When I was a teenager in the 1950s, my parents always took my sister and me, in December, to a relative's farm about 300 miles from Sydney.
The journey took most of the day, chiefly on unsealed roads. The farm was over 3,000 acres, and around 20 miles from the nearest town.
There was no power to the house, which meant no fans to alleviate the intense heat. Flies and mosquitoes were abundant, and thousands of them were unattractively embedded in the sheets of sticky paper
