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Heather Stafford
Warrandyte 'Sitting down place'
This is where my great uncle George Jackson settled in the 1930's in an "old miner's shack" with the name of "Levenshulme". The old digger up untill the late 1950's was a local, especially at the Warrandyte pub—it helped ease the pain of the shrapnel.
White beaded honey eaters, blue wrens, yellow breasted robins, bronze native thrushes, possums he made quite tameand a pet kookaburra would perch itself on my uncle's balding head.
He would boil one of his bantam's eggs, put it in his pocket, climb over the adjoining low wire fence coo-ing his neighbour Dr Mary Kent Hughes to be ready for breakfast. Other neighbours would get soup or a stew, made on the wood fired oven.
We would tramp through the bush aware of old mines, going down to the Yarra for a swim, which was lined with willows brought as cuttings from Napoleon's island prison.
Each morning after retiring at sunset and rising at sunrise the gumleaves were swept up from all around his home.
This saved his home from the bushfires which destroyed all around him—the bush, other homes and his outdoor 'dunny'—I remember a long walk from the house.
By Heather Stafford.
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