The Chinese market gardeners of Winton

We rocked into Winton calling in, again, at the musical fence on the outskirts of town, where Pete gave us a rousing encore on the drums.   

The musical instruments made from any resonating cast-offs have grown and changed over the years since we first visited.  This is now more of a musical venue, than a fence.  It now has stall seats and a set of bleachers in the dress circle, for larger groups, so folk are still enjoying it.  

One of the locals has arranged his old vehicles, including his ancient carts, in a rusty row all along his fenceline in town.  He sign says he has 'Dun travellin' so has hung up his wheels, ready to retire.

Wille Mar never had time to retire.  His fruit and vege stand at the back of town was one of the longest running market gardens  in Australia.  It was his life and his livelihood.

Willie’s Chinese name was Mar Way, but  he was only ever called Willie Mar in Winton and thereabouts.  His story is one of the highlights of old Winton town.   

As a young man at the beginning of the 20th century Willie worked on stations in and around Winton cooking and gardening.  He started growing vegetables on a little plot of dry land on the edge of Winton, where he eventually built himself a house and a storage shed, too.   

He came from Zhongshan in China where he had a wife, but he rarely had the funds to go home. When he did visit for a lengthy stay in 1929, a son was born, Mar Yen Shoo, but Willie had to return to Winton to run his vege patch and did not see his son until he turned up in Winton some twenty years later.  

Young Willie Mar came to town in 1949, without any English at all, and knowing little of his father.  He had five busy years with him, though, learning everything he could about market gardening before Willie Mar senior died in his garden one day, at the venerable age of 86 years.  

Young Willie continued on about his father’s business. 

His home was spartan: corrugated iron, without electricity for yet another 40 years, so, no heating in winter, even.  His furniture was minimal: his cooling fan a rusty 20 litre drum filled with water, covered with a hessian sack.  Evaporative.  

His vegetables, too, were stored in dark spaces covered with moist jute bags to keep them hydrated and fresh.   He recycled newspaper into little paper sacs glued together with flour and water gum— little containers for his precious vegetables so that his customers could comfortably carry them from his store.  

He repaired his father’s  irrigation channels and maintained his water ponds.  There were six of these set in two rows of three apiece down the garden. Originally these were lined with wood, with steps built down into the pond, then up out the other side.  Willie would water the garden using a long pole over his shoulders and two watering cans hanging from each end.    He would step down into the first pond, fill up his watering cans,  step out the other side laden like an ox, then water two rows of vegetable by pouring from the home made spout.   He would step down into the next pond and continue it all over again, many times a day so that his plants stayed well watered despite the relentless sun.  

He grew vegetables of all varieties, even bok chop and gai choy, harvesting what seeds he could for his next planting season.  These he kept in recycled tins, pots or paper bags in his storage shed.  

In season his ponds held fish, crayfish and even inland crabs.   He boiled peanuts for the children who visited and  gave away turpentine mangos free from a tree his father had planted in the centre of the garden.  He jerry-built cages for the roosters with twists of wire and corrugated iron, attempting to keep them away from the hens at times.  “You like chicken?” he would ask in his tortured English as customers came through the shop door.   Orders he promptly delivered in his utes which were held together with chicken wire and remnant bicycle tyres.  The locals kept driving to a minimum when Wilie was doing his rounds; he drove without looking left or right.  

He wanted no wife, he said.  He went back home to China for a visit in 1980, but returned to Winton a few months later to his beloved vegetable garden and his customers who treated him with great affection.  

Willie died in 2007.  

He is buried in Winton.  Close to his father.

West of Winton a recycled mailbox caught our fancy.  Just bits of metal recycled, drums, buckets and rods, then painted up.

I think Willie would have approved.