A fancy party and I was the hired help. Farm handing had become too real

The evenings were long that summer. Entertainment was scarce.

When two merino rams took to fighting for the attention of the ewes, the percussion of their head clashes rolling through the twilight, we sat on the porch, watching the show.

You didn’t want to go anywhere near them when they were in that mood, said the station manager. Everyone knew stories of some fool who’d tried to stop rams fighting and had ended up in hospital.

I was working as a farmhand on a large isolated sheep station that was a world away from just about everything that beckoned to a 15-year-old boy in the first month of 1967.

My room was a lonely hut smelling faintly of sheep-dip and strongly of mice, birds nests and the leather of old horse harnesses.

A little transistor radio kept me company at night, capturing the signal from Melbourne’s The Greater 3UZ, where Stan “the Man” Rofe broadcast nourishment for the 1960s: rock music.

The Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations was unlike anything anyone had heard before; The Loved Ones’ Ever Lovin’ Man changed time itself; The Spencer Davis Group’s I’m a Man sent a charge direct to the brain of a teenage boy.

Let’s Spend the Night Together marked The Rolling Stones as deliciously bad. The Easybeats easily beat The Monkees for cool. Eric Burdon, The Who, The Kinks and The Troggs told our generation’s tales of yearning.

Days began around dawn.

The manager’s wife fried eggs and bacon and brewed strong tea. She cut sandwiches and wrapped them in waxed paper for our lunch in the paddocks.

The absentee owner, a friend of my dad, had offered me $30 a week to work on his property during part of my school holidays.

I’d stack hay and drive a tractor with harrows attached, herd sheep from one pasture to another and paint gates.

It wasn’t my idea of fun. I suffered hay fever and believed school holidays were supposed to be a holiday. But 30 bucks was 30 bucks.

At night, when the manager and I weren’t being entertained by a couple of prize-fighting rams pumped on testosterone, we’d go spotlighting.

I balanced on the bonnet of a paddock ute, feet on the ’roo bar, armed with a rifle. The manager drove the ute and operated the spotlight, searching the dark for the bright yellow eyes of foxes.

And then came a day when I was ordered to prepare the big old woolshed for a party.

The owner’s daughter had invited her girlfriends from boarding school in Melbourne to mark the approaching end of the holidays. Boys from other large properties were coming, too. There’d be a record player and dancing.

And there’d be a midnight hayride.

I had to clean the woolshed.

A fancy party and I was the hired help.

Farm handing had become too real.

I’d be able to hear the party from my malodorous outsider’s hut, for sure. Even Stan The Man wouldn’t be able to blot out the sound of rich kids having a ball.

I was moodily sweeping the woolshed’s floor and tacking coloured streamers to the beams when the owner’s daughter turned up.

She had an invitation in her hand.

For me! And she wanted help in choosing the music. Do you like The Rolling Stones or The Beatles, she inquired? Her friends liked The Monkees but (and she almost whispered this confidence) she thought they were lame.

Here, suddenly, was a first holiday job worth every farm gate that I’d laboriously painted.

The party was a triumph.

The owner’s daughter’s friends were fun and lovely in their teeth braces and giddy on the fruit punch the boys and I stiffened with surreptitious doses of rum.

I strutted as if I owned the woolshed.

And then came the hayride.

I got to lounge on hay bales surrounded by boarding school girls. The farm manager on his tractor dragged us though darkened paddocks on a trailer, his wife travelling behind in the ute, aiming the spotlight lest any funny business occurred.

And out of the dark, one of those girls grabbed me and crushed her lips on mine.

I got such a shock I leapt from the trailer, fearing the spotlight had caught us. I ran alongside until we got back to the woolshed. What madness had possessed me?

Later, I lay in my hut counting the what-ifs I’d passed over. Count Five’s Psychotic Reaction shrieked from the transistor, failing to drown the giggling in the shearers’ quarters where the girls were billeted.

“I feel so depressed, I feel so bad,” Count Five moaned.

So much for the summer of love, 1967.

I wanted to bash my 15-year-old farmhand’s thick head against something hard and feel the percussion of it rolling across the paddocks and into the night.

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.