EUDUNDA - COLIN THIELE COUNTRY
The Sun on the Stubble, The Shadow on the Hills - the author's book titles come alive in Colin Thiele country. In this episode, I carved a trail through historic Eudunda to pay an 80th birthday tribute to one of Australia's best-loved storytellers. The famous author's birthplace is touching 130 years old. Eudunda is high in the ranges beyond the Barossa Valley, about 1˝ hours drive from Adelaide.
For thousands of years the Nadjuri aboriginal people called the gully above the town "Jadunda-kawi", meaning water out of the ground. The spring-fed and small creek, and the early European stockmen would bring cattle down from northern Kidman properties or across the Murray Flats from NSW and water their mobs there.
About where the single-storey colonial Eudunda Hotel stands today, an enterprising fellow called Henry Watson set up a grog shop to water the horsemen. That was in 1870, and within a couple of years, Irishman John Hannon subdivided a section of land and built the pub. Within a decade, Eudunda had all the trappings of a farming town.
Round it, the land attracted the same breed of hardworking Silesian settlers who founded Hahndorf, Lobethal and the Barossa Valley, you can definitely add Eudunda to that list. Among them was Colin Thiele's grandfather. On a rambling dirt road high on a long ridge we found the family farm where Colin spent his boyhood. The cottage is set in wheat paddocks well back from the road, still surrounded by old stone outhouses and barns.
In his first novel, the new octogenarian wrote about "the morning light, golden on the stubble", and continued "far up the slopes towards the range, the patches of fallow stretched rich and brown and the magpies were circling and carolling above the gums". As Postcards pilgrims, we marvelled at the beauty of his country before our eyes. It was exactly as he described it.
A few kilometres south, Eudunda's early growth spurts have left their legecy in a well preserved town. Good wheat years in the 1880's, however, were followed by drought and depression and the stoic cockies responded by forming a famous regional institution, the Eudunda Farmers Co-Op. It peaked at more than fifty shops around the State, and the town supermarket is still a part of it. There are several shop signs of its Germanic heritage in the main street, and into this farming community the revered educators and writes Colin Thiele was born in November 1920.
Only German was spoken on his farm, and he learned his English language in a tiny school at Julia. His beloved teacher's wet-day storytelling sowed more seeds.
Speaking of stories, he came to a pretty cottage in Eudunda to live with two eccentric bachelor uncles, Fred and August, for his upper primary years. Round the fire at night they told ghost stories - so convincingly, as Colin puts it in "Dew on My Boots", that he usually went to bed in a state of shock. On our literary trail, we'd found the germination of his book "Uncle Gustav's Ghosts".
The old family names and family trees carpet the walls on the Eudunda Family Heritage Gallery, and amongst the Schillers and Schmidts and other Silesian names, the Thiele's are there, of course. The town historian burst into some rollicking "Eudunda deutsch" as he encouraged us all to join the coming 80th birthday celebrations.
On a bend between the old and deserted first shopping street and the town centre, the nineteenth century Eudunda Mill is a landmark. It was the birthplace of the Laucke flour-milling tradition and the source of Mrs. Thiele's farm supplies. The money from her cream sales, however, went to her son's education. In the old railway yards across the road, the tall white silos will soon be high again with wheat. Across from the now sadly dilapidated Eudunda railway station, Colin would watch the wheat-stacks "rise up into the sky" each Christmas, "with the centre…still a jumble of hollows, nooks and ridges - marvellous for races and Sunday games". They were a favourite nestling spot for lovers, too.
A few kilometres along the track, Colin Thiele caught the train everyday at Hampden siding to go to high school. I stood on the pine-tree infested platform recounting the saga…..a half-hour ride on his bicycle in the dark along a rutted road to catch the 7am train, not to return till 8.30pm to ride home. He'd stay at Kapunda High School till 7 o'clock each evening, the headmaster gave him his own set of keys so he could lock up. But in all those school and train-carriage hours, he read the classics and watched the undulating countryside go by, and buckets of literary seeds were sown.
His love of the land and the language come together when Colin Thiele writes about the Coorong in Stormboy. "They call it the Ninety Mile Beach. From thousands of miles around the cold, wet underbelly of the world the waves come sweeping in towards the shore and pitch down in a terrible rain of white water and spray". His writing had both daunted and inspired me as we wrote the Postcards documentary special, The Coorong. Again, his words were magnificently apt when we approached the cliffs on the Great Australian Bight during our West Coast special.
"It is not only their sheer height and inaccessibility that awes the mind and stirs the heart. It is their setting. For here their spirit is at one with the land".
Beyond the Barossa, Eudunda boasted two Lutheran churches for the best part of a century. There were two theologically divided congregations until they united in 1966. Eudunda was almost two towns too. The old uphill half was split by the railway from the flat which won out as the shopping centre.
They're unified behind their mascot, Uncle Gustav, who stands in metallic profile beside all three incoming roads. He is one of Colin Thiele's many characters who walked the streets before they appeared in his dozens of novels that borrow from his memories. The sun fell on the stubble and the escapades with chooks and cows and pigs happened over these hills and this town. Make no mistake, the town in The Valley Between, Gomunda, is his hometown, Eudunda.
Colin Thiele turns 80 on Thursday 16 November and on the following weekend they'll gather round the sculpture in Memorial Park in celebration. Their famous son sits in bronze with notebook in hand and Mr Percival the pelican from Stormboy at his side. Sadly, the town picnic and other festivities will take place without his presence, as he is exiled by arthritis and ill-health in Queensland. But he'll be back in spirit. Eudunda is part of this lovely man and inspiring writer. As he writes of his boyhood here, "you soak it up through your boot-soles". Happy Birthday, Colin Thiele!
Thanks to Flinders University Cultural Tourism students Rebecca Oliver, Jacqui Kohler and M Worby for their research assistance.
Details:
Colin Thiele 80th Birthday Celebrations
November 17-18, 2000
Eudunda Town and District
Eg Saturday 18 November
Family Fun and Picnic Day
Centennial Gardens 9.00am-4.00pm
For information:
Eudunda Community Business and Tourism Association
PO Box 1
Eudunda SA 5374
Phone: (08) 8581 1167 or 8581 1958
Email: carina_brown@hotmail.com
Or peterh@rt.rbe.net.au
Web Site: www.rbe.net.au/~peterh/ecbat
