The Memory Store: Babies came from here…

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[Image of Don Johnson and Terra Barrett standing in front of a hillside root cellar]

[Don Johnson standing inside the doorway of a hillside root cellar]

Don Johnson: Well it was a place you might come courting, according to older people, I don’t know whether you get a girl in there with all the spiders and such. But my mom always told me, and I heard it again when I started working in Elliston, that this is where they told people where babies come from.

And so they did – oh and Mom said this is where she was babies come from when she asked her Mother about the facts of life. When I asked, my mom gave me a book written by a Victorian Methodist, a missionary, and after reading that, I tell you, the ‘come from the cellar stories’ sounded better. Pretty terrified outlooks on reproduction back then in the 1800s, especially Methodist ideas.

In Elliston, there is supposed to be really, the babies came from here, but you dug with a silver shovel. Probably because kids come down here looking for babies and digging up cellars so they put the caveat that you need silver shovels.

From reading about ancient cultures, it was a common thing that life will come from under the ground and come up, and too, the cellar was a source of bounty. This is where your food came from, it was associated with food and you went to the cellar and brought out good things to eat, nurturing, so perhaps the baby connections from that – I don’t know. But it’s strange that, cause there’s something different where a baby comes from a stork out of the sky and we come up out of the ground.

[Don Johnson and Dale Jarvis standing in front of two hillside root cellars]

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