City Farm

Another weekend, another weekend alone with Ella, the third consecutive weekend I've had to find something to entertain her. I'm hoping the situation will change soon; the last three weekends fell very unfortunately because Darren worked the last weekend of his six months at the hospital and has been involved in training for the first two weekends of the new job. It's almost as bad as being in the NHS, though there's quite some way to go to beat the entire month he worked in November 2006 without a single day off. That's thirty consecutive days if we're counting. I've no idea how the NHS justify this but they clearly don't care much for their medics having a life outside the hospital.

Anyway, Ella and I headed out woop woop again, this time to Fairfield City Farm. She's been reading the Usborne series of books recently and they all revolve around Apple Tree Farm, Mrs Boot the farmer and a series of animals who get into unfortunate situations, like a pig who gets lost and a pig who gets stuck and a sheep that eats all the flowers for the village fete. I thought a visit to a real farm would help bring it all to life for her.

When Sydney was first settled by the Europeans they found the soils around the harbour were pretty useless for growing the seeds they'd brought from England. Before too long they were setting sail inwards along the river to explore the land further west and this is where they eventually established the first successful farms to feed the new colony.

City farm was bought up in 1947 by a group calling themselves "Big Brother" whose main concern was helping "a splendid type of British youth" emigrate to Australia in order to secure the commonwealth. They paid for their passage then gave them 2-3 months of intensive free training in aspects of farm work before sorting them out with a job on one of these farms out west.

The farm originally covered 240 hectares and four thousand British boys passed through on their way to a new life down under up until 1971. The pictures are from a display in the heritage centre. I wish the two countries really were this close together, I could nip home and hoover the stairs.