Yesterday we started re-organising the large farm machinery as part of our re-interpretation within ‘Clarrie’s Shed’ to create: ‘Home grown – from slab hut to dining room’.

A simple task - we just had to move out a stripper and winnower and bring in a sulky.

Sounds easy, but the domino effect of this was to:

Two items were beyond our volunteer manpower to push up hill, so we used my 4WD to tow them.

It was interesting to actually handle and move these items. Some had brakes or steering or internal moving parts connected to the main wheels so we had to consider how they actually worked.

The stripper has metal ‘fingers’ to strip the heads of wheat, with a beater forcing the heads into a hopper and then unloading onto the ground. The wheat heads were then shovelled into the winnower, whose revolving threshing drum was turned by hand to separate the grain from the heads. This was then cleaned through shaking sieves and a blower, delivering the clean wheat to bags via an elevator. Our versions of these two machines are from the 1880s.

Gertie’s sulky is a single horse drawn cart - the property of Gertrude Alice Gleeson (1896-1988) who ran a small dairy herd and sold the milk locally from this sulky.