BERRY, NSW

Berry is a small town on the south coast of NSW with a lot more cows than people, about 2 hours drive from Sydney. I lived there until I was 14 with nothing much to do apart from playing cricket, football and tennis, climbing the local mountain, catching rabbits, swimming in the creek when it was hot, building dams in the creek when it rained, riding horses or bikes or billy carts, chopping wood for the fire and the bath, kicking a football over the house, building tunnels through the ferns, fighting with kids we didn’t like, and so on. We had no TV, no computer, no refrigerator, no hot water and no sewage system but we did have a wireless set that brought excitement in the form of the test cricket (which we usually won), the Davis Cup (the USA sometimes beat us) and the adventures of superman. Milk was delivered by a horse and cart, and so was the bread, cream was made with a hand centrifuge at the butter factory down the end of the street, eggs came from the chooks in Tom Lidbetter’s back yard, and we grew our own peas, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce, onions, oranges, mandarins, lemons, peaches and plums in our back yard. We also had a persimmon tree but I didn’t find out that they were delicious until I was 14. There were no street numbers since the postman knew where everyone lived and our phone number was 23. It is now an 8-digit number in case the population increases to 100 million.

Berry mountain, and view of Berry & ocean from the mountain.