I'VE been staring at a grainy black and white picture of a rough little railway siding in East Gippsland.
It appears in one of those local histories dutifully put together every hundred years or so by someone who has the time and a typewriter and enough of a sense of duty to the past not to let it all slip into obscurity.
But Nowa Nowa's railway station is still real enough to me despite it now being nothing but a flat, empty expanse of weeds.
Sleeper-pass was an almost ceremonial weekly event, Tuesdays I think, where Dad and all the other sleeper-cutters would emerge out of the bush with their motley assortment of trucks and unload them, probably proudly, in stacks beside the rail track for the inspector to stamp the ends with a little hammer declaring them fit to carry the lines of the Victorian Railways.
I too, as a little pre-schooler, inspected and compared. Some were a bit sketchy with more rounded corners where the log was a little skimpy, most were of a solid workaday standard, which included Dad's. But one bloke's were always absolutely square with sharp and perfect lines.
Pointing this out to Dad, he agreed that they were very good but that the bloke would be throwing away a lot more timber as slabs to achieve this result. I could see the point.
Two stout poles would be propped up at a gentle angle from the ground to the rail-truck floors and smeared with oil. A sleeper would be dragged across the poles and two blokes would slide it up to others in the truck.
They'd keep the green wood sliding onto the growing stack, deftly capturing each with their sleeper-hooks, a handled rod of steel about a metre long with a hooked point kept needle-sharp with a file.
I imagine for many of the cutters this was their only social contact working now in relative isolation.
Perhaps even then in the '60s, swing saws and chainsaws and trucks allowed for more men to be able to make a solitary living rather than in the days of teams and crosscut saws.
Your sleepers are now all made of concrete.
One can hardly imagine there is much to charm a little boy in whatever horrible factory they come out of.
