by John Wells
When the first farmers, usually cow cockies, moved into the scrub round Darnum, they faced all manner of problems. It was backbreaking work, and often heart breaking work. The clearing of their selections is a whole story in itself. Even finding and pegging out their selections was sometime almost impossible.
Here was various methods of clearing, which we've talked about before, but there was always the constant regrowth. When the first clearing was burned the grass would flourish in the ashes but a few years later that was no longer the case.
Would-be farmers would often come up alone and spend the best part of a year clearing enough land to support a small herd and building a house, and would then brin wives and children up to help with the vast amount of work still to be done. Wives an children alike contributed enormously to the task.
A couple of paragraphs from the 1881 Darnum booklet are relevant. "Dairying was a long, hard task…Milk was set in broad, shallow dishes for about two days and the cream was skimmed off as it rose and made into butter for 4d or 6d per pound. Hand separators from about 1888 helped enormously. Butter was churned, patted into shapes, packed and sent out…"
The butter was often buried as deep as possible in the soil to keep it cool until There was no refrigeration available and transporting bulk milk was simply impossible. When there was enough butter to be worth the trip it would be taken to the railway, the lifeline if ever a community had one, but sometimes in summer the carefully collected butter would be reduced to oil and months of work would be lost.
"Gradually there was a change from skimming and farm-made butter to the delivery of (milk) in cans to the creamery which did the (separating) work. The skimmed milk was used by the household, and for calves and pigs…"
It was desperately hard work just getting the cans to the creamery. It was desperately hard work clearing the scrub regrowth. It was desperately hard work that sent many farmers broke despite years of back-breaking effort from everyone in the family.
There was no refrigeration available and transporting bulk milk any distance was simply impossible.
There is a quiet heroism in the work of those pioneer families.
"It was in about 1910 that Thomas Strickland installed a brine-cooling plant at Gainsborough, south of Darnum and sent the district's first milk by train from Darnum to Melbourne." It seems that if cans were placed in brine and the brine was circulated between them it would cool down. If there is more to it than that, blame Google.
From 1912 Morris Brothers were receiving whole milk at their new Darnum plant. Farmers would bring in their milk, usually on a sledge, and the plant would brine-cool the milk and use a horse-drawn wagon to take the cans to the railway station. The fresh milk would be at least a day old before it got to the metropolitan area distributors. I'm not quite sure how effective brine-cooling would be, but it was all we had.
In about 1915 Casanelia and Sons opened another milk depot down on the Moe River, for the water supply. The record is a little confusing (to me) because the Casanelia plant is said to have resulted from the failure of a small casein-processing factory set up by a farmers' co-operative when Morris' refused to pay enough for the milk they took.
These were not elaborate factories, but there was still a cost in setting them up and that would only have been met if the 'cockies' were certain the need for it would last.
By the mid-1930s the roads were good enough for the milk to be trucked to Melbourne and the milk train no longer collected milk at Darnum. It still went in milk cans until 1955 and I wonder how many old and unused milk cans there must still be in Gippsland.
In 1925 Morris Brothers moved their operation to the river as well. As they cleared the land around it they burned the logs to make charcoal, which was then burned again to release carbon dioxide as fuel of the gas-powered engine that powered the separator and the refrigerators. During WW2 many vehicles were fitted with gas-burners to power them.
Using separators must have meant collecting the cream, so the milk left would be 'skimmed milk' instead of whole milk. Morris Bros produced cheese, which might explain the need for separators.
In the 1930s, along with improved roads, and in the Depression, milking machines were put on the market, a huge labour-saver, though not all farmers could afford them. Of at least equal importance was the arrival of SEC electricity in 1928. That power was not a great labour-saver, but also a step forward in health care and in food preservation, in social interaction and in cooking.
I am forever talking about the difficulties our first settlers faced but let me quote again from the Darnum centenary book. "The worst flood was in December 1934 when the river came down with such force ad to wash away the pylon of the railway bridge … the road bridge was under water… (On man crossed the flood by inching his way across the still-linked rails of the line) Mail bags were heaved across the river to the other side, to be retrieved and taken bay car to Warragul".
Morris Brothers sold out to Woodruff Dairies, a city distributor. The plant was sold again in 1979 to Petersville. The bigger players were taking over the dairying industry.
Bonlac started their factory in 'Darnum Park' in July 1997. Fonterra bought the operation in 2006. It produces cheeses, whey, powdered milk and 'nutritionals' there now, and collects milk from a wide area.
Gippsland milk, or in this case, Darnum milk, is still of critical importance to our diets, our economy and to the farmers themselves. The way we handle it has changed and the 'little cocky' has all but left the stage. Dairying is now no place for a farmer short of capital.
Perhaps all the good folk of Darnum should look around them and imagine a dense and always-wet forest, with a few muddy tracks and a brand-new railway, and think on just how much work went into clearing that forest, and how many dreams and hearts were broken by the incredible difficulties these first dairy-farmers, and their families, suffered.