© Charlie Hayward, 2025.
One of the great disadvantages of suburban life is the lack of the proliferation of jams, pickles, and bottled fruit and vegetables in the Fowlers Vacola jars made by Mother.
Each fruit season commenced with the ritual of jam making for my family at Cookernup – apricot, plum, peach, melon, nectarine, and later loquat jams. Quince chutney was followed by the pickles – green tomato, cauliflower, and of course pickled onions.
Fowlers Vacola jars came in a variety of sizes. To bottle the fruit, the contents were sealed with a rubber ring inside a close-fitting lid, secured by a strong clip and then sterilised in a large container supplied by Fowlers, which thermatically sealed the contents. Each year my poor mum sweated over the wood stove to boil the water in the steriliser to preserve the contents of the jars. The preserved fruit could be used for many months, even years after.
Every household held a collection of jars, lids and clips which could be freely traded between housewives, and later were when the practice became less popular.
Fruit was plentiful, often grown in small backyard orchards. No orchard was complete without at least one quince tree, a lemon tree, an orange tree, perhaps a blood orange and a citrus called a citron, which appeared to be a cross between a lemon and orange, and of course an apricot. A jam melon was also grown.
We obtained our apricots each year from a small orchard, south of Cookernup Cemetery owned by a Mr Charlie Nicholson. To us, he was a mysterious old man who owned a horse and dray, and from time to time repaired the potholes in the gravel road on contract with the Harvey Road Board.
We children enjoyed picking the ripe apricots, and of course stuffing ourselves with them in the process. Jam and pickle making was an art passed between housewives and of course to my sisters, who all continued the art – Barbara with fig jam, Jan with pickles, and even myself producing peach jam when peaches are available.
Marie, my wife, and I continued bottling fruit, particularly Elberta peaches, for which we would drive to Donnybrook from Katanning to the Misses Sharp’s orchard. We bottled them with the help of Suzanne, our first daughter, then aged four.
We even tried some vegetables, and following Fowler’s recipe some salmon fillet, which looked revolting in the jar, much to the amusement and pretended disgust of our friends Gail and Peter Burrow, but they tasted OK.
These family rituals seem to have died out but the many Italian families continued the practice with olive pickling, tomato sauce making and growing grapes and making wine. The Sceresini sausage making day will live forever in my memory. My Italian son-in-law’s parents always bought a half ton of grapes from which the year’s wine was made. His brothers warned us not to breathe on the house walls as we left after the obligatory tasting of the wine as it would strip the paint off!
Nowadays, Asian migrants have brought with them a wave of Asian tropical fruits and vegetables which together with all the culinary recipes brought by the European migrants (my parents included) have enriched our everyday diet.
I only hope that they have also brought with them the family rituals which produce the delicious food.
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Both images – Museums Victoria Collections, https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/items/262522
Accessed 08 September 2025.