Free Ruby of Kettle Farm by Lucia Masciullo Page A

beginning! Australian people are resourceful, open-minded and always with a smile on their faces. I think all Australians keep in their blood a bit of the pioneer heritage, regardless of their own birthplace.
    Here I began a new life and now I’m doing what I always dreamed of: I illustrate stories. Here is the place where I’d like to live and to grow up my children, in a country that doesn’t fear the future.

I n 1931 most medical conditions were treated at home with simple remedies: Vaseline for burns, aspirin (Aspro or Koo-Roo powders) for pain, iodine for cuts and grazes, Indian Root Pills ‘to cleanse the blood’, castor oil or syrup of figs for constipation, and hospital brandy for almost anything. Cod liver oil was the standard tonic for growing children.
    There were no antibiotics. If you had tonsillitis, you gargled salty water and hoped you’d feel better soon. It was quite usual for children to have their infected tonsils surgically removed. (Doctors sometimes even took out healthy tonsils, just in case.) The antibiotic penicillin had been discovered in 1928, but it wasn’t much used until the late 1940s.
    Schools were regularly hit by mass outbreaks of infectious diseases like chickenpox, measles, rubella and mumps. There was nothing to prevent these outbreaks, or the even more serious disease polio, although there had been limited vaccination against diphtheria, whooping cough and tetanus since the 1920s. A combined vaccination against these three potential killers wasn’t introduced until 1953.
    There was no fluoride in the water or in toothpaste, and almost everybody had decayed teeth. You soothed a painful tooth with clove oil, or wrapped a hot brick in a towel and pressed it against your face. In country areas, particularly, many teenagers had false teeth. Girls were encouraged to have their teeth pulled out and replaced with shiny white dentures. This promised them a film-star smile, and as a bonus their future husbands would be saved from expensive dental bills.

Living on the Edge

    During the Great Depression dozens of Adelaide’s unemployed and homeless men set up camp along the banks of the River Torrens, living in tents or in huts made from wood, bags, canvas and corrugated iron. This photo, which shows some of those riverbank homes partly submerged by floodwaters, is dated 3 September 1931.





Here’s a sneak peek at Meet Grace
    I T must be the longest day this winter, Grace thought, and all I’ve found are a few bits of coal and a piece of rope.
    Grace waded towards the riverbank, wiggling her toes into the mud, feeling for anything that had washed in with the tide or fallen from a boat or barge to put in her kettle. That was her job as a mudlark – to search the bottom of the Thames for things to sell. She shivered.
    A dirty fog hung over the water, draping everything in grey. The other mudlarks looked like shadows as they waded through the river. Grace felt the water cold against her legs – the tide was on its way in and her dress floated around her like a tent. She knew that soon she would have to get out of the river, but her kettle was only half full.
    â€˜Please let there be something more,’ she said to herself, her teeth chattering, ‘some copper nails or a piece of driftwood.’
    Grace looked across the river at a forest of masts. It was the same view she saw every day. Sails of every size billowed beneath the winter clouds. Barges filled with coal and iron held anchor, ready to be unloaded on the shore. Longboats cut slowly through the water carrying fruit and meat to distant parts of London, and busy workboats ferried people up and down the river.
    Ouch! Grace gasped when she felt a sharp pain in the bottom of her foot. She bent down and searched around in the mud until she touched something that felt like metal – cold and smooth. She pulled it up. Grace wiped it clean with a corner of her dress and turned it over in