Brewer's ruins...

This is the house my forefathers built sometime before the first war. It was only lived in for 30 years, and was my father's childhood home, and has since become the ruin it is now. I am not sure who built the place, the land was taken up by my great grandmother in 1912, although the family had been in the district since the early 1880s when they moved from Melrose, and my great grandfather died in 1899. It may have been built by and my grandfather and my great uncle Ted, who lived in another, similar house, about 400m south with my great grandmother. The house was built of limestone gathered from the square mile the family bought as their farm. The stones are cemented together with a weak mix of cement, sand and earth, a sort of marl. The floors were marl about 3/4th inch thick on levelled earth, and the roof was galvanised iron on 3x4s, with no ceiling apparent although hessian bags were often used in these vernacular houses. The house consisted of a kitchen with iron stove, a sitting room with painted marl walls, two bedrooms, and a small addition, a parlor, or third bedroom, beside the hallway. Behind this house was a series of lean-to sheds that were used for horses, farm machinery, tractors, and cars. Water was gathered in an in-ground stone tank lined with cement. The tank is still there although the lining has deteriorated to the extent it will no longer hold water. A much larger tank, 4m deep, of the same construction is about 200m away, near the road. This tank held about 50000 litres, or 10000 gallons. This is by way of a back story.

This is an ancient almond tree standing in the middle of a paddock of two row barley. Behind the tree is the wreckage of an old pine on the left, and the ruins of the house, and a mulberry tree of the same vintage.
Some years ago this area was burnt in a fire. The pines died, the almond survives, just. This was the only fruit I could see, a single nut within an arm's reach.
The branches are covered in bright yellow lichen. New branches have come through the lichen, complicating the tree's structure to the point it would be almost impossible to prune except severely.
This is the other dead pine. These trees are all of approximately the same age, some 80-90 years. In the background are mature examples of E. calycogona, mentioned in a previous post about Brewer's corner.
Closer to home is the mulberry, a mature tree probably as old as the other trees mentioned above. This one appears quite fruitful, as it is in bountiful flower. Immediately behind the tree is the in-ground tank that serviced the house, holding about 5000 gallons of water. The back door of the house would have been just to the right of the tree, where the stonework ends. (I think it was the back door, as the view above suggests the front of the house, but it faces away from the road. There is evidence of a front porch of some kind near the door.) The room on the right was the parlor, or third bedroom. My father had 2 sisters and a brother, and they also had plenty of family visitors, so there was a need for bedrooms.
The base of the mulberry. These seem to be slow growing trees. The oldest exotic tree in South Australia is a mulberry planted on Kangaroo Island in 1835-6, which was still productive in the 1950s and 60s when I was a kid, because in mulberry season we kids would sometimes spend an afternoon pigging out on fruit while our parents were in town. The tree was probably three the size of this one.
Mulberry flowers. The tree was covered in flowers, which points to a good season. They will, of course, be wasted by everyone except the birds and bees.
The lichen on the trunk of the tree. This is a quite thick and well developed covering of the older braches of the tree. it has been quite dry in recent years but the occasional rains would be enough to ensure the plant lives on.
Behind the barley is this mountain, Mount Misery, a terrifyingly jagged peak of unclimbable heights. The Mount formed the shared inner corner of the farm. I suspect the name was given either in jest or as a warning. My family went bankrupt on this land during the Great Depression, and moved away. But the names of families, places, the times, still inhabit me from my childhood when my father used to talk about his childhood. He was about 24 when they left the district, some 6 years after the farm was sold from under them by the State Bank of SA, now known by its fatuously modern business name of BankSA. The barley, this is the great barley growing area of Australia, is the best in Australia. If you want good beer, here is where you get the barley for the malt. This crop will go into many appreciative stomachs over the next year or so. Skoll.