How fortunate can one be to have journeyed through so many different changes in life, to have been born into a life style with no hint of what was yet ahead.

A life in the country where the community consisted of mostly relatives, who were mostly farmers, life was simple and to us, uncomplicated.

Our bread was brought to the door by the friendly baker, sometimes the bread was still warm and always fresh, our groceries were often delivered by the baker as well, if the order was not too big. There was an occasional swagman on the road who for some reason always seemed to call by my grandma’s where I was staying, she would give him some food to keep him going for while, he would then wonder off down the road into the wilderness in the hope there would be a job for him somewhere.

I would always look to the day when I would hear the tinker of little bells which indicated the beautiful covered and very colourful wagon of the Indian Hawker was on it’s way down the road.

Oh, how I loved that beautiful wagon, filled with beautiful smells of perfume and spices, tooth paste and combs and seemingly anything a girl could want, conjouring up pictures in my mind of India a far away country filled with pretty things. I can still feel the cool breeze on my face and hear the steady clip clop of our big brown horse as we sat in our beautiful shiny black jinker on the way to visit our cousins on Saturday nights, and I loved it when he ” bolted ” once we turned the corner to go home.

Now how different it is, the community is so large now it is almost impossible to to know but a few, the farms have been cut up into smaller blocks and there are many more houses. We now have to visit the Supermarket for our groceries and bread, and no one knows what a Swagman was. There is no nice Indian man in a beautiful covered wagon, we now have department stores filled with lovely treasures from India and many other countrys, but no magical thoughts of far away places but instead we can now visit them. No Jinker to visit people in but a nice shiny car to keep up with the pace of our life today, which is going so fast it all seems to be just a dream.