KATANNING

Inside the old flour mill in Katanning. The old guy standing by the machinery wouldn't stay there. I had to bring him home.
Allergy fields. No, I really mean canola fields. Who knew canola oil could come from such pretty stuff?
September 1, 2011 Thursday

Today we drove to Katanning. It’s the city a little over an hour’s drive south of here. The Crooks family lives there and brings their 5 young kids every Sunday to church. There were also 5 other names on the branch list there that we decided to visit. We stopped at the Visitors’ Centre, which was located in an old flour mill. It was cool to see but they didn’t have a good map. So we went to the library and paid $.55 for a copy of a good map that had a legend for all the streets.
Katanning is a huge wool processing centre and they also process lots of sheep for meat. We passed a place with a sign on it, “Abbatoir.” It was a huge building and there were lots of cars there. We wondered what it was. Later Sister Crooks told us the abbatoir is where they process the meat. Maybe if we’d taken French in school we’d have know that? Katanning advertises itself as a multi-cultural town. They do have a small mosque and we saw 3 Muslim women at Woolworths. Katanning’s population is about the same as Narrogin, but it’s a little more spread out.
First we visited Melinda Hogland. She turned out to be an American who came over here in 1974 to teach school. She grew up in California and went to college in Utah. When she graduated there were too many teachers and not enough jobs. Australia was the other way around and it brought a huge planeload of teachers over. Melinda ended up in Katanning, got married, raised two kids and is still teaching school there. She was nice enough to talk to but let us know that the “church is all part of history for me now.” She didn’t want home or visiting teachers although she says it seems like someone contacts her every six month or so.
Next we went after James and Brian Jardine. They were on the list as living together and both were adults. We went to their house on Park St. The people there said they’d moved to Daping Street to a yellow house with big sheds behind it. So we drove down Daping and didn’t see anything matching that description. We did find a yellow house on the corner of Daping and another street with a small shed behind it. The man who lived there said he wasn’t Jim, but he told us Jim did odd jobs at the old Federal Hotel in town. So we went to the hotel. A guy working in the kitchen gave us Jim’s phone number. (Good thing this was a small town.) Jim was really surprised to hear from us and said we could come over for a visit. He had a job to do but he could put it off for a while. He did live in a yellow house on Daping Street but it needed paint badly and the big sheds were way behind their place. He invited us in and introduced us to his wife, Diane, who goes by Di. He’s about 60 and she’s 40. He was surprised that we had him on any list and didn’t know there was a branch in Narrogin. They’ve lived there 10 years and ours was the first contact. What nice people! He and his first wife raised their kids in the church but then divorced. Di’s family was members but apostatized when she was about 14. When they married, their reception was at the Thornlie chapel. They had sisters teach them the missionary lessons, but Di wasn’t baptized. Orson thinks she can be rebaptized since it was her parents that had her name removed and not Di who requested it. We are going to check into it for her. We ended up visiting for about an hour and a half. They were excited to get a couple of old Ensigns that we had in the car. They made the whole trip down there worth it.
It just amazes us. It seems like all over West Australia that if someone doesn’t come to church, nobody even bothers to look for them. We’ve run into this in every ward and branch we’ve worked in. We then tried to visit the two Polynesian sisters who come to Sacrament Meeting about twice a month, but neither was home. So we stopped by to visit the Crooks for a minute and then headed home. We got back here about 5. It was a good day and the weather was beautiful.
On the way down there we passed field after field of bright yellow canola plants. They are in full bloom right now. We pulled up a little lane between 2 fields to take some photos. The air smelled just beautiful. The sad part is that I’m allergic to them and was stuffed up and sneezing and blowing the whole time. Once we got into town away from the fields I was okay. We bought a couple of vege pasties, a big bottle of orange Fanta, and a couple of dessert squares for lunch. It was a very filling lunch. It was the first pastie I liked. The others we’ve had just didn’t do it. These were really good.