Well, who’d a-thunked it? It turns out that your correspondent had a privileged childhood.
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Which is just terrible, as all my life I’ve been quietly proud of growing up on dairy farms in the 50s and 60s when times were rock hard and we dreamed of one day having leftovers.
Not that we knew about that then, or cared much. Life was happy so who cared if your “new” bike was something Dad found at the tip and repainted?
But now the truth can be told. There was certain long-lasting benefits in that life which modern societies – especially in Melbourne – yearn for. Dirt.
I’ve been fascinated to follow reports from the Australian Centre for Food Allergy Research which has declared Australia in general, and Melbourne in particular, as the food allergy hotspots of the world. More and more evidence is pointing to the fact that we are just too clean.
A Professor Hamida Hammad has been studying how kids who grew up on dairy farms and were exposed to all the muck in the air were better protected from asthma and various allergies.
It produces a protein called A20 and it was reported that already kindergartens are being built on former dairy farm sites just to expose the little tackers to the farm dust.
Ahhh, but wouldn’t it have been nice if it’d been just dust? Dairy farms produce a lot of poop. Cows seem to pump it out in great convulsive streams.
Dairy farm kids all have experienced the surprising sensation of being pooped on from a great height. (It may even equip us for bureaucratic adult life?) Almost daily you were splattered from the back-splash and had to finish a session in the dairy ankle deep in green, slimey muck. Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, it did.
See, on a dairy in those decades, you had to hose out the concrete-floored part of the bales and all this gloop had to go somewhere. On our farm, we had a very large open topped sullage tank into which the stuff was hosed and swept.
What do kids do on farms? They run around playing games, whooping and pointing “gun” fingers.
“Pyow! Pyow! You’re dead. Count to 10.” And then you’d bolt around the corner.…straight into the open-topped sullage tank.
Sinking beneath the surface of semi-fermented cow excrement is a very special feeling. My brother reached in and hauled me out. Laughing his chops off.
But the benefit of this privileged experience is that to this day, I can eat just about anything. So, that’s something. We slopped in muck when it rained. Breathed clouds of dried muck when it was hot and stood in fresh cow pats frequently.
No-one had heard of antiseptic wipes or potent anti-bacterial chemical hand wash. Cleanliness to us was turning up at the dinner table with the worst of the day’s experiences washed off.
Now Melbourne, allegedly the world’s most liveable city – is also the place with the greatest concentration of people who can never taste the delight of peanut butter.
I bet Bendigo does not share this sad situation. Why? Well, newcomers to Bendigo, or people under, say, 30, won’t recall that the biggest Bendigo TAFE building is on the site of the former Bendigo livestock saleyards.
Or that great streams of animal waste used to flow down hill to … Lake Weeroona, which at times resembled my childhood open-topped sullage tank.
Now, aren’t we lucky? Privileged, even.
WAYNE GREGSON