Betty Barton’s Dream
My mother, Betty Barberis (nee Barton), grew up on a dairy farm named Kent Meadows, at Gundowring in the Kiewa Valley, Victoria.
She was born in 1927. Her paternal grandmother was an artist and musician who had studied under the Italian painter, Nerli, in New Zealand. She was a cultured woman living with her son’s brood of children and retreated into the world of her paints, harp and violin, a world the little grandchildren viewed from afar.
Mum, started drawing with burnt chicken bones and charcoal stumps on the concrete floor of the dairy in between chores in the cow yard. Her other Grandmother, a brilliant business minded lady, owned the Bogong Hotel at Towonga. Mum’s father Roderick Barton, had trained in carpentry and built bungalows out the back of the old hotel. Many Australian artists, Arthur Streeton, Septimus Power etc. were lured to the hotel by the view of Mount Bogong, the moody high country light , saturating Australia’s second tallest mountain, the verdant valley below fringed by sweeping willows dipping into the deep trout pools. The artist’s paid Grandma Hore in paintings. They painted and fished. Mum watched them with interest.
If Mum wasn’t helping in the cow yard she was helping at the hotel.
When the Second World War came her father was the first in the area to volunteer, when his troop were deployed to Malaysia, the army wouldn’t let grandpa leave Australia as he had twelve children. Grandpa was incensed and left the army and joined the air force, where he served in Sale for the rest of the war. Mum’s mother, who never drove except a horse and buggy, was left with the farm and the children.
Mum aged 14, in Form 2, and her brother Ken, 16, left school to run the farm. Mum had dreamed of being a teacher and often prayed to God to help her. She loved the farm years, she said it taught her she could turn her hand to most things and she could work out how to solve varying issues. A land army girl was sent to the farm to help. At one stage mum was ploughing down on the flat, a draught horse pulling the plough. As she stood on the plough for a ride, the horse was spooked by a snake and took off! Mum balanced above the iron teeth of the machine, as the huge horse lunged up the flat. She hung on for dear life and never told her mother about the wild ride.
Mum decided she wanted to paint in oils and set upon a scheme to raise Rhode Island Red chickens and butcher them for market.
Mum couldn’t chop their heads off, so enlisted her mother, Dolly Barton, to the woodblock! Mum scalded and plucked and cleaned the birds. Mum raised seventeen pounds after a year and bought her paint box, which she used for the rest of her life.
Mum was a member of the Young Farmer’s League and raised and judged calves as part of the program. There was a Young Farmer’s competition where one raised a cow and kept a visual journal of the endeavor. After the work of the day, which began before dawn and finished after dark, mum worked by the light of the kerosene light and painted her project book over the year of the project. It was entered into the competition and the best works where displayed at the Royal Melbourne Show. Mum’s Project Book won best work. The Minister of Education saw the work and awarded mum a scholarship to become a Manual Arts Teacher.
Mum began her Manual Arts Course in 1946 in Wangaratta. She had only completed Form Two and went on to have a long career as an Art Teacher in Victorian Schools. In 2013 she donated her project book and her Wangaratta manuscripts to the Victorian State Library. In the materials donated is the correspondence from the Minister of Education.
Mum died in November 2013 and is buried at the Kiewa Cemetery in mum’s beautiful and beloved Kiewa Valley.