Making Do

By Merlene Fawdry. Ararat, VIC

I come from a long line of women who knew how to make do, beginning with my convict double great grandmothers, who came to this country in ragged clothes and tattered bonnets, with only the skill of survival and the ability to spot an opportunity to begin their new life. I learnt the craft from my mother, who learnt from her mother before her, both honing their skills during The Depression and the Second World War, when every decision was made on a needs must basis. By the time I was born, in the boomer year of 1946, things were looking up a bit and mum had managed, by either fair means or fowl, selling her eggs off to anyone who fell for her brown-eyed appeal and the gaggle of kids behind her skirts, to purchase a Singer sewing machine. This wasn’t the machine of her peers, with the rattling belt driven treadle, this was an electric job that whirred to life with the press of her knee against the lever, and she put it to good use. After the day’s work was done, she’d sit by the fire unpicking anything that had completed its current incarnation, clothes she’d grown tired of, flour bags and sugar sacks. Once she had a sizable pile of fabric she’d set to work.

The soft cotton flour bags transformed into petticoats and bloomers, complete with stamped-on trademark. Other girls may have had floral shop bought knickers, but mine were always identifiable by the brand, Richie’s A Grade Flour, stamped across my backside. The petticoats fared better, dandied up with crocheted hem and neckline, they were the perfect insulators for the square of red flannel she pinned to our singlets at the first sign of winter and remained until the last of the autumn frosts had passed. Sugar sacks were made into pinnies, jazzed up with rik rak or bias binding and, if she was really on a roll, a floral pocket salvaged from the fabric of an outdated dress. Scraps from any project were repurposed as pot holders and dish cloths.

When my mother wasn’t doing needlework, she’d turn her hand to knitting, fingers flying back and forth as she listened intently to the wireless, making all the knitwear for the whole family, everything from fancy jumpers to thick woolen socks with neat heels and toes. Many items were made from wool unpicked from old jumpers no longer fit for wear, our small arms held out straight as makeshift skein holders, all part of the production process of breathing new life into the old.

Hand me downs were the order of the day, and growing into an older sibling’s clothes was considered a rite of passage, like moving up a grade at school. Mum didn’t have time, or maybe even the inclination, for other forms of art, viewing books as an impediment to her need for neatness and most forms of music as an assault on her right to peace. The closest I came to hearing anything like serious music was the opening theme to Blue Hills, and the Majestic Fanfare introduction to the ABC news.

We had never heard the word recycling, yet we did it on a daily basis. Kerosene tins became dunny pails in the outhouse and, with fencing wire as a handle, they turned into buckets, used as water carriers from pump to copper and copper to bath. Newspapers became toilet paper, cut into neat squares, and threaded onto string for convenience, hanging alongside spider webs and other creatures of the dark. Even water was reused, with baths only on Saturday night so we could be presentable for church the next day. We started with the youngest first with clean, but the least amount of water, with boys going after the girls in order of age, a fresh kero bucket of hot water added from the copper per person, with dad going last. The rest of the week it was a spit and polish with necks rubbed raw from the sugar sack face washers, ears polished to glowing.

The women of my family were also practiced magicians, turning a little into a lot, and trash into treasure. They never bemoaned what they didn’t have, using their imagination to put whatever they had to good use, and this was their wealth. Having a large family of my own, I made good use of the knowledge I acquired, feeling the weight of responsibility to my forebears, and an obligation to present and future generations to maintain the tradition of making do. I recycle, upcycle, and sidecycle, being crafty and creative alongside my daughters and granddaughters, all making do one stitch at a time.