June 1950 School Magazine

Brisbane Girls' Grammar School Magazine

June, 1950

June, 1S50

Brisbane Girls' Grammar Scho.ol Magazine

ADVENTURES WITH GRAPES All day I had been crisscrossing, over and back the mulga-lined Murray and its tributaries; and now at evening we were swooping down towards Mildura, a green oasis on the brown ricbon of the Murray. Below, as the plane circled, I could see the irrigation channels sparkling through the vineyards like a handful of diamond necklaces flung care- lessly on the ground. My brother had invited me to spend the Christmas holi- days with him in Merbein, a grape growing town with about 3,000 inhabitants, where he works on a C.S. and I.R. research station; and after getting out of the plane and collecting my luggage, I looked uncertainly round for him. The Mildura air pert is the barest place I have seen, all around to the pink rimmed horizon stretched flat parched land, a bitumen road ran by it vanishing each . way into hot shimmering nothingness. The only sign of habitation . was an unpainted broken down wooden building in the middle distance, that in structure vaguely resembled a church. My brother soon arrived . It appeared that his car "Chloe" a Chic of dubious antecedents had finally given up the ghost a few days before. When I had visited him in Adelaide the previous year it had even then been in a process of gradual disintegration, first one headlight then · the other having to be tied on with string, the hood finally subsiding in sullen obstinacy, and the doors havin·g an unnerving tend- ency to fly open when going round corners, so this came as no surprise, the roads around Merbein being of the rough · country variety. However, he had borrowed the car of the bank ma-nager who lived in the same hotel as he did, so we arrived at the one and only hotel Merbein possesses in style . Cars or bikes are quite necessary possessions of people who live in Merbein, for the only way to get into Mildura is by either a bus which runs at rather infrequent intervals, or by a bi-weekly train which bears a distinct resemblance . to Steven- son's "Rocket" and which nobody ever uses. While there, some p laces of interest which he showed me, were the loch at Wentworth, the pumping station for Mercein on Winery Hili, a slight rise and the only eminence of which the district can boast, where the irrigation water is pumped from the Murray, the packing shed where c:in endless procession of oranges moved a long in a grader, dropping out in their various sizes; and, of course, he showed me all over 27

- ). GREEN, liLA.

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