Looking Back

By R.F Giles

Dingoes proved a real menace there, so the family moved to Capella where they purchased the Paramount Theatre and a small cattle station before winning a land ballot off the failed Queensland British Food Corporation. He then married and moved to the Gold Coast then to Brunswick Heads and to another theatre. Television caused a recession in that so he went out as a deck hand on a trawler and cut timber before selling out and returning to the bush. He then took a position with British Petroleum being granted the whole of Cape as his territory. He then bought a produce agency and Stock Agency at Bowen in Queensland buying several cattle and sheep stations until a car accident killed his partner, so he sold out and bought charter boats, operating them from Brisbane to Thursday island, but after losing a deckhand retired from that and went back into business in Bowen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Oct 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781493108015

R.F Giles

Basically the writer was raised during WW2 in Kingston SE, a small South Australian coastal town. As he grew up he tells of his experiences helping his Stock Agent father droving sheep for clients, watering them, walking them up to 20 kilometers a day, learning to ride a one pedal bike, graduating to driving as he grew older and had an apprenticeship as a bee keeper, then moved trainloads of sheep from Broken Hill down to Kingston. Some war time experiences crept in before the family moved to Queensland where the author joined his father, at first droving and shearing sheep for him, branching into timber cutting before taking on droving from New South Wales up through the sparsely settled Carnarvon Ranges the Emerald district where he joined his father buying into a much larger property.

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Copyright © 2013 by R.F Giles.

Library of Congress Control Number:                      2013917770

ISBN:                  Hardcover                            978-1-4931-0800-8

                            Softcover                             978-1-4931-0799-5

                            Ebook                                  978-1-4931-0801-5

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Rev. date: 09/25/2013

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My story here covers bits and pieces of my life, as I recall them, from my childhood through to more recent times and, too, I have inserted occasional pieces of history, leading later into my life, such as the brief introduction to the QBFC or cameos of characters and incidents I came across along the way.

Mount Pleasant in the Adelaide Hills, a pretty town, is built along the banks of the Torrens River shaded by huge eucalyptus-scented gum trees missed by early settlers when clearing their new farms.

Dad grew up there to be a short but solid-built man who habitually had a big cigar in his mouth but was not averse to chewing tobacco or smoking the occasional pipe either. As he aged, his hair receded quickly, roughly at about the same rate that his cunning increased, so perhaps his hair loss sharpened his already-keen perspicacity?

His early primary school years were spent at Mount Pleasant while living at the original Lansdowne homestead there before he became a boarder at Scotch College in Torrens Park, a suburb of Adelaide, matriculating as an accountant.

Dad inherited a love for the land, and when he married my mother, Coral May Forrest, in Adelaide, he persuaded Granny to loan them money to purchase a dairy near One Tree Hill in Adelaide. This was at the start of the Great Depression, and despite all the young couple’s work, the farm was eventually lost, together with Granny’s money. At the start of this venture, Dad employed a man to help; however as the Depression bit in, he found he could not pay him. This man knew how bad times were, so offered to work for just his tucker and a roof over his head, but income soon became so meager that Dad could not even afford to continue that arrangement.

He applied for a position with a stock and station, first moving the family to Kingston where we lived first at Vine Tree Cottage, an old stone building with a huge grapevine growing across the front verandah. My room joined the unscreened verandah where within that leafy shelter of grapevines, spiders lived and explored my bedroom at night. One night, one came in under the blankets and up the leg of my pajamas; and I awoke, screaming that something was biting me between the cheeks of my bum. My screams aroused Mum, who bravely dispatched the spider and dispensed soothing cream and words; however, long into my teens, the sight of a spider sent a shudder through me, and I would mindlessly kill the poor hairy creatures.

Later, we moved to a house with an office attached; next to what was known as the ‘New Institute’, used as our town hall and to show movies. Behind that hall was a much older stone building known as the ‘Old Institute’, housing in a locked loft at the rear, ancient film projectors from silent movie days, along with bits and pieces of (for us kids anyway) mysterious electrical paraphernalia. Also in that ancient dusty room was an electric light bulb that was always turned on. A caretaker kept both buildings swept and the yard tidy, but judging by the cobwebs in that old operating box when we boys climbed in through an unlocked back window, he overlooked that part of his mandate. I would not say we actually broke in because the window was unlatched and opened easily. Inside that room was a whole Aladdin’s cave of curios and we thought of ourselves as explorers, not trespassers although one of us did keep nit just in case the caretaker came into sight.

We first moved to the new house before I was old enough to go to school, living there for about ten years, and from there I first went to school and started making lifelong friends. One of these friends, Mick Kirkpatrick, a boy two years older than me, lived in town for schooling, going home on weekends to the family sheep property, Fingerpost Station.

Anyway, Mick used to make wonderful model toy war tanks out of off-cuts from building sites, and we kids would play with them on a sandy abandoned rabbit warren behind our house, right next to the Old Institute.

Ray Basheer, another mate, was the son of our local storekeeper; and his father had given him dozens of tiny die cast toy cars, later known as Matchbox toys, with which we were playing one afternoon on the carpet in his house. Mum and Mrs. Basheer were playing ladies at the same time, over a cup of tea; and when it came time for us to leave, Mum called to me.

‘Come along, Dick. Help Ray put his cars away, and we will walk home.’

I did as I was told but snuck a tiny yellow sedan into my pocket before the job was completed and could not wait until reaching home to be able to play with my new acquisition. I sort of knew this was wrong; however, ‘stealing’ was a word I had never heard until a few minutes after returning home, when Mum caught me playing with it in the lounge room almost as soon as we entered the house. Knowing full well from where it had come, she tried a trick question on me.

‘Where did you get that toy car, Dick?’

‘It’s mine.’

‘No, it’s not. You stole it from Ray. Stealing is very naughty, so we will have to go back to the Basheers’ and give the car back to Ray.’

Ray had so many, and I had none, so could not see why I should not have just one. Perhaps I was then a candidate for communism at the tender age of three, but Mum was determined to alter my thinking, even if this meant coercion.

‘If you don’t give that car back to Ray, you will never be allowed to play with him again.’

I burst into tears without any noticeable effect on my normally meltable mother, who remained adamant that she would not be a party to my theft, which saw us walking back to the Basheers’ house, with me blubbering, sulking, and hanging back while Mum ploughed forward, dragging me along in her wake. She continued all the way lecturing me about stealing and the shame I had brought on her. Mrs. Basheer met us at her front door, where Mum explained what I had done, so Ray was duly called outside where I was made to hand my treasure back—and say sorry. Ray could not have cared less as he had plenty more, and could not understand what the fuss was about as he did not know what stealing meant either.

‘You can keep the car’, he offered, holding it out for me.

That offer was firmly refused by Mum, and as we left, I could see Mrs. Basheer trying to hide a smile.

*     *     *

Although fearful my willy would drop off, I now suspected Granny had lied but could not understand her reason. I did wonder if I should raise the subject with her to prove she was wrong. However, even at that early age, I came to the conclusion there was more than a biological difference in the sexes, so I kept that exciting secret to myself. I did not want to be punished for knowing about a mystery like this, and often thought about Jenny’s mystery, wondering why my penis reacted so as it did. The reason for this was beyond me—then!

I stayed occasionally at Jenny’s parents’ home, where her mother bathed both Jenny and me in the same bath, so we explored further our physical differences. W hereas Jenny was a skinny little bundle of energetic curiosity, she could not take her eyes off my mystery either.

‘How do you wee without a willy?’

‘Doesn’t that get in the way? I wonder why you have that thing and aren’t like me?’

Then her mother would march back in. She had been a nurse before marrying, and her strong thing was enemas. She would subject both us, children, every night to this humiliation; and I hated it so much I was just so glad to go home, even if it meant no more visual explorations of the mystery of life.

Across the road from our home lived another grazier’s wife with her children—Frank, Joan, and Elsie—in a big white-painted stone house surrounded by tall Cyprus trees. No doubt they had a father too, probably living on their station, although I cannot ever recall meeting with him. Frank started school before his sisters or me while we younger children played together, being neighbors, so to speak. Behind their house was a stone shed, which was probably once used for stables, and we kids adopted it as our cubby house. We heard of someone having to go to hospital and used that as a reason to commence playing doctors and nurses, with each of us taking turns at being the patient and undressing for examination. I have no idea how we were never caught, especially as their mother was a prim and proper martinet, perpetually sour with the male race.

The next year, Joan went to primary school followed by Elsie and myself, so that childhood game was soon forgotten with the excitement of learning and making new friends.

‘Stacks on the mill,

The more on still.’

When raining and confined to a shed at the rear of our school, that was one of the first games we learned to play, either at recess or lunchtime. Rain would come down, and we would all rush inside where there were insufficient seats on the benches provided, so there was a scamper of laughing kids to find a seat. Those who missed out would jump on one of those seated and yell, ‘Stacks on the mill, the more on still.’

First one child then another and another would sit on the poor unfortunate underneath until he or she emerged somehow from under the melee to sit back on top of the next child.

We were taught arithmetic tables by the singsong approach. ‘One and one are two, two and two are four’, and so on, and I recall how proud I was to be able to count to a hundred. Sometimes we’d be taught snippets of poetry by two of our three teachers, Mr. Auhl, Mr. Denton, or the headmaster. Joan skipped home after school one day after learning the ‘Ode to the Pelican’, which she repeated in front of her stern-faced mother in the singsong fashion taught to her.

‘A wonderful bird is the pelican,

His beak can hold more than his belly can,

And we often wonder how the hellecan.’

Well, do you think Joan’s mother didn’t half crack up when she heard the word ‘hellecan’ spoken by Joan?

Fancy a teacher of all people, instructing little girls, especially her daughters at that, how to swear. She would give that teacher ‘hell’ she told her daughters, marching them off to speak with a rather bemused headmaster, insisting he dismiss Mr. Auhl on the spot. This did not happen.

School introduced us to many new friends, one of whom was Dick Hartman, an Aboriginal boy with a perpetually cheerful grin. We were all seated two to a desk, and Dick was my companion and desk mate. Teachers asked us questions, and if I didn’t know the answer, I would kick Dick under the desk; and if he did not know, he would reciprocate. After all, when the teacher addressed us as ‘Dick’, one of us had to answer, and between us we came top of the class. Dick was very popular with all we kids, and especially so when we found his grandmother was Queen Ethel, head of the local Aboriginal tribe. For us, the only queen we had ever heard of was the Queen of England; and finding we actually had a real queen right there among us was somehow quite exciting, so knowing her grandson Dick was a real honor. Especially for me being his desk mate!

After school, we would often gather at the top of a hill in the street behind the Church of England, where we would climb into big old-fashioned wide-mouthed tires, which our mates would then start rolling downhill. In these we would race one another to the bottom of the hill, reaching what seemed tremendous speed before we would hit something or fall out, giddy but happy.

With World War II on, guns fascinated us, so we would make cutouts of them and play cowboys and Indians. Then Mick came up with a design for a real one. Well, sort of anyway. Actually, it was a crossbow made from a piece of pipe lashed to a frame with a bow attached at the back. The bowstring was a rubber ring cut from a tire’s inner tube, drawn back tight, and locked on a notch on the bow’s frame. An arrow was then placed inside the pipe from the front end and then pushed back, tightening the rubber. Then the contraption was pointed at a target, and the rubber released. It was inaccurate and really dangerous as the first arrow could have done real damage as it missed someone by an inch. So Mick, who did have some sense, cut the point off.

*     *     *

Dad purchased blocks of scrubby land, heavily infested with rabbits and Coastal Boobialla Wattle trees, then enlisted Mum and me to help him eradicate both those pests. He would—on the Sundays he took off from work—fell the wattle trees with an axe while Mum and I dragged the fallen trees into heaps, piling them on top of rabbit warrens, preparatory for burning and thus smoking the rabbits out of their burrows. Dad would also set and bury steel rabbit traps at the entrance to burrows each morning before felling the trees, and each evening we would have a harvest of rabbits trapped by their legs that he dispatched by wringing their necks before skinning them. He would take a few rabbit carcasses home to eat as a change from the mutton we seemed to perpetually have on our table.

Dad was a superb judge of live sheep weight and often won live sheep by guessing their weight at shows, with the sheep themselves being offered as the prize. Granny would render (skim the melted animal fat off anything she cooked) the mutton and store this fat to use either to cook or make soap with. To make homemade soap from the rendered mutton fat, Granny would mix melted glycerin into the fat then pour it into a mold with a couple of drops of essential oil and allow to set.

One hot Sunday, when we were out clearing and burning land, Dad told me to go to the car boot and get a flagon (a large glass wine bottle) of water for him. Dad used clear lighting kerosene to light the fires, stored in another flagon in the boot, and did not use old newspapers to light his fires, which were needed for another obviously important task at home in our outside toilet (Dad never used modern-day toilet paper). It was about 11.00 a.m., on a hot, windless Sunday, and all the fun in the job had long since evaporated for me after a 5.00 a.m. start. Dad, who never went to church himself, reckoned I was better off helping him than out playing with the other kids; however, the only benefit I could see was being able to skip church! I trudged slowly toward the car, dragging my feet and wasting time.

‘Come on, Dick. Get a bloody move on, or I’ll die of thirst before you get back here.’

I picked up my pace a bit near the car, and before taking the water to Dad, I upended the flagon to my lips and took a big swig, unfortunately not taking the time to smell the contents. Kerosene! I spat what was in my mouth out just before the fumes from what I had swallowed caused me to pass out. And the last thing I heard was Dad calling to me.

‘What’s keeping you, lad?’

From then on, we no longer stored kerosene with the water. And soon after that incident, Dad bought a thing called a rabbit fumigator, which belched a mixture of smoke laced with poison through a flexible pipe pushed down the burrows then covered with dirt to keep the lethal smoke from leaking out. Every time smoke drifted out of the ground from another exit to the rabbit warren, it was my job to race over and fill that hole with sand. Once the land was clean of rabbits, we fenced it with rabbit-proof netting, dug about 60 cm deep into the ground. Then Dad would sell that block and buy another to start developing all over again.

A vacant block of partially cleared sandy land joined our house block with rabbit warrens everywhere, and at the other side of that lived the Hills family, consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Hills and one little girl. We children especially became friendly with Heather; however, we excluded her from our doctors-and-nurses game.

To go to the movies cost six pence (five cents) for kids, and soft drink bottles had a three-pence deposit included in the purchase price, so two drink bottle deposits equaled a ticket to get into the flicks to see Tom Mix or Gene Autrey, our favorite and most famous cowboy stars. I scoured the local rubbish tip along the reed-infested Maria Creek for bottles every week. One time when the bottles proved elusive as my mates had already beaten me to them, I asked Dad for the money to go to the movies; however, as always, Dad believed anything that was worthwhile having had to be earned, so he gave me five rabbit traps. I might add, he paid me nothing for helping to develop his land, but then that was probably only slightly less than I was worth in his opinion.

‘Go out and set those traps like I showed you on that land we’ve been clearing, Dick. You’ll get a shilling a skin, which will more than pay your way in.’

I set the traps that same night and, on the way to school next day, let three dogs and two cats free from the saw tooth shaped trap jaws! As I fought to avoid being scratched and bitten as I let the last cat out, Mr. Hills came over and helped me, telling me he had already set a dog free and reset the same trap earlier in the morning because it howled so much. Six animals in five traps was not a bad catch, I mused, wishing they had been bunnies as I took a shortcut through the Methodist Church yard to school. However, I did trap two rabbits later in the week when, after skinning, I had my entrance to the theatre paid, along with a soft drink and a sweet. Or so I thought.

Releasing the rabbits from my traps, I then had to break their necks by taking their heels in my left hand while holding the neck behind the head and then stretch the animal’s neck hard across my knee. Next, it was necessary to skin the animal, which when shown how by Dad seemed a quick and simple operation. However, nothing seemed to go right for me. I had to run a knife cut around each leg just above the paws then run a cut through the skin along the inside of each hind leg to meet up under the belly. Next, I would grasp the hind legs firmly and pull the skin up toward the head, and it would peel off inside out. A quick cut around the neck and the skin could be tugged over the head, ready to be pegged out to dry when placed over a piece of number 8 fence wire shaped like a bow. This held the skin stretched, and to keep it that way, the two ends of the wire bow were pushed into the ground where the skin was left to dry. The carcasses then had to be gutted and given to Mum to cook. I loathed the whole process, as killing anything was then abhorrent to me, to say nothing of the way the stink of the gutted animals turned my stomach. The town dogs found my skins pegged behind our house on their hoops of wire and settled for them if they could not have the bodies. Thus ended my first efforts as a hunter—and my pocket money.

Alcohol was rationed during the war, so home brew flourished and saw many illegal brewers such as Max Engelhard, a client of Dad’s, well into making home brew. One day with me along for company, Dad called at Max’s farm while canvassing for sheep business, where he was offered a sample of Max’s latest homebrew.

‘Would you like a lemonade, Dick?’

‘Oh yes, please.’

A glass was handed across to me, which Max dropped, pretending it was me being the clumsy one who had let it slip. To everyone’s surprise save for Max, it bounced unbroken on the concrete floor.

‘Seen these new unbreakable glasses before, Tom?’

‘No, never!’

Broken dishes and pocket money were always a big problem for me, for if I broke a dish, it came out of my pocket money; and what little pocket money I made had to be worked hard for. Most of Dad’s clients reckoned my services, as his assistant, should be offered gratis. Mr. Engelhard knew that, so trying out the unbreakable glass on me was a joke he was going to tell all over town for the next month.

Anyway, Dad must have been impressed for as soon as he was back in town, he bought some of those glasses. And when a client, Eric (known everywhere as Ned of course), called at his office, Dad took him out the back for a short snort of his latest brew, proudly offering this in one of