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Posted -  17/05/2004  :  16:37
VERBATIM TRANSCRIPTION OF LESLIE GRAHAM MACDONALD TAPES
Recorded and transcribed by Stanley Graham. Strictly copyright. No part of this manuscript may be reproduced by any means, nor transmitted, nor translated into a machine language without the written permission of Stanley Graham.

Tape identification File Number

Tape 1. Yellow. Track 1. 024\lgstory.003



We started, when we shifted to the new house, to go to a new school. They called it Eulomogo School. There was an old feller there that was the schoolmaster and his name was Bentley. He was an old bugger. He used to...... I got the cane every day I think and Stan and Jim the same.

One holiday time we decided we’d get our own back on him. We hadn’t enough sense to realise that what we were going to do wasn’t going to harm old Bentley at all, it was just going to harm the school. We went to the school, we broke it open, we took all the books out and burnt them, tore them up, shoved some of them up rabbit holes and God knows what. Then when the school opened up again there was a hue and cry for the people that had broken into the school. Nobody knew. But there was one lad named Woodley, who was with us, he let the cat out of the bag and one day I was playing at home when I saw the police sergeant and the old schoolmaster drive up. I thought, this is it.

So they started asking questions and eventually said “Well, you’ve got to go to gaol. We’ll take you to Dubbo to gaol.” So I said “Alright, if I’ve got to go to gaol I’ve got to go.” They took Stan and I and put us in one of these sulkies and we set off to the gaol in Dubbo. They’d had a talk with the old man before we left and I think it had been agreed to take us so far and then and then chuck us out and let us come back home to get a damn good hiding because they didn’t take us to gaol, they took us about two miles up the road and then let us go. We went back home and Mother gave us both a bloody good thrashing. That episode closed.

I think at this stage I’d better say something about my parents and their background.

My Grandfather on my Father’s side was a Scotsman. He had been, I believe, a ship’s steward and he deserted his ship to go gold mining. His wife was a German lady who emigrated to Australia with her parents in the early 1850’s or 1860’s. Grandfather was a miner, in fact he was an adventurer. He’d have a go at anything where he thought there was some easy money. He was an incurable gambler and he had quite a bit of luck at gold mining but it never did him any good in the end because as fast as he made money he gambled it away.

One time, he bought a pub, it was a small country shanty pub, I don’t suppose it cost him more than a thousand pounds but he had great ideas about what they were going to do with it I believe.

One night they were playing poker and a cattle owner came in and joined in the game. I believe that some time in the early hours of the morning there was only old Alec and this cattle owner left in the game. The Old Man lost steadily until eventually he had no ready money left and he said to this cattle owner, “You know that little pub at Appletree Flats?” and he said “Aye.” He said, “I’ll put this hand up against you and we’ll have one straight hand for a thousand pounds” and the cattle owner said “Right, you’re on.” So they played one hand, I don’t know what it was they played but it was what they called “sudden death” and the cattle owner won and the Old Man was broke. Anyhow, that’s just the type of feller he was.

His wife was an entirely different type altogether. She was a very gentle, kindly lady and she was very good to us when we were small.

On my Mother’s side, her Father was an Italian although he didn’t like to be called an Italian, he always claimed he was a Neapolitan and hated the sight of the Italians. His wife was an Irish Lady and I do happen to know what her maiden name was. She was called McFaddean, I know this because her brother lived with us at Eumalga for quite a long time. She was a different type altogether than our Father’s Mother, she was full of fun, she liked people, she liked mixing with people and I always remember her as a very gay old lady.

So there you have it. My Father’s Father was Alexander Neill MacDonald. His wife, I never knew her Christian name. My Mother’s Father was George Johanstone, lots of people referred to them as the Johnsons but that wasn’t correct. He was a very religious man, I remember the few times that I met him we always had to say grace before meals and afterwards. He was very strict with all the family. But nevertheless he was a good man. We will now continue with my experiences at Eumalga.

I think it was in the year 1898, there was great excitement one day and we were all sent out on a picnic. I remember Father filling up some picnic baskets and taking us away up on to a place called Green Hill. We were told that we hadn’t to leave there until he came for us. We stayed there all day and just as the sun was going down he arrived in a spring cart to take us back home. When we got home we found that we had a little brother, that was Alec’s birthday.

I know this was some time in the fall. I’m not quite sure of the exact month he was born but I do remember that at about that time every year, Mother used to go away to Mudgee for a visit to her people and we were left in the care of Mae Reel.

One day I was messing about with some powder. The idea was that I was going to blow up some ducks on the pond. I got hold of some black powder and a cap and I put it into an old treacle tin. I threw some bread into the pond to get the ducks to come over the top of the powder tin which I had already rolled gently into the pond. When the ducks got feeding over it I lit the fuse and waited for the explosion. Nothing happened for about four or five minutes and I came to the conclusion it must have been a dud cap I had put in. I pulled the tin out by a piece of wire I had attached to it and was prising the lid off with a knife when the whole thing went off in my face.

Of course, I couldn’t see, I just screamed and they came running to see what was the matter with me. With Mother and Father being away, Mae didn’t know what to do with me so they sent Stan off to Brownlow’s for some help. They came over and all they could think off was to rub some lard on my face. Anyhow, they put me into a buggy and took me off to Dubbo to Doctor Demolion.

He treated me and for about three weeks I couldn’t see. I had a mask over my face. But the funny thing about that time is that I can never remember feeling any pain and I haven’t any recollection of feeling any pain at all but I do remember very vividly the day the old doctor came and took this plaster off my face. I remember it came off just like one of those dummy masks that you see kids wearing at Christmas time. I remember the first thing he said to me was “Can you see?” I said “Yes, I can see”. He said “Can you see the bottom of the garden?” I said “Yes, I can see the bottom of the garden.” He said “Oh, thank God for that, he isn’t blind.” Anyhow, my eyes were bad for a long time, they were always weeping, they used to run very easily. But they seemed to get stronger as time went on. As far as I knew at the time I had suffered no ill effects.

I was to find out later that I had been permanently injured in the right eye. The first indication I had of any injury was that I couldn’t see to shoot off my right shoulder. I didn’t realise that I wasn’t seeing right but I could never hit anything so I tried off my left shoulder and all my life I shot off my left shoulder until recently I went to a doctor about my eyes and he told me that I had a traumatic cataract caused by an accident. Of course, that all harkened back to the old days when I tried to blow the ducks up on the pond.

My next misfortune was that I contracted typhoid fever. No one else in the family had it and they were always at a loss to know where I had got it from. I think I have got a good idea. Anyhow, the doctor had been to see me and said there was nothing they could do only keep me in bed. Whilst he was there an old chinese gardener came round, he used to come round periodically selling greengroceries and melons. His name was Kwong Lee. Whilst they were talking he heard the doctor say that one thing that would help me would be some ice. Old Kwong said immediately, “Ice. You want ice? I go to Dubbo and I get ice.” Off he went and just took his horse out of the shafts of the spring cart and tipped the damn thing up, tipped all the things out on the floor, put the horse back in the shafts and set off to Dubbo. About, some time in the afternoon, he arrived back with a block of ice about three feet high and two feet in diameter wrapped up in sawdust and blankets. I’ve never forgotten old Kwong for that, he was a decent old scout. But anyhow, after some time I got right from fever and seemed none the worse for it as far as I knew.

During our school holidays it was our custom to make a bit of money by trapping possums, gathering dead wool and gathering bones. One of our favourite occupations was what they call “mooning” possums. This could only be done when the moon was almost full and the idea was that you went out in the moonlight with a gun and you walked around the trees keeping the tree branches between yourself and the moon and of course you get the possums in silhouette and it was an easy matter then to shoot them out of the trees. In this way we used to get ten, fifteen, we’ve had as many as twenty possums in a night. We also used to snare possums. There was one place, Murrumbidgerie Station, owned by a man called Jim Rutherford, who would never allow people on his place and trespassers were prosecuted rigidly, but we used to go to his place at night and set our snares after dark and then round next morning just at daylight to get our snares out and the possums before any boundary riders came round and caught us there.

Opossum skins at that time were worth about 36/- a dozen and it was a common thing during our holidays for us to average oh, ten to fifteen possums a day. Then we used to go gathering wool. That was sheep that had died and the wool was left lying on the ground. When the carcass had decayed away we went and picked the wool up and bagged it and bagged the bones. When we had got so many ready we would take a horse and cart and go out and load up the bones and wool and take them into Dubbo and sell them at the skin depot.

On one holiday, we made, between the three of us, a little fortune of just over ,50. This was put in the bank for us and we were supposed to draw it out when we went on holiday but we never ever had a holiday and never saw the ,50 again.

Another way we had of making a bob or two was kangaroo hunting. We had a rifle but at most of the places around there we were afraid to fire it because we were trespassing on somebody’s land. In Australia at that time trespass was a very serious offence and we could be fined as much as ,50 so we had to be careful. In the main, we used dogs. We had one dog, a kangaroo dog called Tip and an old cattle dog called Brownie and a fox terrier, I’ve forgotten his name now, I just can’t remember his name.

Down on the Macquarrie there was an old wallaroo there, he’s supposed to have stood eight feet high. He didn’t stand anything like that but that’s what they all said. One day we ran into him. The dogs took after him but he didn’t bother to go very far. He just hopped down about thirty to forty yards and backed up against a log near the edge of the river.

The dogs went in at him and he kept knocking them off and knocking them off. Eventually he got hold of this terrier in his arms and was holding him up against his chest. He put up his foot to try and rip him and just at that moment old Brownie flew at his neck. He ducked his head to try and miss the dog and fell in the river. He stood in the river up to his waist and we swore blind that he was ducking the terrier under. So Stan took a tomahawk and rushed into the river and knocked him on the head with it and that was the end of the old wallaroo. We skinned him, took his skin home and when Dad saw it he said “Well, you’ve been wasting your time with that, it won’t bring two bob!” So that was a day we had out that didn’t return us any money at all, but we had a lot of fun.

This dog Tip was one of the hottest numbers I have ever seen on hares. I never ever remember seeing him start out after a hare that he didn’t catch. He had a most peculiar way of picking up. When he caught up with the hare he used to put his nose under its body, flick it up and catch it in the air. I know Father won many a pretty five bob piece by backing him against other dogs. There was no dog in the district that he wouldn’t take on at coursing.

In the year 1899 it was shearing time at Eumalga. When shearing was on, everything else stopped. It was only a small shearing shed, I think there were eight stands and in those days shearing was done by the blade, machines had not become popular.

When shearing was in full swing, Mother used to do the cooking for the men and we used to get in outside help. I remember that there was one girl that was there helping and her name was Esther. I don’t remember her other name, in fact I don’t know whether I ever heard her name. I remember her because she was a bit of a flirt. She used to be always talking to the shearers and the roustabouts, she was always knocking about the pens when she had nothing to do in the kitchen.

One day, I was playing about when Father went to the bunk-house with a stockwhip in his hand. He came out of the bunkhouse with a young fellow, I don’t know his name. If I ever knew it, I’ve forgotten it. He brought him out in front of all the other men and he turned to these men and said “This man has betrayed a very sacred trust. He was given some letters to take to the Post Office and on the way he opened one of the letters and read the contents and asked the woman in the Post Office to give him a fresh envelope so that he could re-direct it and send it on. That envelope contained a letter for this girl’s sister. I’m going to teach him a lesson, one that he won’t forget in a hurry.”

Saying this, he set back and he started on this fellow with the stockwhip. I don’t know whether I ever witnessed anything quite so horrible in my life. It certainly scared the living daylights out of me but I couldn’t go away. I had to stay and watch it. He flogged this man - he begged and prayed Father to stop, he said he’d apologise and all sorts of things but Father flogged him and then he said to him “Now git!” As this fellow went into the bunkhouse for his things he flogged him all the way to the door and when he came out he flogged him all the way to the horse yard and he got his horse and rode off. Then Father turned round as though nothing had happened and carried me off up to the cookhouse where Mother was.

In the dry weather it was the practice to cut branches from the tree called the kurrajong for the stock to eat. These leaves from the kurrajong tree were very nutritious food for the cattle who really loved ‘em. One day I was out with the men cutting kurrajong and of course I was taking a hand, I had a tomahawk. I climbed up this tree, started to cut a branch down, when the tomahawk slipped and went into my foot making a gash about two inches long in my ankle.

I fell out of the tree, was bleeding like a stuck pig, thought I was going to die and the chap who was with us, a fellow named Louis leFevre, he didn’t seem to know what to do. He took me trousers down and ripped the tail off me shirt and wrapped it round it. The coloured boy, Jacky, said “No, wait, I’ll stop bleeding.” He went off and found this cobweb. He put the cobweb over the wound then wrapped the shirt tail round it and took me home. Father got a needle and cotton, I think it was silk cotton, and put two or three stitches in it for me and I went on alright after that. I was hors de combat for a week or two but there was no ill effect afterwards.

Another day when we were birds-nesting Stan met with an accident. We were taking it in turns to climb the tree when we found a nest and this particular tree happened to be a pine tree. Now these pine trees grow with a tremendous number of branches. They are very easy to climb because there are branches all the way up. But he was up this tree trying to get a nest which was right up in the uppermost branches. It’s very brittle timber and he got up a bit too far and the thing leaned over and broke and he fell down through all these branches. Well, he got a hell of a scratching on the way down, he was cut all over when he hit the floor. When he hit the floor he hit his head against a stone and it knocked him out. I didn’t know what to do, there was no one else with us so I thought the best thing to do was to go home and tell ‘em he was dead. I rushed off home and told Mother what had happened and she set off with me to go back to him. We got about half way there when we met Stan coming down. Although he was cut all over the place he wasn’t badly hurt, it was all scratches but he looked like a butcher’s shop.

Our only sporting weapon in those days was an old muzzle-loader. Father wouldn’t let us have a breech-loading one. The way we used to operate was that we each used to take a shot in our turn. Of course, if Jim and Stan and I were out Jim always had first shot, Stan had second and I got third shot. But this day there was only Jim and me. We went out and put up a hare and Jim shot it. I said to him “It’s my turn now. I’ll load up.” He said “No, it’s not your turn, Stan always has second turn, he isn’t here today and I’m going to have his turn”. I said “You are hell as like, it’s my shot next.” He said it wasn’t, anyhow, we loaded the gun and he walked off with the gun. I was carrying the hare and he was carrying a rabbit we’d caught. We were going down a blind gully and I saw some rabbits and I said to Jim “Give us the gun, it’s my shot.” He said “It’s not your shot it’s mine.” So I struggled with him for the gun and I got it away from him. He got up and he swung this rabbit and hit me in the left ear with it. He knocked me for six. Anyhow, he must have realised he’d hit me too hard because he never made any attempt to pick the gun up. But I picked it up, I aimed it at him and he run away and he’d be about twenty or thirty yards away from me when I pulled the trigger but by the Grace of God, the gun didn’t go off. I hadn’t put a cap on it. By the time I had got the cap out of my pocket and put on the gun he was too far away. I’d cooled down then and was sorry that I’d made an attempt to shoot him. I often thought afterwards that it was a piece of luck that I wasn’t branded as a murderer because I really did intend to kill him I was that mad with him.

On our way back from this hunting expedition we had to climb up a steep hill. It was in a paddock called Dunrobin. About half way up this hill Jim said to me “ Let’s get some shelter, there’s a storm coming up.” We could see these big black clouds rolling up and we found some shelter under an old dead tree. We’d hardly got into the shelter before it started to rain gently at first but within ten seconds it was coming down in sheets. As a matter of fact, when we looked up the hill we could see the water coming down just like a river running down the side of the hill. Some cattle grazing on the lower slopes of the hill were hit by the water and just washed into the river. I don’t know how many of them were drowned but it was my first experience of a cloudburst. We had to hang on to the log to save being washed away. The storm lasted only about twenty minutes and when it was finished we were none the worse for wear but the creek which had been almost dry when we crossed it was running a banker and the cattle had been swept away downstream.

It was about at this time when I first met my favourite Aunt, Aunt Maggie. We were coming home through the fields one afternoon when we met a well-dressed lady and gentleman carrying a suitcase. They stopped us and said “Excuse me but can you tell us how we can get to Eumalga?” We said “Yes we can tell you, we’re going there ourselves and we can show you the way.” The lady said “Do you live at Eumalga?” We said “Of course we do. Who do you want to see at Eumalga?” She said “ I want to see your Mother and your Father, I’m your Aunt Maggie and this is my husband Mr Sergeant.” Well, I took a fancy to her right from the start. I thought she was a lovely girl and I still think she’s a very nice woman if she’s still alive. Unfortunately, her husband didn’t live very long. They had one daughter called Vera, she was a very pretty girl too. She was my favourite cousin. Aunt married again to a man called Rochester. They had one son and he is now a priest in a teaching college at Bathurst in New South Wales.

We had some very great friends who lived at Murrumbidgeree. Their names was Minogue. Old Jack Minogue was an Irishman who emigrated to Australia as a young man and his wife who was a widow woman called Mrs leFevre and , by the way, she was the woman who attended my Mother when I was born. Jack Minogue was a shearer, in fact he was a top-class shearer and he used to go up to Queensland and start shearing on the Queensland border and follow the climate down until he got into the temperate zones then he’d come home and go on the spree until he was spent up. Then he’d go on shearing right down into Victoria and sometimes across in New Zealand. He was a blade shearer and later became a machine shearer and could always knock off anything up to 150 a day. I know that’s nothing like the record but for a man to do it day after day and to do a top class job, he was no slouch at the job.

Jack was a queer cuss and he had met the Governor boys at one time and there’d been some trouble between him and the Governors. When they were reported in the district, at the time when I told you that May Reel had us all in the bedroom. Jack Minogue, remembering the trouble that he’d had with them, thought that they might be coming to get their own back on him. So he decided to box cleverly. They waited until after dark then he shifted his wife and all the kids out into the open and they camped in the open so that if the Governors should come, he’d have the drop on them with his .32.

This went on for a night or two, I think it was about the third or fourth night, it was pitch black and Jack heard what he thought was the Governors sneaking along the palisade fence looking for a way into the house, He couldn’t see anything he could just hear someone moving along. As the palisade fence was painted white, this dark colour showed up against the fence even in the dark and he decided that he’d at least finish one of them off. So he let rip with about two rounds of .32 out of his repeating rifle. He heard a grunt, then a groan and then no more. He was afraid to go out and see which one of them he’d got, because he thought the others might be about somewhere and he thought they might get him but he sent his son, young Jack Minogue off for the police. If it hadn’t have been for him sending for the police we would perhaps have never heard the story because when it came daylight the next morning and Jack went down to see which one of the Governors he’d shot, he found out that he’d shot his own old boar pig. Of course, when the police came they spread the story all round the district and things were almost unbearable for Old Jack for a few months after that happened.

It was not long after this that the Governors were captured or should I say slaughtered. It was one of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of the Western Police. They were found asleep in a forest in the afternoon by a trooper and I think his name was Kilpatrick. He shot Jimmy and Joe, Jimmy had eight bullets in him and Joe had four in him. Their own guns had never been touched. These men had been shot in cold blood whilst they were lying asleep. The feeling was so high against this chap that he had to resign his job from the force and move on to some other district.





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