Queen Sandy

Sandy Davies went from being a ‘busted ass and broke’ lamb farmer, to Queen of the Watermelons. She’s battled floods, drought and backbreaking work but never fails to laugh through it all. We find out how gigantic watermelons can get and reminisce about the golden age of Chinchilla's 'Miss Melons’ competition. 

Brought to you by The Queensland Writers Centre and supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.

Produced by F&K Media.

Transcript

 Telling Our Stories to the World is a series from Queensland Writer Center. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast was made. 

Welcome to Queens of the Land, the podcast about women carving out their best life on the land. I'm Jane Hultgren. And I'm Helen Roche. Helen, what's the most physically demanding job you've ever done?

Well, as a general rule, I'm kind of an office person. I don't do much physical, but probably back in the day when I worked in a pub in London moving around kegs and stuff like that. Moving around kegs? Yes. Yeah. Nice. So how do you reckon you'd go picking fruit in the sun in the middle of summer and get this, not just any fruit?

We're talking watermelons in Chinchilla, so they're heavy and it's like 40 degrees. Well, for a start, I don't really like watermelon, so it's probably not a job I'd be choosing, but I happy That's okay. You paid to pick, not paid to eat well. Fair enough. I mean, I'd certainly be working on my biceps, but, oh,  I think I am a bit of a princess.

I don't think I would like that at all. Yeah, I reckon I would be like, oh yeah, I'll do that two watermelons in and then just run. No, actually no. I'd be too puffed to run, I’d swiftly power walk away. Uh, today we're gonna meet one tough lady. So it's hard labor. It's hard. It's picking melons manually.

We've seen young ladies lose up to 10 kilos and turn themselves into lean, mean fighting machines by the end of the season. We had an English couple once. I thought we'd killed them. They got here in 44 degree heat for the first week. The young man fell asleep in the shower. He was that buggered. I might add, she was more of a goer than him!

So this is Sandy. If Chinchilla had a female icon, it would be Sandy, Queen of the Watermelons, and she's got this beautiful, infectious laugh. She is so down to earth and so funny and so passionate. And, uh, she told me that she worked at the schools. Um, and I sent a picture of us to my mate and she's like, oh, Mrs Davies, she's an icon. Um, and yes, she's is. 

On the day I interviewed her Sandy was wearing this fantastic outfit. It was this shirt covered in like watermelons and these little watermelon earrings because she was getting ready for Chinchilla Melon Festival. Oh my god. You're gonna need to stand up for us.

Okay. So we can, we can get the full effect. That is funky. I know. Really funky. Yep. Half of Chinchilla’s... I love it. Half of Chinchilla’s already wearing them.  It's like Christmas. You put the decorations up like a month early. Oh my gosh. The town's on fire already. The vibes are here and people are starting to, you know, think about floats and shop decorations and shirts.

What is the Chinchilla Melon Festival? Oh my gosh. How do you even describe the Chinchilla Watermelon Festival? So the whole town, uh, gets together every second year. There's a parade, there's a beach party. They literally dump a bunch of sand in the main street and throw this beach party. They judge who grew the biggest watermelon.

They have watermelon skiing and it's, yeah, Chinchilla Christmas. We have free melon feasts. There's movies for the kids. There's photo competitions. Uh, the art gallery has competitions. Saturday night is a free for all concert. This year it's Kate Sobrano, and honestly, by Sunday afternoon, chinchilla is back to normal.

The mess is all cleaned up. The QGC have started pulling down all the tents and everything, and you basically wouldn't even know there's been a festival. It's that good.  It's a smooth oiled machine, I tell you! It happens every two years because it's bigger than Ben Hur. Although it started small. I think we had 2,500 people visit in the town, but now up to 20,000 at its peak.

I've gotta get myself to the Chinchilla Melon Festival. I am sold. I wanna see, I wonder how big the biggest melon is. Oh, like how many kilos is a giant melon? How many do you think? I don't know. Like a normal melon maybe is three or four kilos. I don't know. It's gotta be at least 10. There was this one year an out of towner came from somewhere.

Oh really? Out of towner.  Yeah. Came out with this big melon on his truck. All undercover kind of thing? Yes. Not the last festival. The festival before an out of towner from Gatten came. And he had it in his ute and he had it all covered over and it was all clandestine. And then he unveiled this thing and it was humongous and it was this hundred kilo, massive thing.

So my son Matthew is so competitive.  The horns come out. And the next year, next festival, it grew here, right? I'm looking at the site behind my house, every day for probably three months, five o'clock in the morning I'd hear his Land Cruiser go past. Every afternoon at five o'clock, I'd hear his Land Cruiser.

So he was checking on it so much. Anyway, we knew it was a big sucker on the day of the picking. You don't pick 'em until the last minute. So then we picked it and we knew then that we had a beauty. All the other growers were saying to Matt, god, we don't care if we don't win, but by hell this prize better not get go outta town again. Weighed in at 90 kilos and we knew then that that was gonna be hard to beat, so the prize went back to us, but it was absolutely hilarious watching the trauma, the trauma of that weigh in was  hilarious.  

It's amazing. Chinchilla ever recovered from that. A hundred kilos. I, I was so naive in my guesstimation of it's gotta be at least 10 kilos.

I know. What was I thinking? That is enormous. That is.  Just crazy. That's bigger than me. So, Jane, have you been? Yes. I went in my second year of teaching in Dalby. Big parties, big floats, and there was lots of alcoholic watermelon flavored drinks. Nice. Uh, one thing I do remember, Helen, this memory sticks out in my mind of being at that beach party as a young lass.

They had all of these different sort of competitions, wood chopping, there was some rodeo things. And then the big event was now it's time for Miss Melons, not watermelons. We are talking ladies melons. Ladies melons. Nice. That's right. And each Miss Mellon contestant got to step forward and show their chest produce and everyone cheered  and I don't know… Did you go in that competition? No, no. Thank you so much, um, for thinking that I might,  but alas, no. 

I had to hit Sandy up about the Miss Melons Competition. They're not meant to do that, but we've got no control over that.  In days gone by, there was a ball and there was a Miss Mellon contest, and all the girls had strut their stuff and I'll never forget, one young Chinchilla lady had nice assets. She come up to two of the growers, one being my husband, and she didn't win. And she lifted up her shirt and she said, they're not winners. These are. And my husband nearly had an absolute coronary on the spot. 

Oh man, that cracked me up. So you can see that she is really passionate about the Melon Fest, but unfortunately poor Sandy this year, she's actually missing it, which she's so bummed about 'cause she has to go in for surgery 'cause she's stuffed her back. So she's devastated to miss this year's festival. I asked Sandy if she was at the first one in 1994.

No, we weren't. We were probably stuck out on the farm, busted ass and broke and not,  not with a cent to drive to town with. Busted ass and broke and living on mutton chops. They were sheep farmers, barely scraping by before they made the pivot to melons. We'd heard that some Chinchilla people were making some money from melons, so we decided to have a dabble with it out there on the farm.

We didn't have any equipment. My husband just, he's one clever cookie, and he welded up a little four bin trailer and we had a little old orange tractor and we started growing a trial plot and it went pretty well. So then the next year we just expanded a little bit and it just went on from there. That's how we got into it, basically trying to battle that 22% interest loan thing.

'cause we could only ever pay off the interest. We could never pay off the principle. So it was a financial thing. So he was shearing all day. And  would come home and we'd grow the melons and, and we'd pick them over the weekend so that he could still get an off-farm income. Off- farm income seems to be a really common thing across everyone, doesn't it?

You're not making enough on the farm, so you've gotta do a few things. I mean, that is backbreaking and 22% interest, I can't even imagine. I know how hard that would be, but she didn't let it get them down either. They just kept thinking, what can we do? How can we work harder? How can we make ends meet?

Mm-hmm. So Sandy is originally from a town called Brigalow, which is even smaller than Chinchilla. So going to high school in Chinchilla was eye-opening for her. Oh gosh, yeah.  Oh, the little old innocent me hitting high school. I nearly died. Oh my God. There were people, more people, um, different subjects. It was like a place to become a ratbag in and get into trouble and do all sorts of different things.

So, yeah. Chinchilla was like the big smoke after Brigalow. Wow.  So just, I went to Brigalow school, then Chinchilla High, and that's where I met my childhood sweetheart. What grade? Um, grade nine.  Oh, in what class? Maths.  I was useless and he was good at it, and he still is, and I'm still useless  and yeah, so we balance each other out perfectly.

Isn't that beautiful? Oh, that's so lovely. The way she talked about him too. You can hear it in her voice. You know, she's giggling like a little schoolgirl. She is. She's taking her back there. Grade nine. That's cool. They had two little boys who were hearing impaired and the family worked their guts out trying to survive. 

That's exactly right.  But that's what we did, darling. That's what we did. Yeah, no wonder your back's buggered though. Yeah, I know.  I know. When I think of the equipment back then, like having to just manually load melons like we did back then, we didn't have what's called a boom and it's a conveyor belt, but back then all we had was picking them up and loading them directly onto the trailer.

Now the bins are only like half, half my height. Well, back then they were about a foot above my height, so we'd have to actually throw them.  Up and over. So you'd have one in the bin, one throwing, and that's how you'd load the bins. So  even back then, we'd make, like the boys that helped, they were only little whipper snappers, so they'd stand on a box and they'd pass like me, the melon down to the bins. What a, what a fam family bonding activity. Yeah, that's, that's why we're still so close and we're still bonding in the melon patch. That is the worst kind of basketball game I have ever heard of. Can you imagine?  Wow. No,  I can’t actually.  Can't imagine, but it actually sounds like it, it made them, yeah as a family and the way that she talks about her boys now as, as men and fathers, she says that it's, it's that kind of all mucking in everyone doing it and playing their part out on the farm that really gave them the best work ethic and the best bond. So, yeah.  I really was inspired by that. Yeah, absolutely.

So I went home and I tried to, uh, get Lucy and Eli to pass me melons. They were on their iPads, so they said no. We played fruit ninja. Yeah, some kind of farm game on their iPads. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Yeah.  In the aircon.  So Sandy says, even though it was hard on the farm, they loved their life because we went through drought and feeding sheep and, and trying to grow melons. But I still say it's the best days of my life.

Out there. Well, we were broke, but we had enough and good support networks. I miss the creek. I miss every afternoon taking the boys down there and cray fishing and stuff like that. We would walk and walk and walk out there along the creeks and love nature, love wildlife, birds and stuff. But the fact that it was simple, we never had outside influence on us.

It was just me and the little boys and, and my husband and our farm and our pets. Recently we had the chance to go back there. So the minute we drove in the front gate, it was the most amazing day that we've spent. It was like we were going home and we went up into the shearing shed and it was all the same and like we had some terrible times out there, like the government come up with this scheme. There was too many sheep across Australia and we had to pick a number, shoot, bury, and they would pay us to compensate us to bring the numbers down. And I'll never forget little Matty when we are drafting off these sheep that day.

And we sort of told him what was happening and he, he just looked at us and he said, Mummy, I love all the sheep.  And on that day we went back out there, we looked at where that big pit was. And where we dozed it over and and did all that. But it was part of our journey and it's made us that resilient. But honestly, going back out there was like going home. 

Oh, that's incredible. I mean, that's the word, isn't it? Resilience. We are talking about a cost of living crisis, but this is a whole other level. You know when when the little kids are having to shoot their sheep and dig a hole. You can see a little boy like saying, but I love all of those sheep. Yeah. And then she did too. The whole family did. But they did it. They did it, and they got through it. And even though there were hard times and there was sadness and there was grief, that feeling of being home and those being the best days of her life. I found that so beautifu. And all of those things make you a rounded human being.

So we can't just have the good, we've gotta have the bad and the bad is what kind of you look back on and go, I made it through that and it's where I am now because of that. Totally. Yeah. Just sucks at the time. So with melon farming, what I learned was, it's like not only the long hot days, the picking seasons can go for six months of the year and the market is all over the shop.

Melon farming's very volatile. Um, you break even a lot. Sometimes you're even behind most years, you have a little, you can have a semitrailer worth $4,000 one day. 2000 the next or 20,000 the next. So no matter what work we do, it all depends on the market. You're also at the mercy of droughts and floods.

When the 2011 floods hit, they absolutely got smashed. Oh, what a nightmare. It was a bumper crop. Really good. At the height of the flood, we got kids to walk the Chinchilla railway line to meet with our car. Who took them to the Condamine… Who put them in a boat… Who got 'em over the river…Who went to ….

Somebody had a car there for us. We drove them to the next creek. Same thing. Boat. Get 'em across. We tried so desperately that year to get some of our melons away. Never seen anything like that mess. We had everything bogged to the eyeballs. The crop had all been washed away. All our infrastructure, we had pumps underwater.

We just emotionally, physically, and just lost it. That that year we nearly lost it. So that flood was just an absolute nightmare. But in saying that, some of the funniest, funniest incidents happened that year, like crossing that creek, one of our little watermelon pickers had his, uh, esky in one hand and his water bottle and the other, and, uh, Bern remembers him floating past him, getting caught in the water. Just grabbed him by the shirt and, and pulled him back to literally saved him from floating away. We still talk about that, and we didn't ever tell his parents till many, many, many years later.  That is such a farming story, isn't it? Just, just to lose it all and then to be able to laugh through it all and he is gonna float off and die.

Little watermelon pickers with his esky in one hand and his water bottle going, what is happening. And getting the kids out. It's just, it's like, it's a matter of fact story, isn't  it? Yeah, absolutely. It's, we just walked down the railway and then we got on a boat, and then we got in a car, and then we got in a boat like I'd be curled up in the fetal position going, oh my God. Oh my gosh. Exactly. And it's always when it is, like she says, a bumper crop. Like it was a good one. It was a good one. It was. They were getting, they were gonna catch a break and then yeah, that happens. She's grateful though, for what melon farming and living on the land has taught her.

Problem solving, calmness to a point. Um, if one thing doesn't work, we'd find out a different way of doing things. Um, resilience. Not the end of the world. Hey guys, we've still got food on the table. We've got clothes on our back. We might get away to the coast for a weekend. Once a year. Made us patient. We learn to wait for the, the good outcomes.

It's like hail crops with farms and stuff. There's nothing you can do about it. Shake yourself off, get going. It's not the place for the faint hearted, my darling. Not a place at all. And when you hear how hard it is and what they're up against, it's not surprising that they're one of three growers left in the district. There was 30. 

So our melon industry's hanging on by thread here, but because we got the giant melon and we got the festival and determined people, I think the legacy of that will live on, I'm hoping, anyway,  I'm hoping.  It's like all farming. It carries a risk. We're gamblers. That's what we are.  We strike it good some years. 

Then I book a holiday before he buys a new tractor. One year I went and bought what called a tractor ring, which gave everyone in Chinchilla the laugh of a century because Bern went off and bought himself this big kickass tractor and I thought, that's it. I'm getting a tractor ring before he spends all the money.

So the girls laugh about this tractor ring.  That's the tractor ring they say. Coming through another melon season. I'm definitely think of I'm due for a new tractor ring. Farming, it takes a, a certain kind of person. You've, you really do have to be able to just, you know, as she said, get up and get on with it when it's not working.

'cause I'm, I'm kind of a person that will dwell on all the things that went wrong and you can't be that. I think it's like you have to be mindful really, don't you? You live in the moment, there's nothing I can do about the past. The future is not in my control. I can only be right here, right now doing what it is.

Yes. That's actually a really interesting point. It's like she says they're gamblers, but I think they're actually like Buddhist monks. Really? Yeah. Aren't they're? No, I agree. 

Next week on Queens of the Land. Imagine having a medical emergency while your husband's on a tractor hundreds of kilometers away. When the kids were little, it was like being a single mom, you know, because he would be on the tractor until eight or night at night, and then the kids are in bed by the time he gets home.

You are listening to Queens of the Land. A season of the Telling Our Stories to the World podcast. Brought to you by the Queensland Writers Center and supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland. Produced by F&K Media.