I’m just a kid from the sticks

When I was ten years old, my family moved 300 kilometres east to settle closer to the coast.  We moved from a 2,500-hectare property where my father was a share-farmer to a 4-hectare rural block.  My father went to work as a bricklayer’s labourer and later as a security guard. Mum went from being a farmer’s wife to a housewife. 

The actual move itself must have looked like a circus convoy.  Dad led the way in a truck with a cattle crate on its back. All our family’s possessions were in that crate and the family’s pet baby kangaroo was in a hessian bag on the floor of the Bedford.  My Pop in his little green Hillman was next.  His passenger was my Nan.  Mum drove the family’s station wagon; a red and chrome Ford Falcon filled to overflowing with kids, chooks, cats, guinea pigs and dogs.    I still recall my utter embarrassment when we stopped midway for fuel. When the hens poked their head out of the crates to look around I tucked mine in so no one would notice me.

My new school was smaller than the one we had left behind but this time we could walk or ride our bikes. While I made plenty of friends, I always felt a little different.  My first ten years in the bush had not prepared me for pop culture; especially the latest music and fashion.  Three years later I made the daunting transition from the little primary school of 100 to attend the nearest high school with over 1000 students.  This time living twenty kilometres out of town on a rural block meant I was labelled as ‘a kid from the sticks’.  I wore this label as a defect.   

It has occurred to me recently that I have been fighting this label for the past 35 years.  Leaving home, going to university and living in Brisbane and then interstate I have tried to shake off this lingering tag of being a ‘kid from the sticks’.

Last year, my job took me inland and west of the Central Queensland coast.  I was surprised by my tears one day as I was driving down a narrow country road. The landscape was nostalgic of the farmland I had known the first ten years of my life.  I think a little of my heart was healed that day as I realised that I was first ‘a kid from the bush’ and I could be proud of being ‘a kid from the sticks’ too.

I feel sad that I felt embarrassed about who I was growing up.  I wonder if things would have been different if the family move could have been re-framed?  Maybe I was (and am) just a sensitive kid.  One thing I know is that it is never too late to revisit childhood memories and re-frame them.  My story may not be yours, but I am no less or no more because I was first a ‘kid from the bush’ and then ‘a kid from the sticks’.  Perhaps I have been resisting too long and the saying is true : “you can take the girl from the country, but you can’t take the country out of the girl’! 

Photo by Mark Galer