I rarely write with the intention of publishing for public consumption. Usually, just to synthesise my thoughts, or reflect on privately later. So this platform will be, for me anyway, a little experiment. The ability to play around with writing in public, on a Web3 native publishing platform feels like a fun opportunity. WAGMI :)

Looking back, I now realise it was a privilege to spend so much of my childhood on our family farm. Remembering where we come from keeps me grounded. To that end, I want to share something written by my dad in response to a Storyworth question posed to him. (As a side note, I highly recommend gifting Storyworth to a parent as a brilliant way to capture your family history.)

Obviously, I already knew so much of his story, but in direct contrast with what feels like accelerating momentum propelling us into an increasingly unrecognisable future, it gave me reason to pause. I read so often “we are so early”. But holy cow (pun intended), we have come so far.

Introducing, Frederick Harry Worboys. The gentle giant who endured life on the land in dusty country Victoria (Australia). He gifted that knowledge to his daughters and continues to share with us how far we have all come.

How is life different from when you were a child?

Probably triggered by previous stories, I have been reflecting upon how very much my life differs from when I was a child. As the eldest child on my parent’s dairy farm, with my brother Richard [Rich] being the second eldest and only 16 months younger than me, became the “right-hand man” to our father running the farm. When reflecting on that time, I have come to understand how important this was to our parents. The constant farm work necessitated that my brother Rich and I were very often required to assist our father milk cows, drive tractors, irrigate, fence, repair machinery, build a hay-shed and protective shelters for animals, cut, rake, press, cart and stack hay for animal feed, put out the hay during winter months and drought periods, mow the lawns and animal husbandry. Thus, our farm duties restricted “childhood” activities.

Rich and I did not have extracurricular [after school ] activities due to being needed on the farm, most often milking the dairy herd once we arrived home by bus from our days at school.

In many ways, farm life was idyllic. We had open spaces to escape to and could go rabbit and fox shooting, yabbying in the dams, or similar. Rich had a love of birds and so he bred budgerigars and pigeons. We had a pet magpie at one time, and another time a pet Kookaburra that had been rescued from a nest in our hay shed. We had pet lambs from a neighbours’ sheep farm. We made our own fun and found ways to amuse ourselves with a life that enabled deep reflection and gained an understanding and a deep appreciation of the natural world. We learned how to drive tractors, utes, cars, trucks, and ride motorbikes, and use many types of tools and machinery, all on the farm. What an education! Today, the farm remains a place of peace for me when I visit.

I suspect that, in many ways, I did not have what could today be classified as a normal childhood. My memory is that, although we had neighbours about 1.5 kilometers from us, we were in many ways isolated from other people; and did not often have visitors [with children who come to play]. We occasionally visited and were visited by neighbours with children and by various cousins that lived about 30-45minutes drive from us for birthday parties, Christmases, etc. I can remember the seven members of our family travelling in our car that was not air-conditioned on extremely hot days to visit cousins, making for a very unpleasant trip. Cars generally were not powerful nor totally reliable, had conventional tyres that gave a poor ride and punctured easily. [Radial tyres later replaced conventional tyres]. I can remember on the occasional times that we visited my mothers’ stepmother at Muckleford, the 1959 Holden station wagon my parents owned could barely make it to the top of a very long steep hill … and I could feel that everyone in the car was silently willing for it to reach the top!

My first car was a 2 door red Holden Torana, the basic, lowest-priced model, bought second-hand because that was all I could afford. It was also very underpowered and was tedious to drive long distances. Before commencing my engineering studies I used much of the savings earned from working on my fathers’ farm from the previous three years to trade that in on a brand new Datsun 180B, gold coloured with a cream textured roof. It was a much better car.

Cars today are both very, very more luxurious and powerful by comparison to most cars of my childhood and youth; and, although still expensive, generally much better value for money. Cars have almost become a commodity today. In my youth, they were comparatively more expensive relative to income earned; and there were far less on the road. However, the price of petrol has increased substantially. Some interesting information is provided by the Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS] at this link [https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/lookup/4102.0main+features40july+2013]. On a related topic, as a child, I remember many more trains were used, particularly to carry goods across Australia. Since that time, train usage has been drastically cut and there are many, many more trucks on roads carrying products trains previously carted long distances.

Mechanisation of farming was well and truly underway when I was a child with diesel tractors, hay baling presses, chainsaws, lawnmowers among the equipment available to us. Herring-bone dairy sheds were becoming common as we grew and our father built one at about the time we became teenagers to replace the laborious walk-in side by side shed. The herringbone layout was much more efficient with milking cows. Rotary dairy sheds have subsequently been developed enabling even far greater efficiency and larger herds to be milked. Today, the ‘family farm’ is becoming much less common due to the high cost of running farms. Farms are becoming larger with employees or contractors to work properties using a greater degree of mechanisation. Fewer children are now involved with supporting parents on a farm.

Farm mechanisation in my childhood did not incorporate much in the way of safety equipment. Occupational Health and Safety was unknown on farms and tractors were not fitted with rollover protection when I was young. “Roll-over” protection started to be introduced as I grew into my teens, and only a few of those had morphed into tractor cabins that provided some protection from the elements, and the noise of the tractor. We did not have a tractor with rollover protection or a cabin and thus no air conditioning. I remember at school being introduced to hearing protection and requested my father to buy some protective ear muffs to which he responded: “what are you…a wimp?” Needless to say, I now have compromised hearing due to the many, many hours of working noisy farm machinery [tractors, chainsaws, shotguns, mowers, etc]. As another OHS example, during the 1970s tractor power takeoff (PTO) shafts were slowly being covered to protect people’s clothes from accidentally being caught; and this alleviated the cause of many brutal farm deaths.

After moving there in 1960 until approximately 1963, the family home at Kotta was powered by a 32-Volt generator. I can still remember seeing new electricity distribution poles and wires being installed in the distance on our neighbours’ property before finally reaching our place. Our family farm was at the very end of one of the distribution lines, but electricity had finally arrived and it transformed our lives! Up until that time, battery-powered radios were available; and then came radios that could plug into the electricity grid. The dairy shed could finally be powered from the grid instead of an ‘antique’ petrol engine! Our house had electric lights instead of Tilley lamps [Kerosene Lamps] and a forever pulsing 32 volt light. Our family had no Television until approximately 1970…and even then only a small number of stations and programs…but it still opened up the previously invisible outside world to us. After the introduction of electricity, we were able to listen to radio more and so listened to ABC news, Earl Nightingale’s “Our Changing World”; and pop, rock, and classical music was introduced to our isolated existence.

Some years after the connection of electricity, our parents “splurged” on a music player…a large polished timber rectangular ‘box’ that housed a reel to reel tape machine, a radio, and a multi-record [vinyl records] player. Subsequently, if we had the money, we could obtain personal portable cassette tape players. Wow! Music wherever we went, particularly when cars became fitted with cassette tape players in the 1970’s. Today we have CD’s and DVD’s which themselves are becoming obsolete as we move to Internet downloadable products.

I cannot remember the year that a telephone line was installed, but I am pretty sure that it was after the electricity connection. Our first phone was a rotary dial fixed telephone with a “fixed” connection made to the house. Our isolated family now could communicate directly with the outside world via the one telephone in the family home. Today we have mobile telephones that are operated by pushing virtual buttons on a screen or are voice-activated; and generally, we can connect to anyone in the world from most locations, depending on signal reception - which is always improving. Individuals today, can now not be isolated, from a communication perspective, in most places where human habitation exists in the Western World.

I attended Lockington Consolidated Primary School until I completed Grade 6, and then Echuca Technical School and completed Form 6 [Year 12]. Crowded classrooms with little to no heating and no air-conditioning were typical. I remember in summer my hands sweated so much onto my writing paper and the biro would not apply to the paper. We had no personal computers, or internet [they were not yet invented] but used school libraries, encyclopaedias, and reference books. Personal calculators were being introduced when I was in Year 12 - I thought this magical! Teachers used chalk and blackboards…overhead projection and whiteboards began to be used when I went to University [at Bendigo College of Advanced Education (BCAE)] for Mechanical Engineering Studies. I was introduced to mainframe computers at BCAE; and our programming input to the mainframe was via preparation of ‘punch cards’ - a very tedious process and one punch error required preparation of all punch cards again! All assignments were submitted in handwritten form; so legible handwriting was critical. With revisions, I absolutely abhorred re-writing assignments…I considered it a waste of time considering my other farm duties…but in reflection, this probably reduced my education outcomes significantly. Compare that to today’s computerised tools, enabling simpler edits of type-written submissions.

I was introduced to personal computing at work in about 1985. I could see the long-term potential and purchased my own PC in the early 1990s and taught myself to type in a rudimentary fashion. Although not a very competent typist, this skill and computer knowledge gave me an advantage over many others and helped with my employment opportunities.

When young we had no knowledge of the climate impact of mankind. However, I remember reading and being strongly influenced by the Ehrlich, Ehrlich, and Holdren book: Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment after it was published in 1978. It opened my eyes as to the impact the human race has on the environment and so I became more and more conscious of looking to minimise my impact on the planet. I was able to readily identify that mankind was integrated into the environment; and understood that every action and event, including those of humans, have consequential impacts on everything else. We may think our individual actions are not consequential; but in reality, we have learned that nothing could be further from the truth. The current “battle” being waged to counter the climate change impacts from human actions demonstrates that an increasing number of people also understand this. Letting go of things that have helped us achieve our current high standard of living is really hard. Not to mention the threat to many who have built empires with climate impacting businesses…oil, automobiles, you name it. Yet we have to find smart ways to reduce the impact of our living on this planet.

Large shopping centres began being introduced in the 1970s, in Chadstone but had no impact on the shopping in Country Victoria. However, larger supermarkets began to be introduced, so the shopping strips of old were decimated in time when convenience and price reductions diverted people to the supermarkets.

Traffic Accidents caused a very large number of deaths and trauma on Australian roads when I was young and I remember countless reports of accidents including the deaths of people from our local area in car accidents. In the 1970s Australia began to introduce safety measures such a mandatory seat belts, road upgrades, and speed restrictions that, over time, reduce the road toll enormously. We are all the safer for this today.

To me and my isolated family, overseas travel was unheard of … except when watching advertisements for cigarettes [Marlboro Man, Peter Stuyvesant, etc] depicting the attractions gained when smoking…another very questionable practice in today’s world where we now understand the health damages caused and so the proportion of smokers in our society is far lower today. The cost of overseas travel became less and less prohibitive as I was growing up with the introduction of large planes. The Boeing 747 was a big thing when it was introduced in the 1970s.

The Echuca Drive-In Theatre was where we as a family had special outings to watch movies. We were all packed into our car and parked the front car wheels on a mound so as to enable all of us to see the large screen. We mounted a speaker taken from a nearby post - it was hooked onto either the driver side or passenger side car window. We continually battled fogged-up windows. Purchase of food and drinks was from a central kiosk during intermission. Sadly, the land that was used for the drive-in has long ago been converted into a housing estate in Echuca; since the prior introduction of TV reduced the patronage substantially and made the drive-in unviable.

Although the family home was built in the early 1960s, it had no insulation and in summer it was exceptionally hot. For instance, hot northerly winds caused even the linoleum floors to become hot so we could not find a cool location on the floor to escape the heat. Winter frosts meant waking to a freezing cold bedroom, and once the timber-fired kitchen stove was lit, the kitchen became our escape from the cold winter mornings; as did the open fireplace in the lounge room, burning wood, during winter evenings.

I have witnessed medical advances with life-saving technology that now saves many lives that were lost in the past. For instance, vaccination programs in our childhood eradicated the polio epidemic that occurred when I was a young child; and measles and smallpox vaccines stopped the trauma of those diseases. And today, I too use relative modern technology to treat severe sleep apnoea that, if left untreated, would cause stroke and/or heart attack and ultimately early death. If only knowledge of sleep apnoea and its treatment was available back then, then my mother and her mother before her, I believe, would have lived longer more rewarding lives.

Today I do not live on a farm…far from it. I now live in an urban environment that has amenities such as many shopping centres, medical centres, many transport options such as planes, trams, trains, and cars. We have many neighbours nearby. Modern cars are becoming travelling computers on wheels with hybrid [battery and combustion motors] or battery only replacing combustion engine only cars at an ever-increasing pace. Hydrogen-powered cars are a possibility in the short to near term.

I am now retired from full-time work, and so I am transitioning back to a more quiet lifestyle somewhat reminiscent of the quiet farm life but with more modern amenities in my home such as Internet, computers, iPads and iPhones, large screen television with a great number of sources of entertainment built if I choose to use them. We still have a fixed home phone that is rarely used since we use our mobile telephones to communicate most of the time. And post Covid-19 pandemic, I look forward to travelling Australia using the much-improved roads, cars, and accommodation and tourism facilities. And, with the flight technology available we may even travel to some countries of the world as our daughters have done in recent times; and as Christine did in 1980.

It is now very obvious to me that the immediacy of communication via all of the available sources today can be very overwhelming, and it leads us to believe the world has “gone to hell and a handbasket”. We mistake the battering of information that comes at us, because much of it is so negative, that the world is less safe and that our societies have lost their way. It is true that we have our internal conflicts, but my reflection also has led me to observe that my life and lifestyle demonstrate that we truly live in the freest and prosperous time of humankind - at least in the Western World since the end of World War II.

It is true that our democratic freedoms are under attack more and more today than at any time since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Personal human freedom was achieved only about 200 years ago; and it is such a fragile, precious commodity and we all must understand how it was achieved. It can readily be destroyed by our inaction or the selfish action of a few. Certainly, the creation of the Western world evolved from many cruel and unpleasant actions over time such as slavery, and the European colonisation of countries that had both good and bad outcomes. However, we have learned, and continue to learn how to treat all people as equal with equal rights and obligations. This is a continuous evolution of the collective thinking and understanding of mankind. It must remain as a continuing evolution by the active involvement of us all to improve our governance and in enacting our civic duty to each other. To take responsibility for our actions. We must protect and improve our lifestyle from the many world players who wish to destroy the Western ethos. Collectively we can maintain our democracy, our freedom.

Preparing this story has been an ever-increasing reflection on life, and I could continue to add to it but I have to stop somewhere so I will stop here.

Below are a number of photos that Dad attached in support of this story.

Imagine what young Fred would have thought if you tried to explain life in 2022 to him. Now, imagine where we might be in another 40 years…