society listen carefully and perhaps you might stay alive as humans.

Back in 1850 I came to south Australia. We were not wealthy enough to own nor build a house so we made shelter out of a tall gum tree 20 meters to be precise. The gum tree was in springton and had previsly been burnt out by Aboriginals. Of course not all new settlers came to Australia and lived in gumtrees, our neighbours of course lived in a stone house with a thatched roof. It had two rooms and was cozy in the winter time as it had a built in fire place. Other houses along our street included a large tent fly house to cover the familys heads. The tent fly was held up by large eucalyptus logs. This house provided shelter from the sun but none from the rain. Another house found on my street was a wattle and duab house. These were most common along the country side. The farme work was made of sticks and then to make walls the fame work was daubed with a mix of mud, straw and dung. Once the walls had set they were then covered with mud to give the walls a smooth surface. Th roof was then made of bark and sticks. These wattle and daub houses were the most common as they provided the protection from nature and were the cheapest and most convienent option.

Each day of my childhood I spent in the house, just me nd my mother doing the daily house work. ofcourse My father was always absent as he was attending work around the house such as chopping firewood. Therefore the housework was up to us. One of the chores we had to do was to prepare and preserve the familys meat for breakfast lunch and tea. It was aboutly nessicary that we preserve the meat in a proper way other wise the flys would be at it in no time.We would buy the meat from local merchants ocassionaly but most of the time father would go hunt some rabbitats or go kill one of the chickens down the back. The hardest part of preparing the dinner was preserving the meat. We used to have a coolgardie safe, about the equivalent to your refrigerator accept it ran on no electricity what so ever. It had four walls one of which was made of a hessian bag. The Coolgardie safe kept all the contents of the box cool. It worked by a tray of water at the top of the safe dampening the wall made of the hessian mmaterial. The water then evaporated off the hessian material and absorbed the heat inside the box thus preserving the contents of the box and keeping it cold. Other familys had there own techneques of preserving meat. One of my friends familys would cover the meat in salt, wrap it in a bag and hang it from the rafters. This was the most well known techneqe. It dried out the meet and kept the flys away.