About the Catchment Area : Creeks & Rivers

Field River memory
Writen by Bernard Doube, this piece is a recollection of Bernard's memories of the Field River in the 1950s.

The Field River rose in coastal farmland and joined the sea at Hallett Cove. It never ran dry, not even during the hot, dry Adelaide summer and so we boys could always swim and paddle our rafts in the small brackish lagoon that separated the Field River from the sea.

Only during winter, after rain, did the water flow directly into the sea. At other times a wide sand bar separated the fresh from the salty, the river water flowing underground to the sea through the sand. We knew this, because when we dug a well in the sand bar, the water was fresh, not salty.

At it broadest, the lagoon was about 5 metres wide, with a mud bank on the uphill side, and sand on the sea side. Upstream, both banks of the lagoon were covered with bull rushes in which families of water rats and moorhens lived out their precarious lives, hunted by foxes, dogs and small boys.

On the uphill side of the lagoon, erosion had cut an embankment just high enough to allow us to pass unseen along the secret path between bull rush and cliff face.

Exploring the outside of the lagoon was easy, but fear denied us the hidden world upstream between the walls of bull rushes. We were poor swimmers and the thought of being trapped up-stream was the stuff of nightmares. We needed a raft.

Upstream beyond the bull rushes, the river entered a deep winding valley and then faded into sheep and wheat paddocks. There a huge clump of sisal cactus grew, with long straight poles growing up the middle of each spiky plant. We boys cut down the poles, lugged them overland and lashed them together into a raft to explore the upper reaches of the lagoon.

The hinterland provided another unexpected joy for young boys. A foxhunt with red riding jackets, black hats, shiny horses, foxhounds, and bugles. They were our own home-grown royalty. Mr Sheidow, a local farmer and Master of the Hunt, had installed a series of wooden jumps over his barb wire paddock fences to provide the venue for and an annual hunting festival. Foxes were unreliable, so on the evening before of the hunt, the farm ute would drag a dead sheep in a wire cage along the route of the hunt to provide a scent trail for the hounds.

The day that we collected the sisal poles, we saw the ute laying of the trail. What an opportunity. We raced home, collected a Hessian bag of rotting fish and returned. The ute had disappeared so we laid our own trail in a large circle inside a paddock, Next morning we returned to observe that foxhounds clearly loved the smell of dead fish above all else and spent an hour or so running the hunt around in a circle in our paddock.

That was forty years ago. Now the bulldozers have been and gone, and Hallett Cove is a coastal residential suburb called Sheidow Park.

Bernard Doube, SA, 20 April 2004