KNOWN AS JACK

From the News 19 Jan 1953
WILLUNGA, Mon.: A
motor cycle overturned,
landing on the seat, and
an attached van capsized
when the connecting rod
broke on the main road
near Mount Compass to
day.
Cyril Jack Stoyel, 42.
meat inspector. of Black
wood, who was riding the
machine, bruised his
shoulder.

From The Advertiser 20 June 1951
Cut Down Tree
For having cut down a growing
tree, the property of Mitcham
Council, at Watahuna Avenue,
Hawthorndene, on January 1,
Cyril Jack stoyel, 38. meat In
spector, of Sycamore Crescent,
Hawthorndene, was fined £2, with
£2 12/ costs.
Mr. Thomson said that Stoyel,
who was the proprietor of a con
fectionery kiosk at Hawthorndene
reserve, had cut the tree down
as It stood In the way of some
flower plots he was making
around the kiosk.
In a letter to the court Stoyel
said he had had the 'verbal con
sent' of the council.

From the Advertiser Adelaide Criminal Sittings Wednesday 8 May 1935
Bank Clerk Sent To Gaol Cyril Jack Stoyel, 24, late of Bute, who had pleaded guilty to a charge of having stolen £280 from the English, Scottish and Australian Bank, by which he was employed as a teller at Bute, was ordered imprisonment with hard labor for 12 months. Stoyel's counsel, Mr. I. McLachlan, said Stoyel had been employed by the bank for nine years. His fiancee took a kiosk at Somerton, financed by him, but owing to the bad season, the busi ness got into debt. Stoyel, who had guaranteed its account, was pressed to reduce it, but could not. He took £295 and tried to win money on races, but lost all except £15, which he replaced. He made a.full disclosure and gave the police every assistance. He had been married since he was committed for sentence, and asked an opportunity to rehabilitate himself. His Honor said that a sentence must be imposed to deter others from similar offences.

Jack Stoyel’s memories.

Although truth is stranger than fiction, there have been so many occasions when eyebrows have risen significantly during my story-telling.

I realise that some of my adventures and experiences have been so bizarre to imagine them in print is preposterous.

Halley’s Comet hung low in the eastern sky plainly exhibiting its misty tail to the naked eye of W. G. Stoyel, my father, who stood in the neat front garden of his home in Wagin, Western Australia. It was 2 a.m. March 24, 1910. He later told me of this day, and truthfully predicted that I would live to see that rare star. Little did he know he was backing a 1000 to 1 chance. Dad’s star-gazing ended when the midwife came to the door and announced that Cyril Jack had been born without incident. It seems strange that such an unencumbered entrance to this world could be followed by an earthly existence of such tempestuous perplexity. To say that I am accident prone is the understatement of the century. It is interesting to note however, I have always walked away from the endless string of mishaps, stretching from the day I was run over by a motor buggy in 1914 to the day I crashed over a 20 ft. embankment inside a car skidding on its roof along a Kangaroo Island gravel road in 1980.

Although only four years of age I remember the motor buggy incident quite clearly. The game of Willy Willy Wagtail was a popular one for children of the horse and trolley days. To obtain a lift along the road the idea was to swing behind the wagon, sometimes resting your feet on the axle. In this way you could not be reached by the vicious, lashing whip of the driver, but not protected from the vicious stream of profanity from the teamster. On this occasion, as the lorry sped past our house I dropped to the road and ran headlong into the path of the petrol driven monster. Both front and rear solid rubber tyres of the offside wheels ran over my legs pushing me into the soft sandy road. The few horrified witnesses told my parents of their amazement to see the little blonde haired boy spring up to scamper flat out for home.

Two years after me a little girl, Dulcie, was born to my parents at Wagin and shortly after the motor incident I recall how I slipped when climbing into Dulcie’s iron railed cot and hung by my broken right arm. I was rushed to the local bowling green where the doctor and my father were playing bowls and in spite of the broken arm and the fuss of the doctor applying the splints, I was intrigued by the characteristic plonk of the bowls. It was the first time I had heard such a sound and I remember the Doc telling me to sit still as I stretched my neck to see what it was. The quack must have been keen to get back on the rink - I still have a bent right arm to prove it.

My father left the Farmers Co-op at Wagin, a Company which he established, and became Chief clerk at Boan’s Store in Perth. Soldiers were everywhere in the streets of Perth and even a 5 year old knew of the war. I enjoyed visiting dad in his office in Perth. There was a life size rocking horse at the store which I loved to race through the imaginary forest at break-neck speed, until one day I crashed to the floor and gashed by head.

Dad, being a Boer War veteran, was called up by the Army and we were now
living fatherless on the banks of the Swan River at Maylands. The house was close to the mangrove swamps, which have been reclaimed for race courses, ovals and air fields. Through these swamps were tracks to the river and today it is hard to visualise a 7 year old boy with his 5 year old brother wandering among these tidal swamps.

One incident I shall never forget was the day Bob, the 7 year
old pushed me out into the Swan River in a galvanised iron canoe.
On the Sunday we had watched the big boys as they made the craft.
The sheet of iron was bent up to a point at each end and nailed to a strut of wood, made watertight by plugging with clay. They paddled around in the boat for awhile and then pulled it on to high ground in the mangroves, expecting it to be there on the next week-end. Bob and I dragged the canoe to a small creek nearby, which was flowing fast with the falling tide. I clambered into the boat, Bob pushed it into the stream and off I sped to the open river, the small craft sometimes travelling sideways, sometimes backwards, swirling and spinning in
the rippling current, heading for Perth, Fremantle and then to the sea. I was not alarmed as the water splashed around my waist - it was a hot day, very enjoyable and great fun. Bob ran home when I rounded the first bend out of his view, and soon a searching motor boat found me. I still recall my frustration as the men lifted me to safety and the little canoe plunged away in the choppy water.

I have visited this section of the Swan River several times. In 1925 Bob and I returned to the scene. When searching for our old home 10 years ago, the swamp reclaiming scheme was already under way, but the river, as always, was quite rough. Had the canoe overturned I would have had to swim for it. I could dog paddle quite well at 5 years old. Most summer evenings my parents would drag a shrimp net at this spot. I would always swim alongside dad as he took the deep end. However the six inches or so of bilge water in the canoe acted as ballast and held my little ship on an even keel in the rough going.

Shortly after this incident I did have to exhibit my swimming skill, this time in the open sea.

These must have been sad days for my mother. The war had taken her husband, and now her two younger brothers had enlisted and were leaving for overseas service. (They were both killed at Gallipoli). She had to go to Fremantle to see them off, and because of the risk of leaving me alone with Jean (9) and Bob (7) I was taken with her so as not to get into any trouble. We boarded a small tug which was quite overladen with farewelling friends and relatives, the boat settling low in the water as it followed the big troopship out through the Molles. The tug drew level and rather close to the ship, the soldiers singing and calling to their loved ones who were all crowding the Port deck, hoping for a last glimpse of a familiar face. The craft suddenly listed badly, the deck awash, hurling people before the rushing sea. My mother’s hand was dragged from my grasp. I saw her big black skirt billow, exposing the white petticoat, as she slid into the yelling, struggling mass of arms and legs. A sailor grabbed me and rushed me to the starboard rail which was a steel cable. “Hang on there kid” he yelled, as he clasped my hands around the rope. As the crowd regained their feet they all rushed up the steep, slippery deck in response to the crew’s boisterous orders and soon the list to Port became a Starboard list. Water rushed around my knees, a sharp gust of wind threatened to blow off my little sailor hat. As I grabbed at the hat my other little hand could
not take the pressure. I often wonder whether the cry “Man Overboard” could have been heard above all the other screaming, but at least 4 men were in with me in a matter of seconds. That night I felt that mum would have rather seen me float out to sea - she sure regretted the loss of that little sailor hat.

I still remember the strange feeling of frustration that haunted me day after day when it dawned on me that my dear little baby sister was never again to be my playmate. Dulcie was taken to hospital, never to return. The fiendish baby killer of the day, meningitis, had claimed another little life to join the army of cherubims.

I had no luck with sisters. Jean, 4 years my senior, was cut down in her prime on the South Road, leaving her 6 little girls and Robert motherless. Jean had influenced my life quite a bit in those rugged days. With dad gone, Jean took over the bedtime story reading each night and sometimes when mum was away she would read from our story books. It seemed that these books were about the only presents we received at Christmas or birthdays. One of my favourites, and one I could almost repeat verbatim, was called “Lost in the Rockies”. Two boys, 8 and 6 (just like Bob and I) were lost in the Canadian Rockies. They were found by an old mountain man who taught them to survive in the forest, finding food, making fire by flint and steel. He showed them how to make a bear trap. A hole was dug across a mountain track, covered with sticks and leaves etc. and down would go the bear. Bob and I made a bear trap at the side of the Maylands house. We dug a hole in the sand, covered it with mangrove branches and sand. In daylight it wouldn’t have caught anything, however the poor old night-cart operator with a full can on his shoulder must have come quite a cropper. The contents of the dunny can hung on the wall of the house for quite some days. Strangely I cannot remember any repercussions - perhaps the victim had had a few too many deodorising ports and imagined he had tripped normally. What a job that must have been on the night cart. It was well known that if there were a majority of women in a household they used to hole the can with a nail to lighten the day’s contents.

Early in 1917 my father arrived home. We were to go to South Australia where he was to work for the Army Pay Corps.

We boarded the “Indahra” at Fremantle. It was a hot evening and when established in our cabin we were quite uncomfortable. Someone said “the fan’s not working”. A speeding fan sometimes appears motionless and the noisy wharf through the port hole must have obliterated the humming motor. Up went my finger to find out - down came my finger gashed and bleeding.

The “Indahra” was an unstable, lop-sided old tub and I got quite a kick out of walking down the corridors, leaning with the roll, copying the sailors. One morning I was on my usual moseying expedition. We were entering the Bight, it was very rough. I was intrigued watching the horses in their stalls getting sea sick. I overheard one of the sailors say “There’s young Jack again - he’s the only passenger not sick”. I used to hang around the places where they were serving beef tea - always scored a hot cup of the delicious stuff. It seemed it was the only nourishment most people could hold down. I was always hungry and had quite a few friends in the galley. I knew every inch of that old steamer. Dad told me in later years that he gave up trying to keep tabs on me. He was too sick most of the time.

One day there was great excitement on deck. Apparently, to avoid the rough seas we had sailed so far South that an iceberg had been sighted. A man gave me a look through his telescope. I was amazed to see how close the great lump of floating glass came over the waves, the feeble sunshine flashing purple bands from top to bottom - a sight I have never
seen since, but one which will be very common when the towing down of icebergs for the world’s water supply gets under way within a few decades.

The “Indahra” docked at Port Adelaide during the ninth night out from Fremantle. The trip had been one long thrill for me. The farewells from my sailor friends and the final glimpse of the battered old tramp steamer tied up at the wharf will always occupy a small nitch in my memory bank.

We travelled by train to Bugle Ranges, a journey which to me seemed endless and painful after the open decks. I found it unbearable to be restrained on a small seat in the train - even more painful when I disobediently opened the window to poke my head out to look at the hills - eyes full of cinders from the engine causing a hasty retreat.

At Bugle Ranges we were met by Uncle Gwyn, one of my dad’s four brothers. Several years younger than my father, he had procured a virgin farm allotment at Macclesfield and with my father in partnership, after the war, they were to clear and develop this rich country. There was an old house on the property and again, we children were fatherless - our Sergeant Major dad was in barracks at Keswick.

Uncle Gwyn had three children and we three and mum made quite a full house. There were several small bedrooms in the stone house and a large living-room/ kitchen with a 6 ft. wide open fire place, which I recall clearly. The cooking was done in large black pots - it must have been quite hard for my mother, who had lived a rather affluent existence in Unley in her youth, her father being editor of the Register Newspaper.

There was no bathroom in the house - the six children were bathed every Saturday night in a tub, whether they required it or not. There was ample water - a permanent creek trickled down past a couple of old lean-to sheds, where two cows were milked. About half an acre of vegetables were watered by reticulation from a dam on the creek which I soon claimed as a swimming hole. Several enormous apple trees grew in the open field and one big pear tree, providing shade for the pig sty. The six or so pigs had free run of the orchard. I often lay in the grass on the side of the hill watching the large white sow, apparently asleep under the pear tree. When a pear dropped with a thud the big pig awoke. I enjoyed seeing the huge slobbering jaws dispose of the fruit with one crunch.

Uncle Gwyn was breaking in a young colt to harness. He often handed me the long rope reins to drive the horse along the scrubby tracks, dragging a huge log. I felt sorry for the little fellow when he got a cut on the rump from uncle’s whip to keep him going, but I knew it would soon be easier going when he had wheels to pull.

With my three cousins, sister, brother and five or six children from neighbouring farms, I made the daily trudge three miles through the scrub to Macclesfield where my school days commenced. I learned little at that small country school. My only memories of the dreadful place were the slaps of the wooden ruler on my knuckles. However, I learned plenty about the birds and the bees on the way home from that school. The big kids would chase me away with sticks, stones and threats, until I was well out of view down the bush track, but my curiosity and inherent bushcraft soon had me circling back to a hidden vantage point from which I witnessed the fun and games played by the 10, 11 and 12 year olds of 1917. If described in detail here it would be regarded as pure fiction.

One night I awakened to find the farm house in an uproar, my mother crying and my father in his army uniform packing up our belongings - we were leaving. I didn’t ever discover the reason for the encounter between my father and uncle. We left the farm before daybreak in a buggy and on unloading at Bugles Ranges railway station, dad slapped the old horse on the rump and off he went home. The story goes that when the buggy arrived back at the farm Uncle Gwyn threw a few bits of gear into the trap and drove away from his wife and children, and like the bloke who lit the fire with Benzene, he hasn’t “benzene” since. I did hear of him around Longreach in later years, but couldn’t establish the fact.

We left the train at Mt. Lofty, and leaving our belongings at the station, the family walked 5 miles to Longwood, to the little market garden which was the Stoyel home at the time, run by grandma Amelia, widow of the Rev. James Stoyel.

When we arrived at Longwood the small market garden had been established for some 20 years. The land had been acquired as a result of proceeds from sales of land sub-divided from the Stoyels’ Fullarton Estate, in the vicinity of Fisher Street, after the death of the Reverend James Stoyel.

The old market garden house had been built some 30 or 40 years previously. It was a big, rambling, stone sort of place with an enormous fireplace in the main room where they did their cooking - mostly grilling in the early days, but later a big wood stove was built in with enormous hot water boilers each side. They lived fairly comfortably, and grandma Stoyel did most of the work. The sons, Stewart, Frank and Jack lived there, but Jack and Frank were Adelaide businessmen and did not work in the market garden. They had established a shop in Rundle Street selling sports goods and musical instrument, etc.

They sold out and went to Sydney taking their trade-name with them. “Home Recreations” the shop was called. It was taken over by Allan’s - a well-known music house, still there today.

Frank and Jack established their shop in Sydney, quite profitably, but Frank died tragically. I don’t know what happened to Jack. As a matter of fact I have done very little, or no research, for this story.

It is purely a record of past events which I am unable to forget.

Stewart Stoyel worked in Adelaide with the Water Works Department. He worked week-ends at the market garden. There was a hired hand who did most of the actual vegetable growing, although Grandma Amelia played an enormous role.

As a boy I worked with her in this garden quite a lot - on holidays from school and at week-ends. when I used to walk up from Blackwood - weeding, sowing seed and even at times, struggling behind the horse with a single furrow plough, or a scuffler hoeing up and down the rows. When I was not there a lot of this work was done by grandma. I can remember getting up at day-break, washing turnips and swedes, beetroot and onions in the creek, tying up the bunches with flax and loading them on to the dray for the market.

Another regular morning job was to go to the stables and collect the horses’ urine from a pit at the centre of the stables. This was collected into buckets, then carried “china-man” style, up the gully and poured into the channels which ran from the little dams in the creek watering the vegetables and fertilising at the same time. Horse and cow manure were the only other fertilizers used.

There were about half a dozen horses - a couple of buggy horses, the garden ploughing horses and three or four cows which had to be milked each morning and evening.

Under the house, a cellar had been dug down into the pure white pipe clay. This cellar contained shelves holding large basins of the milk which had to be scalded each morning. The cream was then skimmed from these basins and made into butter. This was also taken to the market with the vegetables. If I had worked well, grandma would allow me a special treat. She would cut me a large slice of her home-made bread and I would cover it with fig jam. Down the stairs I would go with an egg slice and cut out from this solid scalded cream the exact shape of the piece of bread and put it on the top.

This old house was surrounded with a veranda. When we arrived from Macclesfield there was no room for me inside the house. It did not trouble me to be bedded down on the veranda on a crudely-made wooden bed with a mattress made of wheat bags stuffed with straw, a blanket and a wheat bag “wagga”. A “wagga” is made by splitting wheat bags from end to end and sewing them all together, making a warm covering for winter nights. I have made many “waggas” since then and found them very effective indeed.

It was here that I first became aware of the beautiful bush of the Adelaide Hills. From my veranda bed the magnificent scenery, fascinating sounds, became forever impregnated in my mind. A steep hill rose a few yards from my bed - at least half a mile towards the sky. It was covered with large stringy barks and wattles below which grew a myriad of wild flowers. In the Spring it became a blaze of colour, pink and white bells of Ericas, spider-like fingers of red Grevilias, red, white and yellow bottle brush flowers, Melaleucas and callistemon were everywhere. Below them a carpet of yellow pin cushions, white fragrant freesias, striped sparaxis and tall, waving red and yellow ixias, making a magnificent natural garden.

In the evenings I would lie listening to the sometimes eerie, but mostly pleasant twilight sounds from this lovely bushland. From the creek, the scratching whistle of crickets, the plonks of the bull frogs, and on moonlight nights the calling mopokes, “Mopoke” “Mopoke” and the dull thud of the frog-mouthed owl and the sudden jerking, rasping cry of possums. Often, in the distance, I would hear foxes calling with their strange high-pitched, lilting bark. On dark, windless, nights this great forest became so silent that I often found myself lying, unable to sleep, just listening to nothing.

At day-break the scrub became a conglomeration of noisy birds- warbling magpies, singing black birds and thrushes, squawking minor birds and greenies, chattering white browed babblers, squealing parrots and whistle hawks. (Shrill whistle sound). Always you could hear the characteristic call of the peaceful dove which is heard in all parts of Australia - a call which, to me, has always been “holly-hock”, “holly-Hock”, and then the willy wag tail chipping in with his version of “sweet pretty Bridget”, “sweet pretty Bridget.”
I was always glad to hear the shrill staccato whistle of the Pallid Cuckoo climbing up the scale and indicating the approach of Spring. (More whistling, which I am unable, unfortunately, to put on to paper). If one could be offered the chance of reincarnation, to be re-born a Pallid Cuckoo should be considered. This bird follows the sun, living always in eternal Spring. His pastures are always green, full of freshly-hatched grubs and grasshoppers. He drinks from streams, running clear from the winter rains. His days are calm and nights are warm - he moves on quickly if he dislikes the weather. The Pallid Cuckoo is so lazy. Why should she work hard building a nest when other birds have done it for her? She finds a suitable nest, pushes out the eggs and lays her own single large egg in their place. And that is all she has to do as far as reproduction is concerned. The real owner comes back to the nest, sits on the egg and hatches out a parasitic monster. I have found such nests of Pallid Cuckoos having taken over one of a small robin and even a tiny wren, the baby four or five times larger than the adult robin - fills the little nest, grabbing greedily everything the hard-working little mother provides - soon to flyaway and follow the sun and whistle for a mate.
However, not all little birds fall victim to this invader. Some have learned to build nests like an Eskimo’s igloo with a small woven tunnel to keep larger enemies at bay.

Grandma Amelia Stoyel died at Longwood on June 9th, 1923, aged 80 years. On the afternoon of June 8th, we were living in Blackwood. A member of
the Longwood church rode down the Sturt Creek with the sad news that Grandma
had pneumonia and was dying. That night my father, Bob and I set off, up
the Sturt Creek to Longwood, some 10 miles of scrub hiking, arriving at about midnight on a cold, windy Winter’s night. Bob and I stayed sheltering in a large hollow tree about half a mile from the house - my father stayed on until the end. We then made for Mt. Lofty railway station, about four miles away, but at 2 a.m. no trains of any kind, so we trudged down the railway track to Belair and then across the National Park to Blackwood and home. A round trip
of some 25 miles. All in the dark and rain - getting home at 4 a.m. after walking
for some 8 hours.

The day after that marathon we all walked down from Blackwood to the Mitcham Cemetery for the funeral. The casket arrived in a vegetable dray. It was laid to rest beside Grandpa, the Reverend James Stoyel who died at the age of 62 years and had been lying awaiting his beloved Amelia for 27 years.

Murray Stoyel, my youngest Uncle was also buried in this grave. He died of pneumonia, a common killer in those times - aged 22 years. However, this young man is immortalised in a poem carved on a rock in Pekina Creek, Orroroo. The Rev. James Stoyel was Bible Christian Minister at Orroroo from 1886 - 1890 and Murray was a school mate of Donald McDonald, who carved a poem on a rock at Pekina Creek prior to leaving for America in 1901, after having invented some type of machinery. The poem goes something like this:
Farewell our old familiar scene
The scene of happy childhood and of home,
The wide Pacific soon shall roll between my soul and thee
For distant must I roam
Poor Rowland Nutt is dead and in the tomb
The school mate whom I loved in former years
And Murray Stoyel sleeps in the silent gloom
His brilliant soul has fled to other spheres,
And other friends I love are scattered wide
The dear companions of my youthful days
And I am now departing o’er the tide
But with these scenes my heart forever stays
Farewell my friends and old companions dear
If any foes I have they are forgiven
And if I never return and never meet thee here
I hope to meet you all again in heaven.

I had no knowledge of the existence of this poem until 1985. Having roamed the hills of the area, climbed Black Rock Peak and spent many week-ends camping in the area, whilst stationed in Peterborough in the early 1930’s, but at this time the rock lay hidden in undergrowth, not to be found until about 1970, some 70 years after the young poet completed his ambitious undertaking. It is amazing how the lad found a suitable rock, cleared the moss and wrote the poem to become impervious to the harsh elements of this area. Maybe he was motivated by the presence of adjacent aboriginal rock signs.

My family’s initial stay at Longwood only lasted a few weeks when father had to report to the Army Barracks at Keswick and we were soon established in a rented home in Black Forest. This was situated not far from the train line which of course, is now the Glenelg tram line, and a few yards from the South Road then just a metal track. The forest itself was a huge stand of Peppermint Gums - so different from the colourful Stringy Barks at Longwood.
It was a large, dark place. Rather spooky I found, when wandering in it. I had many experiences at Black Forest, which I suppose I will attempt to include in this story, although I was still only 7 or 8.

There was one occasion, when wandering through the forest with my brother Bob and my sister Jean, we came across an enclosure (fenced off) on a large red bank of sand, and there was a man digging up some roots from this sand. It turned out to be licorice root. He was a workman, and digging the root up and piling it into bags. He gave us some pieces. We found it lovely to eat. A few days later we sneaked back to get a little more of that tasty root. The owner of the plantation happened to be there and we weren’t too sure of him. He yelled out to us to “clear off”, which we did, but later on Jean and Bob sent me back, up over the sand hill, wriggling on my belly to get some more of that beautiful licorice root. It seemed to me that the old bloke could not see me from where he was sitting but apparently he could because after I had done a little bit of digging I heard this terrific roar and I set off to get over this little barbed wire fence - and bang he let fly with a double-barrel shot-gun. He was a fair distance away, and knew that he wasn’t going to hurt me very much but Jean had quite a job digging pellets out of my behind when we got home. Of course we were not game to tell Mum and Dad anything about that episode.

We walked four or five miles across paddocks to Goodwood School (St. Georges Church of England Day School) - a little hall which still stands on Goodwood Road opposite the main St. Georges Church. It was a very High Church of England being conducted almost like the Roman Catholic Church. The teachers were nuns and the Angelus would ring about every hour and we would all get up and chant “Hail Mary’s”, which was rather strange for a Church of England - now I come to recall. However, I didn’t get on too well with the nuns ¬I was always being belted with the ruler, and apparently I must have been a bit disobedient. One day I put up my hand and asked to be excused to go to the toilet. The nun would not let me go - she thought I was putting on an act to get away from school work. But nature’s call was urgent! I finally sprang up and rushed out of the church, not quite making the toilet at the back of the place. I was sure in a mess and wasn’t going to go back into the school so I attempted to climb over the little picket fence which enclosed the side of the school, on to the road leading to Forestville and Black Forest. As I climbed the fence I got to the top but slipped and as I fell a picket went up my trouser leg and there I hung, not able to free myself. A trolley pulled up with two chaps on board. One of them jumped down and lifted me up off the fence, helping me to escape. As I shot down the road a way I heard him say to his mate, as he climbed back into the trolley, “Jesus Christ, was that lad on the nose”. I sure would have been.

One morning on the way to school across the paddocks with Jean and Bob, I dawdled some distance behind. They looked back - I had disappeared. These broad, flat paddocks, were being cleared of the huge red gums which flourished in the clayey soil of the Adelaide Plains. When one such tree had been grubbed by pick, shovel and axe a very large hole was left to be filled later with sand. After the rains these holes could be small dams some 15 ft. across and 6 ft. deep with steep sides of slippery clay. I had been skipping around one of these and in I went. The water was 4 ft. from the top. Jean and Bob could not reach me. They called for help. A lad passing by on his bike quickly lowered the cycle over the edge. I grabbed the wheel and was pulled to safety. My rescuer’s name was Marcus Oliphant. His early schooling was at St. Georges. He was a prominent St. Georges Troupe Rover Scout. I was a Cub later and quite proud when Mark took time to talk to me at Scout Meetings. He was an important person, even at 18, and destined to become Governor of South Australia.

Shortly after that episode I was taken away from St. Georges Church School and sent to the public school at Keswick which was about 5 miles down the South Road.
I used to travel by myself every day to this school which I hated. They were a very poor lot of teachers. I seemed to be getting belted all of the time. I remember once being really hammered for spelling “face” FASE. I’ll never forget how to spell “face”.

My father grew vegetables at Black Forest - beans, tomatoes, cucumbers ¬and we used to have to put all this in large baskets and hawk it around the neighbourhood - to supplement his Army pay I suppose.

The chap next door had a couple of pigs. One day one of the pigs got out of the sty and came over and started rooting around in dad’s vegetable patch. This big bloke came over to get his pig - dad really abused him - he wanted the damage paid for. Anyhow, a fight started and that was one time I realised what a dangerous man my father was. This bloke was bigger than him but dad soon had him knocked over and was digging the boots into him - I was watching from around the corner of the shed - probably terrified but I think I was entertained. This Mr. Hill was a nasty bugger. He had kicked me out of his place a few times so I didn’t mind seeing him get booted in the ribs.

Sometimes, on Saturday mornings, we would take vegetables along a little winding track across the paddocks and through patches of scrub to the Adelaide Central Market. There were two or three stall holders who used to buy up the home grown produce a bit cheap. After delivering the vegetables, on one day Jean, Bob and I had three or four shillings payment. I was walking along the aisles in the market, just looking around. I would often find a twig of cherries, an orange or a banana, and on some lucky days a coin - perhaps a tray bit (three pence) or even a zac (six pence). To find a bob (a shilling) was like striking the lottery. This day I could hardly believe my eyes - there lying amid the rubbish by the stall was a note - it turned out to be a pound note. The stall holder on counting his takings had dropped it - I of course thought it was lost. This bloke must have had a surprise when he bent down to pick up his pound note to see a little hand come underneath the stall and grab the quid and off.
I wasn’t game to stop - I thought he would kill me, so on I went. When I got home with that pound note, of course Mum was all for returning it but it didn’t get returned. It was approaching Christmas and that was very handy to buy presents.

As a matter of fact Bob and I each got a wooden scooter for Christmas that year. On Christmas morning we were out of bed before dawn. There were the scooters, and we were off riding at daybreak. The South Road, at that time, was being upgraded. It had a concrete kerbing for a mile or so which made a really good place to ride a scooter. Away we went at break-neck speed. It was a straight line up the road to Shepherds Hill, which we could see in the distance. We made for the hill as we wanted to go right up the top of this hill and then come racing down, which would be great fun. It was some 5 or 6 miles away and a long trudge with the scooters. Half way down, on the rough old metal road, both scooters smashed up. The front wheels being wooden with light axles soon broke and we had to carry the scooters back home. In the meantime, everyone was looking for us. It was almost dark when we got back. We were away all day Christmas Day - missed Christmas dinner, and so you can imagine the trouble we were in. We both got taken to the shed for a few cuts with a stick.

Another day I’ll never forget. That year, at the end of the War on 11th November 1918, the signing of the Armistice. On Guy Fawkes Night, 5th November we had a community fireworks display which was just a bon fire with a few families gathered around letting off crackers. Apparently, once again I did the wrong thing - probably threw a cracker at somebody and got into a lot of trouble. At that time the war had not finished but after the signing of the Armistice, an enormous celebration had been planned in a paddock not far from our house. The locals had been carting trolley loads of dry wood, trees, leaves - had built an enormous bon fire in the middle of this paddock under a big dry tree on the top of which they had hung a four gallon tin of petrol which, apparently, was going to be holed with a bullet at the start of the bon fire. I had watched this bon fire being built and you can imagine how sorry I was for myself when it was announced that I was not allowed to attend this bon fire as punishment for my behaviour on Guy Fawkes Night. I was to be left home in bed. Try as I might I could not get permission to be there. It really worried me to look at this great big stack of wood. I worried so much about this that I thought “Bugger it, if I’m not to see the bon fire nobody is”. I got up at 2 o’clock in the morning. I knew where mum’s matches were - near the copper in the shed which she used for a laundry. I sneaked over and put a match to the famous bon fire. You can imagine the consternation - all hell broke loose. The fire went up. I didn’t know anything about the petrol at the top. When the heat exploded the petrol the fire spread everywhere. I would have been in a lot of trouble had anyone found out who did it. Actually they blamed a few local hoodlums who were always in trouble and these poor buggers got into a lot of strife. Of course they were innocent.

I did attend some end of the war celebrations. One I remember really well was going with my father to the Cheer Up Hut which was situated alongside the old Railway Station in the vicinity of where they built the Festival Theatre. Billy Hughes was there. I will never forget Billy Hughes in 1918. He was always a great orator. He must have been to impress an 8 year old boy with his act.

The Palais Royal on North Terrace was the Army Pay Headquarters in those days. It was a huge, igloo type building and I often went there with dad while my mother was shopping in Rundle Street. The soldiers being discharged were in great festive spirit. You can imagine the celebrating that was going on when they were finished with the Army forever. They were brandishing bottles of wine and staggering around on North Terrace. In those days it seemed to be rather a fashionable thing for a drunk to do. If he was sitting down on the side of the road, with kids around, he would put his hand in his pocket and throw a hand full of coins out into the street. If a kid found a drunk in this condition and hung around it would not be long before he would start throwing pennies around and sometimes even threepences - rarely sixpence of course. A threepenny bit took a bit of chasing in the dust.

I remember the epidemic of Spanish Influenza. The Old Exhibition Building, opposite the Palais had been turned into a morgue for mass corpses. The epidemic must have killed hundreds of people. It came to our house. It is quite possible that it would have been very rare for any household to be free of this terrible thing. Although it didn’t seem to kill children, it made me very ill. I still remember lying under the vines in the shade at Black Forest with this terrible headache and being annoyed by the squawking of cockatoos in the trees, and the shrill whistle of the funny little P. type railway engines on the line which carried the large box type carriages from King William Street to Glenelg. The Adelaide Station was situated just south of the Supreme Court.

My mother, Elsie Hattie Morgan spent most of her childhood at Unley. She was the only girl from her father’s second marriage. A half sister, Martha, who became
Mrs. Dasborough lived in Broken Hill. They were related to the Queensland
Morgan’s and the Premier of Queensland and mum, as a child, had actually visited and stayed with the Premier’s family in Rockhampton in the enormous building which is now a Roman Catholic Convent.

Mum was an accomplished pianist. She had been given a piano when she was about 18. She was a very good soprano singer and performed quite regularly in concerts in the Adelaide Town Hall. On one occasion she actually recorded a duet with Dame Nellie Melba in the Town Hall - about 1903. When I was a lad I used to look at this round disc record,
not having any way of playing it. However, when the Elliot’s came from England (Mary was an Elliot) they brought with them a gramophone which played the disc and so we all did get to hear that rendering of Juanita by Elsie Morgan and Dame Nellie Melba (25 years later). Strangely enough, it was looked upon as some sort of a joke. The record was carelessly lost. I wish it had been possible to transfer it to a tape, to hand down to our children - but in those days, like most antiques, there was no value placed on anything old.

At Black Forest my mother obtained her piano from Unley and set up as a pianoforte teacher and voice trainer, a large brass plate at our front gate advertising the fact.

I don’t remember very many happy days at Black Forest, as a child. I worked every day in the vegetable garden, hoeing and weeding, planting and watering, after having walked five miles from school and on the way home collecting kindling wood and tying the bundle with a piece of rope, which I carried in my school bag.

On Sundays we would walk to St. Georges for 11 a.m. Service. Home for the elaborate Sunday dinner, then back the 3 miles to Sunday School. It was drudgery, which I hated. Hating the boring church service however didn’t excuse me from the duties of altar boy. Dressed in a white gown I carried one side of the priest’s flowing regalia as he climbed the altar stairs to conduct Matins at 11 a.m. St. Georges Church was steeped in the heavy odour of incense. Undoubtedly the churches of ancient times, along with their high roofs, used incense to offset the odours of unbathed bodies and dirty clothing. I was intrigued by the way Canon Wise, mumbling prayers, swung the chalice hanging from gold chains, the puffs of incense whipping from side to side to spiral upwards. A part of my altar boy duties was to light a small gas jet and place a wire cage filled with coke over the flame. When the service was due to start I placed four or five pieces of hot coke in the chalice and then two marble sized balls of incense on top. One day I whipped a few balls of incense into my trousers pocket. The next day I invited all my playmates into our big shed for a game of church. I made a small fire of chips in the corner of the shed and placed a few red coals with a ball of incense on top in a jam tin with two holes and strings for swinging, and with my congregation of children sitting in front of me, became Canon Wise swinging the incense and chanting and mumbling prayers. This turned out to be quite a good move on my part. My mother recognised the strong odour coming from the shed and I had to own up to the dastardly crime of stealing incense from the Church. Canon Wise was informed and I was sacked.

We moved to Blackwood and rented a house from Edwin Ashby, alongside Ashby’s Orchard. The fence along the back yard was the railway fence, on a big bend of the train line between Blackwood and Eden. The scrub grew right up to the edge of the orchard. There were no houses between our place and the Sturt Creek. There were miles of wattle plantations in those days, wattle bark being used for tanning leather. In the Spring the ocean of pure gold rolled over hill after hill above a sea of thousands of blue orchids.

I always volunteered to take the rent up to Edwin Ashby each week. He was a grand old fellow and told me stories of how he had travelled the world collecting birds. It seemed to be his hobby. His study was crammed with stuffed birds from all over the world - large parrots right down to minute humming birds from Africa.

I worked many hours with Edwin Ashby in his garden. He was grower of rare Erica’s and the very same garden is now a portion of the South Australian Botanic Gardens.

I also worked with his son Keith, who was a great, tall, strong lad and would stride through the orchard at a very fast walking pace, making it necessary for me to trot alongside him. For a 9 year old I must have been fairly useful around that orchard and in the garden, because every week when I took the rent up Edwin would pass me a shilling out of the rent which, apparently, was my wages. There was very little I couldn’t do around the place. As a matter of fact when they commenced to build that big dam, which is still there today, I helped by driving a horse and a scoop, no mean feat for a 9 year old to hang on the end of the scoop to dig it down into the ground and pull it up the bank and let it tip over and flow down over, swing the horse around and down again - but it was only a game for me. I often get quite a thrill when I pass there these days and look down at that same big pool of water in the middle of this Botanic Garden and realise that almost 70 years ago I helped to build that very same pool. Keith Ashby stocked that pool with fish - Murray cod, trout and red fin.

The Sturt Creek rises in gulleys just short of the Mt. Lofty station and runs down through Upper Sturt, through a few market gardens and orchards and then into a long area of about 3 miles of scrub to Coromandel Valley, through the valley with more orchards and market gardens, and then down through Craighburne which was a sheep station owned by the Downers. I knew practically every inch of that same creek from Upper Sturt away down to across the South Road. As a matter of fact one of the best rainbow trout pools was one just the other side of the South Road. I daresay there’s a pool there today ¬minus the rainbow trout, of course, the whole thing being polluted. There is not a living thing in that creek these days. We lived on fish from that creek and also from the Happy Valley Reservoir, which was about a 4 or 5 mile walk across for us. There was not a trout in my section of that river that I couldn’t catch. They used to move up occasionally. There was a place just around about Eden where a big flood dam was built a few years ago. In those days, there were three waterfalls in this part of the creek, each about 8 to 10 ft. with a pool below each one. The trout would hatch out lower down in the reed beds and then move up the creek. They would get to these pools where they were held up, being too small to climb the rapids. There they would grow and live. We didn’t fish there very often because you would catch too many small ones. But occasionally a big one would get in there and it was a pretty good spot then because unless there was a lot of water coming down those falls, they could not get up them but in the winter when the creek was in flood all those fish went up over those waterfalls and up along the river, ever climbing up. There were many large pools formed along that creek. I knew them all and the complement of fish in the pool. When a pool was over fished the trout would become very shy and wouldn’t bite but when a new one came in there I would get him.

I always carried a small length of cord line in my pocket and a small No. 4 hook. It was then simply a matter of breaking a long, thin, wattle stick, tying the line on the end, getting a piece of light driftwood, six inches long, for a floater, catching a grasshopper - the ones that clicked and flew and showed a yellow tail. They took some catching, chasing them with a bough and smashing at them. But if you caught one of those you would get a trout for sure. It was just a matter of flicking the floater upstream and let the current take it slowly down across the pool, repeating a few times. If you didn’t get a bite like that there was nothing hungry in that pool so on you went. A lot of times, if you knew the fish were there, you could bring them on to bite by going upstream a little bit and by grabbing a stout stick and digging into the bank making the water dirty, it would flow down through the pools and the fish thought it was fresh water coming down from a flood which got them moving on the bite. Quite often they would go for your grasshopper and sometimes would bite on worms in that condition.

Coromandel Valley was named by sailors who jumped ship from Glenelg and followed
up the Patawalonga into the Sturt Creek which they followed up to a fertile looking little valleywhich they named Coromandel Valley after the ship which they had just left. Some of the sailors’ descendents are still living in the valley. When I was a lad there was one family, the Moags, had a small market garden there and Syd Moag had a vegetable round. I used to work with him on that quite often. He employed me to help him to go to market on a Friday, so it meant me being away from school. Sometimes, Iwas allowed to miss school because it was mostly on Fridays that we went to the Government orchard at Coromandel valley for gardening lessons and apparently old Nick Opie, the Headmaster, didn’t think I need much in the way of gardening lessons, because he used to send me from Coromandel Valley right up to Belair to collect his pay. Apparently the pay cheques were brought to Belair and then distributed from the Belair School. This meant at least a 20 mile walk for me. I followed up the Hawthorndene Creek as a rule, and there were quite often a few pools there with a few trout in also, as it ran into the Sturt Creek at Coromandel Valley. So I followed right up the Hawthorndene Creek and up through Leigh Windsor’s orchard, alongside the National Park to the Belair School.

However, when dad found out that I had been doing this he didn’t mind me stopping away from school on Friday - he considered that instead of wearing out boot leather for old Nick Opie, I could earn myself a couple of bob working for Syd Moag down at the market. This meant getting up about three o’clock in the morning and walking up to the Blackwood Post Office, waiting in the cold, to hear Syd Moag’s horses trotting up from Coromandel Valley. Sometimes it was so cold that I used to get in the telephone box by the Post Office and cuddle up there for a bit of warmth. It was hard work down at the market, following Syd around with a little trolley, picking up the stuff that he had bought, taking it back, loading it into the van. We stopped for lunch. Went over to Turners and had a pie. That was quite an interesting part of the day.

With the van loaded we would move on up Fullarton Road, serving a couple of customers there, and then up the Old Belair Road to Belair where we started serving customers in earnest. I, of course, would get the hardest and most distant customers, up the steepest hills, and it was quite a struggle with a large basket with 14 lbs. of spuds and half a dozen bunches of turnips, carrots, parsnips, a couple of pound of cherries and half a dozen bananas Some of those trips were really tough going. I earned my two bob!

This job came to a very sudden end, when one morning we were going down the long Belair Road, Syd having been digging spuds, had the van loaded with about 20 bags of potatoes. The road was rather wet and slippery and the two black horses were hanging back in their collars going down towards the Devil’s Elbow below Windy Point, Syd pushing with all his weight on the great lever that held the big wooden brake blocks on to the big wheels. Syd’s legs started to tire and the horses started to slip and the trolley started to go faster
and suddenly, crash! Through the wall of the Devil’s Elbow and the two horses hanging by their collars over this precipice, the bags of spuds flying out in all directions, with me just hanging on by the skin of my teeth on the edge of the van which didn’t go over - luckily there was something I was hanging on to. And Syd, of course, not having as much luck as me, crashed, broke his leg and that was a mess. The two beautiful black horses were dead when they were cut from their collars - crashed 50 ft. down into the bottom of the creek. For years I shuddered as I passed this spot and could see where the wall had been repaired. Had more of the wall broken the van would have gone straight over. I am sure I couldn’t have survived that one. Luckily it jammed between the wall and stayed there. Just enough for me to hang on and crawl back out - unscathed as usual.

Up the Sturt Creek in those days of course, bush fires were always raging in the summer and old Nick Opie, the Headmaster of the school, had a telescope which he used to, at the slightest sign of any smoke, pinpoint the spot, and away he would go with the big Grade 7 boys to fight the fire. As a matter of fact, if we were having a dull time, and there hadn’t been many fires, at lunch time we used to sneak up the creek and get one going, built in a way that it wouldn’t get away too quickly, get back down and then go into school. Old Nick would see the bit of smoke and would say “Boys, I think there’s a fire up the Sturt Creek”. He’d get his telescope out and have a look. One day he was looking up there and he said, “Good Lord, I think that fire’s going to go up and endanger poor old Mrs. Yeo”.

Mrs. Yeo was a sea captain’s widow. She built this house away up on a hill where it could overlook the Gulf, her husband having been lost at sea, and the dear old thing thought that one day he would come sailing back up the Gulf. She lived a lonely life up there. Actually, at times, I ran messages for her down to the shop at Coromandel Valley and lugged her groceries back up the hill. Anyhow, this day, old Nick thought the fire was going up to threaten her house. There was a little lad went up with us, a fellow called George Lane. He was always getting into trouble that bloke, and he said “Oh no Mr. Opie, it won’t hurt Mrs. Yeo, we lit it on the other side of the creek”. Of course that was about six handers all round for us.

Then there was the day we lit a fire and the wind changed. It shot back almost catching us and getting into Frank Smith’s crop and playing merry hell, and burning down his hay stack. No-one found out how that started luckily.

We lived about 12 months in Ashby’s rented house by the railway line, then purchased an old home about ¾ of a mile away in the scrub. It was one room, with a galvanised iron roof, the one room being built up of stone, with a fireplace. The other four rooms had canvas walls and were painted with whitewash - just lime and water mixed together. We later built a
new modern brick house where David was born.

One day in 1922, or thereabouts, Jean, Bob and I were sent out on a Saturday afternoon to sell tickets for a church concert and on returning found that our family had increased to seven. I had not moved into the new house staying in the old one, until moving to country postings in the Bank. I often had Rover Scout friends staying with me and startled these city lads by shooting the candle out each night. They would be in bed and would say “Who’s going to put the candle out” and I’d say “Don’t worry, I’ll fix that up” - and I just got the little .22 that always hung in its holster above my head, and shot the candle out, the bullet flying through the canvas into the scrub. I derived enormous satisfaction and pleasure from my scouting activities - from the earliest of Cub days with the St. George’s Troupe to Rover Scouting with the Blackwood troup.

I attended the World Jubilee in 1923 at Flemington Race Course where the senior scouts had the chance to qualify for the Fettler’s badge - a world first at that time. The camp was visited by Lord Baden Powell, the organiser of the Boy Scout Movement, and he gave us all a small edition of the New Testament, which I still have today. Strange how I have managed to hang on to that all of these years - I have lost so many other things.

I spent a lot of my time at that Jamboree with the South Yarra Sea Scout Troupe and I obtained my Seamanship Badge. That was where I was first introduced to boats and later on got quite interested in sail boats and power boats, so much so that I wrangled my way into visits to the camps with the Port Adelaide Sea Scouts. I spent Easter 1924 with a group of Sea Scouts, crossing the Gulf in a 4 masted barque and camping at Stansbury. I was the odd man out on that little trip ¬walking around the town I was the only one in khaki - the other lads with their little sailor suits - the Port Adelaide Sea Scouts. However, I had them all at sea when it came to the bush hiking over the sandy wastes at the back of the town on the Peninsula.

The next year I attended the Hobart World Jamboree. We landed at Launceston and hiked across Tasmania. We were shown over the first Hydro-Electric Scheme. (I don’t know where that was but it was an amazing thing). Now of course there are hundreds of those things over there.

My Rover Scouting days were somewhat ruined by the fact that I had to attend Church every Sunday. Having a Camp to go to was no excuse at all but I came to an arrangement with my mother in the finish that if on a Wednesday I rode my bike to Unley High School and left early enough to go to Holy Communion at St. Georges Church at Goodwood, I would then be able to go on a Camp and would be excused from church on Sunday. That was a very strict condition. I went down there a couple of times to Holy Communion, which was a terrible humbug and I had to ride right back to Unley High School and back home. Anyhow, at the end I jacked up on that. I thought “I’m not going to do this any more” - so I used to leave early and just take my time going to school, doing my homework and stopping on the way down and having a rest - but I didn’t go to church any more. If I wanted to go camping or fishing over the week-end, I just didn’t bother to go to church. Of course I fell out with mum over it and she sort of disowned me a bit after that. But I did occasionally go to the church with the family on a Sunday when it was necessary or when I had nothing else to do. We always walked down to Coromandel Valley Church but later when I met Mary, and became engaged to her (she was a Sunday School teacher and she liked to go to church) - we went quite often together.

As a matter of fact I’ve got a very interesting story about the church. On Sunday, after the 11 o’clock service finished, a group of us on our way home walked through the hills admiring the flowers and the scenery and that sort of thing, and if we had any visitors, and we very often did have visitors staying with us, they would be very interested in our scrub. One Sunday a party of us trailed along through the scrub and Bert, who was about 8 at the time, spotted a bird’s nest in a small sapling about 3 or 4 inches across. He climbed hand over hand up this little tree, which bent over. His feet and also his tail came fairly close to the heads of everybody looking up as he pulled himself up to look into this nest to find out how many eggs were there. But the exertion was a bit much for him - he managed to gasp out “no eggs” and then passed wind with an enormous explosion. It went something like this – “No eggs. Blrrrrrrrrrrr” right in the faces of the visitors. To this day if anyone says “no eggs” or “any eggs” I always hear Blrrrrrrrr after it.

There is another family story I feel mustn’t be left out of church incidents. It is one about the Mothers’ Union. Mum was a member. It was a group of church women who used to meet at different houses once a week to discuss the sins of the neighbourhood. They had afternoon tea and it was quite a cosy little show. There was always a dozen or so of them crowded into the house - the biscuit tin was always empty after those meetings. This day (David was about 5), just returning from his first few days at school, had found an enormous mushroom on the side of the road. along the side of the road in those days were big heaps of rocks from the quarries. The labourers used to sit at these rock piles with hammers (knapping hammers they called them) and broke up the road metal into about 2 - 3 inch sizes for road making. As a matter of fact, at school if you weren’t doing any good the teachers used to say, “You look like finishing up on the road cracking rocks. That’s all you’ll be good for”. One of these chaps must have noticed David with this big mushroom and he would have said “Look at that lad with that effing big mushroom”. Of course David was very pleased with this and trotted on home and burst into the house in the middle of the Mothers’ Union Meeting and said “Oh Mum Look at the effing big mushroom I found”.

The Blackwood Scout Master at that time was Scout Master Gardiner. He was a returned soldier and had been gassed by the horrible poison gas. Although he was Scout Master he was too sick to accompany us on hikes and other scouting activities and slowly had to decide that he would have to give away the Scout Master’s job. We searched around for a new Scout Master. At that time a very notable man had come to live in Blackwood. He was very interested in scouting and didn’t have to be asked twice to take us over. His name was C.T. Madigan. He was a great Scout Master. He used to tell us stories of his exploring in Antarctica with Douglas Mawson and he had many tales of the African bush where he had worked as a Geologist. He had been a distinguished soldier in the war with the rank of Captain. The Blackwood boys were very lucky to have such a man as Scout Master. And I was also lucky to get his help when stranded at the Granites in 1933. However, he had to give the job up when he went exploring in the Simpson Desert area, about 1927, and the job of Scout Master was taken over by my father.

The Blackwood troup had many jobs of organising camps for city lads from city and suburban troups and of course we didn’t mind that - there were plenty of spots in our hills suitable for Scout Camps. There was one place on the Sturt Creek above Coromandel Valley where there was another big pool with a large willow tree. It was called the willow Pool. It contained plenty of fish, plenty of yabbies and was a really good place for a camp. It had almost a hundred square yards of flat couch grass bank, - a lovely spot. The scrub was very thick up around it. One could hardly walk through it. I remember once we had a camp with some city lads at that pool. We saw a few snakes as we were making our way up the creek with the boys. I used to meet them at the Blackwood Railway Station and explain to them how I was going to lead a trail to the camp site - usually 3, 4 or 5 miles away. We had to make chalk arrows along the bitumen road which was newly laid down through Coromandel Valley and when we left the road on bush tracks the trail would be arrow signs of stones or broken boughs etc. making them use their scouting ability to follow the trail. In parts where I couldn’t lay a trail I always had a little bag of paper which we used to drop along in the form of a paper chase. I remember once we had a very important camp at Clarendon. It was on the Clarendon Football ground - a state-wide show and I was selected to lay the trail from the Blackwood Railway Station to this camp - it was about 9 miles away. I met them at the station and explained that at any bends in the road I would be cutting across through the scrub to shorten the distance they must follow my tracks and were to give me 10 minutes start. Anyhow these city lads, they came from Melbourne, Sydney, everywhere decided to try to catch me. I could see that they were making some ground on me so I had to cut off into the scrub every chance I could get - lead the trails down the steepest gulley and up the steepest hills and slowly I got away from them. I got back onto the main road just the other side of Coromandel Valley where there is a big, long hill, and I thought “Well, I’ll test them out here – I’m going to run all the way up this hill”. I got about quarter the way up the hill and was getting pretty tired. In front of me was Bick Nicolle, a friend of mine, with his big solid-tired International truck, making for Cherry Gardens to get a load of wood, so I just sat on the back of that truck which was moving along at about 8 miles an hour, threw the paper out as I went up this four mile
hill - I sure shook them off.

But getting back to the Sturt Creek Camps, we had a lad there, Jack Conlon, who had a big cattle dog which always came with us. It was a very handy dog. Used to catch rabbits and all sorts of things. He was able to make his dog almost sing songs - he would sit in front of him and make it bark out songs as he sang. If he howled like a dingo the dog would also howl like a dingo. It was a very effective little turn. At this camp we had these city lads there and he sneaked away into the scrub. I was telling them stories about “You’d better be careful at night. Don’t go too far away from the camp because the wild dingoes here had been known to attack man and might even take you back to their lair”. Jack Conlon got up the hill behind a couple of big rocks with his dog and just at dusk set up this terrific dingo howling and the lads, you could see by their eyes, were fairly terrified. We slept on ground sheets.
Next morning I got up and there was one lad alongside of me. He had his towel wrapped around his throat - he said “I didn’t want a dingo cutting my throat open at night”. We also had seen snakes and as they were all huddled around the fire with their ground sheets, while they weren’t looking, or were down at the pool, I would sneak a long line of rope under three or four of the ground sheets and then about 10 o’clock at night when we were all settled down, I would just give the rope a bit of a pull. Then I’d hear “I think there’s a snake under my bed” and they’d all jump up in great turmoil.

Fishing in the Onkaparinga, below Mt. Bold, there were some beautiful big pools which are now at the bottom of the Mt. Bold Reservoir. They were full of enormous red fins and brown trout. It took me 6 hours to walk from Blackwood over to there and back and that meant 6 hours, leaving at 5 o’clock in the morning and get there about 11 to fish to about 3 and then get home again at 9 o’clock at night. It was a pretty big day. I wasn’t able to get too many kids to come with me on those fishing trips. But sometimes, the aforementioned Bick Nicolle would give me a ride as far as Cherry Gardens to his wood cutters’ camp and I quite often went up there and camped the night at the wood cutters’ camp and then went on to Mt. Bold - camped there another night, back Monday morning and often straight on to school. I got to know those wood cutters. I was very interested. There were a lot of Italian wood cutters there. One chap who was a champion axe man. He used to compete professionally at Shows all over Australia. He had his racing axes there which he used to sharpen like a razor. I was very interested in that. I actually camped with him a couple of times He showed me how to sharpen axes, showed me the correct way to use them, which was a very important part of my life later on. I also became a commercial wood cutter, at times, made quite a few quid out of it. This chap’s name was Figg, and in later years I was shocked to read of the Upper Sturt tragedy. His wood cutting camp was at Cherry Gardens. He lived at Upper Sturt near Mt. Lofty. He would be away the whole week cutting wood. One week it was raining and too wet to cut so he went home arriving during the night and found another bloke in bed with his wife. He went berserk. The bloke got out of the window and disappeared - Figg didn’t catch him but he got his axe, chopped his wife up and their three little children -
he picked them up by the legs like rabbits and with his sharp axe, cut their heads off. They didn’t find him for about a fortnight. He took a shot-gun disappeared into thick scrub and shot himself. While they were looking for him there were even so-called jokes about him. They would say “Oh. they have found Figg”. “Where did they find him”? “On the tree”. They thought it was a great joke but it was rather upsetting for me because I had found the chap to be quite a normal, reasonable, pleasant man.

There were other fishing trips which used to take us to Happy Valley Reservoir where there were plenty of fish, but it was against the law, of course, to go in there and we were always being chased out of the place, but I was very fortunate. My father suggested that I go and see Uncle Stuart at the Water Works where he was an important man and would issue me with a Permit, which he did. I was the only lad in Blackwood with a Permit to go and fish in Happy Valley Reservoir. I used to get a great kick showing it to the bloke who came rushing through the scrub on a horse ready to kick me out. I just flashed this Permit. Or he would come rowing around in his boat, which was a foolish thing - you could hear the oars banging on the oar locks - he never caught anyone that way - they were always well-hidden in the bush by the time he got there. I saw him come there one day. There were half a dozen fishermen from Adelaide. They had flash baskets and flash gear. I was fishing in the middle with a wattle stick and a bit of string on the end and a little floater, pulling out these red fin, one after another. They were fishing with flies - they thought there were trout in there. There were trout too but we could never catch any but this chap came down, sneaked down, rode his horse down 100 yards from them and then sneaked down and took all their gear. Took their rods and baskets and everything else. They said, “What about that kid there?” “Well what’s the good of taking a wattle stick” the bloke said. He knew very well that I was fishing with a Permit. I don’t know who those blokes were but he went away with an arm full of gear.

I was fishing there one day and three or four of the local identities there (Blackwood blokes who were always out on illegal stunts). As a matter of fact the blighters used to put nets across the pools in Sturt Creek, throw worms in and as the trout rushed for the worms they would get gilled in these nets. They had a long net which they were going to put across this arm at the Happy Valley Reservoir. It was about 100 yards across there. One of them said “Hey Jack. You can swim. What about swimming across with this piece of rope? We will pull the net across and we’ll give you all the fish you want”. I really didn’t want any. I could catch all I wanted. But I thought it was a bit of a challenge so they tied this clothes line around my waist and away I went swimming with it but after about 50 yards the rope got heavy and wet and was sinking down and making it too hard. I couldn’t make any progress. So they realizedI wasn’t going to get there and they started pulling on the rope to pull it back. But the rope had
gone right down and of course as they pulled on it was dragging me under. I had the dickens of a job. I could have got back easily enough without them pulling on the rope but I nearly drowned. They then put sticks on it at a few feet intervals which floated the rope behind me and I got across it O.K. There were a couple of blokes on the other side and they dragged that arm and got a ton of fish out of there - all sorts of fish. Trout as well which I didn’t know were there.

The Sturt Creek Hills formed one huge recreation area for me - riding, camping, fishing, shooting, swimming, cliff climbing and nature studies.

I also discovered that easy pocket money was to be gained from this scrub. A sugar bag full of gum from the wattles was worth about 2 pounds at the Farmers Union in Adelaide and Dalgety’s paid well for bags of dead wool. I found the best dead wool from sheep which fell over the steep cliffs in the vicinity of the Cave pool and I often helped an overgrown jumbuck over the edge with a well-aimed boot from behind a large tree where the sheep tracks skirted the precipice. Rabbit skins were big money, especially when a relative of Mum’s was the buyer at Dalgety’s. All the skins I took in, despite their condition or sex were paid for as top quality bucks. I made really big money when a possum season was opened some time in 1926. Professional trappers invaded our hills. They set hundreds of traps beneath the trees, the trap plates covered with flour, which attracted the possums. Soon I collected a nice stock of traps. I also collected about 6 nice possums a day. By being able to move about on my own ground in the early morning darkness, I pulled up a trap, possum and all. About 6 possums and traps in a chaff bag became a writhing, clanking mess, which took quite some carrying, even for a tough 16 year old boy. When clear of the trappers’ ground, and well hidden in a thick clump of sheoaks, I would kill the possums and carry them home. A quick breakfast, and then off on my bike to Unley High, about 8 miles of hilly road. Riding home after school I would be off into the neighbouring scrub with my wheelbarrow and axe to get the next day’s house wood. In fact for my 14th birthday I got a new barrow. After getting the wood I would skin the 6 possums (possums must be skinned cold to get top prices).
Warm skinning is much easier but a great deal of fur is lost. I lived alone in the old house and nailed out the skins on the wooden doors each day. I received an average of 15/- each - something like 4 pounds a day and the average wage for an adult was about 8/- a day.

This lucrative enterprise did not last very long. One of the professional trappers was talking to my sister Jean at the local Parish Hall dance one Saturday night of the mysterious trap disappearances. Before she went to bed that night she woke me and told me of the ominous warning. I still went down that night, but moved through the scrub like an Indian brave. I approached a clump of wild cherries, a spot where they often set many traps and when almost half a mile away I spotted the glow of cigarettes coming from a thick blue bush only yards from the traps. I moved around them to the line of traps beneath the big red gums and passed several trapped possums. From the end of the line I collected about 8 possums, deciding to make it my last trip.

Suddenly I became a very wealthy boy, but nobody else in the household knew how much I had made out of possum skins. They all knew that I was getting a fair bit, but I had forty or fifty pounds hidden in my little room and soon I started to spend it. I bought a new Mauser rifle repeater, a German make which was a far better type rifle than any other kid around the place had, a new Stormy Archer bicycle, imported from England - quite the only one of its type in Blackwood, and also a lot of camping gear - ground sheet, a blanket which was waterproofed on one side and warm on the other,a bowey knife which I had always wanted, a decent torch and a Box Brownie Camera. I was well equipped for camping.

I soon had the opportunity to use all of this new gear. The aforementioned buyer at Dalgety’s, who I had befriended, asked me to go with him on a trip up North during the school holidays.

We travelled following the railway to Pt. Augusta, then through the Flinders. We camped at Angorichina where they were building a Hostel to treat tubercular returned soldiers. We passed through Hergott Springs, William Creek, to Oodnadatta, which was then the railhead. We then wound up on the Afghan track. Following a single camel track was not easy for a 4 wheeled vehicle. There was plenty of sand digging, crowbar work on rocks and axe work. There hadn’t been many trucks up that way in 1925 after we passed the new railway line operations. It seems strange to me to have seen this train line being built in 1925, completed about 1930 - then to travel over the same ground in 1982 to see it being pulled up. Of course it was quite wrong to build a railway along the same route taken by camel trains, which travelled the lowest country, following creeks for water and feed. Little wonder the railway flooded after any rain storm. On the track up the Ghan track, we saw large mobs of Brumbies. Mum’s cousin, the Dalgety man, made transactions with horse catchers to deliver horses to the Oodnadatta railroad. It was better money for them. Before this thousands of these beautiful horses were shot for the 5/- worth of hair in their tails. Buying horses for Dalgety’s and in a Chev 4 1 ton truck we went as far north as Stuart Springs which is now Alice Springs. There was only one shop in Alice Springs at that time - Kilgariff’s Store. As a matter of fact, there is still a descendent of Kilgariff, a member of the Northern Territory Parliament. We moved east from Alice Springs right up as far as Betoota. We actually went parallel with the Birdsville Track - even 10 miles or so further north which according to everybody these days is across the Simpson Desert and a hazardous trip for present-day vehicles. However, we didn’t know that - we didn’t know how impossible that is supposed to be. He was making for towns in western Queensland, Betoota, Boulia. However, we came to a huge sand hill which even the Chev 4 couldn’t get over - had no hope of getting over it - and only a few years ago I encountered the same sand hill when travelling north on holidays with the Rathjens. We did not have much trouble to get across it then - but the Chev 4 couldn’t get through it. We went on to Batoota and down across Coopers Creek to Innamincka where I saw that enormous stack of bottles - 200 yards long and about 50 ft. high and about 50 yards wide, which was later washed away and broken up by a huge flood. Remnants of this heap can still be seen. That was a really great trip for me. Probably started me on my gallivanting around the bush.

Apart from providing good fishing, the Cave pool on the Sturt Creek was a famous spot. It was the headquarters of the Blue Devil Gang. We were a gang of lads with nothing much to do. We read Wild West stories about Hopalong Cassidy and saw films which were pretty crude in those days but Cow Boy pictures always impressed us. We formed the gang (we were actually cow boys). One member of the gang had a big brother who worked at Holden’s Motor Body Builders as a trimmer. He brought home large sheets of the material that they covered the seats with. From this we made chaps, we had belts, we made holsters and we all had .22 revolvers with which we could practice a draw - we could quickly draw those little guns and shoot and make a jam tin jump around at our feet. We practiced and practiced. The Blue Devil Gang had an initiation ceremony which was pretty dangerous. There was a big old silver mine up on the side of the hill, a mile or so from the Cave pool. Down around the side of this mine there were shafts four or five hundred feet deep you could throw a rock in and hear it whistling through the air before it hit the bottom. At one of these shafts there was a patch of peppermint gum saplings, which were about 5 or 6 inches through the butt. The initiation ceremony was to climb one of these, causing it to bend over. The future member had to do this, climbing hand over hand, until his legs were hanging. in the very middle of this 500 ft. drop - it seemed to be my job to show the new member what had to be done each time - so I had performed that dangerous ceremony dozens of times – didn’t fall down once by the look of it. Anyhow the Blue Devil Gang occupied a lot of our time.

We had a competition for diving into the pool. It was a fairly deep pool. As a matter of fact it claimed the lives of two lads who were swimming alone there one hot day, and in the main street of Blackwood today there is a water drinking fountain with a plaque in memory of Frank Collins and Rodney Saint, the two local boys who were drowned in that pool. I claimed the high diving prize by diving from the very highest possible spot on the cliff above the pool. Gradually we went higher and higher. But I didn’t get that high diving prize for nothing because on the bottom of that pool lies my left front incisor. I climbed to this spot (I had been looking at it for years, really wondering whether it was possible to jump from this ledge, arch up over the jagged rock just below, and land in the pool). But as I got bigger I got more expert. As a matter of fact when we rode our bikes down Shepherds Hill and went swimming at Glenelg we dived from the roof of the kiosk which was fairly high and on trips up through the sandy track to Murray Bridge and camping beneath the bridge, we often dived from the road bridge to the water, which makes me shudder now when I drive across there and look down.

But this dive into the cave pool was quite dangerous. I only did it once. On other high dives I would shoot down the 20 ft. of water and hit the smooth rock bottom with both hands but on this dive I was going with so much force that my hands did not hold me and my mouth hit the rocks and my tooth snapped. In later years I had a false tooth of solid gold made from a sovereign.

As this seems to be quite a rigmarole of close shaves I had as a kid I will recall a couple of serious incidents which could have really been dangerous but turned out to be innocuous.

There was one occasion when I was walking around the train line. We always used the railway track when going from one place to another (if there was a train line there) - a railway always goes straight, through hills - it is always the shortest route from one point to another - and a really good walking spot, except that you are walking on the sleepers. They are spaced in such a way that every time a rail joins, there are two close sleepers which seemed to interfere with your stride as you were covering the ground. So we found it better to walk on the rail itself. We got very expert at walking quite fast on this rail. However, on bends there was a check rail put in alongside the main rail, in such a way that there was a space between the two rails. If your foot slipped down there, normally there was room to be able to pull it out. But this day I had a new pair of boots which I had bought from the possum skin funds - and they were fairly big, elaborate, hunting type boots, and when I slipped down into this cavity there was no way that I could get out. I did think of undoing the lace and leaving the boot there but it had cost me too much, I couldn’t do that. Anyway, luckily a crowd of lads came along (coming home from the creek). It was about 5 o’clock and at that time the Melbourne Express was due. We could hear it some miles away - it always made a dickens of a fuss with two RX engines on the front and one on the back, pushing that great train up over the hills. I had to get out of there within about 10 minutes for sure. I started off dragging my foot along in there to get to the end of the check rail which was 100 yards away. Anyhow we left it a bit late - we still had about 10 yards to go and the train seemed to be getting closer. A couple of lads ran down the track to attempt to stop the train. I quickly undid the lace and tried to get my foot out but it would not come out of the boot even then. So we kept on frantically making for the end of the track. The engine came in sight about half a mile down the track where it had swung around out of a cutting and I had decided that I had better throw myself down and let my foot get cut off - there was nothing else I could do. Anyhow, there were two lads trying to stop the train (the first one was saying afterwards that the train nearly ran over him and didn’t make any effort to stop) and then the next lad jumped up on the track and waved his arms and that was just enough to save my life (or my foot) because although the train did not stop we heard the engines’ puffing get slower and that just gave us enough time to make the last few feet and get me out.

I recall another incident probably worth including in this story. When we first came to Blackwood the viaduct between Mitcham and Eden was still in use. The long Sleeps Hill tunnel was being built. We often walked across the viaduct and through two small tunnels to Clapham which was as far as suburban trains would go in those days. Crossing the viaduct was always rather precarious - it was about 150 yards across a steep rocky gorge some 200 feet below. There was no side hand rail - a 12 inch plank across the sleepers between the rails was the walkway and if one looked down between the sleepers it was quite scary. Half way across there was a cage of wire mesh about 2 ft. wide - a place of refuge if a pedestrian was half way over when a train burst from the tunnel on to the viaduct. One afternoon when playing at the spot with some other 9 year olds I was offered the dare to stay on the viaduct as the Melbourne Express passed over. I’ll never forget that experience. I set off to get into the cage when we knew the train was about due but the train burst from the tunnel with me some 20 yards from the safety cage and too far to get back. I had to run along the narrow plank with the engine whistle screaming at me. I made it with the great black engine only a few yards away, with the driver hanging out waving his fist only about 4 feet from me crouching in the wire cage. The viaduct was swaying like a spider net between two trees. The long tunnel was completed soon after this incident. If that viaduct had been used much longer there surely must have been trouble. In later years I had been caught several times in the long tunnel. There were plenty of escape cavities about 20 yards apart, and painted white, easily found in the semi-darkness. However, the choking heat of the smoke from the up travelling trains and the screaming brakes and rattles of the down trains made it quite an unpleasant experience.

My father had invested in the brick making business and actually became Secretary of The Metropolitan Brick Company. They had a brick works about three-quarters of the way from Blackwood to Eden on the train line. It had been purchased from Wades, years ago, and was a going concern with a fairly big quarry where they quarried this yellow shale. It wasn’t actually clay - it was a very soft stone but made a very hard brick. As a matter of fact they made the bricks for the T. & G. Building. This quarry was some 50 ft. high I suppose, going into this hill, and on some Saturdays I worked at the brick works on little jobs. I had the job of poking a little tool into the ventilating bricks. Bricks were made solid and then the holes for ventilation were pushed through with this little round tube. It was a fiddly job and was a good job for lads. We used to work pretty fast at it and finish up making 4 or 5/- on a Saturday. I used to walk down the train line, as usual, to attend this job, and around and up to the office, where my brother Bob was working. He was a clerk in the brick works office, and I booked on to go to work for the day. But this day I don’t know what got into me but I decided to cut across and walk around the top of the quarry and down the hill (a short cut and I was probably running late). As I crossed the top of the quarry I went to the edge and looked over to see how deep it was and it was just at that time that they decided to blast. Of course before they lit the fuse for the blasting they called out “fire” and so forth to people around down at .
the bottom but there was no warning for anyone standing on the top of this thing. Suddenly this enormous explosion - and the whole place where I was standing started to slide down into the quarry. I made a couple of attempts to run back out of it but it just took me on down. So I turned around and stood on this huge bank of stuff which was sliding down the hill and sort of balanced myself and just rode it to the bottom. There was an enormous cloud of dust and you can imagine the blokes’ amazement to see a lad walk out of the middle of the dust and on down to the office to start work.

I had completed 3 years at Unley High School and at the end of the third term had applied for a job in a bank. I had been advised that all the vacancies had been filled for that period but if I wished there would be a job available for me commencing in June. I accepted this job. However, not wanting to spend six months uselessly at school, I thought I would get a job. So I got on my bike and had my first trip away looking for work. I finished up over on the West Coast working for a farmer. They were friends of Bob’s. He had befriended a daughter whom he had met in Adelaide and he had been going to this farm for holidays and they gave me a job. They were selling out and going to Western Australia. They started farming at Merriden - Bob went with them.

Later, after they were established, the owner came back to the West Coast and I had put in about 2 months at that time, with the new owners. He suggested that I come over with him to Merriden. He said he was then going up north into Western Australia shearing. (He was a shearer). Bob and I could go with him. We drove from South Australia to Merriden in a Bean Buckboard (a utility). It would be interesting to find the origin of this vehicle because it was a pretty good truck. You can imagine going over from South Australia to Western Australia on practically no roads. We camped at the Eucla Telegraph Station which closed about 3 years later. From then on the track followed along the telegraph line going two or three poles and then passing to the other side, around a few more poles and then passing to the other side, and on and on. It was just a matter of swinging the steering wheel from one side to the other. You could see that the track had been made by a fellow in a horse and cart going along studying the wires - that was probably the only reason to have a track there. There were very few travellers in those days going across to Western Australia from South Australia.

When we got to Madura there was another obstacle. The hills rise steeply at Madura. The plains between Eucla and Madura have always reminded me of a giant heel mark. At Eucla you are on the Nullarbor Plain and suddenly you drop down a couple of hundred feet to a plain. You go across this to the other side of Madura and once again climb back up out of it on to the Nullarbor Plain. It apparently was a place like a big bay when the sea was in there. At Eucla the sea was some ten miles away - just faintly it could be seen over a few sand hills. Now if you go past Eucla you will go out and have a look at the old Telegraph Station which is practically covered with drifting sand and there are miles and miles of sand hills between there and the sea. This has happened in the last 50 years. The sea and the Sandhill’s are gradually coming inland. At Madura the Bean had to be assisted up the Madura Pass by a cable which was attached to a large crab winch at the top with a couple of men on the handle. It was quite a job to get a vehicle up over that pass in those days. Of course now a bitumen road winds around and you can drive up there in top gear.

We went from Station to Station to Norseman and then from Norseman across the old Norseman Road to Lake King. This was a hazardous trip in those days. It was the longest stretch without habitation. It necessitated carrying a 44 gallon drum of petrol in the back of the Bean. The track climbed over hundreds of sand hills. I came back over that track in 1986 when it had been graded and it was being prepared to be made into a road. Even now it is no pushover. In those days the sand hills really took a lot of digging, pushing, etc. to get across in a truck.

We went from there down to Wave Rock which was quite an interesting thing, even 50 years ago, and then on to Meriden.

At the new farm at Meriden which was being cleared, and one or two crops had been sown, the owner was running short of money. He was a shearer and had to go shearing to supplement his funds. He invited Bob and I to come with him in the Bean up to Mt. Anderson Sheep Station, way up north to the Fitzroy River. We set off from Meriden across to the coast hitting it at Geraldton and then following the old road which practically followed the sea, going around swamps only to leave the sea, but it never got more than 10 or 20 miles away, crossing big rivers on fords which were covered with 2 or 3 feet of water. We passed through Onslow and Pt. Hedland, which were very crude towns in those days, and then following around the 80 Mile Beach to Broome and from Broome we made for the Fitzroy River and up to Mt. Anderson Sheep Station.

I worked with Bob in the shearing shed, sweeping and wool rolling, and earned a couple of pounds a week and then it was time for me to get back to Adelaide, it being about May. So I went into Derby, seated on the top of bales of wool being pulled by a donkey team of about 50 donkeys, down the Fitzroy River on a very small bush track and across to Derby - that took 2 days. Quite an interesting trip with the driver and the donkeys having to be taken out of their harness each night and tied up to trees and watered - they didn’t get much in the way of food - just what they could pick up. Then harnessed up again next day and on again. When I got to Derby I booked my passage back to Perth
in a boat which, when I first saw it, was lying on its side (the tide goes out for miles) and I went along this little jetty and was shown the boat that I had to board next day. It didn’t look too encouraging lying on its side, it didn’t look that big. As a matter of fact it wasn’t a very good trip - it was pretty rough.

We called in at Onslow on the way back and I was interested in a little engine that worked on the wharf. It was a motorised engine which towed a couple of carriages from the Onslow Wharf down to the town, a mile or so away. Last year (1986) when coming through there, there was that same little engine, with a couple of carriages set up, in the main street on a little rail, all painted up, being an historical item. I have a photograph which I took on the jetty at Onslow almost 60 years ago and again a photograph of the same little engine sitting in Onslow in 1986 - a part of Australian history. I also have a photograph of myself perched on the top of the bales of wool with the donkey team at Mt. Anderson prior to leaving for Derby.

In 1985, whilst travelling through there, I called in to Mt. Anderson Station, which is now all cattle, with my 60 year old photograph. The people there weren’t very interested at all, strangely enough. The cattle men could hardly believe that it had ever been sheep, but one chap took me down to the big old rambling shed and showed me there, hanging in the rafters, 40 or 50 donkey collars. I photographed that. I had previously photographed the donkey .
collars and the donkeys that wore them 60 years prior. Two very interesting snaps.
The first one was taken with my little Kodak box Brownie - a camera I bought when I spent the spoils of the possum episode. The latest one was taken with my automatic Canon camera. Nowadays, I have thousands of photographs in albums from recent trips around Australia, but the very important ones I took with the little Brownie are mostly lost. There only seems to be half a dozen or so of them still around. For instance the photograph of the big stack of bottles at Innamincka, which I know I took and which I can remember having seen, is lost.
Also one of catching horses at Boulia to show us the numbers. We had some exciting trips chasing horses, catching them and examining them to see what age they were - the buyer having to know all these facts. The hundreds of snaps which we had hanging around the place, even up to the time Mary and I were first married - as we shifted from place to place - clearing up rubbish - they were gradually lost.

I remember one trip Jean, Bob and I had shortly after the war, when the great battle ship, H.M.S.Hood and the cruiser Repulse visited South Australia. They anchored about two miles off the Glenelg jetty. We walked down from Blackwood, down to Brighton, along the beach to Glenelg, bought our tickets (3d. for children) and these tugs from Port Adelaide were taking the visitors out to see the battle ships. The trip was supposed to take about 2 hours. We were landed on the Hood. However, for some reason or other the tug boats went on strike, went back to Port Adelaide and left the few hundred visitors on the decks of the Hood and the Repulse. We stayed there all day - we were fed by the sailors. As a matter of fact Jean became quite friendly with a sailor on the Hood who later corresponded with her for years. Anyhow, I got into a fair bit of strife on the Hood. I was about 12. Very interesting to see actually when the Hood did come here - what date it was. There_ was a chap painting some canons and I climbed up this ladder when he left for a second or two and put my arm down this canon to see how nice and smooth it was. The barrel and bore of the cannon intrigued me. The rifling in this little cannon allowed my arm to go down there, however I couldn’t get it out and there I was up there struggling. I had on a little silk coat and pants and a straw decker hat - I was dressed up for the occasion. I got into my usual lot of trouble with grey paint all over this suit. I didn’t get into any other trouble that I can remember on that boat, but we were there until dark and Jean and her boyfriend went up to the search lights and Jean was pointing out in the hills where we lived and this search light was so strong from Glenelg - he was able to aim it over the hills, up over the train line, up alongside where they built the new long tunnel, there was a gully which went right up to our back door, practically, and we could almost see from a ship anchored off Glenelg our own back door at Blackwood. However, we stayed on the ship until 11 o’clock at night when the Warrawee, the steamer which used to run to Kangaroo Island, came alongside the Hood and took us all on board, and back to Glenelg. A fact I remember about the famous battle ship - as this little steamer pulled up alongside, it was tossing and rising two or three feet alongside the deck of the Hood which just sat in the water like a solid concrete floor. When back on the shore we had to walk along the beach to Brighton, then up Shepherds Hill and home, arriving home in the early hours of the morning. There were no telephones in those days - nobody knew what had happened. It was just one of those things which people had to put up with.

Jean had a box Brownie and took lots of photographs whilst we were on board that battle ship. I can remember them kicking around the place - they have all been lost.
Shortly after returning from my travels in Western Australia, I found myself landed in that stuffy old bank in King William Street, My first job was to walk miles on the bitumen streets around Adelaide delivering Bills of Lading and Drafts, and running all types of messages. There was even a bank bike which I had to ride around. A horrible old thing - the chain fell off all the time.

My father insisted that I attend an Accountancy class of 3 years duration at the S.A. School of Mines, from which I obtained a Diploma in 1929. The Bank encouraged its juniors to take a course by correspondence with Hemingway Robinson. This, once started, had to be completed, otherwise the Bank would not pay for it. I was entitled to become a member of the Australian Institute which helped me to secure a job or two at odd times, but I was never contented in offices and didn’t stay long. I found myself back at the School of Mines once again in 1946, this time studying for the Royal Sanitary Certificate which enabled me to become a Meat Inspector. This job did suit me as it included trips around the bush - I was a Meat Inspector for 20 years.

The old bank bike was a fixed wheel with no brakes, and when the chain came off there was no way of pulling up. One day I delivered a passbook to a V.I.P. customer at North Adelaide and coming back, flat out, past the Children’s Hospital, the chain came off. There has always been heavy traffic in North Adelaide, even in 1927. There were no traffic lights. At busy times a policeman stood at intersections, controlling the cars. This day the copper had his back to me and arms up stopping the cars alongside me. As I flew past him, just scraping past a truck coming with the right of way he roared like a wild bull. Nobody disobeyed a traffic cops signals in those days. His mate on a Harley Davidson and side car raced after me signalling for me to pullover and stop. I yelled, “I can’t stop - no chain”. I didn’t stop until I was well past the Torrens Bridge and the copper, after listening to my story of the lost chain, the rotten old bike, put me and the bike in the side-car and back to the bank we went. He took me straight into the Manager’s office where he made the boss agree to purchase a new bike and soon I was riding a brand new Super Elliott.

Talking about Super Elliott’s, Mary had started work at John Martins about that time and I always used to manoeuvre at the Blackwood Station to get into the same carriage with her and soon we were looking for empty carriages. This didn’t happen very often but - sometimes - when it did, whoopee!

I first met Mary at a Blackwood dance. I had known George Fairlie, her cousin, for some time, and he introduced me to her at the Parish Hall. But I had seen her dancing and I wasn’t game to have a dance with her because she was a real expert. On the way over from England on the ship it appears that she danced day and night the whole way over, and in those days, the modern type of dancing, foxtrots and modern waltz and blues weren’t being done at a place like Blackwood so I decided to go to Adelaide to the Palais Royal and learn to dance properly, which I did. So it was some time before I was game enough to start dancing with
Mary. But of course, after awhile, by still being friendly with George, I manoeuvred myself into the house down at Hawthorndene and Mary and I became very friendly.

Most of the big balls and dances were held in the Boys Club Hall. The Blackwood Boys Club was a wonderful institution. Although it was called the Boys Club, there were also Girls Clubs there.

We attended a gymnasium from the ages of about 10 or 11 and then later on they held boxing and wrestling classes. Old Syd Moag, the aforementioned vegetable chap, had recovered from his broken leg, and he took control and conducted the boxing classes. He was pretty good too. He was a man who had a neck deformity - his head was slightly on one side. This seemed to help him as one of the most important things was to keen your chin tucked in under your shoulder - well he did that naturally. He was pretty hard to hit. He taught us everything - taught us all there was to know - how to use a straight left and come in close so that you couldn’t be hit and things like that and I used to hold my own in the class with most of the kids but there was one bloke there who was a couple of years older than us and he used to belt the daylights out of me. He turned out to be a professional fighter. Old Syd would never hit you he would pull his punch a few inches from your nose and never hurt - but this bloke used to plunge his great glove into your nose and make the blood squirt out. He would knock, you arse over head and send you skidding on your back across the Club Hall floor. He was a terrible bloke. As a matter of fact he turned out to be a professional fighter under the name of Kid Armstrong and became Amateur Welter Weight champion of South Australia and then later on he became Light Heavy Weight champion of Western Australia and Kalgoorlie. When he was training for a fight he would pick fights at dances and get quite good training by belting blokes who had no chance with him. He accused me of dancing with his girl one night at the Parish Hall and knocked me over on the floor.

At the back of the bank where I worked there was a Central College of Physical Culture, so I went in there and was training there with the blokes and I thought I was pretty good and actually got to the stage where I manoeuvred so that old Hughie McGough (that was Kid Armstrong’s name) tackled me again outside the Parish Hall, but I still wasn’t good enough - I finished up in the hedge. Later on, in years to come, there is quite a good old story about how I got my own back. Perhaps this might be the time to tell it.

It is jumping from one place to another, but this is years later. He was a great booze artist Hughie McGough, and one Easter Saturday, we were up in the pub, Bob Parkin and a few of our mates, and Hughie was as full as a fart. He ha~ picked a couple of fights, knocked a few blokes over and he was coming back and getting into the beer and I said to Bob, “I’m going to tackle him later on, He’s getting that drunk, I reckon I can do him”. And Bob said “No. You had better wait for a bit longer”. There was a tough lad who used to come up from Marion, (down Sturt Road he lived) - he was pretty good. I have seen him clean up many blokes at dances, but he was sober and thought it was his chance. He picked on old Hughie and it wasn’t long before Hughie had him cleaned up so I thought that I was lucky I didn’t tackle him. We stayed on boozing. Six o’clock the pub shut and Hughie could hardly walk and Bob said “What do you reckon?” I said “No way. I think we had better leave it”. He lived up at Upper Sturt. He used to go down over the Windsor’s’ Orchard and up over a winding track up through the scrub. I thought “Now he’s nearly out on his feet. He’s struggling along there”. I followed him. “He’s going to fall over any minute”. I ran along in bushy country and got in front of him on the track and stood behind a tree. They had been wattle barking there leaving the heaps of short wattle sticks and I picked one of those up. He used to sing Irish songs when he got full. As he came past he was singing in a very slurred voice “By Killarney’s Lakes and Fells” I crashed the wattle stick onto his felt hat as he passed my vantage point, he slumped and fell and rolled down the steep hill into a Briar bush like Brer Rabbit, he just lapsed into a heavy sleep and I waited for a while but when he showed signs of coming to I quickly slid away. I knew the man for years after this incident, he had no recollection of it, however I felt I had been revenged somewhat.

Mary worked until 6 o’clock at John Martins and we then caught the quarter past six train together to get home each night. But I knocked off about half past three which gave me plenty of time to spare so I would wander up Rundle Street to the Oriental Hotel and have a beer and then to the Oriental Billiard Room which was owned by Fred Nicolle, who married Jean, my sister and who is the father of the six girls and Robert the one boy. When the old home and farm at Happy Valley was sold he had money to invest. I remember going with him, looking around. At one stage he almost bought a market garden at Uraidla. I often look at the place as we drive through there now. Wonderful spot. He wouldn’t have gone wrong if he had bought that. But there were too many black berries on it and he didn’t like work. In those days they had to dig black berries up with a pick and shovel. Now all you do is spray them with a bit of stuff and they’re gone. Fred invested some of his money. He bought this Billiard Saloon in Gawler Place and I used to go up there every night to play billiards, do a bit of marking for him. I used to run the place. As I appeared, he went home. I enjoyed working there often taking a bob or two from mug players. Of course he came back for tea, just after 6, in time for me to catch the train home with Mary.

The very first time I laid eyes on Mary was under strange circumstances.
The Blackwood Rover Scouts were in charge of a Chamber of Horrors in the Boys Club Hall at a Community Fete and we had been allotted shower rooms at the
back of the hall and a change room, which we rigged up like a Chamber of Horrors similar to the one at the Royal Show. We had skulls of cattle and bones in a desert, an imitation sea with a model ship going across it and a fellow pulling a string making the ship rock, there was Davey Jones walking the plank, it looked fairly interesting. In the shower alcove we had a bloke dressed as a devil. I led the people around the Chamber of Horrors describing all these things and in the shower alcove where the devil was I pressed a switch on the side of the door lighting a globe covered with red paper making hell fire. We had dry ice making smoke at the bottom, glowing red. Of course it looked very effective. As I pressed the button the devil would shoot forward, arms grabbing the person I was conducting. It was in the dark. I didn’t know who it was. It happened to be Mary. She sprung back screaming and wrecked the whole thing. She jumped up in the air and swiped her arms around and pulled all the electrical wiring down throwing the Chamber of Horrors into to pitch darkness. On the way out of the Chamber of Horrors there were two planks, gradually placed wider and wider. As the girls walked along it their legs stretched wider apart and right in the middle of the widest place, I pressed a button starting a big fan below, which blew their skirts up. Of course there was a lot of screaming as the girls rushed out - attracting customers. But after Mary pulled the wiring out the Chamber of Horrors was extinct. When I got out in the light with this young lady I thought to myself “Well, all that time I’ve had that pretty girl hanging on my arm”. Later in the fete she was a star in a one act play. She gave evidence against the local butcher for displaying bare legs in his window - things like that. I was very intrigued by this girl.

I met George Elliot, Mary’s older brother - Scotty Elliot the local lads called him, his Newcastle-on-Tyne accent being mistaken for the Scottish brogue. He was a very good hockey player, and of course George Fairlie, her cousin whom I knew, also played hockey, and from then on I wormed my way in by befriending George Fairlie. And soon I was “in like Flynn”.

The Elliot’s had lots of parties and lots of fun down at Hawthorndene - making our own fun - nobody had much money to spend.

I started at the bank on seventy-five pounds a year – that’s about 25/- a week and I had to give all but 5/- of that for board at home - everybody had to do that in those days. I got increments each year (small rises) but not much. At home at night there was not much in the way of radio programmes for awhile. Radio started when I was about 14. We first heard radio from Sydney - 2BL was the first station. There were a couple of Victorian stations later, but they didn’t broadcast all the time. There was absolutely nothing to do unless you made your own fun.

We used to go to the pictures - that didn’t cost much - the silent pictures. Then came the first talkie which Mary and I went to. We booked our seats for the Singing Fool at the Regent. There was a bit of muck-up there because Mary had a seat at the end of the aisle and my seat wasn’t next to her - I didn’t have a seat so I finished up seeing The Singing Fool sitting on a step alongside Mary. I reckon I was a bit of a fool - I didn’t do much singing.

I remember the story about the old lady who wanted a front seat. There was an old rich lady who was always used to the best seat in the theatre and she wanted the best seat in the middle of the front row. When she was told “the best seats at the pictures are further back” she said “Oh. no. I want to see this picture and I want a seat right up close - I don’t want to miss any of this Al Jolson and his Swinging Tool”. On the stage at the Regent they had this enormous gold coloured Budda with a big mouth which opened and out came the words “I am the voice of the silent pictures which from now on will be called Talkies”.

In 1931 Mary and I had been going together for a couple of years and we decided to get engaged. This announcement was made in the paper. Shortly afterwards I was called in to the head office of the bank and asked about this engagement. The Bank controlled every bodies lives. They said “You are not in a position to be married”. A married bank clerk who was posted to the country had to be found married quarters which was a problem for the bank. Actually the Manager asked me “Have you got this girl in the family way?” I was embarrassed and told him so, but that is the sort of thing they did. A couple of days later I was posted to Peterborough which they thought was as far away from Mary as possible.

In Peterborough I stayed at Casey’s Hotel and of course, having a bit of spare time on my hands, used to spend quite a bit of time in the bar. Not much money to spend but I used to work behind the bar at times and drink a bit of grog. Also I used to keep nit for the book maker which earned me a couple of bob every now and then. But most week-ends I spent hiking around the bush, exploring the area around Peterborough. Although I did join a concert party which used to tour around the neighbouring towns. We were called The Moderns of 1932. We used to all hold hands and come out on the stage dancing and singing “We are the Moderns, the Moderns, The Moderns of 1932”. (Jazz time). Then away went the concert. I used to dress up as a girl and one of my acts was a high kicking episode where I kicked my shoe off into the audience - that was a bit of a stunt. Then we used to do a bit of dancing. There were three of us who did the after beat - a dance all the rage in those days. I sang with a little plump girl “If I were the only boy in the world and you were the only girl”. Mary got a bit jealous of her but she was a strange little sort, and one whom I certainly would not have enjoyed living alone in the world with - she sang well enough though. Mary came up to Peterborough sometimes to stay at Casey’s. They used to let her stay free of charge because we were engaged. Old Ma Casey used to put Mary away down the end of the corridor from my room and right opposite Casey’s room was a squeaky board which I walked on once when sneaking along at night. The door opened and out came Amelia’s head – “What are you doing there Jack? Where are you going? That’s not the way to the toilet. The other way - down there”. She was right on me.

Every night in the lounge Casey’s supplied the music. Their son Naish played the piano and Tom, who later became a politician, played a violin. There was a lot of singing - thirsty work - and rounds of drinks were served. One night at a function like this old Jim said to me, “Go down and get the drinks Jack – here’s the money and the orders. I’ll have my usual”. He had a bottle of whisky on the top shelf. In those days the publican had to buy a drink with every round, even if there were only one or two chaps in the bar - when it was the publican’s turn, he had to buy a drink. And old Jim used to always have the whisky out of his own bottle. That night when I went down to get the drinks, while I was pouring the drinks I thought “I’ll have one of his special whiskies”. I got Jim’s bottle, poured a nobler with some ginger ale. It didn’t taste like whisky and ginger ale at all - I tasted it neat - it was cold tea. The price of a whisky was 9d. so every time you included Jim Casey in the round you were having a 5d. beer and were paying 9d. for his cold tea.

There were a couple of lawyers staying at the pub. One was Cecil St.Ledger Kelly, the other Fred Adams. Old Cecil was a bit of a booze artist. He wasn’t a bad bloke. I used to get on pretty well with him. I used to go to dances quite a bit around the nearby country towns and one Saturday night we went on a trolley with two horses (a crowd of girls and boys) all with our bottles of beer and having a pretty good time. We went to the small town of Dawson, some 20 odd miles from Peterborough. It was quite an ordinary country dance. Everyone getting pretty well inebriated, the lads getting a bit rough and tumble, a few fights and that sort of thing. Next morning when I woke up (I had just got home, into my room, dropped my suit in a heap on the floor and fell into bed). When I was putting my suit away (it was quite a nice grey suit) I was amazed to see blood stains over the lapels and down the coat - quite a lot of blood. I had a look at myself. I didn’t have any cuts or scratches or anything on
me anywhere. I blew my nose - it hadn’t been bleeding. I couldn’t work it out at all. At about 10 o’clock that Sunday morning the phone rang for me. It was Sergeant Wright from the Peterborough Police. He wanted me to come down to the Police Station. I said to him “What for?” He said “I’ll tell you when you get here”. I said “If you’re not going to tell me what it’s for I am not going to come down there”. He said “If you don’t come down, we’ll come up there and arrest you”. So I said “All right. I’ll come straight down”. I went around to Kelly’s room, woke him up and told him about the blood on the suit and that I didn’t know where it was from and about the police phone call. Kelly said “Well look, you go down there, I’ll follow you”. He got dressed quickly, followed me down and stopped in the main street. I went around the corner and down to the Police Station. Kelly said he’d give me about five minutes to find out what it was all about, then he would come in and give me a hand. So I went into the Police Station and up to the counter. A young mounted constable came round and grabbed me and pushed me into a room. Then old Sergeant Wright got hold of me and said “Now Jack. You’ve got to give us some information”. I said “What sort of information?” “Well” they said, “we know you stand outside the pub keeping nit for the bookmaker. Now who is the bookmaker”? “Is it Jim Casey?” “Or is it Tom Rees”? Or there was another bloke there - I have forgotten his name. “Who is the bookmaker?” I said “I don’t know. I’m not standing out there keeping nit, I’m just standing out there for something to do”. And with that the mounted constable gave me a bang on the ear hole - a real heavy punch - I started to yell, I said “You rotten bastard. What are you doing to me? I am just telling you that I don’t know anything about any bookmakers”. There was quite a bit of yelling and I tried to get out of the room. They were really hammering me, then in walked Kelly. He hammered on the door, walked in and said “What’s going on here”? I said “They’ve been beating me up. They reckon I’m keeping nit and they want to know who the bookmaker is”. “Oh” he said, “come on straight away up to the doctor”. Old Sergeant Wright really was in trouble. How the dickens could he have expected me to have a lawyer walk in like that? We went straight up to the doctor (Dr. Wilson). I had some marks on me. A bad bruise on the side of my head where they had hit me and so a couple of days later Kelly and I went back to Sergeant Wright. Kelly said “You have been picking on this lad around the town for quite awhile - at different times you have picked on him - now you’ve overdone it. The next time you lay a hand on this boy you’ll be in trouble because the doctor has certified that he has been hit here”. And of course that’s where it stopped. I never did find out how the blood got on the coat but I had a great time in the town after that. I used to carry out the after hours grog from the pub and the coppers never went near me.

The work in the bank at that time was really getting me down. I was the Ledger Keeper at Peterborough and everything had to be written in these enormous books about 6 inches thick and about 18 inches square - all the cheques were posted in pen and ink - the balances brought forward after every cash and every cheque payment - passbooks had to be written up at the same time - on overdrafts the interest had to be calculated in red at the edge of the page every day - and once a week all balances had to be extracted and balanced with the cash book and the journal and the general ledger - down to the last penny. Most of the customers were farmers and I befriended a few of them. I used to go out to the farms on week-ends sometimes, looking around, perhaps helping them with a bit of sheep dipping and things like that. I certainly envied them their free life, although, at that time, they weren’t going very well. As a matter of fact it was also my job to make demand on a couple of poor old farmers who had fallen foul of the bank and couldn’t pay their commitments. The idea was to go out with a document stating that “from this day the bank owned their farm and would take charge as soon as possible”. Those trips were nearly always 10 or 15 miles, then once again, I rode a trusty old push bike out to these places. I am remembering this because one place that I went to, the old couple and the young daughter, got so irate I thought perhaps I might get shot. I didn’t get shot but as I rode down the long track to the gate they sooled their Alsatian dog on to me and as my leg came up on the pedals he ripped the left cheek of my bum and tore into it. I had to jump-off the bike and keep him off by pushing at him and by that time the farmer realised what a serious matter it was and he came driving up in his old Ford and they took me back to the house. The sweet young lady spent a bit of time bathing my bum. It wasn’t that bad!

The banks had been hit by the depression as well and a few staff had been retrenched. I was hoping it was my turn soon. However that didn’t come. One day a couple of miners came down from the north with a couple of bags of ore to be crushed and assessed at the Government Battery at Peterborough. This Battery is still in existence today. They came from a place called Tennant Creek away up north in those days - a long haul on a rough old track down to Alice Springs and then by train down to Peterborough with the two bags of ore. They stayed there for a few days - stayed at Casey’s Hotel and I talked with them about their prospecting activities. They told me that if there was any paying quantity of gold on these samples Tennant Creek would be a good place to make for. I told them I was sick of the bank.

Their bags of ore were rich in gold - it was the first strike from Tennant Creek. After that there was quite a rush up there and I was very sorry that I hadn’t taken their advice. As a matter of fact I could have possibly gone back with them. I rued the chance I missed. So when the chance came soon after to go on a gold rush, I didn’t hesitate. I was having two weeks holiday a few months after that in Adelaide and my friend Jack Conlon (the lad with the singing dog) advised me that if I wanted to get out of the bank now was the chance because he was going to the Granites the next week. It cost twenty-five pounds to pay a passage on a truck (a Rio speed wagon). I had a couple of weeks holiday and I thought at the time, perhaps I can go up and have a look and come back anyhow for twenty-five pounds. It was only a single passage for twenty-five pounds of course, and I don’t know what happened to me - I just decided “I’m going on that trip”. I produced my twenty-five quid, which was about all the money I had, and away we went. That twenty-five pounds didn’t include food either. We took quite a bit of gear - a bit of tinned stuff. We actually packed up as if we were going on a scout camp. We got to Alice Springs - it took us about 3 or 4 days - and when we got there Jack Conlon had a brother there who met us in Alice Springs - he came on with us. He had quite a big bag of tucker and water wasn’t going to be a problem because there had been a hell of a lot of rain out that way. The track was very boggy - that was one of the draw-backs. It took a week to get to the Granites. On many boggy stretches they had made corduroy track roads - cutting trees down and putting logs across the muddy patches and the Rio had quite a struggle to get across there. Along that track about as many vehicles were coming back as were going. We soon realized that gold prospecting was hopeless. The Granites Gold Rush was a complete failure. But we had one trump card up our sleeve. Our Scout Master Professor Madigan was the Government Geologist at the Granites. We knew he was up there on the field and made ourselves known to him. He said “You lads had better get back straight away”. He put us on a Government vehicle and we went back. There were lives lost - people were sick - people starved. The story of the Granites would be a good one to get hold of and brush up on. There are books written about that ill-fated Gold Rush. Anyhow I got back a month after my holidays ceased and of course that was the end of my banking career, which
was very unfortunate at that time in the height of the Depression. I found myself unemployed. However, I was strangely happy.

Professor Madigan reported to the Government that there was no gold there ¬that the Granites find was only superficial. He was mistaken. A few years ago, about 1983, I went up across that same track, across the Tanami Desert (in a little Celica) and at the Granites we found an enclosed area of about a square mile, enclosed with high cyclone fencing and a big gate locked, announcing that it belonged to the Tanami Gold Company, and just last year it was announced that it was a very very rich mining field. It had taken a long time for them to get permission to mine from the Aborigines but once they did start mining it the North Flinders shares which were about 2/6d had risen to about $12. Anyone who invested in North Flinders would have been able to make a handsome profit a few months ago when they started to produce gold there. Actually, earlier, the Granite shares floated - went up to about ten pounds and after Madigan’s report went down to a penny.

Once freed from the archaic shackles of the bank, for the first time in my life I became my own man, working in the orchards, vineyards and gardens of Coromandel Valley, Clarendon and Happy Valley. I earned 4 times my bank salary working piece work as much as possible, packing apples for export at 3d. a case, each apple wrapped in tissue and packed according to graded size. It took quite some skill. By using every daylight hour almost non-stop I often cleared 15 pounds a week. Rural workers paid no tax in those days, whereas in the bank I had to pay both S.A. State tax and Commonwealth income tax, the two taxes amounting to
6 pounds on my 75 of the first year. I could dig 100 bags of spuds in a day in a good crop getting 1/- a bag. This included picking up and tying the ears and loading on a cart at the end of the day. A bag of spuds about 250 lbs. took some lifting after digging all day, but I felt good working without effort, feeling fit and strong. The mid-day break was heavenly, sitting on a grassy bank in the shade of gum trees, perhaps munching Mary’s corn beef and onion sandwich, washed down with crystal clear creek water, my lungs filling with pure air. There were always unpolluted creeks in those days. Vegetables were grown on the fertile flats along rivers and creeks and whether digging spuds, picking peas, beans or strawberries, a worker could always get a cool drink of water free of polluting spray materials. These days these creeks run cloudy and lifeless and undrinkable. I’m glad my life is finishing and pity the kids starting theirs with such a hopeless outlook. The apple crops of Victoria and South Australia often varied. A heavy crop in Victoria found them short of workers - a light crop in South Australia meant the opposite. Advertisements for packers at Harcourt, Victoria, had me packing my bike and pedalling the long trip. The Harcourt Orchards are in hilly country. I found a job packing in a shed in the middle of an orchard on a high hill, the track to the shed climbing up very steeply through the trees. One evening after a day’s work, the apple grower came down to the boarding house in the town where I was staying with the orchard workers and asked me to go back to work that night. He had a contract for cases of apples to fill on a ship leaving next day. He was a few hundred cases short. He would pay the packers 4 pence a case for the quota he required from each man. After tea I rode up to the orchard and admired the full moon rising over the hills. As I walked my bike up the steep track, I stood the cycle against a stack of cases with the dozen or so others, the packers already speedily working on their 40 case quota for the night. I soon got into my best packing speed, finishing before many. I wearily grabbed my bike and set off down the steep moonlit track between the apple trees on my bike, the brake handle had broken. I tied the cable to the head (the cable running along the bar could be pulled up and the brake applied). I soon gained speed and started to pull on the cable. The brakes failed to work and soon I was travelling 40 or 50 miles per hour. I tried to swing off the track up a row of trees, crashed headlong into the butt of an old Cleopatra, hit my head and gashed my leg I spent 2 days in Castlemaine Hospital. Back at Harcourt I was faced with a 3 pound repair bill for the chaps bike I had smashed - a few spokes and a bent frame. In my haste to get back to bed and being so tired, I had grabbed the wrong cycle. The cable I had been pulling was merely the light wire. If I had been half awake I would have realised I was free wheeling. That bike had a good back brake, but my bike was a fixed wheel which I had left still leaning against the cases.

Mary had left John Martins. Her mother’s health was affected by diabetes. Mary was required to run the household at Hawthorndene. We had been engaged for 2 years but had been separated most of the time. Now we were making up for lost time. Every week-end was a planned campaign. Most Saturday nights we would be dancing, often walking to and from dances as far away as Uraidla, Eden and Bridgewater, but mostly at Belair or Coromandel or our own Blackwood Club Hall, or Parish Hall. Quite often we would go to Adelaide to the Palais Royal where we could stride skilfully around the great fast floor doing the modern foxtrot, quickstep, waltz and blues. We danced until midnight at the Palais. The last train for Blackwood left at 11 p.m. and just for one hour’s extra dancing we often chose an eight mile up-hill walk. Those times all forms of public entertainment were illegal by law on Sundays. Dances must cease at 12 midnight Saturday. The last trams to all suburbs left King William Street at 12.05 a.m. After the last dance we would dash along North Terrace then search along the procession of trams to find one marked Mitcham, board the crowded tram on the move. The Mitcham last tram sometimes went up through Mitcham. We would then walk up past the cemetery and up the short cut to Belair. Sometimes the tram went no further than the Torrens Arms Hotel and from there Mary and I walked happily up the Belair Road singing the popular songs of the day, the music of Boke Smiths Palais band ringing in our ears. I wonder why musicians of 1980 require electric amplifying. A piano, 3 saxes, 2 trumpets, 1 trombone, a banjo and drums could fill that huge hall with music above which speaking was difficult. At Torrens Park a track behind the stray dogs home went up a steep hill to Belair, then at the pub we would take to the scrub through Windsor’s Orchard to Hawthorndene, and home at 3 a.m.

Most week-ends Elliot’s house was crammed with pommys. Migrants for miles around would know where they could get a good Sunday dinner and tea. Often a Saturday party would carry on to Sunday. We had very little grog but the parties were always happy, rowdy affairs. No smoking or hangovers, the young people making their own fun. Sunday morning the young crowd would go walking in the National Park, then back to Aunt Bella Elliot’s huge table crammed with enough food for all. During the great Depression, Mary’s mother fed 10 times her own family. She was the greatest business manager I have ever known. These days she would have made a million. She ran the little Hawthorndene Kiosk and always had money in her handbag, even when Pop Elliot, like most tradesmen, was unemployed. The married unemployed were given a dole of food coupons, single unemployed in South Australia, nothing. They must live at home or go begging, looking for work. The married man on the dole
had to do a day a week on Council work. I felt sorry for Pop Elliot seeing the fragile little man lifting huge rocks, building dry walls at Windy Point, after a walk of 5 miles, an ordeal for a skilled engineer who had worked all his life with precision tools.

Some week-ends Mary came with me on camping trips to my beloved scrub. I would pack our sleeping gear on the handle bars of my old bike (rolled and tied). I had traded my 8 year old Mauser rifle, its large engraved wooden stock and wooden barrel mounting making it cumbersome on a bike. The Gunsmith, J.T.Lake, knowing the value of the German gun made me a clean swap of a brand new Winchester repeater, which could be halved, wrapped and neatly tied beneath the bike’s main bar. On the rear baggage carrier a box contained a few spuds, onions, salt, pepper, tea and sugar and a large billy which carried water, if necessary, but which on these trips often made rabbit stew, a small billy for making tea was hung behind along with a little kerosene lantern. This gear travelled with me on bikes many hundreds of miles - perhaps thousands, the little Winchester providing life saving tucker quite often. Mary sat on a cushion on the bar when the track permitted us to ride, but mostly I walked the bike, Mary often helping to push up over severe hilly tracks. We would make camp on the Sturt Creek by a pool I knew contained trout. In the evening Mary sat by the fire, sometimes knitting, doing her fancy work or reading by the light of the small lantern while I fished for the timid trout with a few yards of line and float tied to a long thin wattle stick. Overnight I landed a 4 pound trout right into Mary’s lap.

We made many week-end trips to Mt. Bold to fish for brown trout or red fin. In the Onkaparinga River, before the reservoir was built about 1938, this section of the river was made up of many large deep pools, and because the terrain made it difficult to reach the fishing was very good. This country was too rough for the bike. Mary and I would walk a direct route via Cherry Gardens carrying our swags up hill and down dale - some 20 miles of real, tough bush walking. Sometimes we made the trip in one day travelling light and faster. Twelve hours walking for one hours fishing and of course rabbit shooting in the evening on the way home. On one of these day trips it had been raining for a couple of hours. When we reached the river which we had crossed on a crude swinging bridge we found the swollen river flowing over it, the bridge hanging dangerously down stream in the current. On my own I would probably have risked it but not with Mary so we set off down the river to try for a place to cross. We found a spot just before darkness fell.The river had spread to some 300 yards wide and although swiftly flowing was only a couple of feet deep. Mary’s 8 stone was easy on my shoulders. Safely across we made a huge fire to dry my clothes. I’ll never forget that evening as we huddled beside that fire - we decided on our wedding plans. Mary would start to make her gown tomorrow. It must be soon at St. Johns, Coromandel Valley - but this was not to be. The very next week-end we were off again on the old Raleigh bikes last trip. With our camping gear aboard we were making for the river down stream from Clarendon. Mary sat on her cushion on the bar as we sped down the bitumen through Coromandel Valley a truck turned in front of us to enter an orchard. The road was completely blocked. I had no chance to stop and swing the bike off the bitumen - bang into a culvert. Mary went flying. Her shoulder was dislocated and tendons torn. She was unable to move her arm for many months. Her plan to make the wedding dress was out of the question so on 4th May 1935 at the Adelaide Registry Office Mary with her arm in a sling promised to love and obey - the love perhaps, but the obeying NEVER.

I still, deep down had the gold fever and when Mary announced that there was a baby on the way, I decided to make for Kalgoorlie. And of course I knew the road to Kalgoorlie - I had been across it before - I couldn’t see any reason why I wouldn’t be able to ride a push bike from station to station just the same way as we had gone 10 years previously in the old Bean truck. So I rode the push bike over to the west coast and worked on farms as I went along, stacking hay, picking up stumps. I was making money and sending it back to Mary all the time. I got as far as Penong, the last town in South Australia and in the pub one day (I had a job on a farm there for awhile, picking up stumps) I announced how I was riding on to Kalgoorlie which was heard by the local police. The policeman came to see me one day. He said “We won’t allow you to try to ride to Kalgoorlie from here. Every time thats happened people have caused trouble. Even people who have tried to drive a car across these days get into trouble and cause a nuisance”. So I had to sneak out of the town at night and make for the track across the Nullarbor. I got as far as Nullarbor Station, but I was a bit unlucky - there had been a murder out there - a black fellow had been murdered by another black fellow on the Nullarbor Station and when I called in there to get water on my push bike with my billy can, there were the same coppers who had forbidden me to go. So, once again on the motor bike was my bike and I was sitting on the back of the rough old Harley Davidson - and back to Penong. I was sick of bike riding at that time.

I got a job loading a truck with sand and gravel from a creek for a builder. He was building a house and they just threw the sand and gravel up on to the truck out of a creek, one day this truck broke down. It required parts from Adelaide this chap had a motor car - a Chev. He was going to Adelaide to get parts for the truck so I went with him. I left the bike standing leaning up against a post in the main street of Penong. It wasn’t a great loss because that particular bike, a Mac cycle, which one could get for 10/- deposit and 1/- a week - I hadn’t paid too many shillings. If they wanted it there it was - they probably didn’t ever see it again. They would have been looking for a fellow called John Dalgety as a matter of fact.

That’s a name I often used after it got me out of a scrape a couple of years previously. One Sunday before I went to Peterborough a mob of local boys had gone off in an old Ford tray top one ton truck duck shooting down at Milang. It was a pretty rough old trip through the sandy tracks in those days. We left before daybreak and got on to this property where there were plenty of ducks. We started shooting. It was Sunday and shooting on Sunday was a crime in those days, it wasn’t the duck season, our guns weren’t registered - nobody had a licence. We were on private property and actually we were breaking a dickens of a lot of laws but there didn’t seem to be much chance of getting apprehended for any of them, until the owner of the place came over and told us to clear out and Bill Conlon, a brother of Jack’s, who later became a fisherman on the Murray, was standing with a couple of ducks behind his back. This bloke said “What are you doing?” We said “We’re just having a bit of gun practice shooting - not shooting ducks”. But Bill was holding ducks behind his back when the bloke tried to grab Bill’s arm to see what he had behind his back, Bill dropped the ducks and clocked him. He turned and ran back to the house. We could see the telephone wires coming to the farm house so we knew there could be trouble. We jumped on the Ford and away we went. We got about three or four miles down the track and decided to get off the main road and so turned and started to go up a sandy track and got bogged. It wasn’t long before along came the dreaded Harley Davidson and side car. There were about 8 or 9 of us and we were lined up and the cops started taking notes. I was amazed. These blokes were all giving their right names, with the copper writing them down with their addresses - some of them came from Belair, a couple of them came from Aldgate - I was scratching for a name. I had used Morgan, my mother’s name at times. But this time I thought what the dickens, and I looked up and there was a big sign on the side of the road “Send your skins to Dalgety & Company”. I had done plenty of that and there it was. So when the cop said “Righto mate what’s your name?” “John Dalgety. “Where do you live?” “Aldgate”. I was the only one who escaped. They were all carted back to the Milang Court few weeks later and fined Fifteen pounds, which was a heavy fine in those days. They were asked about this John Dalgety nobody dobbed me in - nobody knew who he was anyway, and he didn’t come from Aldgate - there didn’t seem to be anyone by that name living in Aldgate in those days. So I found John Dalgety a pretty lucky name. Hence the Mac people would be looking for John Dalgety to repossess that bike.

Back in Blackwood I was still determined to get to Kalgoorlie Mary’s brother George decided to come with me. Paying a fare on the East/West Railway line was out of the question but jumping the “rattler” seemed to be a pretty good possibility. So away we went out to Dry Creek and “jumped the rattler” to Pt. Augusta. As we got out of the goods train at Pt. Augusta there was quite a fuss in the railway yards.