Barefoot in Logan Village (e-book PDF)

Barefoot in Logan Village

An anecdotal and oral history of the Logan Village District (Southeast Queensland)

(Please note: this is again available in paperback as well as an e-book)

  Barefoot in Logan Village

As well as interviewing twenty older folk (who live, or lived, in this former farming district), who told me their interesting stories, I have told my own young story ... and my parents’ story, my grandparents’ and my great-grandparents’ stories. The book is about the lives of real people. I have painted a picture of life as it was lived in the early days.

My father inherited the farm at Buccan from his parents who had inherited it from my grandmother’s parents who first settled there in 1884. Grandad’s parents came from Germany in 1863, and settled on the other side of the Logan River at Chamber’s Flat.

The photo on the front is of me when I was three, and Dooley, my dog who saved my life from drowning in the tepid washing water that filled the outside copper. The story is in the book, of course.

There is a novella that I wrote when I was at University. It tells the tale of my great-grandparents who lost three children in one month to diphtheria, the baby, the toddler and the eldest, a boy of eleven. Grandma was three at the time, the youngest remaining child, and she told me how her mother begged her to suckle the engorged breasts that the poor woman endured after being pregnant or breast-feeding for twelve years...and now no baby or toddler. It was this tragedy that caused them to emigrate to Australia.

Marty came to live with us when he was eight. He took me to school at Logan Village on my first day, and looked out for me all the time. We walked the five kilometres barefoot, he, my sister Joan and I. He loved me. This is his young story also.

I describe our farm, the Logan Village Hall and the School. I talk about my sojourn in Wattlebrae Hospital when I contracted diphtheria in 1931. I wonder about the love letters from Dad’s cousin Oscar to his fiancée Agnes, which were found on the big tip after the sole survivor, Oscar died. With the letters, I found some old photos of me and our family that I have included in the book.

When I sang an old drinking song at the old hall in Logan Village, standing on an Austrian-bent chair, having refused to take my old coat off, aged three, the local lads threw money at me...it was so exciting!

People phone me sometimes, crying, saying, ‘I really loved your book!’