The blessed gift of good-hearted neighbours

We arrived at our home by the coast weighed by the thought of all the mowing and weed pulling that would be required.

We’d been absent for weeks, work and city life swallowing us. Spring was well advanced on the back of rainstorms, causing an explosion of new growth.

Good neighbours in the country are invaluable.Credit: Tamara Voninski

As we rolled through the front gates, a perfectly mown lawn greeted us. We knew who must have granted us this happy gift.

Our next-door neighbour, an easy-going fellow with a fine beard whose generous nature means his large back shed regularly fills with his mates for such ritual events as Thirsty Thursdays, had wheeled out his lawn mower in our absence.

I called out to him over the fence. He was bashful, waving away our thanks. We delivered him a slab of stubbies, and he was adamant he couldn’t accept such a thing until I insisted it was simply a contribution to him and the boys for the next Thirsty Thursday.

Good neighbours are treasures.

My grandfather learned the truth of it in the 1920s.

His father, my great-grandfather, had died in a car crash, his jalopy turning upside down and pinning him just up the road from the family farm. It meant, everyone in the district knew, that the farm would pass naturally to my grandfather, a young man then.

He was only a few years returned from the Western Front where he’d been wounded twice in ruinous battles during the Great War.

Everyone might have assumed the farm would be willed to him … but where was his father’s will?

Tony Wright’s grandparents on their wedding day.

Mysteriously, it went “missing”.

There had been dissension in the family ever since the war had ended and my grandfather returned to Australia with an English bride. She had been his nurse in a large military hospital after he’d copped his second series of gunshot wounds.

Initially, she was welcomed into the family.

But then it was discovered she was a Catholic.

Bigotry was buried deep in the hearts of many in the farming districts of Victoria’s south-west last century.

My grandfather and his family were Presbyterians, only a couple of generations out of Donegal, Ireland. To Ulster’s Presbyterians, Catholics were scorned at best, seen as the enemy at worst, even halfway across the world.

Why, even a few years previously in Australia during the war, hadn’t Catholics led the campaign to prevent conscription, undermining the war effort?

What, my grandfather’s sisters wanted to know, was their soldier brother thinking, bringing a Catholic into the family?

What he was thinking, of course, was that he was in love with a fine woman, and the Great War had stripped him of any notion that bigotry should play a part in the affairs of the heart.

Yet even one of his brothers stomped across the paddocks from his neighbouring farm to declare that he wouldn’t darken his doorstep again, brother or not (though the hot threat cooled with the passing of years).

And so, into this fevered atmosphere, the legal will that would determine the succession of the family farm disappeared. No one ever determined what might have come of it.

My grandfather’s father had, in effect, died intestate. And the family wasn’t about to ease the way for the property to go directly to my grandfather and his Catholic wife.

The farm was put up for auction.

It was a fine property of rich pasture, high and well-drained and graced with a homestead and treed park admired for miles around.

There would not have been a neighbouring farmer who wouldn’t want to add the place to their spread.

But on auction day, all those neighbours came and stood silently with their hands in their pockets and kept them there when the bidding opened.

My grandfather made the only bid. It was below what any competitive auction would have secured, but he would still struggle for years to pay off what was supposed to have been his from the start.

The neighbouring farmers, the family story goes, never asked for thanks or future favours or even spoke aloud about why they had stood around a juicy auction with their hands deep in their pockets.

They were simply country people who could smell an injustice a mile off.

Besides, a lot of them had fought in Europe with my grandfather only a few years before, and some of the older men had lost sons there.

By declining to compete for something they figured was another man’s inheritance, they were quietly correcting the balance of things.

They were good neighbours.

My grandparents raised five daughters and a son on the property, and when the time came, it was passed down to the next generation. And every Sunday, the old boy drove my grandmother to the little Catholic church down the road, not caring what anyone thought.

I don’t know if anyone would attend an auction for a home in today’s ravening property market and, driven by the principle of fairness, keep their hands in their pockets despite the chance of a bargain in the offing.

Meanwhile, I’ll settle for the neighbours we are lucky enough to live among down by the coast, where I can return from a spell away to find the lawn mown for no reason other than plain, good-hearted generosity.