Our Fruitful Record - Community
Communities developed around the small villages that were established in the early days of the Campbelltown region: Magill, Paradise, Athelstone and Campbelltown. Many early market gardening families continued to live and work in the area for several generations and this resulted in a stable community. Market gardening families knew each other and were often involved in the same church or in sporting clubs such as the football teams. An annual agricultural show was held at the Glen Roy Oval, Paradise from the 1920s until about the late 1940s and people exhibited their vegetables and fruit. The immigration of Italians after World War II who worked family market gardens added to the growth and diversity of the community. The long tradition of the community of primary producers built a strong foundation for the food culture for which Campbelltown Council is known today.
"… we had two milking cows, Mum and Dad, coming from Italy, they used to make cheeses and ricotta… I saw the transition from draft horse and tractors… we used to work the land with the draft horse and what else? Chicken, we used to grow ducks and we to also, in those days, you could grow pigs… to make our own sausages and smallgoods…" - Sam Mercorella
Pictured: Alfred James Smith Pierson with the house cows, Glynde Road (now Glynburn Road) Hectorville.
"…by the time I was 10 to 12 maybe, we got to do bits and pieces… there might have been hoeing, weeding, we got involved a bit in the watering because they used water from a bore and they ran water down a canvas channel alongside the ends of rows." - Margaret Emery
"And I used to do all the tractor work those days and used to plough, do all the things that we had to but… when I left school in ’62, I came back on the land." - Sam Mercorella
Pictured: Parade ‘We are the boys from Payneham’. James Benjamin Pierson (white suit), Alfred James Smith Pierson (on horse - five years old).
"The churches meant a lot, there was two churches in Athelstone. ... the top end church was the Gorge Church they called it. They had their congregation and we had our congregation ... just quite close to where the Athelstone Shopping Centre is today ... and came middle of January, early February, we’d have a picnic, and the two churches used to combine, and they used to load the trucks up, trucks with boards across for everybody to sit in the back of a truck. Twenty people or more, all sitting in the back of truck. We’d go down to Brighton, or Henley Beach or Glenelg, and we’d spend the day down there having a picnic, so the community was fairly, from my eyes, was very combined." - John Lomman
"(our father)... said that primary school education was good enough to work in a market garden, only things changed later on and we did a lot of reading in our young days and that sort of educated us in how to use all sorts of words and circumstances we didn’t learn at school." - Merv Ey
Pictured: Athelstone School, class photograph 1949. Fourth row, fifth left, Cyril Emery, eighth left, Robert Emery.
"Well, they worked long hours, didn’t they? And they were working five days plus they worked till dinner time, 12:00 pm they used to knock off and well, Sunday morning, a lot of them were church goers back in those days…" - Paul Emery
"I can remember as a small child, what is now the Campbelltown Oval was the Glenroy Oval, Dad was on a committee, a progress committee and a group of local growers used to meet down there to organise the trotting track ….... They used to have a Show once a year which was magic, ... all the growers used to have an exhibition of their produce, it all used to be judged, they had trotting, they had all horses in action, all the local growers used to get together on the progress committee and organise it all, and it was a huge event in Campbelltown. All the machinery sales people had their little displays of tractors etc.. It was a mini Adelaide Show, and it used to be one Saturday a year." - Jim Pierson
"My grandmother, she used to go to the abattoirs once a month. And she’d go around to the different growers and… they might have a little pig, piglets, they didn’t want or something, and she’d take them out to the abattoirs, and she had a little business." - John Lomman