This is where I grew up. It was once an apple orchard. Then someone removed most of the apple trees and planted plums, cherry plums, peaches, crab apples and pine trees. When I arrived at the age of six it was twelve acres of paradise for a small child.
The house is still there but the land was carved up into housing blocks thirty years ago. The township of Yerrinbool is now unrecognisable. Although the population has grown considerably the school and the General Store no longer function.
Yerrinbool is situated in the Southern Highlands of NSW, mid way between Mittagong and Bargo. It began as a railway town and straggled along beside the Hume Highway which stretched from Sydney to Melbourne. Long since bypassed, it remained attractive to visitors because of its many apple orchards. They too have mostly vanished.
We will go back to a time when children poured out of the school onto the dusty playground, when trains stopped at the award winning railway station, when milkshakes at the General Store were eleven pence halfpenny and when Sunday School was held each week at the local hall.
This was the 1950s. It was a time when my mother would put on her hat and gloves and walk carefully in high heels to the General Store. The toilet was out the back and emptied by the night man. The milk was left in the billy at the gate and the meat and vegetables arrived once a week in a truck. There was no TV, only a wireless. The water for a bath was heated in a copper in the laundry by lighting a fire underneath.
Why the Curry Apple Orchard? Well, you know how various phones and tablets leave a message at the bottom of an email – “sent from your marvellous idevice”. I wanted something more original and as I have many products of the Apple variety my husband suggested an orchard of Apples plus our name. Some people have asked if I live in an orchard and I have to reply that I don’t but would love to return once more to the apple orchard of my childhood.
The Curry Apple Orchard 