Summary: This is an autobiography. Merv McRae was brought up as one of 14 children. His father was a farmer, and for most of his life, Merv was a farmer. He volunteered to join the army during World War 2, and was sent to Singapore. When a decision was made that Singapore could not hold against the Japanese, the Allied Forces were ordered to surrender. It could not have been realised at the time just how barbaric the Japanese were to be in the treatment of their prisoners.

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Preface:

I have not sought the consent of any person included in this book, be they dead or alive. Everything in this book is factual, as far as my memory serves. I, and I alone, am responsible for all opinions expressed in this book.

My heartfelt thanks go to my wife Alison and my son Peter, who have both given me Larry Dooley about my spelling and grammar. They have been my live Funk and Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary, as well as my inspiration, advisors, and censors. Alison can also cook.

It is seventy years since I began this life; I intend here to record the highlights of that life, both the humour and the rough times of those seventy years. I feel we in this twentieth century have had the best of an age.

Now I fear for the next century, the way things have been developing, the greed for the dollar to satisfy the needs of people for drugs, all the latest things in electronics, the diseases which hadn’t been heard of in the past. I can only foresee a deterioration in the quality of life, unless all people from the top to the bottom in pecking order combine to fight the crime and the drugs. I can’t see a promising future unless this is done; the young also must help, to improve the future quality of life.

Merv. McRae.

Mortlake, Victoria, 1985.

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“But Sir.”

Part 1/Chapter 1- Pedigree.

All my ancestors came from farming families. Mother’s people, the Marchments, came from England somewhere, in the 1850s or thereabouts, and travelled to Stuart Mill, in the North Central district of Victoria. Then it would be my grandfather who selected land at Swanwater, in the same area. It was some of the best wheat-growing land I have ever seen, and they prospered there, as well as having about ten children. One day, Grandfather ran to catch a train, overdid his heart’s capacity, and died of heart failure at the age of forty-five. The farm was left to too many brothers, who had wives who outdid each other in spending capacity. “Woodlake,” as the farm was known, had to be sold; the Marchment girls were upset about this for years after.

One of the “girls,” Aunty Amy, married and went to Western Australia. When Aunty came from the west to visit, she would get together with her sisters, Sophie, Louise, Ginny and Ellen. Off they would go to stomp around “Woodlake” for an afternoon of pure nostalgia.

Our Mum, Sophie Marchment, married Alexander John Duncan McRae in about 1907. Judging by a photograph, she was a pretty girl, about five feet three inches tall. After she and Dad were married, they moved to what was to become “Loch Lomond.”

Mum would have been a sweet girl, always one to get her “stubborn” up. Dad promised she “would never have to soil her hands.” She told Dad she wasn’t going to have children; she had a sense of humour, and so did mother nature; it was she that landed Mum with fourteen healthy kids, and not one of them planned. I don’t think she ever regretted having any one of us after we were born. She used to say “babies bring their own love.” We probably all caused her heartache at times. There has never been a parent who hasn’t had to worry about their offspring, and never been a parent who was not willing to help them if it was at all possible.

My father’s people came from North West Scotland. Dad used to stir Mum by saying to her, of us kids, “You have some of the bad blood in you, your mother was an Englishwoman.” Mum never ceased to get wild about this; Dad was proud to be a Scot. His branch of the McRaes came from the Kintail country, near the Isle of Skye, and are connections of the McRaes who own Eilean Donan Castle to this day.

Donald McRae, in his book “Clan McRae,’ referred to the “scattered children of Kintail,” and to the mass migrations away from Scotland to America, Canada and Australia, which took place in the nineteenth century. We have met McRaes from one branch which settled in Canada, and now own a lumber business in which they float lumber down river to the mills in the traditional manner.

My Grandfather was a boy of fifteen when his family landed in Australia. They selected land in the North Central district of Victoria, near St. Arnaud; it was known as “Oakbank.” They were a large family, but Grandfather died at the age of forty-five, which left Dad and the two older sisters to carry on the farm work. Jessie, the oldest, married Tom Trower, and went to select land at Manangatang in the Mallee. They had three children before Tom died at an early age, leaving Jessie to carry on the farm. She did so in appalling conditions, living in a humpy which could scarcely be called a house, until 1938, when she got a better house.

Aunt Maggie married and went to Underbool, in the western Mallee. She lived in nothing more than a bag shelter, and had five children there. It was years before she got something better. Things were tough in those days. The young of today wouldn’t believe the conditions these people endured, nor would they be interested, and yet people were more or less content, just as people are more or less content in this age.

Dad, I gather, wasn’t very popular when he bought some land next to “Oakbank” and called it “Loch Lomond.” Dad’s brothers and sisters were getting older by then. Dad would have been the mainstay at “Oakbank,” and would be missed as the manager.

Dad was always a big man, over six feet, and would be more or less seventeen stone, never much less. Mum brought the height of their progeny down a bit, as she was a foot shorter than Dad; none of their sons would be six feet tall. Apart from his large family, Dad built his farm up to two thousand acres. He went through the depression with a huge debt to worry about, but did not go under the debt adjustment scheme which was used at the time. The grocers, Lorimores, had enough faith in him to carry us through, as well as putting a bag of boiled lollies in with the groceries every Thursday. Dad certainly had his worries over those years, and yet would try to take us on a holiday to the beach every year, (a project similar to an army operation.) It is not until one is older that one realises the sterling qualities of one’s parents.

Dad died at the age of sixty-three in 1946, of heart failure after an operation on his prostate. Now most of his sons have had that operation with gay abandon, and are all OK with it, even if their pride is a little dented. I believe technology has come a long way in forty years.

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Explanatory notes: 2000 acres = 809.37 Hectares.