Prepared to Pick
A Pea Picker’s Basket
Born five years after the first World War (1914-1918), Lil Jordan had already travelled through childhood and adolescence, married and had her first child by the time she came to live in Iluka with her husband Jim in the late-1940s. With the strains of WWII (1939-1945) having slowly eased, optimistic times were returning.
Lil had come of age, and to Iluka, during a period of change – including positive change for many women. With thousands of men away at war, new opportunities had opened to women, at least for its duration, which included doing paid work. Having paid work gave to women first-time, or greater, economic and social freedoms.
Nearby Lil’s new home at Iluka, on the fertile Chatsworth and Woodford Islands of the Clarence River / Breimba, peas and other cash crops were grown by settler farmers. During the war, the farmers here relied on local women to pick their cash vegetable crops and help with the hand-harvesting of sugar cane. This experience led to an ongoing reliance on women to perform local seasonal crop picking work after the war ended.
Lil was one of the women who did seasonal crop harvesting work for Clarence River farmers in the 1950s. Together with her fellow women workers, she took a river punt and this cane basket to go pea picking on Chatsworth Island.
In the basket Lil carried what she needed for the day – including a Thermos for ‘Smoko’ and sandwiches for lunch. And, as a precious photo of Lil and her fellow femme workers shows, baskets like Lil’s were popular pea picking paraphernalia.
