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Doc
Keeper of the Scrolls
2010 Posts
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 Posted -
17/05/2004
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16:34
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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 2.(completes track) 024\lgstory.006
It was whilst we were living here that I was sent one day to Murrumbidgerie to the store for some things that Mother wanted. On the way back I saw a man on a buckboard in front of me going hell for leather. I noticed something dropped off the buckboard. When I got up to it I stopped an picked it up and it was a bag full of money. I’d recognised who the man was, it was Jimmy Rutherford the owner of Murrumbidgerie station. I set off after him, he’d turned off the main road just after he lost his bag and went down what was more or less a private road leading about five miles or six miles down to the station house where he lived.
I caught him about half way there and I galloped up along side of him with this thing in me hand and I shouted to him “Mr Rutherford, I’ve got a bag here that you dropped.” So he stopped and he took the bag off me and he opened it and had a look in it. I don’t know whether he thought I’d been in it or not, I don’t know how he thought I’d get in because he had to use a key to open it. He said to me “Right, how much does a revolver cost?” I said “I don’t know, I think they cost about four or five pound.” He said “Well here you are, here’s a fiver. Go and buy a revolver and some bullets and shoot yourself for being such a bloody fool. If I’d have found that bag, I’d have never galloped after the feller that owned it.” He hit the horses on the rump with his whip and set off and left me. Anyhow, I was five pounds better off. I was a millionaire. I took it home and gave it to Mother, told her what had happened, I don’t know whether she believed me or not but she took the fiver and never said any more about it.
It was also while we were living here that I saw the first stampede of cattle. It was the most frightening thing that I’ve ever seen in me life. We knew what cattle did when they stampeded, we knew that there was nothing would stop them. Being country boys we’d been told all about this and we’d heard tales about stampedes. But we had a lad with us from the city. His name was Barton, I forget his christian name but it might have been Dick Barton, in fact I think it was. But all day long he’d been telling us that he couldn’t climb trees because we were birds-nesting and he didn’t take his turn at climbing when we found a nest.
We heard this rumbling and Dick said “What’s that?” Stan said “I think it’s a stampede, anyhow we’ll get to know later on.” Anyhow, it was coming nearer to us and Stan said to him “Now then, it’s a stampede, the best thing you can do if you can’t climb a tree is to get behind a big tree and stand behind it and don’t move whatever happens.” We run and found the first decent sized tree and hopped up it. When we looked, he was up a bloody tree too, he couldn’t climb but by God he went up that one. The stampede missed us by about a quarter of a mile. There was no need for us to get up a tree at all they’d sheered off and gone in a different direction. But they went through a fence, a six wire fence and they laid it as flat as a flounder on the ground. Nothing in their path stopped them, they went straight on, where they finished up I don’t know but the last we saw of them they were going like hell.
One night, shortly afterwards, somebody came dashing into the house shouting “Bush fire!” We all run outside and we could see the smoke from the fire over a hill. As far as we could reckon, the fire would be about eight to ten miles away from us but the wind was blowing in our direction. For the next two or three hours you never saw such activity in your life. Father went out, got the horses harnessed up to a plough and they hared off across to our boundary, other ploughs followed him out and there they were ploughing like mad, ploughing a fire break to try to stop the fire getting into the wheat crop which was just then ripening.
Anyhow, other people had been doing the same thing further afield from us and the men harnessed up horses and carts, some went by saddle and some in these carts and set off to help fight the fire. At nightime, we got Mother to let us go and we went up on top of a hill just about three miles outside our boundary fence. I can remember very clearly standing on that hill and seeing the fire burning and it was just the time when we got there that it was burning in a field that had been ring-barked the year before and it was all dry timber. You could hear the birds screaming. There was things coming towards us, there was rabbits and hares, kangaroo rats, wallabies, all sorts of life just coming with one idea in mind, to get away from the fire. We even saw snakes trying to get away. We were so excited we didn’t even bother to try and kill them. Anyhow, we were fortunate. The wind changed and it came on to rain and the fire was got under control before it reached our place. But quite a number of farmers round about had had their crops burned.
That year, we had a wonderful harvest. In some of the fields it averaged as much as ten bags to the acre. Each bag weighed 200 pounds. So it will give you some idea of the weight of grain we were taking. Our hay crop was just as good, I think they took somewhere about 300 tons of hay in.
Whether Father’s share in this scheme was more than Old Payne wanted to pay, I don’t know but I think that that was the trouble between them. But anyhow, once again it was like Eumalga, all of a sudden bang she goes and we’re off again and this time we moved to Murrumbidgerie.
This would be, as near as I can remember in the March or April of 1905.[Father was 12] Whilst Father was settling up his affairs with the Payne family we did quite a lot of odd jobs to make a pound or two. We did rabbit trapping and I used to go with him when I come home from school. The method of trapping in those days, we used the old gin traps and we’d set the traps in the afternoon, we had about 150 traps. We’d set them at burrows and dung hills and on rabbit runs and on each one where we made a setting we’d make a mark pointing to the next trap set. You had to remember these in the dark because you had no other way of finding your traps. If they were buried under the ground, if you weren’t very accurate you’d miss half of them. Well we used to get first what we called a “sundown catch”, we’d know whether we were getting any, from our camp, we’d hear the rabbits squealing. Then, just after sundown we’d take a hurricane lamp, go round, take the rabbits that were in the traps, kill them, bleed them and gut them and hang them up at some nearby gathering spot. Reset the traps then, at about 11 o’clock at night, we’d go round again, clear the traps again and then at first light in the morning we’d go round and take what were caught in the early morning catch. They were taken off then to Murrumbidgerie station, we had a spring cart and horse, some mornings we’d have as many as fifty or sixty pair, I think the most we ever got was about seventy five pair.
We used to get a shilling a pair for the rabbits. They were inspected on the spot and you were paid cash for them on the nail. The general routine was that when we got them to the station, which was about half past seven in the morning, I’d go home, Father would see the rabbits passed. Those that were condemned he’d bring home. Sometimes we’d have rabbit pie out of them, sometimes they were fed to the dogs or, if we had too many, we used to give them to Jack Minogue for his pigs. Then I’d get ready for school. Father would do what he had to do until about mid-day then he’d go and set the traps to get ready for the night. That went on day after day and he carried on at this for about a month or so and then eventually he disappeared. Of course, Mother knew where he was but we didn’t know, we just knew that he’d gone. The next we heard about him, when I say we heard about him I mean the kids, he was at a place called Berrida on the Marthaguy Creek about fifteen miles out of Gilgandra on the Dubbo Coonamble line. He came home and he took Jim with him. Stan had not quite finished school, he wanted to go but Father wouldn’t let him go. Anyhow he went off and they used to come home about once every three months. I know that Stan says in his letter about once a year but it was more often than that. It was about once every three months.
It was the Dubbo Show and Father and Jim had come home from Berrida and as usual we were all looking forward to a day at the Show. Father must have been doing pretty well because he gave us a pound apiece to go to the show and I know that when we got to Dubbo I had tto go and pick up a parcel in the town. Mother had given me some money to pay for this parcel and I had some loose change in me pocket and enough money to pay me way into the showground and on top of that I had this pound that I’d been given for spending money.
I went into the showground and was walking up towards the pavilion when a fellow stopped me and he said “Have you just come in?” and I said “Yes.” He said”Oh, you won’t have heard about that monkey biting the boys arm off this morning will you?” I said “No, I never heard anything about it. Did the monkey get out of its cage or something?” He said “No. It was tied up behind the tent and this boy went playing with him and it bit his arm off.” So I never said anything and he said “Would you like to see the monkey?” I said “Aye.” So he said “Come on along with me and I’ll show him to you but you mustn’t go to close to him because he might bite you.” So anyhow we went round behind this tent and sure enough, there was a monkey there on a chain, he didn’t seem very vicious to me but alongside of him was a fellow with a little table and he was playing with a thimble and some peas. I’d never heard of the thimble and the pea game, or the three card trick or anything like that, I was a complete mug. This feller said to me “I wonder what he’s doing there?” So I said “Let’s go and ask him.” So the feller said he was just playing a friendly little gambling game on his own, anybody could join in and it was a matter of finding the pea. He had these three thimbles, he showed you where the pea was, moved them about and you had to find the pea and he’d bet you that you couldn’t find it.
So anyhow, he shoved them round a bit and he had a newspaper and he pretended to be reading this newspaper and the feller that was with me picked one of the thimbles up and he said it’s there. So I said “Oh.” So anyhow the feller puts his paper down and says “Well, are you going to have a bet?” So I said “Aye, I’ll have a shilling on.” So I picked this one and he turned it up and he says you’re lucky, you’ve won. So he paid me the shilling and he started of with them again. I had another bet and I backed a thimble that the chap that was with me had indicated and I won that. So I thought oh, it’s easy money this, I’m right in clover here. So he goes on again, shoved ‘em round again and I was wondering whether to have a good bet or not and again he started looking at his paper and this chap picked up the thimble and, sure enough, the pea was under it. He put it down again and said “That’s it!” He said “Come on, have a decent bet.” So I get this quid out of me pocket and I put the quid on it, the bloke picked up the thimble and there was no bloody pea there, it had gone.
Well, I was so dumbfounded. I was amazed at losing this pound, I turned away from the table and was walking off. I’d even forgot to pick up the parcel I’d been carrying but anyhow the feller came running after me and gave me the parcel. I spent all that day and I daren’t tell any of the family I’d lost this pound. I never had anything to eat, I couldn’t spend anything and I had a perfectly miserable day. But it was a good thing in one way because it taught me a lesson. I never forgot it and years afterwards I got even with the thimble and the pea man, but that’s something I’ll tell you about later on.
Well, the Show over, we caught the train and we went home. Father and Jim went back to Berrida and we settled down to the normal humdrum life. I don’t remember how long it was after the Dubbo Show but Mother was confined and gave birth to triplets. I can tell you there was some excitement in the MacDonald household that day. Mrs Minogue was again officiating and when the first baby was born she thought that was it and about ten minutes after we heard another scramble and excited voices in the bedroom. She come out after a while and said you’ve got another baby sister. About an hour after that there was another scramble and the third one turned up. We were all agog, we thought it was wonderful to have three sisters all at once. I remember us going into the lounge to try to listen to what was going on in the bedroom and I distinctly remember one thing, I heard this Mrs Minogue Say “There’s no use to worry Lilla, if there’s another one it’ll come when it’s ready.” Anyhow, there wasn’t another one, that was it.
There was all kinds of people come to visit to see these children, Mother got the King’s Bounty I think it was called in those days. I think it was twenty pound or fifty pound I’m not quite sure which. Then there was the question of the christening. There was terrific arguments about what they were to be called. Anyhow, in the finish, to try and satisfy everyone, they settled on calling them three names apiece. The oldest one they called Margaret Iris Emily, the second eldest one they called Vera Mary Grace and the youngest was called Vanessa Phylis Sarah. Unfortunately, the youngest didn’t have very long to bear the burden of three names, she died when she was about a fortnight old. She took ill suddenly with convulsions, they sent for the doctor and he didn’t have much hope of her recovering and said that it would be advisable to send for Father.
They sent him a telegram and they also went to the police station and asked the police to try and get in touch with him. Well a couple of days went on and he didn’t show up and they come to the conclusion that neither the telegram nor the police had been able to locate him, so it was decided to ask for volunteers to go after him and bring him back.
There was a young fellow named Jack Crawford, he was courting Mae at the time and he had a pal called Jimmy Coburn and they came along and they said to Mother “We’ll go and see if we can find him. We’ll go on our bikes.” They gave them all the information they could which was very little, they directed them to Gilgandra and then they had to find their own way to Berrida. They set off about eight o,clock one morning and we just had to leave it at that and wait for them to return.
They turned up the next day about mid-day. They hadn’t found Father, they’d got lost somewhere in the bush and hadn’t even reached Gilgandra so they gave up and come home. In the meantime, he had got word through our telegram or the police, I don’t know which, and he arrived home. But shortly after he arrived, Vanessa died. In Australia, when anyone dies, particularly in the summertime, they’ve got to be buried within forty eight hours at the outside being a hot country it’s not possible to keep them any longer than that. Anyhow, all arrangements were made for the funeral and she was buried in Murrumbidgerie cemetery.
There was an incident during the burial that I remember clearly and it also illustrates the type of man that me Father was. The fellers that had dug the grave had not dug it big enough or they hadn’t dug it straight or something but when they were lowering the coffin when it got down about half way it jammed. They were fiddling about trying to get the coffin down and it was affecting the womenfolk. They were fainting and swooning and weeping. Father left the mourners and went up to the grave and he said “Lift the coffin out.” So they lifted the coffin out and he said “Give me a pick.” And he got down in the grave himself and straightened the wall out sufficiently to allow the coffin to be lowered in. It was lowered in and that was the end of that.
There was one very amusing incident occurred while Father was at home from Berrida. There was, in Dubbo, a catholic priest by the name of Father Dunne.[Later Bishop of Bathurst] He used to travel the surrounding districts visiting his parishioners. Invariably of course, he always called on Mother. Father wasn’t a catholic, in fact, he hated the sight of them but Mother was a very devout catholic and the old priest used to call periodically. One day, he turned up and we had a little plot of land alongside the house that Father had been growing some experimental wheat in. Whilst he was away I tended this plot, it was only a very small plot and when he come home it was ready for cutting. He’d cut it and stooked it up to dry and was going to thresh it by hand. When the old priest arrived he pulled into the yard and unhooked his horse. He saw these sheaves of wheat stood up and he went and got a couple of sheaves and fed ‘em to his horse.
After he’d been there a while in the house, Father arrived home and he said “Who’s horse is that?” One of us said “ Father Dunne’s.” He said “Who’s fed that wheat to him?” We said “Father Dunne.” So he just turned round and walked off, he was away about five minutes when Father Dunne came dashing out of the house with Father after him. He stood there while the old priest hooked his horse into the buggy and the Old Man said to him “Now you can take this to help you on your way!” He fetched a whip out and started flogging his horse. The horse went tearing up the lane with the old man hanging on and the Old Feller said “If ever you come back here again it’ll be you I’ll flog not the bloody horse!” Anyhow, the old man always made sure Father was away before he come visiting again. Of course, it didn’t stop him from visiting, he used to come pretty regularly.
It was now the school holidays and I got my first job. I went to work on a farm which was owned by some friends of ours named Crowley. I went there as a roustabout, doing all kinds of odd jobs round the house and helping the women-folk during harvest. The first day I went, old man Crowley said to me “Have you ever used a scoop?” I said “No, I’ve never used one but I’ve seen them used and I know how to use one.” He said “Do you think you could use one, are you strong enough?” I said “Yes, of course I am.” He said “Right, I’ll get Denny to take you out to a dam. It’s almost empty and you can scoop the silt out of it.”
So we loaded the scoop up in a dray and got a set of chain harness, hooked the old horse up and away we went. Denny took me out and showed me the job and he said “Well, there you are, you can ride the horse home tonight if you’re not finished and we’ll come back for the scoop when you’re finished.” So I started scooping the dam out. Now the procedure was that these dams were made for water catchment where there was no creek water or river water available. The idea was that they’d sink a tank in a favourable position and then they’d plough trenches away from it to trap the water and run it into the tank. But with the stock going in to drink and the silt coming down with the water they gradually silted up and then they had to be scooped out.
I thought this was a lovely job because I had to strip off everything but me boots and drive this old horse in to about a foot of water and scoop the muck up and take it out to the low side of the dam and tip it where it wouldn’t be washed in by the next rainfall.
This job took me about three days. I eventually finished it and the old man came out and had a look at it and he thought I’d done a good job and he gave me five bob extra.
Another of the jobs they gave me to do, and the one I liked best was running errands for spare parts for machines which had broken down, taking letters to the post and all that sort of thing. They gave me a lovely little pony. It was about 11 miles into Dubbo and if they had a breakdown on a machine I was sent off for the spare part about 11 mile there and back and I really enjoyed meself on those trips because it was across country most of the way and I used to be jumping logs and racing the pony to see what I could get out of him. Altogether, having a damn good time. But then, they put me on to a winnower, winnowing wheat and it was a back-breaking job. This decided me that I probably wasn’t old enough to go to work so I went home and never went back again.
Before we leave Murrumbidgerie, I better tell you the story about how it came to change its name. There was two or three versions but the real one I think was that people got to analyzing place names, wondering how they got their name. The story come out that during the railway construction, there was a shanty at Murrumbidgerie, that was before it got any name at all, and the blacks used to come into this shanty and if they could, although it was illegal, they’d try and buy liquor. One of their favourite drinks was rum. One feller was suppose to have come along one day and the boss of the pub said to him “what do you want Jacky?” and he said “I want more rum budgerie.” Now budgerie means very good and this rather tickled the landlord’s fancy and they decided to call the place More rum bidgerie. It got to be known roundabouts and there were so many jokes in the paper about it that the town committee got together and decided that the best thing they could do was change the name because it wasn’t doing the place much good being held up to ridicule.
They brought out a story that they were having difficulty with the postal authorities that mail supposed to be going to Murrumbidgerie was going to Murrumbidgee down on the Darling and they were getting Murrumidgee mail at Murrumbidgerie. So they thought it would be a good thing all round if they changed the name and called the place Wongarbon. I think they were as bad with Wongarbon as Murrumbidgeree. It was out of the frying pan into the fire because Wongarbon is an aboriginal name, I don’t really know what Wongarbon means but I do know that it is a composition of aboriginal words.
After the death of Vanessa, Mother couldn’t settle down at Murrumbidgerie and Father decided that the best thing would be to move back to Dubbo where she would be amongst more people that she knew and closer to the church because this was always a grumble with her that she couldn’t get to church as often as she would like to go. We didn’t move into the Peppers again, we moved into a bigger house nearer to town.[1905/1906]
Stan had now left school and had gone to the Bush with Father and Jim. I was very disconsolate, I had nothing to pass me time away and I missed Stan a great deal. I had friends right enough but it didn’t seem the same without him and I was counting the days until I would be able to get away from school and join them. I once again took to playing truant. That was simply because I felt so lonely that I couldn’t be bothered trying to learn so I used to spend the day in the park rather than going to school. One day I was playing about in the park when I saw the school attendance officer coming across the park He spotted me and took off after me. I made a dash for it but I could see that I wasn’t going to get away from him. Running through the park was a big open drain which run into a sewer which went down through the town and out into the Macquarie River. Now it’d be from the park to the Macquarie, it’d be about half a mile. So I thought I’ll duck into this sewer and he mightn’t see me and I’ll wait until he goes away and then I’ll come out again. Anyhow, I went into the sewer, I went in about a hundred yards and sat down, there was plenty of room to move along if you kept your head down a bit. I wasn’t there very long before I heard noises in the sewer and it sounded as though there was a team of wild horses coming down it so I went further in. These noises followed me and I kept going. Eventually the noises stopped. It was pretty stinking in the sewer but there must have been enough fresh air, I didn’t feel any ill effects from it. I thought the best thing I can do, Ive got this far, keep going. So I kept going and I come out on the bank of the river and I went off swimming for the rest of the afternoon. That was the end of me playing hooky for a while because when I got home, Mother had heard all about it and I got the usual bloody good hiding and the next day she took me to school personally and saw me into the classroom. I got the cane again from the teacher, we used to call him Old Baldy Jones. He was an old bugger but I had to put up with it because every day after that Mother used to take me to school and see me inside before she left.
I didn’t last much longer at the Dubbo Public School. I was always getting into trouble for fighting and disobeying the teachers and in the finish, I don’t know whether I was expelled or whether they advised Mother to take me away and send me somewhere else but, anyhow, I was taken away from the school and I was sent to a grammar school which was run by a Mr Sweeney. Now life at the grammar school was entirely different because we played games and we had all kinds of interesting studies and I really enjoyed going to school. This Mr Sweeney was a batchelor and his sister was his housekeeper. I got on very well with her right from the word go. Mr Sweeney used to go about three nights a week to his club and I used to go and sit with Miss Sweeney and keep her company until he come home. To pass away the time she used to tell me tales and read books to me and she always seen that I had plenty of sweets and a good meal before I went to bed at night. Rather than it being a chore for me, I always used to look forward to the nights when he was going out and I could go and spend the evening with his sister.
Mr Sweeney’s approach was far different to anything I had experienced before in schoolteachers. While I was at the public school they didn’t seem to take any interest in me at all except to give me lessons to do and give me the bloody cane when I didn’t do them right. I never got a chance to play with a cricket team or a football team and I knew that I was a reasonably good cricketer and I knew that I was a very good footballer because I played a lot with scratch teams round about the place and always did very well. Well, I hadn’t been there a week before it was games afternoon and one of the assistant teachers said to me “What sort of games do you play best?” I said “ I don’t play any very well.” He said “Well, this afternoon we’ve got some tennis and some cricket going, would you like to have a game of tennis?” I said “No thank you, I’ll play if you tell me to but I can’t play, I never have played, I haven’t got any interest in it.” He said “ Would you like to have a game of cricket?” I said “Yes please.” He said “What are you, a batsman or a bowler?” I said “Well, I don’t know whether I’m anything in particular, I,m a pretty good fielder, I’m not very good at batting and I’m not very good at bowling.” Anyway he said I could have a go.
I knew nothing about the finer points of batting in those days, all I knew was there was a ball coming down and I had to hit it as hard as I could and make as many runs as I could and depend on the fieldsmen not catching me out. I knew nothing at all about playing a ball down on to the ground. I just used to hit it and trust to luck. Anyhow, this afternoon I think I scored about twenty and then they give me a bowl and I took two wickets so they were very pleased and I was delighted.
When it came to swimming I really was in me element because I’d had plenty of swimming and I was like an eel in the water. We used to have one swimming afternoon a week from the school. I never won any prizes that I can remember but I used to take part in all kinds of races but there was always somebody a little bit better than me but I always made the school team up and they used to tell me that I was good club man, whatever that meant. The main thing from my point of view was the fact that I enjoyed it so much.
Then there was another lesson that we used to get, it was a course called Natural History. We used to go out in country on a suitable day and when we come back we had to write an essay on what we had seen. Although I’d lived in this district all me life, until then, I’d never appreciated the beauty of the countryside in Spring. You could go out on to the hills, climb up the hill and look down into the valley and see a blaze of golden Wattle, the varying shades of green of the different kinds of tree, the Box trees, the Gum trees, the Kurrajung and the Wattle all blended together like one big picture and the birds, the Cockatoos, Gallahs, Rosellas, Quarry Hens, Parrakeets, Budgerigars, Magpies, Butcher Birds, all the wealth of bird life that I’d walked about all me life and never taken any notice of until these lessons drew our attention to them. For me, that two years under Mr Sweeney was the best years of my school life.
When it was about time for me to leave school, His [Mr Sweeney’s] Father, who was the principal of the Dulwich College at Solihull, died and as it was a private school, it was decided that he should leave Dubbo and take on his Father’s job at Dulwich. He asked me if I’d like to go to Sydney with him and I said I would and he said that he’d talk to Father and tell me more about it later on. Anyhow, when Father come home he saw him and he told him that he was prepared to take me and keep me and to put me through college, the only condition being that I only come home once every six months and that my parents would be prepared to leave me there until I was 18 years of age. When I got to know about this I cooled off a bit about going to Sydney because I didn’t want to be stuck in a school until I was eighteen years of age. But Father’s attitude saved me any worries on that score because he said that I couldn’t go, that I had to stay at home and that anyhow, I had to go out into the bush with him. Mr Sweeney said that he was very sorry but if that was Father’s decision it had to be abided by and therefore we said goodbye.
I think it was about this time that Father decided to start a sideline. You’ll remember earlier on I mentioned a man named Kwong Lee who was a chinese market gardener between Dubbo and Escol. Quite near to Kwongs place was a piece of river flat that, somehow or other, had not been included in any of the local surveys. All ground in Australia is surveyed out in squares, one mile square and this is called a homestead selection. Then it’s built up by these squares into bigger areas going up to almost unlimited size, nevertheless, it’s all marked out into 640 acre plots. Somehow this site was sandwiched in between two others and there was no record of it. Father went to the lands office and got control of this land, I think it was on a thirty three year lease.
At that time in Dubbo the sanitary arrangements were what we used to call a night soil system. There was no water closets and the lavatories just had a canister in them. This canister was emptied every so often and taken away and disposed of in the country. A family called Rich had the contract of clearing the night soil. Father was friendly with Mr Rich, by the way, they were a Jewish family, it’s not very often you come across Jews doing this kind of work. They were a family. There was 21 children in the family, 19 of them living and they run this undertaking as a family concern, they also had a big tailoring business in the town.
Father arranged with Mr Rich for the disposal of the sewerage on this place and as it was a few miles closer than where he was already dumping, and a better road to get to it, he quickly snapped up the chance. The method of disposal was that they should get a subsoil plough and they used to plough drains, I don’t know how deep because there was no subsoil for about ten feet down, it was all silt that was washed up from the river and there was no such thing as getting into subsoil, you could get as deep as you liked. It was topsoil all the way. So they dug these trenches and they used to fill them in with night soil, they’d put so much in then they’d put soil on top of it and they carried on like that until the trench was filled up. Then it was laid fallow for about a year, and then it was ready for use.
Anyhow, When old Kwong got going with his vegetables on this plot they’d some of the best vegetables ever seen in the district. As a matter of fact it wasn’t long before they had a monopoly of all the hotels and boarding houses and greengrocers in the town and it was famous for miles around. This went on for a year or two and then suddenly, somebody, I suppose it would be some interested party, got to know what was going on and they started a campaign in the Dubbo Liberal about it, about this “filthy proceeding” they called it. They said that the vegetables weren’t fit to be eaten and all that sort of thing which was a lot of tommyrot. Still, to the ignorant section of the population and to a lot of other people as well, they didn’t like the idea of the food they were eating being grown on that kind of manure. Hotels and boarding-houses, greengrocers all cancelled their contracts. To try and keep carrying on, they decided to send the stuff to Sydney but it was such a chancy business that after a time they had to give it up because there was occasions when there was a glut on the market and they had to send money after stock to pay for its disposal. Instead of making money they were losing it. So they called it a day and put the plot down to lucerne and I suppose it’ll be lucerne to this very day.
About this time, my inability to resist the temptation to rob an orchard got me into very painful trouble. There was a chinese garden near to where we lived and, amongst other things, he used to grow a lot of melons. It was a fairly warm afternoon and we were playing in a bit of spare ground with some other boys and a lad named Dick Samuels, who was one of my bosom friends said to me “What do you say if we go to the chinese garden and get ourselves a melon?” I said “Right, I’m on if you’re game.” and he said “Right, well we’ll go.” and he told his brother Clive, and this Clive used to stammer. He said “We’re going to go and rob the chinese garden.” His brother stuttered out that he would come to so off we went. There was a lot of low scrub along the boundary fence of this garden and after discussion it was decided that Dick and Clive would keep watch and I would go in for the melon because I knew where they were. So off I went, I crawled in, keeping out of sight, I couldn’t see the old chinaman anywhere. So I looked round until I found a melon, I tested it to see if it was ripe. The method of testing was to cut a three cornered piece out with your knife and have a look if it was ripe. If it wasn’t ripe you just stuck it back in again and it healed itself up and you went and looked for another one. Anyhow, I found one that was ripe and it was a big ‘un. I cut it off the vine and I started to roll it. I noticed that rolling it over the hard ground, it was cutting through the skin. I thought, that’s no good, I’ll have to carry it so I picked it up and I was running with it in me two arms, stooped down and all of a sudden I heard Dick shout “Look out! The chinaman’s coming!” I decided to stick to the melon, I didn’t intend him to catch me. I hadn’t gone more than about ten yards when I heard the report of a gun and a terrific pain in me backside. I still hung on to the melon though and I got through the fence. I think the old chinaman was that frightened he’d turned back and didn’t come after us again. Whether he knew he’d hit me I didn’t know. But he was about a hundred yards away from me when he fired at me and he knew what was in the cartridge. It wasn’t buckshot, it was saltpetre. My God, the pain of that when these things went into my backside. Well we set off for the river, took the melon with us of course. I got into the river thinking that might ease the pain but it didn’t so I had to lay on the grass whilst Dick picked these bits of salt out of me with a pocket knife. For a month after that I always thought of the melon when I sat down. But fortunately, none of the wounds went the wrong way so I didn’t have to report the matter to Mother and Father.
Mother decided that she’d like to go back and live at the Peppers and as the place was now empty, it was decided to buy it.[1907] The deal was put through and we moved back to our old home. But before we went it was found that I walked in me sleep. One night, Mother tells me, I was sleeping in the front bedroom, it was a big house, bungalow type, there was six rooms at the front of the house and then there was a long verandah with wash house, bath house, kitchen and etc, storerooms, running along this verandah. She heard me one night get out of bed and come down the verandah and she followed me, I went into a room and turned the tap on and washed me hands and then I went out and went to the well that was the water supply for the house, it stood in the yard. I lifted up the door of the well and had a look down the well. She was so frightened that I might fall down at this stage that she grabbed me and I woke up and asked her where I was and she told me all that had happened. She was so worried about me that she took me to doctor next day and he told her that there was nothing she could do about it but that it was very fortunate that she didn’t cause me some injury by waking me up. He said in future, if he walks in his sleep, just leave him alone. He’ll not come to any harm.
When we got settled in at the Peppers I took a horse and cart and went out into the bush to get some firewood because in those days there was no such thing as buying coal, your fuel supplies were gathered from the countryside round about. You usually had to get permission from the owner of the property but he was always very glad to give you permission because they wanted the dead wood collecting from the ground because it interfered with the growth of grass. I was out this day cutting wood and loading up the dray on the bank of the river. I met an oldster coming along with his scythe. It was almost dinnertime so I invited him to have a bite with me. He sat down and shared me meal and he gave me some tobacco which I rolled in a piece of newspaper and had a smoke. He was me friend for life because he’d given me a bit of tobacco and he started talking and I asked him where he had come from. He said he’d come from Venn, up round the Coonamble district but he’d spent most of his time on Cooper’s Creek.
He got yarning away and I sat and listened to him telling me about things that he’d seen and things that he’d done and he’d been a drover and fought with cattle duffers and all that sort of thing. he got on to talking about bushrangers and he said that he knew two, Gilbert and Dunn. He told me the story how they were finally captured. These two chaps weren’t very notorious bushrangers but they had broken into one or two banks and they’d stolen cattle and shot one or two people and there was a price of ,500 on their head. This chap said to me “You know, there’s been a piece of poetry written about Gilbert and Dunn written by a feller named Banjo Patterson.” I now know of Banjo Patterson very well by repute but I hadn’t heard of him at that time. He said “I’ll just tell you about it.” and he started off. I can remember the piece of poetry because in later years I learned it. It started off:
‘There is never a stone for the sleepers head, there is never a fence beside but the smallest child on the Watershed can tell how Gilbert died....’ Then of course it goes on, he recited the whole thing to me as he told me the story but I’ve forgotten it now. These two chaps, the police were after them, they made for a place in the Warrambungle Mountains where the Father, no I’m wrong, the grand-father of Dunn, was a stockman on a station. They went to his hut, his name was Ford, and asked for shelter for the night and he said “Yes, come in and we’ll drink a drink to the roving boys and to hell with the black police.”
So they went in, tethered their horses outside, he cooked them a meal, they drank some rum that he had in the place and they went to bed. During the night he couldn’t get at their revolvers but he got at their rifles and he drenched their rifles. That was by pouring water down the barrels. He got out and went to where he knew the police were camped and told them that Dunn and Gilbert was in his hut. They surrounded the hut and early in the morning, just as day was breaking, Gilbert woke . He woke Dunn and said there was something wrong, there was somebody outside. He turned to the bed that the old man was sleeping in and he wasn’t there. He said to Dunn,”I know now that there’s something wrong, your grandfather’s not here. He’s split on us.” Dunn didn’t know what to say, in fact there’s no record of him saying anything as far as this chap knew. Gilbert said “There’s only one chance for us, it’s a cert that we can’t both get away, one of us has got to go. So, you give me your revolver and I’ll go out and meet them and you get out the back way as best you can and get a horse and try and make a break for it while I fight it out with them. If I’m lucky, I’ll follow you.”
So this was agreed on, Dunn gave him his revolver and Gilbert went out and called to the police to come and fight you bastards. Anyhow they fired on him and he returned their fire and a battle took place and Dunn got out the back way and got on a horse but as he was getting away one of the troopers shot him in the back. Gilbert was shot dead. Now the Warrambungle Mountains are about a hundred miles, probably a bit more, from Dubbo but Dunn next showed up in a scotch thistle patch behind the Dubbo showground. He was found there by some children who were rabbit hunting and he asked them for water and food. They could see that he was wounded but they didn’t know that it was Dunn. They went home and told their parents about it and the Father, straight away jumped to the conclusion that it must be Dunn. So he went to the police. The police surrounded this place and, Dunn was taken. He was later tried and hung. I checked this story later with Father and he said that it was perfectly true. I also learnt that Father had a great sympathy for Dunn and Gilbert. I don’t know whether he knew them or not, he never said, but when he learned that the man who reported Dunn’s presence in the thistle patch to the police was Mr Bunyan, he was furious and he made it his business to see Bunyan and tell him what he thought about him. Although they’d been very good friends for years, Father never spoke to him again as far as I know.
There are quite a few lads in Dubbo that I like to remember and I’ll just mention here a few of my bosom pals when I was going to school. First and foremost of course there was Dick and Clive Samuels, they were my real buddies because we hunted and fished and swam and surveyed the surrounding countryside, always together. One would never dream of going anywhere without the others. There was Cherry Langley, the son of a racehorse trainer who was also a very good friend and with whom I spent many happy hours.
There was another lad called Horace Findlater, for him, I have a very kindly thought because one day when I was walking across the sleeper paddock, I met the town bully, a lad named Gutter Clark, he’d be a chap about sixteen years of age then. I was then about twelve or thirteen. I was a good marble player and he knew that I had a lot of canelia stones so he stopped me and said “We’ll have a go at marbles.” I said “no, I’m not playing marbles today, I’ve got to go down town for Mother.” he said “let me have a look at your marbles.” I said, “No. I’m not going to let you have a look at them.” because I knew what Gutter Clark was and I knew if I let him get hold of me marbles I’d never get ‘em back again. So he said “If you don’t let me have a look at your marbles I’ll give you a belting.” So I said “All right, you’ll have to give me a belting.” because I knew he could do ‘cause he was a lot bigger than me. Anyhow I was shaping up to him and he clouted me a time or two and I could see I was going to get hell knocked out of me, when all of a sudden I heard a voice saying “You lay off Gutter!” and when I looked up it was Horace Findlater. He was about Gutter’s size. He said “You leave this lad alone or I’ll teach you a lesson.” Anyhow, he was a bit of a coward this lad Gutter Clark, he wouldn’t face up to Horace and he took me over to where he lived and his Mother washed me face and the nose bleed and after that Horace Findlater was one of my heroes. I have a story to tell about him but it comes later on because eventually, he became a driver on the railway. Anyhow, I’ll tell you that story when we git to it in the proper order.
It was through Cherry Langley and a lad named Gil Henderson that I was invited to play in the North Dubbo Rugby Team. It was the first time I’d ever had an opportunity to play club football and I wondered how I’d go on amongst the older fellers. I mentioned this to Gil Henderson and he said “You’ve got no need to worry about it because I’ve seen you play and I know very well that you’ll be able to hold your end up with the best of them.” Anyhow I was picked and when we got down to the ground I remember ‘em giving me me jersey and me boots and shorts and I was very proud to think that I was going to play in front of spectators. I said to the captain of the team, a feller named Bob Steele, “Where am I playing Bob?” He said “You’re going to be playing on the right wing today. You play out there and see how you go on.” I thought well, I’ll have a go at that because I like playing on the wing and we were playing a little place called Narromine. The referee was our local padre a feller named Ernie Coverdale.
I was lucky, I scored two tries and kicked a goal so I was a hero first time out. But five minutes from time, I forget what the score was but we were about even, anyone who could score looked like winning the match and we’d had a row of about five yard scrums but we couldn’t get over and they couldn’t break away, we had a terrific match. Anyhow we finished, I think we just won or perhaps they just won, I’m not quite sure. That wasn’t of any importance to me, it was the fact that I’d got a game with a club team. The only thing that I was sorry for was that I was shortly going to leave home and that my chances of playing more football with them would have gone because we were expecting Father home at any time now and I was hopeful that when he returned, he’d take me with him.
Anyhow, he did arrive home and the two boys were with him and they were telling me what sort of a life it was out in the never-Never and I was counting the hours until I could be with ‘em. The day before they went away, Father came to me and said “Got your bag packed?” I said “Aye, I’m ready to go.” He said “I’m taking you with me this time but you must remember that you’re not going for a picnic, you’ve got to work, and you’ve got to work hard. you’ll have to settle down.” I said “Alright, I’ll do anything at all. Just let me go.”
The next morning we got on the Dubbo to Coonamble train and went out to Gilgandra and there we picked up our horse and spring cart and set off for Berrida. Father hadn’t come with us on the train because he always used to go by bike. The forty mile ride was nothing to him and we thought to ourselves that we’d get there before him and get settled in before he gits there, because we never thought that he could beat the train. We didn’t realise that the train that we were travelling on was a mixed goods and passenger train and used to stop at every siding to shunt trucks off and pick trucks up and the trip from Dubbo to Gilgandra, although it was only about forty mile, it used to take about half a day.
Anyhow we got the horse and cart and got some rations that he’d instructed Jim about and we set off for camp. When we got to the camp, I thought it was one of the most romantic looking places I’d ever seen in me life. It was in a big bullargh scrub, the bullargh tree is a tree which grows very high and it always grows in swampy country and it’s not much good for anything at all in the way of building material - well for any use at all really. Well, we were camped at the edge of a lagoon and it was called the Tucklebung Lagoon. There were three lagoons in this area. This one was Tucklebung, the next one was Uabalong and the one further on down the Marthagai was called Eegigaleegeebung. I don’t know what tucklebung meant or what Uabalong meant but Eegigaleegeebung, it meant that the place was haunted with the spirits of the aborigines who’d died. And you could never get aborigines to go their at night time. It was said that all the bullargh trees in the lagoon housed the spirits of their ancestors. There was a water tank quite close to us as well but we used to use the water for drinking from the lagoon which was about three hundred yards away. The method of carrying it was two five gallon kerosene tins with handles in them on a yoke. I quickly learnt that that was one of my jobs, carrying the water.
The first night we were there, Father went out with a gun and shot a couple of curlews. Brought them back, we plucked them and he put ‘em in the camp oven to roast and we had them before we went to bed that night. Well, I thought this was marvellous. I’d heard them talking about shooting duck and brush turkeys and pigeons but to actually experience having some game on the first night in the camp was quite a thrill. I found me bed in a little six by eight tent sleeping with Stanley on one side and Jim on the other. I went to sleep, thoroughly one of the happiest boys in Australia. I was soon to learn that being in the camp in the bush wasn’t all adventure but I’ll tell you more about that when I start again.
Berrida was a sheep station of some 60,000 acres of land. Almost entirely devoted to sheep. They kept a few cattle to slaughter for themselves and to keep for milk and there was a bit of arable farming, only just sufficient to keep the saddle horses supplied with hay in the winter time or when grass was scarce. The place was owned by two brothers, Jim and Mac Barry and they came into the squatter class. Now the squatters derived their name because of the fact that they’d squatted on the land before it was surveyed and laid claim to it. As the government of that period was very anxious to settle the country they put no obstacles in the way of anyone who wished to go beyond a certain distance line from the coast and claim and take up land. The usual procedure would be, a man who intended to start squatting would be to get himself a mob of sheep or a flock of cattle and put all his household goods onto a wagon, family and all included and set off across country in the hope of finding some suitable settlement. Sometimes of course, they’d already surveyed the country themselves and they knew where they were going.
10,214 words.
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LESLIE GRAHAM MACDONALD TAPE (06)
