Miles of Post and Wire [1 ed.] 9781921248597, 9781921248153

Citation preview

Florence Corrigan has spent most of her life living and working in the Pilbara in Western Australia. Born in 1932, Flo’s childhood was a nomadic one as her father moved his family around harsh station country picking up jobs where he could get them—fencing, mining, roo shooting. Flo never went to school and she was an adult before she learnt that she was descended from the Nyoongah people of the south-west of Western Australia.

Always looking for challenges, Flo was in her late

sixties when she had her first taste of formal education. She also took up painting and has been awarded major prizes at the prestigious Cossack Art Awards. She lives in Roebourne with her partner, Frank.

FINAL PRE-PAGESindd.indd 1

6/05/11 11:39 AM

FINAL PRE-PAGESindd.indd 2

6/05/11 11:40 AM

miles

of

post and

wire Florence Corrigan with Loreen Brehaut

FINAL PRE-PAGESindd.indd 3

6/05/11 11:40 AM

In memory of my brother, William Edward (Doug) Burgess. With love.

First edition published 1998, new edition published 2010 Magabala Books Aboriginal Corporation, Broome, Western Australia Website: www.magabala.com Email: [email protected] Magabala Books receives financial assistance from the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts advisory body. The State of Western Australia has made an investment in this project through the Department of Culture and the Arts in association with Lotterywest. Copyright © Florence Corrigan Designed by Jo Hunt Printed in China by 1010 International Printing Ltd National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data Corrigan, Florence, 1932 Miles of post and wire/Florence Corrigan New Ed ISBN 9781921248153 (pbk) Corrigan, Florence, 1932– Rural women–Western Australia–Biography Women, Aboriginal Australian–Western Australia–Biography Western Australia–Biography. 920.72

GOVERNMENT OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA

FINAL PRE-PAGESindd.indd 4

Department of Culture and the Arts

6/05/11 11:40 AM

Author Note When I was thirty, after I had my eldest son, I wanted a job in Brisbane in a big laundry. It was good money and I could have done it. I knew I could. I had everything fixed except I had to have my birth certificate. So I sent off for it at the Births and Deaths Registrar in Perth—Florence Jane Burgess. I got a letter back saying there was no person of such name. Is your mother alive? I had no idea who I was and I didn’t have a birth certificate. My mother was dead and I was stuck with not knowing. I just felt the ground cut from underneath me. What could I do? I’d already started to suspect that I might have Aboriginal blood that my parents hadn’t told me about, and now I didn’t have a name. It felt terrible. I couldn’t get that job that I really needed. I was an alien in my own country. I could have got run over or anything could have happened to me, and I would never have been identified. Unknown. A person without a name. By this time I already had a son and had put his name as mine, not knowing that wasn’t my name either. His father had gone. We were all alone. Florence Corrigan

FINAL PRE-PAGESindd.indd 5

6/05/11 11:40 AM

Acknowledgements This book was first published in 1998 and my special thanks go to the Karratha Community Library for providing a place for Loreen Brehaut to take down my story; in particular to Anna Vitenbergs for her encouragement, valuable advice, and the many cups of coffee. My heartfelt appreciation goes to Loreen Brehaut for the dedication and time she brought to the first edition of this book. Loreen did a wonderful job asking the right questions and jogging my memory. I will always value her friendship and professionalism. With this new edition, I must thank my dear friend from Roebourne, Margaret Mitchell, who supported me to tell more of my story and worked very hard recording my life in recent times. Thanks also to Magabala Books for believing in my story and having the faith to rework it for this new edition.

FINAL PRE-PAGESindd.indd 6

6/05/11 11:40 AM

contents nothing special

1

Pilbara country

22

growing up

45

independence

62

across the Nullarbor

80

motherhood

97

Jimmy

111

bush to town

133

the puzzle

155

’til the day I drop

181

epilogue

197

family tree

223

glossary

224

FINAL PRE-PAGESindd.indd 7

6/05/11 11:40 AM

BLANK

FINAL PRE-PAGESindd.indd 8

6/05/11 11:40 AM

Dear Pilbara

With your mountain ranges and gorges of red, blue to grey With spinifex hills, ghost gums, bloodwoods and wattles Mulgas, gidgees and rivers like green ribbons, winding down to the sea With your flood gums, paperbarks, and sweet Minnie Ritchies With your beautiful pools and springs where dingoes, kangaroos, donkeys, cattle, emus, wild turkey and birds come to drink and play at night When the rain comes the rivers flood out to sea like mud. Flo Corrigan, Frank’s Camp, ‘Coolwater’ 2007

FINAL PRE-PAGESindd.indd 9

6/05/11 11:40 AM

nothing special

nothing special

In 1932, my parents went down to Perth to buy a car and had me. They were only down there for a short time and I was born at King Edward Hospital in Subiaco. My mother told me that when they were driving out of Perth, they collided with a horse and cart on the old causeway. I think they went back down around Esperance because the family had tracts of land around Oldfield River—wheat and dairy farming. They went fencing on Milly Milly Station. My father and uncle, Harry Reynolds, my mother’s brother, had an argument or something, there was a shoot-up. I don’t know what it was about, I was too young to remember. Wires got crossed somewhere there. It was a blue, a real blue too! They left there and I think Mum and Dad came over towards Meekatharra or Leonora. 1

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 1

6/05/11 11:33 AM

I know it was not long after that they went prospecting for gold out of Leonora. That was before the war started; now that’s going back quite a long way. There was all Mum’s people and us, all out in the bush out of Leonora, at a place called Lion’s Well. We lived in just one tent for the family and all our wind breaks were made out of mulga. We only had a bush bed made out of grass or whatever, some blankets and a piece of anything for a pillow. And that was how we lived. When Mum and Dad used to go into Leonora, we would camp out on the fringe of the town, in the bush. They never took me much into town, very rarely. I thought it was great when you got into town. I remember I wanted to go in to the pictures one night. In those times it was silent movies and my mother and my aunties were going. I wanted to go but they wouldn’t let me so I cried my eyes out. Leonora was quite busy because there was a lot of mining and prospecting going on in that area at the time. It was just before the war started to get bad, you know. The old shop windows with all the dummies in it dressed up, and all the goodies. Whenever I went into town I thought it was special, but I didn’t get into town very often. We used to walk away down the bush; we liked to look around the rubbish dump! We’d enjoy picking up little bits and pieces: other kids’ toys, pieces of dolls or things that we’d like to play with. We used to take them and that’s what we used to have to play with; we thought it was alright. In those days, the Afghans used to come around with camel teams, delivering silks. I remember my mother buying pretty 2

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 2

6/05/11 11:33 AM

nothing special

materials; I’ve got a photograph of her and my aunty together in those long fancy dresses. It was a pretty apricot material with little prints all over it and the other one was a little bit different, more pinky but the same print. My mother had beautiful, dark hair with waves in it and when she used to get done up she looked really pretty. I can remember my grandfather and grandmother, and Uncle Phil, Mum’s brother, and his wife, Aunty Edna; they might have been courting at that time. I think Aunty Edna was descended from Afghan and Aboriginal people. Aunty Mary, Mum’s sister, must have been there at some stage, too. I remember she used to get very drunk and one day she cut my hair off. I was very small. I don’t know what my mother said about it but I wasn’t very happy because I remember crying. I didn’t want it cut. She reckoned it was better for me, I looked better. Things like that stay in your mind more than anything when you’re a little kid because it’s something that hurts you. In those days Aunty Mary used to always get drunk and she was only a young woman, too. She used to be sick all the time. One day in the bush she couldn’t stop from being sick, and there was a great big pool of beer on the ground, that was all there was, like a waterhole! I remember her well enough in that respect. My grandad was a big man and he had a white beard. He had a truck, a real old-fashioned one. It had a wooden cab and no doors. Old wooden spokes in it. It was a flat-top. I remember climbing on it, up the step and onto the seat in the cab. My grandmother was there, too. They were always together. 3

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 3

6/05/11 11:33 AM

She was a fairly dark lady. I got on well with her but she had a little dog called Brown Dog that used to bark at me when I went near her, so I was a bit scared. She used to go prospecting a lot with grandfather. They had a goldmine, too. My grandmother’s mother would be a full-blood Aboriginal to make her what she is, and my mother was quarter-caste. They called it quarter-caste in those days. She was a lot browner than I am and my grandmother was a lot darker still. But kids don’t think about why some people are darker than others, it’s just your family. I didn’t know till I was grown up that we were Aboriginal. Dad was fairly tall and very lean, fair-headed, fair-skinned, blue eyes. I take after my mother with brown eyes. I can remember them using Aboriginal bush medicine when I was with my mother’s people. I was climbing a flaming tree, being a kid, being smart. They always reckoned I was a little tomboy. I got a stake in my knee between the joint, right in the joint on the inside. They took gum leaves off the saplings, warmed the leaves in the fire and bandaged it round my knee as hot as I could stand They got the stake out that way, drew it out with the leaves. I was crook for a while, but I never went to hospital. I think it was my grandmother’s idea. Another thing they used was bloodwood gum, for many different things.You boil it. When it is in the water it goes white. It was used for the runs and tummy-aches. I think they used it for flu as well. My grandparents were living in the bush, too. We all were at the time, but we were separate to the rest of them. Mum used to hunt goats for meat and she kept an old goat called Peggy for 4

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 4

6/05/11 11:33 AM

nothing special

milk. Peggy used to run away with the wild goats and Mum would have to chase her and bring her back. I used to hate goat’s milk, I still do, though it’s good for you. Anyway, we were all together at Lion’s Well, not far from each other. Enough distance so we didn’t get in each others’ hair. I don’t know where Mum and Dad carted the water from, but they carted it from somewhere. At Lion’s Well we used to go playing around in the bush. By this time my brother Dougie had been born in Meekatharra. One day I was walking through the bush quite a distance from the camp and I came back with a little bit of blue quartz. The ground was flat rocks with just a little piece of quartz sticking up out of it. I brought it back and it was loaded with gold. It was a beautiful specimen, blue quartz with all this yellow gold sticking to it. I said to Mum and Dad, ‘There you are!’ and Dad made me go back and find the place. Luckily I remembered. It took me a little while but I went back and I showed him where it was, and he was still mining that when the war broke out. They used to peg their leases. Dad did, and even my grandparents used hand tools, with the hammer and drill, to put holes in for firing. They would sit for hours and tap the hole down. They had to keep their drills and forge and sharpen them every time they got blunt. They had a little piece of rod with a flat end on to scoop with. They used to pour water into the hole and scoop the stuff out, to keep it clean. That was what they used for making holes for firing in those days. It was slow, with a pick and shovel and just a bucket and windlass; that’s all they had. The last mine that they had, Dad was down about thirty or forty feet, roughly. 5

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 5

6/05/11 11:33 AM

He was following the reef that I found; it was a very rich mine, but the trouble was it was loose country, it was on an underlay. Instead of it going down, it was going on a steep slope and it was getting dangerous. It could come down on him while he was working. Very loose country, but gee, it was rich. My sister Edna was born out in the sticks, near Leonora. Aunty Edna delivered her. I remember that, I must have been about four or five years old. Mum had Edna in the bush there, out of Leonora. I don’t remember it too well; they kept it fairly quiet. I remember Mum had to go away for a little while and I had to stay home. I realised afterwards, she had another little baby, that’s why she was away. Mum may have been caught short there, she must have been because she couldn’t have got into Leonora quick enough to have the baby. The roads were rough, you know. My mother went over to Aunty Edna because she must have been in labour. I was a little kid then but that’s what might have happened. She’d gone over to Aunty Edna’s to have the baby and Aunty Edna delivered it. My father was there but he was working, mining or something. He was there alright but I don’t know what part he played when Mum had the baby. When the war broke out, I think the gold prices went off the market. There was no value in it, so my parents left it and never went back. That mine just went back to the land. It was as rich as hell. Today, it would probably be mined. I would not know where to look for it now, the country changes. I remember Dad trying to join the army. He went down to Meekatharra to join up and they rejected him because he wasn’t 6

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 6

6/05/11 11:33 AM

nothing special

fit, I think. So they sent him home. Dad went shooting roos after that. He found out there was money in shooting roos to make felt hats for the army. I don’t know how he got onto that, but they were supplying him the ammunition. They were getting all the old stuff that wasn’t much good, to shoot roos. Dad had a .303 rifle. I don’t know how he got it, but both he and Mum had a .303 each. They moved north to Bulloo Downs Station, near Newman. I remember Dad going in there and asking for a job roo shooting. The owner there, Watty Hall, met Dad at the front gate. He had these blue-heeler dogs. Real savage crossbreed they were. Anyway Dad got a job shooting roos on the windmills. We’d put in at least a few weeks at each windmill. During the dry season, it was good because the kangaroos kept coming. But when the wet season came the kangaroos used to disperse, so Mum and Dad would have to walk and shoot. When they got the horses they rode. It was easier for them. Mum used to go one way shooting and Dad the other. They had a couple of sack bags slung over the saddle, hanging down on both sides. They would shove kangaroo greenskins into the bag on each side to even up the weight on the horse. They might get about twenty or thirty roos a day, sometimes only two or three. It all depended on how the roos were. They’d get quite a few in a week when they were having a good run. Mum was a fairly strong person. She never was shooting with a light rifle either, a .303, that’s a fairly heavy rifle, and she used to do all the roo skinning and things on her own. Dad needed her efforts because they both worked pretty hard. 7

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 7

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Dad and Mum used to peg out the kangaroo skins and when they had trouble with weevils in them they would buy this stuff and mix it up, it was like a poison. They used to paint it on the face of the skins—on the inside, not on the fur. They’d peg them and when they were dry they would pull them up and stack them flat. Sometimes I’ve seen a hundred skins pegged because I had to pull the flaming things out. I got sick from the weevil poison. I thought I was going to die. I reckoned I was in the clouds one night, floating around up there, looking down at myself! Being a kid, I probably put a finger in my mouth and got it off my hands from touching the skins. When they packed them to send away, they would pack them head to head, wrap them with wire and cut out a little piece of tin, like a tag, with the address on and ‘Burgess’ on the back. When they got enough together, the mail truck would pick them up to take to the railroad at Meekatharra. We never carted them around in big lots; Dad sent away a hundred skins at a time. Soon as they got about a hundred skins up, they got rid of them. I don’t know how he got paid, I think it might have been sent in the mail. The mail truck went to all those stations out that way. He would get it with our stores. I knew Bill Campbell and Billy Collins; they were doing the run for a long time. They say that was the longest mail run in the world. Now and then we’d meet somebody travelling with the mail truck. That would be about the only people we saw. Later on, I travelled on the mail truck myself. One time we caught the mail truck going south to send stuff away and Billy Dunn was on the 8

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 8

6/05/11 11:33 AM

nothing special

truck going down. He was going to Meekatharra or somewhere to get married. Then I heard that he was dogging. We used to run into each other when Mum and Dad were dogging.

About that time, in 1941, my sister Barbara was born. She was born in Wiluna. I can’t remember anything specific to tell me why we were there. Mum could have been just passing through and had Barbara. Mum and Dad only had a car and petrol rations started to get a bit heavy, so Dad decided to sell the car. I think he had an old-type model Buick. Canvas-hood, four seater with wooden spokes. He had an old wooden trailer as well, which he turned into a cart. We were at Mundiwindi with one horse and couldn’t get fuel for the car, so Dad sold it to the postmaster, and kept the trailer. It was a little wooden one, six by four with rubber tires. Mum and Dad went out and cut some nice straight trees. After he took the centre pole (tow-bar) off the trailer, he put the bush poles on for shafts and made leather traces. They didn’t have a collar for the horse to pull the cart along, so used a thick strap until they could get a proper one. The strap wasn’t a very good idea, but it worked for a while. Dad had a camel’s collar once. This had to be put on upside down. It worked okay. The cart carried pots and pans, cooking gear, the camp oven and swags and things we needed for the bush. It was the only 9

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 9

6/05/11 11:33 AM

thing we had to shift with. We used it for a long time, right up until the war ended. We had picks and shovels with us, and a dolly pot. Mum used to carry this on a pack-horse, because they were always looking for gold in the bush. I still have one of them. We didn’t find much gold, but did find some nice green crystals; they would shine like jewels. I loved to see them as I rode over them. If there were enough horses the family rode as they moved camp. If not, the ones without walked or double-banked on a horse. Mum and Dad would go on ahead to find a way that the cart could go through the bush, then come back and get us and the cart, take it to where the next clearing was needed, clear that away, then we would move on. There were some places where they needed to go up through the ranges like. If we had to go up a hill and round the side, they had to dig part of the hill away and move rocks to make it flat and wide enough. This didn’t happen very often. Mostly the way was good.

Mum and Dad had two horses—Tallering and Boomerang. Old Tallering was just a drover’s horse. The drover named him after Tallering Station in the Murchison, where he originally came from. Old Boomerang was a wild brumby that they’d caught and tamed. They had them two for a while and they continued on roo shooting. As they went along they kept accumulating horses. We used to catch brumbies and break them in. There was a young stallion 10

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 10

6/05/11 11:33 AM

nothing special

who used to come around the herd at night. He used to bother them a lot so my mother tried to shoot him. They ended up taking him into a yard where they broke him in and dressed him. They had him for years Mum found he had a bullet lodged on the rib bone. It stopped there and didn’t go into him. It was still in him when he died, old Brown. A lot of wild stallions would come and torment the herd. Mum and Dad used to shoot them because it was the only way you could get rid of them. There were plenty of stallions in the bush but some of them were too old to break in, you know. There was one that Mum and Dad got in the yard and he was a beautiful animal. They took him into the yard and almost broke him, but he was that stubborn his head swelled up so they let him go. Then they saw him a little while later and he was as good as gold. When they’re stubborn you can lose them, breaking them in. Later on I had to ride them and cope with them. They had to be broken in, mouthed and able to take the saddle and things. I did alright. Dad used to shoe all the horses. Most times he got some horseshoes sent up from Meekatharra, and other times we picked up old horse-shoes that station or drovers’ horses lost. They’d fall off and we kept them. Dad used to shoe them and Mum would help. There wasn’t a forge or anything like that so the shoes had to be shaped in red hot coals in the fire. Most of the shoes came made-up; all Dad had to do was heat them enough to be able to bend them with a hammer. See, some horses got different-shaped feet; some might be small, some big and some long. Dad would 11

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 11

6/05/11 11:33 AM

shape them on a little bit of an old anvil. When he put the shoe on and finished the hoof off with the rasp and everything, he would mark it with the hot shoe. It’s a thing they still do today. The shoe leaves a mark, so when they nail it on it stays in that groove. When fitting and nailing a shoe on a front hoof, the foreleg was usually strapped up. They had to be particularly careful when doing the back hooves as the horses had a bad habit of kicking. The horse would pull its hoof back and let fly. If one was really bad they would throw him to the ground to do the fitting and nailing. Mum did the holding while Dad did the shoeing. Dad made some shoes himself too, if he had enough iron of the right thickness. He would bend it around and make a groove. Then with a shoeing punch he would punch the holes where the nails go in. This was done while the shoes were hot. Mainly old shoes which had been lost in the bush were used. The station horses lost them when mustering or doing chores like checking windmills in that hard country. Whenever we saw a horseshoe we would pick it up and, as long as they had enough wear in them, they’d be okay. Dad bought a lot of shoes from the stations. They carried most sizes in shoes. The shoes would be taken off when the hoof had grown too long, the hoof trimmed with a rasp and the shoe reset. The shoes were used until they’d worn really thin, then they’d have be replaced by thicker ones because it doesn’t do the horse any good to keep them on. They would go lame, and be just limping along. The hoof would wear back where the shoe was too thin. (Hooves grow like your fingernails do). 12

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 12

6/05/11 11:33 AM

nothing special

We had one horse we called Bob Dyer. He had bumble front feet. The hooves had grown out too far at the sides and turned out. I had never seen one like this before, and don’t know how they came to be like this. Maybe he was born like it, or perhaps he’d been burnt from a bush fire. They threw him and trimmed the hooves right back really close to the quick so they could be straightened up. Dad had to make shoes the same shape as for a donkey. These are longer and narrow. He was a good old horse and worked well as a pack-horse. Learning to ride, Dad would say to us, ‘You either get on and ride, or else walk, whatever you want to do.’ So we learnt to ride the best way we could. We had no shoes; we were walking barefoot and the bush was prickly. A lot of burrs and stones and the ground is hot. It wasn’t easy, so it’s better to ride!

We were still living in the bush under canvas or whatever with swags. Under a tarp, mainly, it was very basic and we didn’t have much. They’d be moving from one place to the other, from one windmill to the next, shooting at night at the troughs when the roos came for water. The camp was quite a few yards from the windmill, and we’d be home there on our own. In the daytime they’d be trying to get some sleep so we’d have to be quiet. We’d go away and play, get away from the place. When we was out at Talawana, right out on the edge of the desert there, Mum and Dad were night shooting. They took us 13

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 13

6/05/11 11:33 AM

with them because they were afraid the Aboriginal people of the desert would come and pinch us. It was just outside the rabbitproof fence, on the edge of the desert. Well, the Aboriginals used to come right in there, off the desert, and Mum and Dad would make sure and take us up to the windmill with them every night. They’d heard that the desert Aboriginals came in and pinched other people’s kids. We saw a desert Aboriginal family one day on the way down to Talawana. We crossed over Christmas Creek. There was a family down in the creek and they saw us. All I could see was two little kids, the mother and the father, just gone, like dingoes—a little lap-lap, front and back, disappearing over the side. That’s the first time I’d seen true desert people. Mum and Dad used to shoot on Bulloo Downs, Ethel Creek and around the Jigalong area for a long while. We got to know the windmill man on Balfour Downs. His name was Bill Ellery. He used to come and see us. We kids were wild, we used to hide. We were like dingoes! I remember we used to run away and hide behind something and peep around the corner to see! You hear a lot about Balfour Downs because all the manganese mines are out there now. There was none when I was out there. When we were there, we would pick up bars of manganese about three inches long, and little trees used to sit on these bars. We used to play with them. Today, they’d be ornaments. Beautiful they were, like little natural trees, manganese, growing on these little bars, out around there. Sometimes we’d go and visit old Brumby Leake at Prairie Downs. His woman was a big tall Aboriginal woman and they 14

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 14

6/05/11 11:33 AM

nothing special

called her Shovelhandle. She was straight up and down. When you went to walk into the house, you’d have to duck your head because the verandah was that low—little old bungalow sort of thing with mud walls—she was rough! I don’t know how many rooms were in it. Brumby was a fair age then, and he didn’t like us coming there shooting roos around his place. He’d chase us away!

We didn’t have much to play with and there were no things like toys. The only thing we may have found would be an old box or something—make a cart out of it, pull it along, things like that. An old piece of tin that might have looked like the shape of a cart. We’d hook ropes on it and drag it to make tracks. That’s about the only things we had to play with and when we moved on it stopped there. We used to ride an old dry tree, for a horse, and we spent a lot of time on this rocking. My doll was a beer bottle and I used to wrap it up, cut little bits of cloth to make nappies and little blankets and I thought this blimmin’ beer bottle was great! My brothers, they’d pick up a little piece of rock that looked like the shape of a car. That was the only toys we had, just natural things. We played our own games like climbing trees and when Mum and Dad were away and we were near a river, we’d go down and get in. We shouldn’t have been down there. I used to get into hot water because of taking the little ones down. We played games with Aboriginal kids, but not very often. 15

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 15

6/05/11 11:33 AM

When we did, we enjoyed it but Dad used to be very cruel on us about that. I started to talk Aboriginal languages and he would belt me for it. Dad didn’t like it. Kids teach kids, you know, and we were learning it quick. I learnt quite a few Aboriginal words when I was younger, but I’ve forgotten now. We couldn’t understand why we weren’t allowed to play with the other little kids. I remember one day we were travelling on the horses and a horse chucked Edna. She landed on her kidney. She lost a little bit of blood but they never sent her to hospital and she got over it. That’s another incident I got into trouble over because I was the eldest. ‘You should know better.’ I used to hate my father, yet I had a lot of respect for him. Dad was hard, well he expected a lot from me anyway. I was always the one he’d get stuck into. He’d tell me all the time to do something and if I hadn’t done it, I’d been playing and he’d come home, I’d get a belting for it. The main thing he used to do was grab me by the left arm, turn me around and belt me with his right hand. When he held on to you there was no hope of getting away. Sit down, you’d get belted. Stand up, you’d get belted. You had to take it whether you liked it or not. It was so hard and you couldn’t do nothing, he wouldn’t let go. Me and my brother Dougie were the eldest and he and I used to cop it all the time. Dad didn’t care what he picked up and belted us with. He used to belt me with the gun-cleaner, like what you cleaned the old .303 out with, that was plastic with a rod inside—that was one of the main ones. He’d belt me across the bum and I tell you what, I had bruises on my bum and couldn’t 16

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 16

6/05/11 11:33 AM

nothing special

sit down for days. I was black and blue. And another thing, if he couldn’t find anything like that, he used to pick up a lump of wire or break a supple switch off a mulga tree. He’d run his hand along and split the leaves off it and it was like a cat-of-nine-tails. I had marks! They’re going away now, but when I was younger you could see the whip marks still on me from him. He was easier on the younger ones but, according to what my brother Roy told me, he was harder on them after I left home because he had no-one else to push around. Sometimes he was good but not very often. Most times he was hard. He was not very affectionate in that way. He had us and that was it. That was all he was worried about. He fed us but put it this way: I had a bastard of a life with him. Mum was always the one that stuck up if Dad belted us. Then she’d get into trouble from him for sticking up for us. I’ve seen some arguments between Mum and Dad where I thought there was going to be murder. Honest to God, they used to have some terrible fights. It’d make you cry to see them doing it. But what can you do? You’re only a kid and you have to let them sort themselves out. With Mum and Dad, if you got scolded or belted, there was never anyone you could go to and confide in.You had to sort your own problems out. And you couldn’t run away because there was nowhere to run to. Normally you would run away to your aunty’s place if you were ill-treated but there was no such thing as this, we were so far from anywhere. If you ran away you’d perish, so you had only one choice—that was stay with him, and he knew this. In later years I often said to him, ‘I’ll call Welfare. I’ll get you 17

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 17

6/05/11 11:33 AM

into trouble.’ But he used to get into us for this. I cried when I saw my brother getting belted for no reason. I said one day to him, ‘Listen, something’ll happen to one of us, and you’ll be sorry.’ Dad was a good horseman, but he gave the horses hell too. The poor bloody horses! He would give them a belting and goodness knows. He was very strong and he would kick them around. Blimmin’ old horses, I felt sorry for them. There was nothing special. Nothing special at all. Lollies or anything like luxuries—biscuits, we never seen nothing like that, ever. When we were around Mundiwindi, an old bloke would come on horseback and see us. He used to bring orange peel dipped in sugar. We thought it was wonderful. They called him Old Pedong but his right name was Teddy Holmes. Every time Teddy Holmes came along, us kids used to rush up to meet him because he brought this orange peel dipped in flaming sugar. It was great! He knew Mum and Dad and if he knew they were in the area he’d pop in and see them. There’s only one Christmas in my life that I clearly remember. It was the last before Mum and Dad left the area round Leonora, just when the war broke out. I remember going over to the grandparents, my mother’s father and mother. It was in the bush and I remember old grandfather sitting me up on his knee and talking to me. That was the last time I saw him. He sat me on his knee and he was telling me stories. It was a real good Christmas with everything, you know. But when we was back with Mum and Dad we got nothing, we saw nothing. Birthdays were the same. It was just another day, that was all. 18

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 18

6/05/11 11:33 AM

nothing special

I didn’t have no schooling but they started learning me when we were out of Leonora. Dad was teaching me. He was very hard on me with the schooling. He made us sit at the firelight and do the schoolwork and I had to do it before I went to bed. The only school books I had were two old English Oxford Readers. A green one and a red one. I didn’t get far in them. There was one story about the crows and one about an old farmer or something, and there was poems in it as well. Dad used to get me on to one story and I hated it. He used to keep on making me try and learn this over and over and be able to read it without looking at it. I really hated it. He didn’t have much education either. I found out later, he had had a very poor education. Dad taught me to write my name, Florence Jane Burgess, and the rest of the reading was off jam-tin labels and that. Most of the time I had to do all this on my own with no-one to help me or encourage me because I had the rest of the family to look after. But if I hadn’t done something each day, a bit of schooling out of those books, writing, my ABCs, I would cop it. I had no assistance and I had to try and do it on my own. Dad and Mum would be gone out every day working and Dad would say, ‘You have to learn this.’ How the heck can you learn something when nobody’s there to tell you? Mum and Dad didn’t talk about religion, not in that country! You make your own religion! Only thing Dad used to make us do every night—specially me—is to make me say my prayer, the Lord’s Prayer. Every night he drummed it into my head. I still know a bit of it, but I’ve got a little book now that I leave on the 19

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 19

6/05/11 11:33 AM

table next to my bed. Now and then I pick it up and have a read of it. Sometimes it does me some good. I think since Jim passed away it has made me do it more, otherwise I never bothered. I remember when Dad got the wireless. Back in the forties he got an old wooden set, about a foot high and two foot wide. At night he’d take the aerial and chuck it out over a tree up off the ground, so they could pick up the skip, to get the news and that. He and mother would listen to the news and radio shows and the main ones they listened to were Dad and Dave and Fred and Maggie. It was something for us. The news didn’t worry us kids, we were more into listening to the shows. Yeah, everybody went quiet!

Mum and Dad were worried about the war. When they were bombing Darwin and up the coast, we were up the back of where the Newman township is now. They were talking about getting away to the hills and hiding, if anything went wrong. There’s such a lot of those big mountains in there, among the Ophthalmia Ranges, you could hide away for weeks and no-one would know you were there. I heard them saying this but nothing happened. By this time Dad had another car, he bought a Studebaker. Billy Mills used to do the rabbit-proof fence between Meekatharra and Balfour Downs; he travelled up and down along there. He had this old Studebaker and he’d had a gas-producer built on the back. So Dad bought this old thing and he used to load it up and go in front to the next stop. We kids always had to bring the horses 20

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 20

6/05/11 11:33 AM

nothing special

along and follow up. One day we was going along the road on Balfour Downs and Dad stopped. We wondered what was wrong. The old Studebaker had a chain in the front to drive the fan; it was like a bike chain. It came off in bits and pieces: we picked it up and took it along and gave it to him. Somehow Dad got it going, I think he might have got some help from the people at Balfour Downs. He had that old bus for a long while, till after the war.

21

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 21

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Pilbara country

With horses we couldn’t carry furniture, you only carried the mere necessities. You were lucky to be able to carry a dish and maybe a bucket. Mum and Dad had two old jarrah fruit cases and they got greenhide and stitched it around them and made two pack bags. The bucket was a square kerosene tin that was cut open. It would be carried in a pack; things would be put into it. We also had a cart but lots of times we couldn’t take the cart into where we went, it was packhorses only. It was very rough country. So the car or the cart remained at the base camp and we’d go with packhorses to a lot of places. In those days you’d be very lucky if you ever saw anyone. It was an out-of-the-way place where we had our base camp and it was only us. Only the station owner at Ethel Creek Station would 22

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 22

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Pilbara country

have some idea where we were but he’d never come near us and the Aboriginal people never came there. It was only those that were on the station that knew us, so it was quite safe to leave stuff there. Most of all our main gear was left at the base camp. It was just basic things that you’d take with you. You know, your swags, packs full of food and one packhorse for dog traps alone. That was it. We had an old donkey given to us. He used to be the packhorse for the traps, for a while. Then one day he just didn’t want to go any further, so we pulled everything off, put it on a horse and let him go.You know what donkeys are like, the only way you can get them going is put a hot potato under their tail, and then I don’t think he’d have moved anyway! We all had a horse to ride. There was seven of us, with Mum and Dad. When the youngest ones were little there was only about six of us, and then sometimes we used to double-up on one horse. Me and my younger brother, Roy, led three packhorses one behind the other through the bush, so Mum and Dad would have the freeway. If they wanted to go somewhere to have a look at the dingo tracks or something, they didn’t have to be bothered with packhorses, they had their horse to ride. The cattle trails would head for water, so that’s how Mum and Dad knew where the main waterholes were. All along that range east of Wittenoom there’s permanent waterways, like springs and soaks all year round. All natural waterways. Any animal in the bush was never going to perish. There was one particular spring right at the back of Mt Newman, or Mt Whaleback as they called 23

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 23

6/05/11 11:33 AM

it, and it was a nice spring. Daytime it’d be nothing, and when night-time came the water came up and it started running. Mum and Dad thought it must have worked with the tides somehow, it used to rise and fall. There was a lot of dead dog skulls and that around that particular waterhole, and they called it Skull Springs. I had to help Mum at home because I was the eldest. When there was washday, and cooking to be done, it was always me. We used to go down by the water with a bucket. We’d boil the water in it, boil the clothes and scrub. We carried a dish big enough to do the washing in and then we’d spread it out on sticks, leaves of trees or on the limbs to dry. There were no clotheslines, mainly green limbs where there’s no black to mark the clothes. For cooking, we had a camp oven. If we hadn’t a camp oven at hand we’d either put most of the stuff on the coals or in the ashes. We made our own bread in the bush. I’d cop a hiding for this because I used to dodge it; it was a lot of work. Mum used to get packets of hops. We’d boil a potato up and chuck the hops in and some hop leaves. Then we would take the hops and potato out and strain the leaves off the water. Mash the potato up with a little bit of flour, sugar and salt. We’d roll it with a little bit of flour and make it into long strings and drop it in the bottle, then pour the hops water in, give it a good shake, put a cork in it, stand it and let it ripen. As soon as the cork blew off, it was ready to make the bread—we tied the corks on with string as they would really blow and corks were hard to get. When it got a good head, we knew it’d be good bread. Then we mixed that with flour into moist dough and set it to rise. It took 24

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 24

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Pilbara country

a long while this way. It took hours. Then we’d knock it back, to get all the air bubbles out and put it in the camp-oven. When it had risen to double its size, the oven went into the hot ashes and got covered over. If there weren’t enough ashes we’d need to build it up round the edge and put some fire on top of the lid. If I made enough yeast bread in the first place, it’d last a few days. But sometimes when there was seven of us, it didn’t last that long because we’d all hop in as fresh bread is yummy. We’d make up a nice fry with the meat and have the fat for dripping and fresh bread, there was nothing like it. If you ran out of yeast bread, it’d be dampers. My father hated baking powder dampers but we’d enjoy them. The best way to cook damper in the bush, if you’ve got a good, clean, sandy creek, you make a good fire till you’ve got plenty of nice, clean, white ashes. And you just mix your damper and make a hole in the ashes for the damper to go in, and when you flatten the damper enough to go in, you put a little bit of flour on the bottom of the ashes where it sits, and just cover it over with ashes and hot sand and let it cook. When you think it’s near enough to being cooked, take it out, dust it off and then get a knife and chip all the burnt bits off. I used to put a little bit of plastic round it and it would come up beautiful. It just softens the crust. When you eat it straight away, instead of cutting lumps off, you break it off, that’s the best way to eat damper.

25

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 25

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Mum and Dad used to make out a grocery order and send it to McAleer, in Meekatharra. They would send down for flour, baking powder, tea, sugar, milk, butter, side of bacon, Dad’s tobacco, a packet of hops to make our own yeast, soap and essentials like medicines and things that my mother wanted. We’d get split peas and lima beans, and after the war we got dried apples, pears, apricots and sago. Then we’d have custard, cornflour, Sunshine powdered milk and salt; we always had to have salt. Holbrook and tomato sauce was the favourite. It would come up on the mail truck. This would be once a month or sometimes it would be two months. It depended on how far away from the highway we were. We only had horses to move around. It was worked out to a fine art. We’d meet the mail on the side of the road, with all our groceries and stuff. We came in out of the bush to the main highway between Meekatharra and Marble Bar. Each time we saw the mailman Dad used to tell him where we’d meet him the next time. Dad knew the road pretty well, so we’d meet him on the certain day. That was our big day out. The mailman coming! We thought it was great. We got down the day before the mail would arrive and if he hadn’t arrived we’d have to wait for him at that particular point because either he was broken down or bogged. We’d know by the roads if it had been a big rain. It didn’t really worry Mum and Dad because they’d do other things while waiting. The dust filtered through all the groceries on the back of the truck, so what chance did you have of it coming clean? You had no chance! And the flour and sugar used to be a reddish colour. Mud in it. We had 26

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 26

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Pilbara country

an old sieve and we had to sieve the weevils out of the flour. We had a pound of butter in a packet. But most of the time the grocer would take it out and put it in a big tin or billy for us and he’d stitch a bag around it, underneath and over the lid. The storeman stitched the bag and the truckie’s job was to wet the bag to keep the butter cool. And if the mail truck broke down along the way or got bogged, the butter would go off. But you still had to use it because that was the only thing you had. There was nothing else. Vegies came on the mail truck, too. Mum and Dad would order spuds, onions and dried stuff like beans and peas. Beans mainly. There was no luxury or fruit or anything. During the war there was rations on and they hardly got any tea. The tea would be for Mum and Dad. Us younger ones weren’t allowed to have it. The powdered milk was for the younger children.

We were living on meat and stuff, and broke out in barcoo rot. We had boils. I had one on my face and one on my finger. I’ve still got the marks. We used to be pretty crook. We’d get the runs and vomit. It was because of the shortage of vitamins in our diet—no vegies apart from potatoes and onions. When ration tickets were finished after the war it was better and we came back to normal living. Then we’d get plum jam and a big tin of honey. The only time we saw green vegetables was when the stations gave us some. Sometimes, after the rains Mum would 27

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 27

6/05/11 11:33 AM

get a young mulla mulla bush (Ptilotus exaltatus) and use the leaves off it like spinach. It’s the bush with a purple flower on the top. When they’re only young and in good soil they have big leaves. My mother used to collect fresh new leaves and she would put a bit of cabbage with them and add butter and pepper and salt. There was a lot of iron in it, it was good but very bitter. They used to make us eat that. We used to pick a whole lot of wild tomatoes (Solanum diversoflorum) in the bush; nice big ones about the size of a golf ball, pick them, get all the seeds out of them, and wash the insides out because they were very bitter if you didn’t. Then we would cook the flesh. We loved eating those. Some other fruits that we liked were: wild orange (Capparis umbonata), wild passion-fruit (Capparsis lasiantha), turkey bush (Capparis spinosa), and blueberry bush (Psydrax latifolia). Wild oranges have reddish seeds and a nice sweet taste like bread-fruit. We’d eat both the flesh and the seeds. The skin around the outside is smooth and round like an orange. There is a yellowish tinge to them when they’re ready to eat. Up towards Tom Price there are a lot of them. They grow on a tree up to about three metres high. The leaves are long and narrow and the bark on the trunk and limbs is dark and black when it is older. Wild passion fruit have these pretty, delicate vines with smallish leaves and can be found near waterways growing up over shrubs. The fruit is small; about the size of a normal marble. When it’s ready for eating the outer shell is bright yellow and dried out. The fruit is sweet and very much like passion fruit. 28

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 28

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Pilbara country

There may be only six or eight seeds in a pod, but they are very juicy and yummy. The turkey bush is less than a metre high. They grow singly in spots a long way apart; maybe half a kilometre. They have lots of round leaves about the size of a ten cent piece, and pretty, creamywhite flowers a bit like an orchid with a strong scent. The fruit is like a short stumpy banana and turns a yellow‑orange color when ripe. The seeds have a peppery taste. We usually threw them away, and sucked out the flesh. There were often bush turkeys (bustards) near them. They loved to eat them, as did emus. Ants were drawn like bees to honey. There were always lots and lots of ants around. Blueberries grew from bushes about three metres high, with branches growing straight out from the trunk like the Malay almond. The leaves are round and flat about the size of a fifty-cent piece, sandpaper rough and yellowish. We found them growing on the coast. The berries are about the size of a thumbnail and grow like bunches of grapes; a black colour and very sweet. There was another little thing we ate when we were kids. It had a little purple flower (Calandrinia species). It’s protected now. It’s got a little root on it like a carrot but it’s white. It’s got a lot of iron in it as well and if you eat a lot of it, the iron will burn your mouth. We’d get them, cook them and eat them. Another thing we used to do was collect the ngarlgu (onion) grass (Cyperus bulbosus) along the banks of the river. It has little bulbs at the bottom of it. Aboriginal kids taught us to dig out all this ngarlgu grass and stick them on a piece of wire or put them straight on the coals 29

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 29

6/05/11 11:33 AM

to cook. Then we’d rub the husks off and eat them, little tiny wee things they were. There was another fruit we used to get, it was a blue or black berry. We ate those as well. I don’t really know the right name. We just called them blackberries. When the quandongs (Santalum acumatum) were ripe in the bush, that was our fruit. We found them in the Pilbara area, around Tom Price and Newman. They come from a shrub with yellowish or pale-green narrow pointed leaves. The trunk and branches are usually blackened. This makes them stand out. The fruit is reddish when ripe. It has a large seed or pip and the flesh is only thin, but they are great to eat raw or cooked. Mum would boil them, sift off the seeds then put sugar in. She’d make up jam and tarts or we’d wash them and eat them raw. Mum would dig wild yams (Ipomoea species) or else us kids used to dig for them. It’s hard digging, if the ground is hard; cement country. They grow in some terrible hard country. It’s good when it’s sandy country, but when you get to real hard ground you can sit there for hours digging to get them! They’re best when you get them nice and young. A good time to get them is after a big rain when they start to shoot. They’re like potatoes, white at first, but they get old and brown and woody when they’re older. The creepers from them grow up the trees. You can’t mistake them. They have beautiful little bells on them. You see creepers growing up around the dry sticks, and if they have purple flowers on them they are the wild yam. And we used to eat witchetty grubs. I’ve had a feed of those many a day. We used to go out with an old Aboriginal lady digging 30

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 30

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Pilbara country

witchetty grubs. She would have a strong pointed stick or a little crowbar for digging. We would always get a feed of them. They are a big creamy-white grub with a little white head and a brown spot in the middle of it. The biggest fattest ones could be twelve to fifteen centimetres long. They were out on the roots of the wattle trees, and other types of scrub bushes. We’d find the shell of old cocoons where the grubs had turned into moths and gone, but under this we would dig a bit and find where the roots were a bit fatter than normal. This meant there would be a grub in there, in little pockets in the wood. You might find two or three in a tree. We used to get them and cook them in the ashes. Just roll them around in the ashes for a few minutes and that’s it. Just pull the heads and tails off. They’re beautiful! When I was older and was fencing on Mulga Downs, Billy, my sister Barbara, Bobby and I used to take the old Toyota and go along the flats. We would attach a rope and pull out the old Acacia bushes and get big ones. We put them in the ashes and cooked them. When they’re ready they stretch out long and have like little brown spots on them. It is easy to take them out and dust them. They’re oily, and you have to acquire a taste for them—they have a nutty flavour. I used to enjoy eating them when I was a child. Quails were good too. When Mum wasn’t home we would go hunting for them and hit them with a rock. They were like little chickens. We would pluck them and grill them. Mum didn’t cook them. We cooked them ourselves. We couldn’t get enough. We didn’t eat their eggs, but we did eat other wild bird’s eggs from off the lakes, down near Wiluna. There were lots of swans 31

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 31

6/05/11 11:33 AM

and ducks. Mum and Dad would wade out onto the little islands. The water would be up to your waist. They would come back with a ton of eggs, a whole bag. We’d have a feast. There’d be eggs for weeks. They didn’t have time to go bad. It was winter time anyway. If you could get a nice fat goanna it was good too. You have to know how to clean them without cutting them open. You get a long stick with a fork at the bottom, like a hook. You poke it up the back end and turn it around and around. It gets the intestines and you pull them all out. You can see when they’re all gone. Then you just put it in the ashes and cook it—I wouldn’t do it now for all the money in the world. I would be feeling sick. Last time I did that was years ago. We had an old fashioned mincing machine with a handle, you know, the old winder. We lived most times on kangaroo or emu or whatever we could get. My mother would mince the meat and make rissoles. When we had a bit of smoked bacon she would mince it in as well. We’d cut kangaroo steaks into strips then season them with flour that had pepper and salt rubbed into it. They went into the pan and we’d fry them until they’d just come to the turn. We didn’t use too much fat. That was all we had then. Just a little bit to keep them from getting stuck. When they were on the turn we poured a little bit of water in. Mum would use tea. Just stir that round, and gravy comes up. That was yummy. It doesn’t take long if you do it right, about ten or fifteen minutes at the most. I still do it like that. Another thing we used to do was put the kangaroo tails in 32

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 32

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Pilbara country

the ashes and roast them. Before they’re cooked you can pull the skin and hair off them, or if you want to you can scrape the hair off the skin afterwards. We would have a good big camp fire with white mulga wood ashes, or snake wood. After the fire has been used there are coals and plenty of ashes. They can be wrapped, but we used to just put them straight in. You scrape the ashes off afterwards and eat the meat. We didn’t do legs like this. We mainly cut steaks or sometimes grilled them on the coals. We didn’t carry anything like grillers. It was just straight on the coals. Of course you would make sure it didn’t hit the dirt though, or you would be eating sand. Sometimes we’d cook the heads of the roo and eat that. We used to eat emu. It was not very often we got on to an emu egg to eat but it was good! It was like Christmas, finding an emu nest. Emu eggs were hard to find. Mum and Dad would spend a day on horses walking round and round in circles, and only found them once or twice. They’re a really big egg. One big egg would take up a whole pan. Mum would scramble them sometimes. Now and again we would get beef from the station. I’ve seen Dad go in and ask for meat from the station—beef or mutton— and they wouldn’t give it to him. So there was only one other way of getting meat and that was to take it. One day we desperately needed meat. We’d been on the station for quite a long time and my father went to the homestead and asked for meat. They wouldn’t give him any, so we got a cleanskin. We would put one down and corn it with salt and if there were any remains we’d burn all the bones and hide, and 33

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 33

6/05/11 11:33 AM

then we’d pick up all the ashes when they were cold and dispose of them so nobody knew we’d taken meat. There was no butcher around the corner. The nearest bit of meat was on stations and they were a long way apart. When we had a whole beast like that, we used to dry-corn all of it, barring a little bit that would keep us going for a day or so. We would cut it all off the bone and into little pieces, cut little slits in it and then we’d dry-corn it. Next we would roll it in salt and put it into hessian or old sack bags and let it brine. After it cured for a couple of days, we laid it out every night on bushes or whatever we could find to let it dry out. Once you dried it out, it was dry like a bull tongue, you could keep it for months and months. We had corned meat to last us all year round. We used to kick it around, pick it up and chuck it in a bucket of water when we needed it. We’d chuck it in water to soak the salt out and it would bring the life back into it, and then you could boil it up. We normally had it as corned beef with spuds. That was good. And when we got sick of eating it that way Mum used to mince it, put onions in it or else just cut it up and make curry or stew out of it. They talk about eating salt these days. I ate salt all my life and there’s nothing wrong with me. When we were kids, there used to be blocks of salt-lick for cattle round the windmills. It used to be clear in those days, just a square block of salt. We’d chip a bit off and wash it in the water in the tank and that was like a lolly to us. We’d suck it till our tongue got sore! Then chuck it away. That’s what we used to do, and they reckon it’s not good for you and that it gives you high blood 34

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 34

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Pilbara country

pressure. Well, I’m in my late seventies and I’ve got no high blood pressure. They keep telling me, even my daughter says, ‘Mum, don’t eat too much salt.’ I say, ‘Margaret, I’ve been eating salt all my life, I can’t stop.’ We used to fish in the rivers for little river perch. They were about six or seven inches long. Cobbler or catfish were there too. They wouldn’t bite the line. What I used to do was get an old bag and put some meat down the bottom, and put it quietly right down in the water so they could go inside of it. The bag was propped open with a stick. When they went inside of it, you would get them. This could take an hour or so. It was quicker catching the perch. Mum showed us how to make hooks out of pins. We would warm up pins and bend them round like fish hooks. We would use pliers and hold them in the fire until they were warm enough, then bend them to get them into shape. The eye was bent around the same way. They were tiny little things. When we had no pins we used to make them out of bits of wire. We used Mum’s sewing cotton for line. We didn’t have fishing lines. We made rods out of sticks. They wouldn’t have to be very long, just enough to dangle the hook in a bit. Sometimes the lines would break if the fish was too big. For bait we used to catch grasshoppers, or grubs. We used to get into a lot of trouble from our parents, for going when they were out. I was the eldest and had to look after the little ones. They used to play along the river. None of us could swim.

35

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 35

6/05/11 11:33 AM

We kids never had any check-ups or needles and never went to any clinics or hospitals after we were born. Not a thing. The nearest hospital was Port Hedland or Marble Bar and the other one was Meekatharra. There were no other hospitals within cooee of us. We never got measles and we never got mumps. In the bush we weren’t in contact with people to get these things. The only thing we may have got was a cold. I don’t remember Mum ever having to stay in the camp for the day because one of us was sick. One time, I do remember, I had very crook eyes. That was later in the years and there was no such thing as getting to a doctor. The only thing I could do was bathe them. I had sandy blight. Today they call it trachoma. My eyes were that crook they were bleeding and I never got any treatment for it, only home treatment. Wash my eyes with salt water or boracic acid and water, and put dark eye drops in. The station gave us a little bottle of dark eye drops to put in my eyes. Any other thing we had to get over it the best way we could. Mum and Dad bought tinned powdered milk. It was for the little ones, the babies. We had to go without because they needed it. In my own family later if there was not enough for myself and the old man, and the kids needed it, we left it for them. We went without ourselves, so I’m used to doing this because family comes first. Mum didn’t breastfeed the babies much. She finished up putting them on tinned milk because most of the time she’d be away and I’d be left to look after them, and I had to have milk for them. For a start they’d be on milk and then later Mum used to get Mills and Wares Arrowroot biscuits, and mix it all up and 36

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 36

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Pilbara country

put it through the bottle, the teat, and feed them until they could take coarse foods. But it was mainly biscuits. When they got a bit older, Mum fed them on whatever she could find, soups and things like that. The babies had Sunshine powdered milk. That used to be on the go then. We had Sunshine powdered milk as far back as I can remember. It wasn’t like it is today—you had to stir like hell to get the lumps out of it. I very rarely buy liquid milk: I still buy powdered milk, I’m used to it. I use it for cooking and everything. You can keep it, you know, it’s milk you can always keep. Mum and Dad camped at the wells when they were roo shooting. They used to have these four gallon kerosene buckets for water. It was very near a mile to the mill from where the camp was and I’d be the one that’d have to go down to the mill. I’d be scared stiff to go down there because the cattle’d chase you! I’d watch the cattle and as I went down I’d line the cattle up with the tank, so they couldn’t see me. I’d sneak in behind the tank and sneak away with the water. I used to be afraid of being chased because they’d come after you, keep following you and they could push you. I used to hate that, station cattle. But it didn’t worry my father, he didn’t care whether they chased me or not. As long as I got the water home! And if I was too long, I got told off or beltings for it. Those buckets were heavy, two of them. One on each side. I’d walk along and put them down, walk along and put them down. They just had wire handles. If there was only one, I would pick it up and put it on my shoulder. I could balance it and stand straight 37

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 37

6/05/11 11:33 AM

to walk, it was alright. But if you had the two, you had to carry them in your hand. I used to hate that. If we wanted a shower or a clean up we had to go down to the tanks and put a hose over into the windmill tank and just run the water on top of us. But if we couldn’t get down to the tank for a shower we used to cart it to the camp, and I’d be the one that had to cart water. The Aboriginal children were so easy and free. They did what they wanted to do. They played and didn’t have chores like we had to do in the family. They were so free to do their own thing. If they didn’t want to have a shower, they didn’t have a shower. Their father and mother didn’t make them. Dad was very strict. He used to make me boil the water to wash the dishes. The dishes had to be scalded. Now that I am older I appreciate his point. He was also strict on us keeping our hair washed, combed and reasonably clean. One day I nearly lost a finger. I’ve still got the scar. He got really wild with me. He was going to cut my hair off. He lifted his pocket knife and I put my hand behind my head to stop him, and it nicked across my knuckle. It was lucky it didn’t cut through the tendons. I was lucky because the only thing you had was your hair to make you look good. We had good teeth. Mum would pull our baby teeth with a piece of cotton. I did that with mine. When they got right down to the last little bit just give it a flick and it’s gone. That’s all she used to do. We never had any toothbrushes, they never taught us that. I learnt to keep my teeth clean after I left home. My father was fussy about other things but he never bothered about that. 38

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 38

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Pilbara country

Only in later years, round about my mid-twenties, I started to get bad teeth. I’d be in charge of looking after the baby. With my youngest brother, I used to lead three packhorses and I’d have a saddle with a roll on the front. I used to carry Roy. I had an old sheet for a carrier. I’d tie a knot in it, chuck it over my shoulder and chuck him in it, and carry him there on the saddle in front of me. I’d be leading the packhorses behind and I had to be sure they didn’t run under a tree and pull the swags off. We would bathe the baby in a face dish. Just an ordinary old enamel face dish that Mum used to use. Sometimes I had to do it, that was my job, so I learnt early to look after babies. That’s why I don’t want any children on my arm today. I tell my sons and daughters, ‘Look, you’ve had babies and they’re my grandchildren. I like to see them, but don’t expect me to look after them. I’ve had my day.’ I’ve reared my brothers and sisters and then my own family. I’ve actually reared two families in my life. I don’t want to look after three families. I want to have my own life now. Mum didn’t use nappies that much. They did have them, but not that many. They used to go without somehow. Mum did have nappies until they started to crawl around and do their own thing. Then they were right. We weren’t potty trained, there was no such thing as potties or things like that, it’s so different now. The baby had to sleep with mother and father in the swag. I used to do that later, too, when mine were little. We used to go in the bush and chuck them in between us, where it was warm. Most of the time, with Mum and Dad, we never had a tent. We 39

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 39

6/05/11 11:33 AM

were moving every day or every second day. Just like the drovers, they were always on the go. We’d be here one day and we’d probably be miles away at another stop tomorrow. When the rains came, we would carry a big rainproof tarp. We used to pitch it out where we’d get a good tree on high ground and pitch it so all of us could get under for shelter. Sometimes we were pretty cold and wet. If it was winter time and we were having rain, we used to make a big fire to keep the camp warm. When we’d lay our swag down, we used to cut spinifex, grass or bushes and lay it down underneath, and lay our swag on it. It got you up off the ground and it was warmer. It let snakes or centipedes or anything go under you and not over the top. They’d go underneath in the warm, into the leaves. We never worried about things like that. We grew up with it; it’d become a part of our lives. We didn’t get any newspapers, very rarely. The only thing was the odd magazine or something that somebody left or gave to us. That would last for weeks. Through the years I learnt to read from old comics. The mailman used to bring some old comics. It used to be Superman and The Phantom. There was about two or three different ones. He’d bring up a stack of these comics and I used to love reading them. I found them very hard for a long while, until I got used to reading them. During the war, Mum got flour bags to make underwear for us. She used to buy this old heavy tweed material. It was really thick, heavy stuff; dungaree. It was like a pin-stripe and they were terrible looking. I used to hate wearing them! She’d sew a flour bag on the top for the blouse, it used to come round your waist 40

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 40

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Pilbara country

and the dungaree stuff, like a skirt; hung down like a tent. They were horrible looking things on you. That’s what she used to make for clothing. I think that’s about all she could get during the war. She’d make all the things by hand for us. Later, when we had a base camp, Mum had an old-fashioned hand-sewing machine. She would sew up petticoats and things out of flour bags. You get them now, calico or cotton flour bags. That’s what she used for underclothes and then our outside clothes was this flaming dungaree stuff. It was only when we come back to the main base camp that she did something like that. When we were with the packhorses in the bush, there was no such things as sewing. When we had the old International ute, she used to sit the sewing machine on the tailboard of the ute and sew. Now and then when Dad got a side of leather, he would make us sandals with ankle straps and a buckle. But if we lost them or if we’d wear them out, that was it. We’d go barefooted. We used to get greenhide and put it round our feet, get the shape and stitch it so it would stay on our foot. When it dried out our feet got sore because it got hard and we couldn’t wear it any more. We got tough feet but there were some burrs in that country that’ve got spikes on them that long, they’d go through your foot. If they were nails, you could have turned them over on the other side! They were terrible. They used to hurt when you’d pull them back and blood used to come out. We had to sit down with a needle or a pin and pick out the splinters. Dad had solder and a soldering iron, but we couldn’t get flux in the bush, so we used resin from what we called the resin bush. 41

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 41

6/05/11 11:33 AM

These can still be seen around Tom Price and places like that. It is a bush which grows quite big and high, according to where it is. They have shiny green leaves and honeysuckle-like flowers. The resin runs down off the stem and onto the limb. We collected it. It was like honey sticking on them. Dad started us off. We would get some empty jam tins. The open ones were for holding drinks and the others we would cut into strips for handles. We would bend the edges of the strips really tight so they wouldn’t cut us, and bend them to the shape of a handle. These would be soldered onto the open tin, and there were our cups or mugs. You could go round the bush now and find some of our old pannikins. If we lost one, we would make another. The iron would be heated in the red hot coals of a fire. We used pliers to hold the tin together while the solder was melting onto them. We didn’t have a car then so there was no need to solder any radiators, but Dad soldered little things like patching up saucepans and billy-cans. He would put a rivet through with a washer and solder it on to keep it from leaking.

I used to go along with the Aboriginal people, when they went into the bush to collect witchetty grubs, berries and things; I used to enjoy that. And then we’d get to play with the kids if we came into contact with them. It was the only other company we had. The Aboriginal people were living mainly off the bush and they 42

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 42

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Pilbara country

were happy. They were doing their own thing, you know. Today, a lot of people are lost without a house but for them, being in the bush was like being in their own house. Most of the Aboriginal men were working on the stations but there was lots of times they used to go on walkabout. Pinkeyes. Pink-eye’s going for a holiday. They used to go in family groups and all the women would carry the swags on their heads and the kids on their backs, with the dogs trotting alongside of them. The men used to carry the spear, shield and the woomera in their hand and hunt. That was their job, they carted nothing else. I’d see them going different places for their holiday, in certain areas. There’d be about ten or twenty people sometimes, it was good to see. There was one particular thing that stuck in my mind. Mum and Dad went out to Balfour Downs Station, we never camped at the homestead. We’d camp up at the old shearing shed. The Aboriginals had their little mias away down on the flats. Little round scrub huts they used to build; mia, they called them. At night-time they’d sing and I’d listen. They’d be tapping a stick on the ground, nearly all night. Tap, tap, tap and singing away. I used to listen to them and I can still hear them. I can still hear that sound. I used to lay and listen and go to sleep. It was great. But you don’t hear that any more. A lot of that has gone and been taken from them. Their way of enjoying themselves, you know? There was no more pretty silk dresses for Mum. I don’t remember her having anything fancy. She always wore a pair of riding breeches and a shirt. She didn’t need nice dresses, not out 43

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 43

6/05/11 11:33 AM

there. There was no such thing as a social life. If they ran into somebody, they might sit down and have a yarn around the camp fire at night and have a cup of tea. If you hadn’t seen anyone for a long time it was like Christmas, having someone to talk to, and that would be fairly brief between times. I remember a couple of times when Mum ran into an old fella, old Bill Carney and his missus, but it wasn’t very often. They had a station between Prairie Downs and Mt Newman Station and we only saw him once in a blue moon. She used to enjoy talking to old Mrs Carney. I don’t know why she didn’t have much contact with other women. Like us kids, we never saw no other kids and my speech was terrible. I was lost for words. Dad kept us away from other people. When people came together in the bush, they would enjoy each other’s company. They’d sit down, have a cup of tea, a yarn and a bit to eat. Mum used to cook a meal for them and make them welcome. We were so far away from town in those days, down around Newman. It was a dirt track to Meekatharra, a dirt track to Port Hedland and Marble Bar, so Mum and Dad didn’t bother. They got enough travelling around the bush, working.

44

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 44

6/05/11 11:33 AM

growing up

growing up

Roy was born near the end of the war. He was the last in the family. I remember Mum had to get out of the bush to Marble Bar because there was a hospital there. We travelled to Marble Bar and we stayed not far from the Battery. We kids used to go down by the creek and all the cyanide water used to run down in it. Mum and Dad used to tell us not to play near the water but we did. The cyanide water, flowing from the Battery, running down like a stream. We used to jump over the water and you could smell the cyanide in it. There was a little old shack that we stayed in. I don’t know if they knew these people or if they just rented the place. We stayed there till Mum had Roy, then we went back out to Mt Newman again. I knew it was another baby I was going to have to look after but it was a brother, so it was good. The brother I was 45

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 45

6/05/11 11:33 AM

mostly close to was Dougie. Him and I used to fight but we were very close. Roy and I were good buddies right to the end. Soon as Mum got a week or something rest she went back to work and I was left in charge of the new baby. Travelling on the ute, there was Mum and Dad with the youngest one riding in the front out of the sun and the rest of us on the back. We had our swags and all. We used to sit up on top of the swags and we’d carry water on the bus, oil, everything we needed. There wasn’t much room though. The rest of us were out there in the sun and the dust. We used to wear big hats to get the shade on our heads. Oh, they were terrible roads. The worst motor car we’d ridden in was the old Stude, when Mum and Dad came up to Marble Bar to have Roy. The blimmin’ old gas-producer was on the back and every time Dad hit a bump or corrugation, the clinkers used to jump out and get on you. I got burnt a couple of times because there wasn’t much room and, when you’ve got your swag and everything, you’ve got to watch that nothing catches fire. There was a big round barrel for the gas that sat on the back of the ute. We used to put coal in, then you had to have a bit of water, and all the pipes to feed the motor, I don’t know how that was done. We’d stop at windmills and stack up heaps of dry mulga wood for coal. We used to put the fire out before it turned to ashes, and bag up big bags of charcoal and carry it on that bus. So imagine how much room was on it! By this time we had a plant of horses and the old Studebaker. So the government blokes came and asked Mum and Dad if they’d 46

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 46

6/05/11 11:33 AM

growing up

go dogging. George Shotter was the boss at the time. He used to travel round and he came over and saw my father and asked him if he would take this dogging job on. Anyone with a plant of horses in the position my dad was in, would get it. We had near enough twenty horses in the plant, so that’s how he got the job. If Dad hadn’t had enough horses, he wouldn’t have been able to do it because there were so many of us in the family. There were no roads then in most of that country and the only way to get at it was by horse. We had to have packhorses and we had to have saddled horses, so we had enough to go around. Dad quite easily got the job dogging, straight after he finished roo shooting. Dad went dogging because all he knew was dogging, prospecting and roo shooting. They would have the job of trapping wild dingoes and poisoning them. The government issued traps, and Mum and Dad had to get their own ammunition and poison. They used to make baits by stewing down a kangaroo, donkey or wild horse and then poisoning it. They would cut around where the dogs would mostly eat and put poison into it. If the dogs didn’t take the poison, they would set traps on the trails. Wild dogs travel on trails, going to water, or going wherever they’re going to hunt. You’d have to be careful how you set the traps because if you leave too much scent they would get used to it and go around it. They’d get foxes that took the poison too, but they’d only get about five bob for them. They got paid for eagles’ beaks as well as emus’ beaks. The emus, they used to shoot the emus and take the beaks. They were all vermin in those days, so they got a little bit of 47

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 47

6/05/11 11:33 AM

money for each one. When they poisoned an animal carcass and left it, the eagles and foxes would naturally have a feed. It was a bonus on top of the dingoes. In those days, Dad was getting paid per scalp. Then when the government changed later on, they got supplied fuel, ammunition and traps and were paid a wage. When that phased out, the government supplied a vehicle with fuel, poison, bullets and traps. In later years when my sister was dogging, she had to have her own vehicle but they supplied the poison, traps and ammunition and she got a contract wage. It was big wages then. But when Dad and Mum were dogging it was different. All that area was running cattle. There was cattle on Prairie Downs, Ethel Creek, Bulloo Downs and Balfour Downs. Roy Hill was the nearest sheep station to us. In those days you’d not get far out of Meekatharra and Wiluna and you get sheep again. It was because they’d had the troubles with dingoes that they called for doggers. That’s how come we went dogging. When Mum and Dad were roo shooting, they worked mostly at night. When it was the good season they used to do day shooting sometimes. In the dogging job they’d be doing the work mostly in the daytime, laying out the poison. Most times me and all the rest of the family’d be left where they left the packs. Mum and Dad’d go and lay baits up creeks and rivers and places where dogs get to. They’d go looking for dens, things like that. They’d come back in the evening and next morning they’d be out looking for dead ones in the same area. So in those days they’d be at home at night. 48

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 48

6/05/11 11:33 AM

growing up

When they were shooting kangaroos for the skins, they had plenty of kangaroo meat. Now and then we used to take a bullock and all the fatty bits off the bullock, horse or kangaroo used to be made into baits. Very rarely we used emu, because it was only occasionally we were short. We never got lost because we were so used to the bush. We never wandered far because Dad and Mum used to leave us at a river where there was water, and unload the packhorses and swags. The next day Mum and Dad’d be gone all day, laying baits or setting traps. They’d come home in the late afternoon just about sundown. I’d be in charge of the rest of the family and it’d be all the little ones. I had to look after them. If anything happened to them, I used to get a terrible belting.

There was one opportunity I had, when I was growing up, to go to Jigalong Mission school. Mum and Dad used to stop off and camp near the mission. Mr and Mrs Stevens asked my Mum and Dad to leave me to go to the mission school there. Dad wouldn’t let me go. If I had gone to the mission school I might have caught up with a bit more schooling. I thought it was selfish because he was depriving me of an education. The mission was like a small station and quite a busy little, nice-looking place. I would’ve liked to have stayed there. It would’ve been different for me and I would’ve learnt a lot. It was a mission for Aboriginal people. When the families 49

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 49

6/05/11 11:33 AM

used to come in from the desert, the missionaries used to keep the school-age kids at the mission and teach them. I wanted to go because I felt it would be a good thing for me, but Dad wouldn’t let me. I was a bit young, I would have missed Mum and Dad but in my own heart I knew it would have been good for me. I would have had some friends of my own age. Another thing, Dad was very against me learning Aboriginal languages. Every time he heard me speaking an Aboriginal language he used to belt me for it. That was a bad thing to do because today Aboriginal languages are the thing you should learn. I still know a little bit of it. I would’ve liked to have continued on learning without him stopping me. It’s a pity. It would have benefited me, today. I could’ve gone a long way, but it’s been taken away from me. I think Dad didn’t want me to go to school because he was frightened I might learn too much. Find out too much about him. I’ve got a feeling that’s what happened. Later on, after the war finished, my brothers and sisters got correspondence classes but by that time I was too old. The correspondence teacher used to travel round the country, to stations and missions and give them schooling. The lessons had to be done. Mum and Dad had to make sure that the rest of them did it. But I missed out on that, too.

In those days a lot of old different droving teams used to go down from the north. Dad would get talking to them. There were camel teams, pulling a dray behind them, and then there were horses. 50

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 50

6/05/11 11:33 AM

growing up

There used to be a team of horses for holding the cattle at night. The drovers took the cattle down and the drays used to take down all the cattle dogs and all the gear with them on the road. On the way down they’d have so many camps. The cook would have to be cooking meals for the drovers, and there had to be horse tailers to go and get the horses early in the morning. It was good to see somebody coming along. If we were around the area at the time and the drovers would be coming through, we’d stop. Sometimes Mum and Dad would camp not far from them and they used to have a yarn. I remember some sheep went down. It must have been a hell of a job. It was a long way. They could have gone from Roy Hill or Nullagine, down to the railhead to Meekatharra. It would have taken weeks for them as they only travelled at the most, ten mile a day. On the way they had the stock route and there’d be government wells where they stopped. They used to draw water for the stock with a whip. The bucket would drop into the well and they used to get the horse to pull it up, then they would tip it into the trough and water the stock. That was a hell of a job, baling water with the whip, but it was better than handling it with a windlass! They only went down along the route and the route that the cattle were travelling on would only be a few yards wide. They were only moving from one well to the other, ten mile a day. They’d be travelling nearly parallel with the old highway coming north but just far enough off so the animals wouldn’t be in the road of the traffic. 51

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 51

6/05/11 11:33 AM

All these guys that used to do the droving were single, I think, because that was their business. It was like a contract every year. When the droving season come around they’d go up and they’d start taking cattle or sheep down to the railheads. They’d have an Aboriginal lady cooking on the droving trips, but I never knew of any white women with them. Sometimes there was an Aboriginal girl and you wouldn’t even know she was a girl, she’d look like a boy, and it was someone’s wife. They needed a woman for camp, I suppose to keep the bed warm at night! They’d help with the horse tailing, bringing the horses along from camp to camp or going out early in the morning and getting the horses in before the drovers would leave.

When they started dogging, Mum and Dad got a base camp on Ethel Creek Station. It was only made out of bush—boughshed, that’s all it was. They had canvas up on the inside for shelter from the rain. Mum and Dad had one place to themselves and we had another boughshed built for us. One was built squarely and the other was built like an igloo. I think Mum had hessian inside of it, to keep the leaves from coming through. That was our permanent camp. Mum and Dad’s bed was made out of timber from the bush. They put three forked sticks in the ground for the head rail, side rail and foot rail, and laid timber that was strong enough to hold them up, and then laid spinifex on it for a mattress. We had the 52

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 52

6/05/11 11:33 AM

growing up

same. We either slept in the back of the old car or slept on a bed that they made for us in the camp. I used to cart water to the camp. We had a big square tank at the camp and I had to fill that. We had two old horses. I used to put the pack on one and the saddle on the other and cart four, square, gallon drums or buckets. We’d hang two on each side and go out to the pool. When the tank got empty it was my job to fill it up again. Newman must have been only a couple of miles from the old camp. I went over that way not long back to see if I could try to find out where it was, but with all the progress that’s taken place now, I’ve lost where it would be and it has changed. I’d love to go back and have a look at it. Pick up some things I had there and have a look, just for curiosity. My sister was there not long before she died in 1991. It’s so long since I’ve been there myself. Today, it’s all torn up, the country’s scarred. Roads that they’d never dreamt of in those days are there today and railways I’d never dreamt of as a kid. It’s changed the landscape completely. We weren’t scared of snakes and that because we were used to it, but I did get bitten once by a whip snake. I found out later it was a whip snake—we always called it a copperhead. It was not far from Willywally, the base camp. I was going to get water and was walking along with an old fancy pair of shoes, not looking where I was going and a little snake bit me on my ankle. The marks are still there. Mum and Dad put a tourniquet on my leg, one above my knee, one below my knee and one a bit further down. They got a sharp pocket knife, lanced it, bled it and just put Condy’s on it. They made sure I didn’t go to sleep for twenty-four 53

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 53

6/05/11 11:33 AM

hours. But it never affected me. That was the first and last time a snake bit me. Clarry Helyar was a windmill man on Balfour Downs. He’d come back and shot a donkey for meat and was trying to offer Mum and Dad some. He was telling them, ‘It’s just like beef.’ He reckoned it was really nice but the old girl and the old boy wouldn’t be in it! That’s how I remember him—he was a redheaded guy but only a young bloke then. Not long after Dad took up dogging, I think he went dogging as well. He used to go away out. Some days he’d be weeks gone and they didn’t know where he was. Sometimes they’d be worried about him and then he’d come back in—he’d been out in the desert country. One time there they thought he was lost, he was gone that long. But he turned up like a bad penny! We didn’t have much contact with the station people. The one I remembered was Jimmy Nichols, he had Murramunda Station. He sold that and bought Sylvania Station. We didn’t have much to do with him. We used to see the windmill men sometimes—they had to keep the windmills maintained and check the fences. I don’t know who was on Ethel Creek as a windmill hand but I knew the owners of Ethel Creek, it was Rodorede.

Before I left that place, there were a lot of wild horses.They wanted to get rid of the wild horses, and instead of shooting them, they just shut the mill off in the heat of the summer. This hurt me. 54

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 54

6/05/11 11:33 AM

My maternal grandmother, Eliza Reynolds (born Munro), as a young woman. She had a little dog called Brown Dog that barked at me when I went near her, so I was a bit scared.

My paternal grandmother, Mary Reynolds (born Ana Maria Borgas).

The Reynolds family came from South Australia—they were pioneers. Dad used the name Borgas and it turned into Burgess. Borgas had been his mother’s maiden name—she was German.

MILES B&W Insert FINAL.indd 1

6/05/11 11:38 AM

My grandmother, Eliza Reynolds (standing), with her sister, Mary.

I remember Aunty Mary used to get very drunk and one day she cut my hair off. I was very small. I don’t know what my mother said about it, but I wasn’t very happy because I remember crying.

Eliza and John Reynolds with their first two children, Jack and Barbara, c1911.

MILES B&W Insert FINAL.indd 2

6/05/11 11:38 AM

Uncle Harry.

Dad and Harry had an argument, there was a shoot-up.

Mum, with her brothers, Phil and Harry, and her baby sister Mary on her lap, c1918.

MILES B&W Insert FINAL.indd 3

6/05/11 11:38 AM

My father, William Reynolds (aka Burgess) with his father, John Reynolds, near Esperance.

His name was William Edward alright, but I thought Reynolds was Mum’s family.

My mother, Frances Reynolds (aka Burgess), on Coodardy Station near Cue. During the war, when Dad could no longer afford to pay for petrol, he sold our car to the postmaster at Mundiwindi Post Office. That’s when he got the horse and cart.

MILES B&W Insert FINAL.indd 4

6/05/11 11:38 AM

Mum (right) and Aunty Edna, in the bush near Leonora, c1937.

That was probably some of the silks they bought from the Afghans, to make those long fancy dresses.

Mum—I’m not sure when this photo was taken.

Dad in Perth, about the time I was born, in the 1930s.

Mum and I were partners, or mates. We parted as good friends.

MILES B&W Insert FINAL.indd 5

6/05/11 11:38 AM

Me in the bush as a toddler.

We all lived in one tent and our wind breaks were made of mulga.

My sisters, Barbara and Edna, Mum and Roy.

Myself, not long after returning north from Perth in the 1950s.

I’d had enough. I never really had anyone in Perth I could trust, I was on my own.

MILES B&W Insert FINAL.indd 6

6/05/11 11:39 AM

Mum’s wedding to Alan Naismith, with Uncle Harry and Aunty Edna. Roy told me she got Naismith out of Kalgoorlie jail to marry him.

With Dennis and Billy in Esperance, around 1964.

MILES B&W Insert FINAL.indd 7

My brother, Roy Naismith, during his training, Wagga Wagga. It was hard on him to get stuck with Naismith’s name as well as his debts!

Skinning a goat at Point Samson with Margaret. I used to cart water and then I’d go out in the hills and hunt for meat.

6/05/11 11:39 AM

Billy, Margaret and a friend, Point Samson, 1967. It was a beautiful spot. When we packed up we were so down, all of us were nearly in tears because we were getting put out of the only bit of home we had.

Harry, Barbara with Bobby, Dennis, Jim with Margaret and Billy, at the Wittenoom gymkhana in 1969.

MILES B&W Insert FINAL.indd 8

6/05/11 11:39 AM

growing up

They were dying, perishing, little foals and that. There was one particular horse that stuck in my mind—he was standing at the end of the trough under some snakewood. He must have had his head in between the fork of the tree and when he collapsed he hung in the fork. Then a mare and foal died just off the end of the trough. The little foal hung around and died alongside its mother. That was cruel. He could have shut the windmill off and then left somebody to shoot them as they came in for water, put them out of their misery, but they didn’t. They were perishing and that’s the worst form of death. When we were away from the base camp we’d be near a spring. Plenty of big gum trees for shade, no worries. Most of the spring waters were nice and clean to drink, good clean water. Only one place we used to strike dirty water and that was a place up on the Willywally there, at the back of Mt Newman, where the wild cattle was. Mum and Dad used to go to this claypan and the cattle used to stir it up, it was thick like custard. It was mud. So we used to get the water in a bucket and stand it on the fire and bring it to the boil, chuck a bit of salt or aspirin in it, and the water would settle, as clear as crystal. It’d be clear just like distilled water, nothing wrong with it. Well, when you boil it, it’s sterilised and when you put something in, it purifies it. When we were dogging we went a long way inland, too. We went right in over the rabbit-proof fence down near the lakes, down to Wiluna country. We all went down from Mundiwindi with horses, down to Nabberu Lakes, down to the east of the rabbit-proof fence on the edge of the desert there. I always thought 55

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 55

6/05/11 11:33 AM

it was nice there. When it was a good season, there was all yellow flowers, we called it yellow emu-weed, and the lakes would be full of wild birds. There was a lot of birdlife, like ducks, swans and waterhens. It was nesting time and Mum and Dad went way across the shallow water in the lakes and they collected a whole boxful of eggs. It was like Christmas, all these eggs to eat! We had a damn good feed! I remember way back, ’46 or ’47, there was a hell of a big rain around Mundiwindi. We were camped on a limestone ridge with the horses and the old Savory flooded, and it stayed flooded for nearly two months. The ducks were nesting in the old hollow trees, and that’s up about ten or twelve foot above the ground. They were hopping out into the water, just below the hollow, with the little ones. That was the worst rains and floods I’ve ever seen. That went on for quite a few weeks—I think there’d be a lot of people in that area would remember that rain. We were on an island and the horses on another. All we lived on was rabbits or what we could get off the island for meat. We couldn’t go anywhere. My mother and us kids used to go and dig yams—wild potatoes. The Ngarluma people call them kulyu, they were alright to eat and we lived on rabbit or kangaroo. The horses didn’t have much to eat. We couldn’t get to them for quite a few days because they were across the channel from us and the water was fairly deep. When we had that rain my father had a big tarpaulin and he had it pitched off the cart, right out, and that’s all we had for shelter. It took days for it to dry out before anyone could move. It was actually raining fish! I hear stories now, different 56

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 56

6/05/11 11:33 AM

growing up

times, people talking about fish coming down in the rain and that time I saw it. There were little fishes coming down—unreal! Something picked them up from somewhere. That’s how heavy the rains were.

I don’t know how old I really was, but I was a fair age and something went funny with myself. We went from one place to another and Mum took the horses; Dad took the car. I went with him and I was nursing my youngest brother, Roy, on my lap. We got to the next spot to camp and Dad says, ‘Get out and get a fire going.’ I tried but I didn’t get out, I fell out. My legs just went under me and I couldn’t get up. I got up eventually, made the fire and then I told Mum there was something wrong with me. It was weeks before I could walk after that. Next thing I found myself starting to haemorrhage and I didn’t know what was going on and she never told me what the reason was. You know; you’re frightened, you don’t want to ask—I started riding horses and all my clothing and the saddle was covered in blood. Mum did eventually tell me. The only thing we used were bits of old sheets torn up. She told me what to do and use, and that’s how I got to know. It was frightening. Mum should have said something to me, but there were lots of things Mum and Dad never told me. As I grew older I sort of got away from the family. I was growing up and becoming a woman. I wanted to be by myself, to have my own swag and my own things. All the smaller ones, Mum 57

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 57

6/05/11 11:33 AM

and Dad used to keep them near them. When I was growing up I had no contact with any other males. I had no boyfriend, I never thought I’d have boyfriends. I was growing up in a world on my own. All of us said one day we’d get married but I didn’t know how I was going to go about it. Mum never told me about babies or anything, I had to work that one out. All of us went through the same phase in the family—us three girls and the two boys. I think the boys found out easy enough. See, if I could’ve gone to school and mixed up with other girls my own age, we’d probably have talked about these things. I only had myself and my younger sisters. It was like a world on our own. It was so different. My sister Barbara and myself were good horsewomen, we were first-class. That was the thing I would have liked to stay with but Dad stopped me; he reckoned all I thought about was horses. He didn’t realise that he’d learnt us, made us ride and handle horses in the first place. He kept knocking me down on things like that. If we’d stayed with horses we’d have been able to do all that because I was pretty clever at it. I used to be proud because I knew I used to ride really good and I knew how to handle a horse. When I left home, I wanted to stay with horses and learn to ride properly. If I’d had the opportunity and been able to go into horse shows and things I would have bettered myself. I wasn’t afraid of horses. When you grow up with them and learn to ride, you learn to become confident. The moment they know you’re afraid of them, they know they can dip you, kick you, bite you or anything. I had a lot of confidence and they knew it. There was one horse that was given to me from Marillana 58

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 58

6/05/11 11:33 AM

growing up

Station. I don’t remember the old guy’s name but he gave Bluey to me, and a dog to my mother. Dad had to break it in as it was only a young colt. We took it back bush with us and one day I had to bring in all the horses. They were away somewhere feeding and it was quite a distance from the camp. Mum said to me, ‘Don’t you go getting on that horse that we just broke in.’ I said, ‘No, I won’t.’ Away I went, and the first one I catch was Bluey. I hopped on Bluey’s back, rounded up all the others and when I got all the others together I took the bridle off Bluey and rode home on another horse, and they never knew that I rode Bluey. I could ride him with no problems; I wasn’t afraid of being chucked off because I knew I could handle him. When I was about sixteen or seventeen they sent me down to work on Three Rivers Station. I was sent down on the mail truck. I think I wanted to get away from the old folk. I settled in there alright and was there two or three months, working for a bloke named Bowman. I worked hard. I used to go out and muster sheep, bring them in to the homestead. There were different things I had to do. At that time wool was a pound-a-pound and the owner wanted me to pick up all the dead wool. I had to carry an old bag and pick up all the wool off the dead sheep. I stayed there on the station and had quarters with another coloured girl. I can’t remember her name. It was the first time I’d stayed in a proper building and in a room! We never had any house to live in, in the bush. It was different, I don’t think I took much notice, it seemed to be alright, just normal station quarters. I noticed more about how my work went. 59

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 59

6/05/11 11:33 AM

They had Aboriginal people and white men on the station. The white men were windmill men and fencers, and the Aboriginal men were labourers who did other things. And then they had a cook on the station and a housemaid. A lot of the stations had Aboriginal women as cooks. They were really good cooks. We never had meals in the house; we had the meals outside on the verandah. I think the men got the same as we did, but we weren’t allowed to mix. If you were caught mixing you’d get into trouble. I was quite happy there but for some reason the boss didn’t want me or like me, and do you know what he sacked me over? A stirrup-iron! One day he sent me out to bring in a young colt he’d just castrated and I had to bring him in to check if he was alright. I spent nearly all day in that bush. It was kurara (Acacia tetragonophylla) country and that bush was prickly. I got him home right up to the house, into the yard. I had an old saddle and I lost a stirrup. I told the boss I’d lost a stirrup so he sent me back up on the ridge to find the stirrup. He got his chance for getting rid of me and all because I lost the bloody old stirrup-iron. The strap that was holding the stirrup onto the saddle, broke. And I wasn’t very heavy at the time, I was quite thin. That’s what I got the sack over. He sent me out on the bloody old limestone ridges, walking, looking for this flaming stirrup-iron. You’d think it was the last thing he’d be worrying about, wouldn’t you? At the time, he was making a pound-a-pound on sheeps wool and he was picking up old dead wool and all! I went back and I couldn’t find it so he 60

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 60

6/05/11 11:33 AM

growing up

sacked me, and never paid me a razoo. He wasn’t broke but he wouldn’t pay me. That sickened me of station people, because they don’t treat you like a person, they treat you like a tool. They just use you and when they don’t want you any more they cast you aside. It hasn’t changed too much, either, on stations—they haven’t changed much in attitude. The year I was there, it was towards the end of the forties, he bought a brand new Bedford truck and it was just after that he sacked me. It was new because it was shiny and he drove it back to the homestead. It must have come up on the train from Meekatharra, and he picked it up and brought it home. You imagine wool at a pound-a-pound. He made big money and he wasn’t going to have to give too much of it away. So I went back home to Mum and Dad. I caught the mail truck out when I expected them to be there. The old man said, ‘You never learn.’ He always called me a dunce and he always degraded me.

61

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 61

6/05/11 11:33 AM

independence

Dad bought an International ute—that was better and more modern. It wasn’t any bigger than the Studebaker, but at least it didn’t have the old gas-producer on the back. We all went on holiday in it once, north to Hedland. It’s the only holiday I know of, when I was fourteen. There was a train running from Marble Bar up to Port Hedland, and when you had to go into Port Hedland you drove along the old railway track over the marshes. If there was a train coming along you had to watch out and get off—you had little parking bays on the side, you know—until the train went by, then you got back on the rail and followed the train into town. I remember seeing the train once, coming out of Hedland. Port Hedland was a tiny little place: the hospital in Port Hedland was the dead end 62

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 62

6/05/11 11:33 AM

independence

and east from the hospital there was hardly any buildings right back to Pretty Pool, it was all country. It was a pretty little area. And down on the low part where there are all buildings now and tanks, there were animals and a little cricket pitch down on the flat where they used to play cricket. There’d be wool and all sorts of things coming in from Marble Bar, like gold, asbestos and other stuff that would probably be coming in on the train and going on to the ships. Animals, too—they had a special way of loading them. They used to come off the land—and then go down a loading ramp and walk into the hold of the boat. That was at low tide. I remember watching them doing it. At that time, Mum and Dad decided to go to Roebourne to have a look around. I don’t know what made them decide to go down to Roebourne for a trip. It was all dirt tracks and then there’d been rains on the road—it took us a few days to get there. We came into Roebourne—that was a tiny little place, too. It had a Chinese bakery. Anyway, we’d come from the bush, you know, and weren’t used to eating lollies and things, and we got a load of groceries from the old Chinaman and he gave us a big tray of Cadburys chocolates. We hadn’t seen any in our life. It was like Christmas to us. This flaming discount was just a tray of chocolates but we thought it was Christmas. Dad decided to go out to Port Samson—he wanted to camp out and go fishing. We went out to the wharf and they said we weren’t allowed to camp in the area. There was hardly any buildings there, either. It was just a couple of old shacks around the 63

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 63

6/05/11 11:33 AM

place that people were living in, and the wharf. So we came back and went out to the same road that goes to Boat Beach, out to what they call Black Tank. We camped there and went fishing. We used to play with blimmin’ turtle eggs on the beach, us kids. Those days there were no restrictions because there were hardly any people around the place. We used to find them and what we couldn’t play with, we used to cook. You couldn’t cook the white, only the yolk, and eat that. We enjoyed ourselves. Then Mum and Dad decided to go and have a look at Wittenoom. They didn’t go up the road where it is now, over the Chichester Ranges; the old road that we went up then was on the left-hand side. If anyone’s got good eyes to see it, it’s still there, where it went up. As you’re coming to Python Pool, look on the left-hand side just before you get to the pool turn-in and there’s a track you can just see going up around the hill. We went up that road to Wittenoom—ooh, it was rough! It was as tough as hell and Dad told us all to get out, Mum and all—we had to walk behind the bus and be close behind in case the car stalled and run back. And if it stopped, put a chock under it or it’d run back down the hill. Anyway, we made it up alright—it was a big load on the little ute. They were carting asbestos on those dirt tracks. Anyway, we got up to Wittenoom and it was a new town, just developing. They had the frames for the houses just built—for the pub, mainly, and the police station. That was when I first saw Wittenoom. That was in ’46 or ’47. Mum and Dad wanted to go up and have a look at the mine. On the way up, there was no bitumen, it was dust all the way and the corrugations were like 64

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 64

6/05/11 11:33 AM

independence

bloody mountains. You had to go steady because there was always trucks coming out or trucks going up. You couldn’t get too close if there was anybody in front of you, you had to stay back because of the dust. If you stayed too close somebody’d run into you! And all the way up the gorge there was old bag huts—shanties—with different people living along the riverbank all the way up the gorge, it was unreal. They were working in the mine—there was no accommodation then in the town. No pub, nothing. We went right up there and pulled up in front of the treatment plant. We didn’t get out, we all stayed in the bus because we were so used to being in the bush. We were sort of wild, you know, but Dad got out to have a look. All you could see when you got up the gorge, was like smoke coming out of a chimney. We thought it was a bushfire up the gorge! It was all the dust, white asbestos dust rising straight up in the air. We knocked around there a little while, then decided to head out. Mum and Dad never stayed at Wittenoom. They went in, had a look and went back home, back to the job. They were pushed for time, so they headed back to where Newman is now, where we had our main camp and back to dogging.

By the end of 1949, when I was seventeen, I was finding life at home very hard. Dad used to always be grumpy with me and I’d be afraid to say anything. The one in my family I used to get on with most and be very close to was Dougie. Him and I used to 65

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 65

6/05/11 11:33 AM

talk about different things: we were always mates. We talked about Dad all the time, how cruel he was or how hard he was. I was always afraid of him. I used to say to Mum, ‘One day something’s going to happen with one of us and it’ll be the worst thing, you’re going to regret it.’ And it wasn’t long after that, it happened. We were at our base camp near Mt Newman—we called it Willywally Camp—and young Dougie got sick. We waited, hoping he might come good but his throat started to swell, like his tonsils were inflamed. Mum and Dad couldn’t do anything for him, so they decided to drive him to the old Hedland hospital. It was hot, the road was dusty, and all of us were on the back of the ute. We had to lay Dougie on the back of the ute with us because there wasn’t much room in the front. It was hard on him because he was pretty sick. It turned out to be diphtheria and in those days there was no treatment. We stayed in Hedland, out at the beach—the Ten Mile. It was a nice little place. When he was in hospital I stayed with him for a little while and then they decided to send me with George Shotter out to his place, Meentheena Station. Dougie was in hospital for quite a while and they were waiting for him to come out. Apparently what happened when I left and went to Meentheena, Mum and Dad took Dougie out. They was out at the Ten Mile camp and he must have taken a turn for the worse. They took him back to Hedland hospital, and Hedland hospital sent him to Perth with the Flying Doctor.

66

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 66

6/05/11 11:33 AM

independence

I went to Meentheena Station with George Shotter, away east of Marble Bar. I didn’t know nothing about the facts of life at the time; I was still young and he was an old guy. Away I go and I think that’s alright, but he stopped before we got back to the station, to camp. He got me into bed with him and I didn’t know nothing about these things. He was old enough to know better—he had a family of his own. He must have known that I had no idea. I don’t know whether God was with me or what. But I was lucky, I didn’t get pregnant. I was happy about that. I didn’t say nothing to his wife and nothing to Mum and Dad. He told me not to tell his wife and all this bullshit. I was very confused and annoyed with my parents for what had happened. He didn’t hurt me, but he hurt my pride.You know, you’re a young woman, your virginity is taken from you and you know nothing about it. It made me bitter towards that family. I stayed out at Meentheena for a while, helping Mrs Shotter in the kitchen. The rest of their family were there and at one stage they gave me a horse to ride that they thought would throw me off, to see if I was as good with horses as I said I was. But I could handle it alright so their trick didn’t work.

Mum and Dad had left Dougie there at the hospital and they came and picked me up from Meentheena. On the way back, because they were long distances, Roy Hill was a stopover. We stopped off there waiting to see if Dougie was alright. They left a message 67

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 67

6/05/11 11:33 AM

that they would be at Roy Hill at a certain time. By the time we got from Meentheena to Roy Hill Station, it was New Year’s Eve, 1950, when they got the telegram to say that he’d passed away. Ferguson, the cook came over and gave us the telegram. I was feeling my own pain and I had no sympathy for my father. It didn’t matter to them. I can’t remember Mum and Dad grieving in any way but I felt it; I felt the loss. I felt empty when Dougie went. I just wanted to go away from them. Roy, he can only just remember Dougie—he was quite young, but Edna would remember him. We were the two that were feeling it most because we were the ones that spent time with him. I don’t know whether Dad had the money to be able to go down to the funeral or to take Mum and the rest of us down. There was the expense of travel because there was no such thing as buses or trains in that country. There was your car and if your car wasn’t up to it you couldn’t go. The only thing was to go back to Port Hedland or Marble Bar and fly out. But they’d have been better off if they had brought my brother’s remains back to Port Hedland. It would have been better for all of us. We’d have known where he was. How they did it was silly, they just let him get buried in Perth. I’ve only recently found out where he’s buried—Mum and Dad never told me nothing. That was the turning point for me in the family. I still miss Dougie and for some strange reason I miss him most of all. After that, George Shotter got this job lined up for me in Perth; I think Mum and Dad schemed this one up. I don’t know whether Dad thought it was going to be suitable for me but they 68

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 68

6/05/11 11:33 AM

independence

wanted me out, down there and with a job. Dad wanted me to leave. I don’t know about Mum, I don’t know how she felt, it wasn’t even hurting me one bit to get away from them. I was so pleased and relieved to leave. It was like getting away from prison. Not my mother so much—but father because he was so hard on me. As I was going he said to me—at Well 36 on the old stock route between Marble Bar and Meekatharra, ‘If you get into trouble, don’t ever come home.’ By this time I had a vague idea what trouble was—if I got pregnant or mixed up with some guys. I turned around and said, ‘I won’t ever come home for any help from any of you, ever.’ And I never did, I kept my promise. They came to me for help. As I left, I didn’t shed a tear, I was too happy. It was like getting out of a trap. I had nothing. I left home with one pound in my hand, an old suitcase and all I had in it was a dressing-gown my mother made out of parachute cloth, one dress and hardly any toiletries. I had to start out with bugger all. George Shotter took me to Perth. But this time I was aware what was going on, I was prepared. He took me down and put me into this bloody old boarding house to work. Old Mrs Horn. He must have known her, he must have told her who I was or what I was. I don’t know whether it was him and my father who schemed up this idea of sending me to this boarding house to work. She was a mean old cow, old Mrs Horn, I used to hate the sight of her. She treated me like dirt—you know how they treated Aboriginal people. At that stage I wasn’t aware that I had Aboriginal blood, but I think George Shotter must have told her. 69

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 69

6/05/11 11:33 AM

The boarding house was right at the end of St George’s Terrace. It was an old brick building, there was a big courtyard in the back and my room was right in the centre of the courtyard. It was an old laundry and it was only a little space, about six foot square. Bed along the wall and just enough gap to stand a chair and something near your bed for a table. I used to get pestered with guys coming in off the bloody streets. Every Tom, Dick and Harry came in there, and I was scared to tell her because she always reckoned I was enticing them. She was a real old bastard—she had enough rooms to put me up and she didn’t. Oh, I used to hate that woman. That’s why I remember so much because I used to hate her. I know it’s a cruel thing to say, but I did because she gave me such a hard time and treated me badly, instead of helping me and giving me a little respect. If somebody would have shown me, I would have been good, I would have come along really well. But she wanted this done and that done and it wasn’t good enough if you didn’t do it the right way. I was always doing it the wrong way because I didn’t know. I had no idea of working in restaurants or boarding houses or anything. It was like taking a little Aboriginal girl out of the bush and putting her in a house and telling her to do the housekeeping. I had no idea. I couldn’t put words together, I couldn’t express myself, nothing. This damned old sheila had me working a flaming big dining room and I didn’t even know how to set a table. They had all white linen tablecloths, and the linen napkins had to be folded a special way. How the heck could I fold? Someone 70

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 70

6/05/11 11:33 AM

independence

who hasn’t done them, it was cruel. I remember setting the tables and all the cutlery had to go in the right places, either across the top or up the sides. And not only that, you had glasses and the water jug. You don’t see much of it today but you had the jug and the glasses on the table. They were trying to make me do the same things as a person who had lived in a house and got trained for all this. Life in the bush was completely different to what it was in town. A house, a bed, kitchen, dining room and things. Well I wasn’t ever used to this. It was a very big shock and very hard for me. There were people who never cared a thought for you or how you were brought up. You were only there for their convenience, to do what they wanted you to do and you’d do it whether you’d like it or not. I had to depend on myself, but because of the hard upbringing I had, I was glad to be away. It would have been easier for me to go back home and fall back into the old ways than be on my own but I was determined. There was nothing for me back in the bush. I wanted to make something of my life and I didn’t want to waste it in the bush. The trouble with me when I left to go out into the community, I couldn’t talk a word of English properly. I couldn’t sit down and have a conversation because I was lost for words. And another thing: signboards and things, I found them very hard to understand because I couldn’t read them! I found it a bit hard, too, when I went to the bank, I had to get help. I felt so embarrassed and there was nothing I could do about it. I’d have to turn to somebody and get them to help me and they’d all be strangers. They must have thought I was blimmin’ crazy! 71

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 71

6/05/11 11:33 AM

It was only after I left home, mixed with people and travelled around the country and worked in different jobs, that I managed to get a bit of education. I’ve had some awful knocks from different people. They knew how to do things I knew nothing about. I had to learn but they didn’t know this. People didn’t realise how it was for me to grow up in the bush and come into their life and be able to do the things without any proper schooling. It was very hard. I had to learn not only to read, write and count, I had to learn to do domestic work and all sorts of things. Soon I earned enough money to really dress myself up. I used to go into shops and find things to fit and suit me. I wanted to dress up because I was so long without clothing. I saved up and remember buying myself a jolly good coat to wear because it was cold. It wasn’t any good to me when I went north again. I didn’t need it. Funny thing though, all the time I was in the bush, I was very selective about what I wore. Always have been for some reason. I look at other people, compare myself and what I’m going to have to wear to make myself look nice. I used to be very dress-conscious all the time, about colours and how I dressed. I had problems, too. Boys used to come and see me and I didn’t know who they were. I got mixed up, and one night by the Swan River I was with these guys I thought I could trust. In the end they ganged up on me. I was lucky to get away from them and get back home, it was frightening. But I learnt a lot from that, the hardest way. And I don’t know if it made me a better woman, but it made me a bit more aware! While I was in Perth I bought some prawns from a cafe, 72

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 72

6/05/11 11:33 AM

independence

and I didn’t know they were off. I had a feed of these prawns and I nearly died from the pain. I was vomiting and going to the toilet. I didn’t know what it was but I found out later I had food poisoning. I never went to the hospital, which I should have done. I’d never been to a doctor or a hospital in my life at that stage. I used to write home but I found it hard. I could read—I’d like to write good, but I couldn’t because my spelling was bad. All the time I was learning to read and write, my father pushed me down because he reckoned I couldn’t spell. And I think that made it harder for me, too. The only thing that helped me was the dictionary. If I was stuck on a word, I used to go through the dictionary, find it and then write it out. It was a bit slow and boring when you’re wanting to write a letter. It was hard, but with my mum, I couldn’t just lose contact. When I did write to her, it was a long time between and when I wrote I had to sit down and think hard about what I said. That was the hardest part. I sometimes got a letter from home. I never sent money home because of what I was told when I left home: ‘If you get into trouble, don’t come home!’ Well it was my money and I kept it. They gave me nothing and why should I have to turn around and send money to them? That’s how I felt, bitter. My mum used to write to me, none of the others. Mum had a little bit of schooling, enough so she could read and write. She could sit down and write a letter. Dad, he didn’t get much schooling but he got enough to get along. There used to be a chocolate place across the road from the boarding house and the lady over there used to ask me to clean 73

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 73

6/05/11 11:33 AM

the floors and whatever. I used to go over there and she used to give me chocolate. I put on lots of weight, eating too many chocolates!

I didn’t stay with Mrs Horn for very long, because I had too many problems with her. I pulled the pin there and I went and worked for a lawyer out at Cottesloe. He had a wife and a young family, and my job was to do the house cleaning and what-haveyou. I boarded with them and by this time I was starting to pick up some ideas how to clean. I don’t know now how I got the job—whether it was the lady at the chocolate shop that told me, but I worked there for a while, and by this time I’d started getting enough education about sex and men. The lawyer was working in town and he used to come home early before his wife and he wanted me to go to bed with him. I didn’t want that sort of thing, so I just said, ‘Right, I’m going.’ He didn’t want me to go, but I said I was, and that’s when I decided to pack up and work my way back up north. I went and called on the Shotter’s before I went back north. They were the only ones I knew in Perth. I found the place and when I went to the door, Mrs Shotter turned me away. She said she didn’t want me there. I had the feeling that she didn’t want me to come into the house for another reason. I think by this time she found out that George had played up. I went back because I knew the family and said, ‘Oh well, nothing I can do about it.’ 74

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 74

6/05/11 11:33 AM

independence

I was staying for a while at another boarding house before I went back north—I ran into this girl that I was mates with and we had to go over to the railway station in Perth. Her mother was coming on the train from Kalgoorlie or somewhere. She told me to wait outside of Boans Store as it faced the railway. She kept me flaming well waiting there a long time, and a policewoman came along. ‘What are you doing?’ she said. ‘Waiting for my friend,’ I told her. ‘Well, move on,’ she said, ‘or I’ll book you.’ And when my friend did come along with her mother. I said, ‘I thought you wouldn’t be long?’ That’s the last I had with her, I felt she’d made a fool out of me. I never really had anyone in Perth I could trust, I was on my own. When I decided to leave Perth, I had enough money to get back and I got the train to Meekatharra. I stayed in the hotel and got a job there. First I was at the Royal Mail Hotel—I was working there and I got a poisoned leg. There was a collie dog that somebody left in the town and it was wandering around. I picked it up and was looking after it. I was patting the dog on the back lawn at the Royal Mail and then a mosquito bit me on the leg. I scratched it and the poison out of the dog’s coat got in my bloodstream and I got blood poisoning. I wanted to go to the hospital but the bloke I was working for wouldn’t give me time off. So I walked to the hospital which was a mile out of town. That was the first time I had ever been to a doctor or hospital for anything. My leg was very swollen. The doctor looked at me and he said, ‘How did you get here?’ I said, ‘I walked up.’ I told him where I worked and he said, ‘Why didn’t they bring you?’ ‘They wouldn’t.’ 75

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 75

6/05/11 11:33 AM

So I landed in hospital for a few days. They lanced my leg and got all the poisoned blood out. That’s the first time I heard about blood poisoning. The doctor went off at me at the time. ‘Don’t ever pat animals,’ he said, ‘and scratch yourself. Don’t ever scratch yourself at any time. Under your nails you carry poison—dirt— and it causes blood poisoning.’

When I got back they wouldn’t give me my job back—they reckoned I should have worked on. So I got a job at the Meekatharra Hotel, straight across the road from the Royal Mail. While I was in Meekatharra I met up with Mum and Dad again: they were out dogging and they came into town. I was trying to tell them to be careful with my sisters because the same old person might seduce them. I tried to tell my mother and father not to let Edna or Barbara go with him, but I couldn’t explain what happened to me. I tried explaining in a round about way to be wary of him. That he’ll seduce the girls, get them into trouble. They wouldn’t listen—I only got roused on, so I let it go. That was the last time I saw my father. I was working there for a while and I left. I didn’t get the sack, I just went back up north. There was nothing going for me in Meekatharra, so I caught the mail truck and I worked at Nullagine Hotel for Thora Howard—I was doing the housekeeping and cleaning the rooms. It was a very old corrugated-iron place—all corrugated-iron 76

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 76

6/05/11 11:33 AM

independence

rooms for the married quarters, and for the single blokes it was like a big shed or dormitory. All the beds down each side for the single blokes if they came along or were going through. My job was to keep the beds made, the place swept out and go over and wash up the dishes and things, and help with the cooking. It was much less fancy than the place in Perth, it was more like a station: sort of bushy. By this time I was starting to get a little bit used to this sort of thing. I must have been about twenty by then. I got on alright in Nullagine. Thora owned the hotel and Bonney Downs Station. I think she got to like me, you know, having me around, working around the area. I can’t remember my twenty-first—I think it might have been when I was in Nullagine, I’m not sure. I was on my own and birthdays came and went because I’d no-one to spend it with. You had to be twenty-one years of age to go in and have a drink. I wasn’t allowed in the hotel, so I must have been about twenty or turned twenty-one. I can’t think if I ever was in the bar in Meekatharra or Nullagine. The publican, if you go in the bar, asked your age, and if you were under twenty-one they wouldn’t allow you in. Also, in those days there was the front bar where the men went and a little parlour—like a little lounge—for the ladies. The men weren’t allowed in and the women weren’t allowed in the bar. That’s how it was. It was really strict. I did not worry about drinking, that might have been part of the reason I wasn’t in the bar. I don’t drink much today. I have a drink but I don’t go overboard. I ran into a guy there and he wanted me to get engaged. He was an old bloke from a station up north and I didn’t even know 77

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 77

6/05/11 11:33 AM

what he was or who he was, but he begged me and I said no. He wanted to marry me and take me to a station in the Kimberley. He gave me a lot of proposals, but I wasn’t ready to settle—I wanted to travel. Another guy I did get engaged to—actually, I bought the flaming engagement ring! By this time I had quite a bit of money saved because I had to save for myself and that’s how I come to have this engagement ring. It was the old man Dorrington I got engaged to. He’d been married and had a grown family. He was a nice chap but he was far too old for me—his children were about my age. But for a while it seemed like a good idea. He wanted me to settle down in Marble Bar or Nullagine. I left there because I got the sack—Mrs Howard’s husband sacked me while she was in Hedland having a baby. I flew from Nullagine to Hedland on a little light plane—the first time I’d been on a plane. It couldn’t have been too exciting because I can’t remember! The only thing I do remember is that Thora Howard was getting on the plane to go back. As I was getting off, she was getting on. ‘What are you doing here Flo?’ she asked me. ‘Your husband didn’t want me any longer, he put me off,’ I said. ‘I won’t be coming back, Thora, I’m finished down there.’ When I got to Hedland I cancelled the engagement with Dorrington—even though I bought the engagement ring, I sent the flaming thing back to him! I should have hung on to it. That was the only diamond engagement ring I had in my life and it was the one I bought myself! I sent it back and often think about it and I wish to God I still had it. What I wanted to do was to 78

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 78

6/05/11 11:33 AM

independence

travel. I didn’t want to get anchored. I wanted to get away, better myself, my education and outlook on life. Otherwise I would have been no better off than when I was back at home with my family. I didn’t want to go back to the bush life; I’d had enough and I would have ended up somewhere on a mine round about Marble Bar and Nullagine, living in an old shack. In Port Hedland, I thought, ’Oh, this is good.’ Hedland was a nice little place then, I really liked it. I got a job easily. I used to go for the jobs I could do. I went for kitchen work, like washing-up and things like that, peeling vegetables. In those days you had to do all that by hand. I worked at the Esplanade Hotel in Port Hedland, and I met Desmond. He was a single man, travelling around and I got to know him. I had itchy feet and I wanted to have a look at the rest of the country—see how other people live and what they did. I wanted to have a look around and I did, and I enjoyed it. We got on well together and I got the opportunity to go with him, to travel, to have company—and that was good.

79

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 79

6/05/11 11:33 AM

across the Nullarbor

Desmond had come from Queensland, and I got to know him. We were really good buddies—we were always together and went places. When I met up with him, I sent the engagement ring back to Dorrington in Nullagine: I said no, I didn’t want to settle down. I went all around Australia with Desmond—I was three years with him, travelling and working. I wanted to travel because I had no education, but I had this thing in my head: I wanted to have a look and see how the other half of the country lived and worked. That was the best thing I ever did to educate myself. 80

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 80

6/05/11 11:33 AM

across the Nullarbor

I went down to Albany with Desmond, way down there and looked at the timber country and come back—that was the first time and the last time I’ve been down that way. That’s when I learnt to drive a car. I wanted to drive and he taught me. We had a Ford Prefect, little tiny thing it was, like a matchbox. On the corrugations it used to rattle cross-ways across the road! On the way back we stayed for a while in Carnarvon. I had trouble with my teeth, so I went to the dentist and had some pulled and some filled. That was my first encounter with dentists—the trouble is that you don’t know what to expect if you haven’t had it happen before, do you? It was new! I found the drill they had when they’re doing your cavities was the worst thing. It made my teeth hurt. They drilled them out and put the filling in. When he was pulling my teeth, he gave me local anaesthetic. It wasn’t a needle, either—I never felt a needle. I think they put something on my gums. I had to do one lot and then the other after a few days, not all in one go. I worked there for a while, at the Port Hotel in Carnarvon. I was working in the kitchen as usual, and we stayed there. At the same time there was a whaling ship in to pick up whale oil at the whaling station. It was a Norwegian ship, and all the boys were in off the ship. They had anchored out and came to shore with the longboats, and they got on the booze, and a lot of them didn’t know how to speak English. The policeman was picking them up and putting them in jail overnight. I felt sorry for them because they’d been at sea for a long time and they were having a real old ripping time! The coppers would pick them up and sling them 81

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 81

6/05/11 11:33 AM

in jail and next morning get them, because everyone of them had blond hair and blue eyes. I laughed—the police were picking the poor buggers up and the Norwegians couldn’t explain. The policeman couldn’t understand them so the only thing he could do was say, ‘Well, you’ve got to go to jail.’ They wanted me to join the basketball team, but I didn’t—I wasn’t staying long enough. I wasn’t into that sort of thing, so that was it. I’m not sure what Desmond did, I think he got a bit of work at the wharf because he used to follow up the shipping a lot in those days—lumping. I think he did a little bit of lumping for a short time because they got picked up as casuals. After that we were back in Hedland and he worked the boats on the wharf there a little bit, and I still had a job at the Esplanade. He bought this old Ford V8 and he was talking about going back east and I said, ‘Would you like me to come?’ We decided we’d like to both go together. The Ford was a nice car; it was in fairly good condition when we bought it. We went all the way from Port Hedland, all round the east coast and up to Mary Kathleen in Queensland. We both worked together—you know, how you team up? We went down from Port Hedland to Marble Bar and then on to Kalgoorlie. That was when the Queen came to Kalgoorlie in 1954—we saw her there. I thought of looking up my mother’s family there but I didn’t find them. I didn’t know where to look for them, we didn’t catch up with them then. We camped on the way because it was cheaper for us. There’s bitumen now, but in those days it was dirt road all the way, and 82

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 82

6/05/11 11:33 AM

across the Nullarbor

when we went over the Nullarbor, I think our first stopover was Eucla, on the border. It was the old telegraph station—we stopped there, and in that time you could walk down to the beach. There was a little old jetty running out to sea and normal traffic for that time and era, you know, people coming and going across the Nullarbor, but there wouldn’t have been as many big trucks as there are today. That old Ford, she motored across the Nullarbor no problems. We carried plenty of water and fuel and whatever we needed for the road. We always did, anyway—used to the bush; it makes you do this. We went from there to Mildura in Victoria. We were there for a little while, picking grapes for sultanas and raisins for making cakes and things. They were drying them on the racks there. After we’d finished picking grapes at Mildura we went down to Kyabram, up the Murray, picking tomatoes for sauce. We’d pick tomatoes and leave them on the side of the road along the farm for the trucks to pick up. They were in old timber boxes. The crates were stacked up on the side of the road for the carrier to pick up to take to the factory. By the time the trucks arrived, all the juice was running out—the flies had blown them and all the maggots were coming out of them. They were real ripe tomatoes, you see, and they go off quick. And they were going to the markets for tomato sauce! No-one knows about the tomato sauce—I do! It put me off for a while. When the season was getting finished, we decided to head off further east to Lightning Ridge in New South Wales. We spent a few days mucking around there looking for opal and talking to 83

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 83

6/05/11 11:33 AM

the old people. Then we left and went across to Canberra. In Canberra, Parliament House was already finished but they were still building the War Memorial. We went to have a look at the Memorial and I also had a look at the Lower and Upper House. I think the Lower House had wine coloured carpets and everything in it, and the Upper House was sort of a royal blue. The main thing that stuck in my mind was the big War Memorial. It was good to go and see that. It was the first and last time I’d been to Canberra. It’s altered now. At that time, back in the fifties, it was not a very big town. Anyway, we went to Brisbane. It was cold. I nearly froze going up through the ranges into Brisbane! It was snowing on the Snowy Mountains. Desmond wanted me to go across and meet his sister. We stayed with her for a little while but she was a funny woman. I don’t think she approved of me being with Desmond, but it didn’t matter. We went picking strawberries for a while, then we headed up the coast to Rockhampton. We had a look at how to mine sapphires at Anakie, then over to Cloncurry and on to Mary Kathleen. Mary Kathleen was a little uranium town that was just starting when I arrived. We stopped off there and camped in the bush under a tree. There was no place for married couples around the area—we weren’t married but we were a declared married couple, we were together—and we camped over away from the town. We had our camp and I used to walk over and work in the single men’s mess and he used to go to work at the mine. The mine was developing and they were building new houses and 84

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 84

6/05/11 11:33 AM

across the Nullarbor

landscaping. By the time we left, it must have been two or three months, it was starting to look really nice. I was clearing the tables, filling up the pepper, salt, sauce bottles and sugar bowls. I just washed all the silver and crockery, like cups and silver. That’s what I had to do and put them all on the bench where the men would come along and pick up a tray, plate, knife or whatever, pick up the food and then go and sit down. I left with a good reference. I saved while I was there and I made big money! The best thing that ever happened to me was travelling around the country. When I got to Mary Kathleen, I was experienced enough to be able to cope. It was good and I was quite happy about that.

When I left home I had to let my mother know where I was. I had to sit down to write and let them know I was okay, especially Mum because she’d be worried. Desmond used to help me quite a bit with that sort of thing. Once I’d caught up with them and they knew where I was, it was alright. But I used to say in my letter, ‘Tell my mother not to write, I won’t be there. I’ll write and let her know from wherever I am.’ And then my longest stop was at Mary Kathleen and I must have written to them and let them know. Next thing I had a telegram to say that my father had passed away. I didn’t go home, I just acknowledged the telegram and said I’d be on my way over. They give you time off when there’s a 85

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 85

6/05/11 11:33 AM

death in the family—I got a day off or something. We were ready to leave by then and so we headed back west. By this time we’d sold the Ford and we got this Chev van. We had bunks in it on both sides—that was good. So we headed off. Went to Alice Springs first, then we went up and had a look at Darwin, and then we headed inland. No bitumen roads then. I remember one stretch of road from Katherine to Wave Hill—could be Wave Hill—it was bulldust, and if you stopped, you stopped. You could see the bulldust like water, rolling along in front of you. You had to stay in low gear till you got out of the ruts. So we pushed on through that and out into hard country. We called into Broome—it was only a tiny little place, not like it is today—it was a nice little place then. Very quiet, and Cable Beach was bush! That was in the mid-fifties. It was beautiful—we camped out there. You go there today, it’s all a blimmin’ big tourist complex. When I went up there just four years back I had a look and I was disgusted with it! When I’d been working at Hedland I’d started putting my money in the Bank of New South Wales, and then when I went east I stayed with that bank. By the time I got back, I had three hundred pounds in my bank. That was big money then.

When I came to Port Hedland, my mother was remarried to a guy called Alan Naismith. After Dad died she’d been down at Kalgoorlie and she got married. Roy told me later that she got 86

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 86

6/05/11 11:33 AM

across the Nullarbor

Naismith out of Kalgoorlie jail to marry him. Apparently Uncle Phil and Aunty Edna were the witnesses at the wedding. All the rest of the family had their names changed to Naismith straight away—I was the only one still called Burgess. Anyway they were in Port Hedland and I run into them there and got to know them again. That’s when Desmond met them. He didn’t know whether he liked them or not. I used to tell him how I was brought up, I was quite open about myself with him. Not long after I came home, me, my mother and my sisters were all in the shower room, and Mum was complaining about this thing on her breast. Her skin was a little darker than mine, and you could see this black lump, and it was sort of bleeding. I didn’t know know much about cancer, and out of the blue I said, ‘Mum, it looks like cancer.’ I never said any more. She complained it was sore but she said, ‘Oh, it’ll be right, it’ll go away.’ I hadn’t had a blue with Mum before that, but I had a blue with her soon after. There was my mother, Alan Naismith, Uncle Harry, Edna, Barbara and Roy—well, Roy was only a kid. There were things going on in the family that I didn’t like. Uncle Harry, Mum’s brother, was playing up with my sister Barbara, and Mum more or less encouraged it. If she wanted to protect Barbara, she would have stopped it right away. As soon as Dad died, Harry came right up north with my mother; next thing it was him and Barbara together. He was about forty then—Barbara was only young, about fifteen. I was quite shocked and I said something. I can’t remember what it was, but it was for the best—not to hurt anyone, but to 87

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 87

6/05/11 11:33 AM

explain that it wasn’t right. And soon as I said it, I got in the shit over it. They all ganged up on me, so I said, ‘Right, get out. It’s my place, get out. If you want to do those things, get out, leave me alone.’ Desmond and I were staying in a little tent in the caravan park. He wasn’t there. That’s when I had a blue with Mum.

After that, Desmond and I went prospecting out in the bush around Wodgina, near Mt Frisco. We were out digging beryl and collecting tantalite. Tantalite was a pound-a-pound—that was during the later end of the fifties, and beryl was so much a fortyfour gallon drum, it was good money. We spent quite a long time there. When we first got back to Hedland we sold the Chev, and the people we sold it to rolled the thing a couple of days later on the causeway going out of Hedland. Went over the side, drunk. The causeway was quite narrow on the old road, and if you’re drunk you could go over the side easy. There was nothing wrong with the old girl—it was a fairly steady old bus. We’d driven it all the way back from Queensland, bulldust and all. We bought an old A-model Ford because we couldn’t cope with the sandy creeks with the big Chev. The Ford was only a little light thing, we could pick it up out of the sand. We carted quite a bit of beryl and tantalite in on that little old thing. We made a little shelter out there in the bush and it was quite comfortable. We came into town once a fortnight or once a week with a load 88

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 88

6/05/11 11:33 AM

across the Nullarbor

of stuff, when it was selling well. We could sell the beryl locally or send it off. Tantalite, well we used to sell it to Richardson’s in Hedland. After the rains I used to go along all the little washes and pick the tantalite up in handfuls, like picking peas. I used to fill up a good-sized fruit tin and that was good money. It was a pound-apound and tantalite was a hell of a weight. If you had a tin, there’d be about three or four pound in it, probably more because it’s so heavy. If I had two nice big fruit tins full, I made over my wages for the fortnight! Well and truly! Some beryl was in feldspar at Mt Frisco, it was very hard feldspar. We used to have a Pionjar, that’s a little machine with a motor on it to drive the drills, to put holes and explosives in. Like the little Kanga today, but instead of being electric it was driven by petrol. There was a lot of alluvial beryl. If you could come across it, you could dig for quite a long time in just loose dirt and get several drums out of it and that was good. No hard work! I was always interested in minerals, all my life—even when I was a little kid. If opportunity had come my way I would have liked to have learned to become a geologist. As time went on, I started reading mineral books and different things, and I just learnt from that and from people telling and advising me. I learnt a lot when I was prospecting and if anyone talked about minerals I could sit down and talk minerals with them. In those days there were not many people in the area. If we needed explosives we used to buy it from Elders in Port Hedland, they used to stock it. All of us used to—we didn’t take big cases 89

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 89

6/05/11 11:33 AM

of it out, we only just took what we needed. I used to sit down and make up the caps and put them in the gel ready to put in the ground. I was a little bit nervous doing it. You have to make sure when you do pick up the cap and put the fuse in, that it’s clean. When you do put the fuse in, it should go in properly and then, when you clip it, don’t clip it too far back or it’ll explode. Make sure you clip it off toward the top, so that it doesn’t go off, that’s all. You have to be careful! Nobody showed me, I just did it—my father was a prospector and a miner. I’m not afraid of it. It’s not dangerous if you know what you’re doing. There were agents in Port Hedland that used to buy the stuff from us. Richardson was the main agent there and he used to buy the beryl and tantalite from us, and then it would be exported. It went mainly for hardening—they used to use it for the rockets and things—flux, hardening. Aboriginal people prospected out around there too. McLeod led the mob and they used to get the best of the pickings. They were in front of us and they used to go along and take all the good stuff from on top. They never dug for it; they took all the top surface stuff and left what we got behind. But we still did alright behind them, so it was good. A lot of the Aboriginals used to mix the iron and tantalite because they both look very much alike. So when they sold it, old Angus Richardson, he got caught out quite a few times. But he started to catch up then—he used to pay them not too much money for it in the end because it was rubbish. Suddenly the bottom fell out the market—some other country came up with better stuff, and that was that. We went back into 90

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 90

6/05/11 11:33 AM

across the Nullarbor

Hedland and I got a job at the Esplanade Hotel again. They had no cook and they asked me if I’d take over the cooking. I’d never done it in my life, and I had to order stuff and everything for the kitchen. I had to get instructions from the first person that was there, for orders and what they usually cooked for tea, breakfast and lunch, and work from that. I did do well, surprisingly. It was hard—I did it, though, and then the guy I was working for, he left and another guy took over and he put me off. He said, ‘I’ve got a cook, don’t worry about it, you’re finished.’ I said, ‘Okay, fair enough.’ And blow me down, it was only a fortnight when he came back to me and asked me if I’d come back cooking at the Esplanade. I said, ‘No way! There’s no way I’ll go back. I was there in the first place, I was put off, I’m not going back.’ By then I was working at the Pier Hotel and I never wanted to go back.

I was working at the Pier and my sister Edna was working at the Esplanade at the same time. Mum and them were out in the bush but Mum used to come in; she was sick by this time. While we were out in the bush prospecting, Mum’s cancer got worse and she ended up in hospital in Perth and had her breast taken off. She came back and went out bush again, dogging, donkey shooting and mustering cattle with the rest of the family. But she ended up back in the old hospital at Port Hedland again. On Anzac Day, 1959, another young Aboriginal lady who was working with me at the Pier was going to have a baby. She 91

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 91

6/05/11 11:33 AM

was pretty big and she said, ‘I’m going up to the hospital.’ I said, ‘Well hang on, I’ll go up and see Mum.’ She was in hospital up there and something told me to go. So that night I had a chance when she was on her own to talk to her. I apologised and made amends and she accepted. She was very sick by this time—on her deathbed. Mum and I were partners or mates and we parted as good friends. I was the last person to speak to her that night. Next morning I got word at the hotel that she’d died. The rest of them in the family blamed me. They reckoned that by me going to see her, she’d died, and they held it against me. They wouldn’t even talk to me. They just blackballed me for a long time. Edna in particular. She went against me and for years she hardly spoke to me. I’ve got back with my youngest sister and my brother, I’ve made amends there. With Barbara, we were naturally friends, but my brother and I, well, we were brother and sister. He understood once he’d gotten older. But that’s how things went. I went to the funeral but the trouble was, when I went I was numb. Everyone else was carrying on sobbing, crying and Lordknows-what, and I was the only one that didn’t have that sadness there. I miss Mum but I didn’t have that sort of sadness they had. Something’s come and gone in my life. I miss my brother, Dougie and I still feel sadness over him today, but I didn’t miss my mother and father as much. I don’t know, maybe because of the way they treated me. But I was glad I had the chance to go back and apologise to her. I thought about it and something told me to go back and see her before it was too late. And the following night at the Pier, 92

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 92

6/05/11 11:33 AM

across the Nullarbor

I was asleep, the room was shut and something woke me up. Somebody put their cold hand on my face—I still remember that. As clear as day. I don’t know what it was, whether it was my mother accepting my apology or just something. You know, when you’re asleep and somebody puts a cold hand on your cheek? I felt it, I woke up and there was nobody in the room. This is hard to believe, isn’t it? I’ve tried to tell people and they don’t believe me. It was strange, it was the strangest thing in my life. I keep on thinking to myself, that could have been my mother, just accepting me again. About that time Edna met up with her husband. I was working at the Pier and she was working at the Esplanade and she used to be jealous of me—she thought I might be running away with her bloke. She didn’t like me very much because I was the last person to see my mother the night before she died, and she held that against me. We didn’t get on at all and it wasn’t till quite a few years later that I found out why she felt so bitter. My aunty was close to Mum, so she knew most of what went on and she told me later, that while I was away from the family, Edna got seduced by the same person as me. They let her go with him and she got pregnant, didn’t she? She had a child to George Shotter and Mum adopted the child out. That made Edna very bitter. I feel for Edna because Mum should have never done what she did to her. I never talk much about it but it wasn’t really our fault, mostly it was my parents, and him, too. I tried to tell my father and mother about him—to be careful with the rest of the girls because they were younger. I was only trying to protect their wellbeing, but 93

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 93

6/05/11 11:33 AM

they wouldn’t listen to me. Mum ruined Edna’s life. My mother and father weren’t very good at doing the right thing by us. A lot that happened to us should never have happened. It could’ve been avoided.

When I was travelling around with Desmond I learnt to drive. When I got on an open highway where there’s not much traffic I used to drive quite a bit myself. By the time I got back over to the west, I was driving really good, and I had to go for my driver’s licence. By this time I’d bought a little jeep, left-hand drive, for three hundred pounds I’d saved up. I’d decided to get my licence in Hedland. I went around to the police station and said, ‘I want to pick up my driver’s licence.’ I told him I’d been driving for quite a long time. He said, ‘Alright.’ He took me for a run around the town and the one mistake I made was not changing down on a bit of slope, to go up. So he made me go around again and I did it right the next time. Another thing he taught me, was not to leave my bus parked without it being in low gear and the handbrake on. I haven’t forgotten. So I done well on that one! Me and another little girl called Ju—I can’t think of her other name—after I knocked off work we used to jump in the jeep, drive out to the beach at Pretty Pool and go for a swim out there. I was starting to find my feet then and feeling good about myself. By this time I was wanting to have a family and settle down. I’d had a miscarriage, I lost a lot of blood. I went along to the 94

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 94

6/05/11 11:33 AM

across the Nullarbor

hospital in Port Hedland and asked the doctor, ‘Why can’t I get pregnant?’ He said, ‘Nothing wrong with you, not a thing wrong with you.’ I think there was some way that God was telling me that I’m not to have children till I’ve come to a certain age in life. That’s all I can put it down to. I wanted to settle down in Carnarvon about that time. I’d already been to Carnarvon and I liked it.You could get on a farm down there and take up a farmlet, start a home, but Desmond wasn’t keen—he didn’t want to settle down. I was working in town and he was doing nothing, and I wasn’t very happy about this. He was still living at the camping ground and I was living-in at the Pier. One thing led to the other and we ended up having a blue. He got jealous and he gave me a belting. I could have put him in jail—I thought about it—but I didn’t because I thought it wasn’t worth my while. I think he got jealous of somebody else and he belted me up as well. We had a big blue and then we split up. I got very hurt. I got hurt very badly then. It was a long time before I got over it because we’d been together for a long time. That broke my heart for a while, as well as Mum passing on, and the others rejecting me because they reckoned it was because of me. After Mum died, I went and saw Desmond and I tried to make up, but it was too late. We were already separated and he wanted to go back east—he had his plane fare. He shipped off back over to Queensland, and that’s the last I seen him. And then next thing, after he’d gone, I found out I was pregnant. I was still in Port Hedland and I got in touch with him and he said, ‘I’ll see 95

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 95

6/05/11 11:33 AM

you in New Zealand.’ He never made any specific place where we were going to meet and I never caught up with him—I could never find where he was. I still think about him, too.

96

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 96

6/05/11 11:33 AM

motherhood

motherhood

After Desmond had gone, I pulled the pin at the Pier Hotel. I told them I was going through a lot of stress—I lost Desmond and my mother, and I was in a lot of grief. I was nearly a nervous wreck and I wanted to follow Desmond to Perth to find him again. The people I was working for at the Pier were really nice—their family name was Wood—they didn’t want me to leave but I said, ‘I’ve got to go, I’ve got to get away.’ So they gave me a good reference. They were leaving too, and they told me where they were going and said, ‘Anytime you want a job, you’ve always got a job with us.’ I left there with a clean record and good references. After I had the blue with Desmond, I sold my little army jeep for three hundred pounds and got my money back. I wanted to look for Desmond. He was going to New Zealand, so I went after 97

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 97

6/05/11 11:33 AM

him. I drove down to Perth at Christmas 1960, with a couple I knew. They had trouble with the gearbox of this old Vauxhall car. Me and his wife used to take turns holding it in gear when he was travelling. So when we got to Onslow he decided it’d be best if I caught the bus to Perth, so I got down to Perth on the bus, spent Christmas in Perth and flew to Sydney on New Year’s Eve. I flew from Perth to Sydney and I booked into a big posh hotel like I’d never been in my life. Room service, own shower and toilet, telephones—everything you could want. Real posh suite I booked into! I was on my own. I daren’t go down the street because I’d get lost, so I booked for a feed to be sent up to me and I stayed there. I rung Desmond’s sister and asked where he was but she wouldn’t tell me. Anyway, I had to get out—I had to get the taxi to catch the plane to New Zealand. I got off the plane in Auckland and booked into the Australia Hotel. It was right in the middle of Auckland, and I went around to the employment bureau and got myself a job over the bridge. When I was there, they’d just finished building the bridge and all the Aussies over there were having a shot at the Kiwis about how their ‘coathanger’ wasn’t as big as ours! I was working as a kitchenmaid. You could walk from the back of the hotel down to the beach and you could see little islands out to sea. I worked there for quite a while and I was starting to get sick with the baby. I was already sick but it was getting worse. While I was there, the girls said to me, ‘Come swimming.’ I said, ‘Swimming! I’ve just come from Port Hedland in Western Australia—from the roasting.’ I was shivering and they were full 98

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 98

6/05/11 11:33 AM

motherhood

of beans. For them it was warm, for me it was freezing. There was a notice on the foreshore not to eat any oysters because they were polluted, and you couldn’t fish or anything. In the staff rooms they had carpets. Daytime it was alright—night-time, bloody fleas come in your bed. I never knew about this and I wondered what these things were. So I decided I’d fix them—I got some flea powder to put in my sheets and blankets but it didn’t help, they still came back. I was bitten from fleas. I gave that job away, got another in the lolly factory and worked there for a little while—lollies made like cigarettes. I’d be sitting at the belt cutting these little lollies and the girl at the end would be packing them. I was there for a while. I pulled the pin and I decided I wanted to go home—I was getting homesick. I could have stayed there because people wanted me to stay. I had good Kiwi friends. They used to come, get me, take me here, take me there and when I said I was going home, they didn’t want me to go. I said, ‘I’ve got to go home.’ I was homesick and it was a terrible feeling. I was yearning for the smell of the bush. The smell of spinifex and gum trees when it rained. I wanted to be back where I came from. I used to buy a bottle of eucalyptus and put a bit on my handkerchief to sniff to try to satisfy myself. It helped a little bit. I pulled the pin in Auckland and had a trip on the bus down to Wellington. I was feeling homesick and sick from the baby, so I got the plane back to Brisbane and decided to go and find out about Desmond. I came back to the nearest point where I could find him and went and saw his sister, but she didn’t want to know 99

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 99

6/05/11 11:33 AM

me. I did her no wrong, but she wouldn’t tell me and I thought that was really cruel. I asked Welfare to help me to get in touch with him but they wouldn’t help. I was in Brisbane for a year and a half on my own. I had no-one. I went to clinics for check-ups, but not much because I couldn’t afford to. Apart from that I had no support from anybody at that time when I went to have him. I was all on my own. I had to get to the hospital and do all the things that had to be done, on my own. It was lonely, that’s for sure—it was very hard on me. I was staying at an old boarding house when I was waiting to have him. I couldn’t go to work and I couldn’t go anywhere as I hadn’t enough money. When I went into labour, I had to get over on my own steam to the hospital. I went by tram all the way from the middle of the city. I was in labour, but it took me nearly a week before I had him. I was nearly thirty years of age, mind you. I was a fair age. I was slow in labour, so they put me in hospital and I was there for nearly a week. I was about six or seven stories up and I used to look out of the window. I wanted to jump out and get rid of my life. I was so fed up and lonely as well. I was carrying a baby and when I looked into the future I didn’t know where I was going to end up. I nearly went over the side there. It’s a terrible thing when you’re having a baby and you’re on your own. I felt like I wanted to jump over the flaming verandah, finish myself, but something told me not to and I just pushed on. I had to organise how I was going to keep him and prepare myself to cope with it. 100

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 100

6/05/11 11:33 AM

motherhood

I had my son—I had a battle having him. When I went in to have the baby, I remember having a young doctor come in, a trainee, and they gave me chloroform on a bit of rag. He said, ‘Do this and you won’t feel anything.’ They’d pull it away and they’d be trying to tell me to push or some bullshit! Anyway, I put it back over and I had this notion halfway through to lift my hands. I lifted my hand and the girl said, ‘Put your hand down.’ That was right in the middle. I was pretty well going into it blind. I was brave! Anyway, I had him and they took him away from me because at that time they had talked me into adopting him. I didn’t see him straight away—they said it was a boy and I wasn’t allowed to see him. So they took me to the adoption ward. All these bloody old matrons down that way—real sergeant majors, they were. It was a funny old hospital with fairly wide halls, and when you walked down the wards, in the centre that was where they used to sit. And if you were going down they’d just pull you up. Real old bitches! They flung me in there and next day the adoption mob came along. By this time I’d had a good think. My body was telling me no. They said to me, ’You want to adopt the baby?’ And I said, ’No! No way I want to adopt the baby.’ I felt proud. It’s your first baby—you feel as if you’ve won a million. I felt that good about it and not being able to see him, hurt. So when they come along with the adoption papers, I said no. They said, ’How’re you going to keep him?’ I said, ’I’ll keep him, don’t worry about it. I can manage to look after him.’ 101

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 101

6/05/11 11:33 AM

The adoption people were talking to me before I had him, trying to talk me into it, and after I’d had him, I didn’t feel I could give up a part of myself. He was the only thing I had and I wanted to hang on to him. And I chased them! I told them to get out, I didn’t want to part with my son. If I had’ve been home when I had him, my mother would’ve probably done the same thing as she did with Edna. I didn’t want to give up my son. I tried to, you know. But I couldn’t give him away, he was a part of my body—it was like somebody coming and cutting my right arm off. I went without a lot to keep him. I had it hard. So I said, ‘I want to see my baby.’ I got dressed and I started heading up the ward and I said to this old matron, ‘I’d like to see my baby.’ She said, ‘No, you’re not going to see your baby.’ ‘I’m going to see my son—it’s my son. I’m going to go and see him and you can’t stop me.’ So I marched up there and there was nothing she could do about it. ‘I’m not adopting my son, no-one’s taking my son from me, he’s mine, I want to see him.’ I hadn’t seen him up till then. Anyway, I got to see him and it wasn’t long after that I was on my way home. When I had my son they stopped me from having milk, so I was only feeding him by bottle. They gave me a little book to show me how to feed the baby and tell me how to look after him. I had to go down to the clinic and get the baby’s needles, and weigh the baby. I’ve still got that little book at home and I’ve still got his little band he had clipped to him. I’d not long had him and I came down with measles. I went to Brisbane hospital to get some treatment and all they did was 102

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 102

6/05/11 11:33 AM

motherhood

tell me to go home and go to bed. I nearly died. I was on my own and I had to rely on the people that were next to me in the flats for help.

I named my baby after his father and registered him under my surname, Burgess. I never found his father, never heard any more about where he was. He’d probably be dead now, he was ten years older than me. His sister knew he had a son but whether she told him, that’s another question. The way she was towards me, she probably wouldn’t have told him. But I took the baby to show her and told her it was Desmond’s son. After Dennis was born, I was up at the children’s health centre at Brisbane hospital—the place for little babies, where they get weighed and checked up on their health and things—and I just come out of there and I was walking along the front of the hospital and I saw this man in front of me. See, I’d been in the bush—I’d know the bush people. It stands out—we all stand out in the city. I saw him and I tried to catch up because I wanted to go back down to the bush, away from the city, where I could live properly. Believe it or not, it was my future husband—I hadn’t met him then. And he was that quick because he’d been in the navy and he walked very fast, I couldn’t even make it. He went down and a tram just stopped, and the trams in Brisbane in those days were fast, and he just disappeared. When I finally came home, back over to Kalgoorlie, where my folks were, I run into him there. 103

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 103

6/05/11 11:33 AM

After I got on my feet I walked for miles in Brisbane, carrying Dennis and looking for work. I had him on my arm and I used to go up to the Social Welfare office every day and report before they would give you any money. One day I went up to the Welfare and reported in. I had Dennis with me, and I walked all day. I had another girl with me and the two of us went together. She had to give up in the end. I walked all day, baby on my shoulder, for miles looking for work. When I got back I had to report to the office with the references from every place I tried. When I got home my feet were throbbing and I had to sit with them in a dish of hot water to get relief, I was so tired. I was staying at an old boarding house in Brisbane. I wanted to get a job out in the west of Queensland. I wanted to get back to the bush because I knew once I was in the bush I would get work. I could get better help because people in the bush were different from city people. The city was like a jungle to me, it was frightening. It wasn’t my style because there was nothing in the city for me. I went into a farming office and got a job. I had the job offered to me. As soon as they knew I was single and had a baby, they didn’t want me out in the bush. They wouldn’t allow it on the stations because I was single and they wouldn’t allow that in the bush. In the meantime I got onto this other job. I had a job at the big laundry in Brisbane. It was good money and I knew I could do it. I had everything fixed except my birth certificate. So I wrote away to Births and Deaths in Perth. Next thing a letter comes back to say that there was no such name as mine. Is your mother alive, 104

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 104

6/05/11 11:33 AM

motherhood

and your father? Right away, I had the feeling that I didn’t have a name. I felt terrible about it and it hurt. I lost the job that I really needed. That was how I found out that there was something I didn’t know about my family. I stayed in Brisbane until I did get work. In the end I got a job at Golden Circle cannery. I used to get up early in the morning, take Dennis to a creche, rush over and catch the flaming train that’d be packed like sardines. So I stuck that out for a little while and I was getting good money. I was trimming pineapples for the cannery. The pineapples used to come in one end. Before they hit the belt they used to go through a barker—to take all the bark off—and then they’d come down on the belt. I was on the lines trimming pineapple and you had to be smart. There’d be a row of six girls on the line. I’d be about the middle and I had to be quick because they’d grab my share of the pineapples to be trimmed. We had a little bow-shaped knife and we used to trim the pips and little bits and pieces that’s left on, then put it down and it’d go on down the belt. They’d go along the belt and go through a slicer and into cans. You’d hear them all rattling like soldiers marching. The bark used to go to a vat and then pineapple juice was made from the bark. That was all crushed, strained and that was our pineapple juice. I stuck there for about a month or something, then one day I collapsed in the lines; I just went down like a sack of potatoes. I was taken to the first-aid place and told to rest. ‘What happened?’ I said. ‘The fumes, the smell of the acid and noise got to you.’ So 105

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 105

6/05/11 11:33 AM

I went back for a little while and then I just had to give it away. Good money but it was only seasonal. So anyway, I got another job in an old people’s place, tending old people and I couldn’t stick it. So I got out of that. I had just enough money to put a deposit on an old Chev car. This guy teamed up with me, I wasn’t interested in him but he teamed up with me anyway. I got him to get me out of Brisbane because I couldn’t drive in the city! So I got out, and a hell of a way down the track, then I split. I drove away and left him behind on the side of the road! I stopped for fuel in a little town on the border of New South Wales and Queensland and a policeman was there. He looked at the car and he looked at me. It was just myself and the little one. He said, ‘Where do you come from?’ I told him I was going back to Western Australia and he said, ‘You’re Aboriginal.’ I said, ‘No, no I’m not,’ but I knew by then I was. The moment they find out you’re Aboriginal you get kicked around, so I was putting that off. I was looking for a place to stop, so he told me where to go, ‘If you go down to the tennis courts—but if you’re there after sun-up, I’ll lock you up.’ So I was gone! I’d already started to suspect by then. I’d already had the problem over the birth certificate, then this little incident with the policeman. He looked me in the eyes and he said, ‘You’re Aboriginal. All Aboriginals and people who come from Aboriginal backgrounds have brown eyes.’ But the shock was not so much knowing what background I came from, it was knowing I had no name. That was the worst part of my life, knowing I had no name. 106

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 106

6/05/11 11:33 AM

motherhood

In those days, I could get killed and nobody’d know who I was because there’d be no registered name. I was an alien in my own country.

I got away down to a little farming town on the border of New South Wales and Queensland and I run out of petrol and money, so I left the car behind and got a job as a jillaroo, relieving for another girl. I knew what I was doing. I worked there to get some extra money and in the meantime I took crook with gallstones. I didn’t know what it was but I had a hell of a pain. Anyway, it’d go off and I didn’t take any more notice of it. Then the jillaroo came back and I had to get going. By then I had a little money saved and the old couple that was on that farm were kind enough to give me a little extra, to get a fare on the train home to Kalgoorlie. I had just enough for the baby and for the fare. So I paid my fare and bought the baby’s food out of it. A little bit of what the baby had kept me going. I was living cheap. I was near a week on the line, travelling, because you had to get off and wait for the next train coming in. That was my longest train ride, coming back from the east to the west. I came all the way from the south-east border of Queensland. I had to go to Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide—not Port Augusta, the other place next to Port Augusta. When I got to Kalgoorlie I went around to an old cheap boarding house and I booked myself in there. Somehow I talked 107

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 107

6/05/11 11:33 AM

the landlady into letting me stop a couple of nights until I found my aunty because I hardly had any money. In Kalgoorlie I had to go around to Social Security and get some money. I was allowed so much money for myself and the baby—or for the baby and a little bit for myself. I think that’s how I paid the rent too. I went to look for my Aunty Mary. I looked her up because I was always in the good books with her. She always thought the world of me. Aunty Mary was my mother’s younger sister. She was a fairly dark, stout, scruffy-looking big woman. I always remember her fuzzy hair—stuck out like a mop all the way around. When I spent time with her and with some of the other relations, I started to realise that I was well and truly Aboriginal. I never dared to ask her about my parents, and my name, though at that stage I was still wondering about it. So to make some money, I stayed and went out pulling sandalwood with her in the bush. I don’t know what got into her but there was one day we came into town and I had a blue with her. It wasn’t my fault, she always had blues with people. She had all these sheep heads that someone gave to her and she cleaned up but they still had the eyes and the bot-fly maggots. I was watching her. She made a big stew and she wanted me to eat this. I wasn’t feeling right in the stomach and I put her off. I said, ’Look, Aunty Mary I’m not hungry.’ She said, ‘You don’t want my bloody stew. It’s not good enough.’ ‘No, it’s not that. I don’t feel like eating, I don’t feel right.’ But she got stuck into me and she pulled off my blouse, and after scrambling with her, I got hold of her. She was a big woman 108

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 108

6/05/11 11:33 AM

motherhood

and I was right in the doorway and I had her down. There was a clothes iron, a big old heavy clothes iron that used to sit on the stove to get hot, near the door, and I lifted it getting ready to hit her. I thought, ‘No, it’s not worth it,’ and put it down. I let her up and then just a few minutes later another coloured lady come along and said, ‘Come on, Flo, it’s no use you staying here, Aunty Mary won’t leave you alone.’ She took me around to some place in Kalgoorlie and put me up. Aunty Mary was a character. When I was out sandlewooding with her in the bush she had a lot of my Mum’s photographs. She was sitting in the shade and was showing me all these photographs. I knew in my own mind not to ask her because I knew what she was like. I was planning to pinch these photographs soon as I had a chance. I was going to pinch them and just leave, so that she’d know what happened. And it never happened. I had the blue at the house in Kalgoorlie and that was the end of that. I wished to hell I grabbed some of them before it happened. While I was staying with Aunty Mary, I wrote to Alan Naismith who was on a station not far away, asking if he needed a cook . He wrote back and said, ‘Yes, we need a housekeeper, and so-and-so.’ I read between the lines that he was wanting a woman to sleep with, so I pulled the pin. That put me right off him completely. He was using the family and not doing the family any good. He was just abusing them in his own way and I never had any respect for him. So I ended up staying in this little boarding house behind the Grand Hotel in Kalgoorlie. I’d put Dennis down to sleep and 109

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 109

6/05/11 11:33 AM

I thought I’d just go over and have a beer. The boarding house was only a few yards through the back fence, so I went over to the beer garden. I met up with an old guy called Tucker who was related to the family. I was sitting there with Uncle—we called him Uncle—having a beer and I met Jim. He was in Brisbane when I was over there, but I didn’t meet him till I came back to Kalgoorlie. Jim and his mate, Jimmy, were sitting across from us having a beer. I was enjoying the company. The two Jimmies were tossing pennies, seeing who would take me out! I didn’t know about it but apparently my Jimmy lost. The other Jimmy won and I didn’t want to go with him, so my Jimmy came across, sat down, had a yarn, a few beers and asked me if I’d go with him. So I went with him instead of the other one. I ended up with Corrigan. It was a good thing because the other Jimmy already had a family somewhere in Australia. My Jimmy was legally separated from his wife in Scotland and he had no ties over here. He asked me to go with him and I spent the next twenty years with Jim.

110

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 110

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Jimmy

Jimmy

So I met up with Jim and we were together twenty years, but only married eight or nine years. He was separated from his wife over in Scotland—he was Scottish—and he couldn’t get married—she wouldn’t divorce him. Jessie Mackie, her name was. Jim and Jessie didn’t get on at all. Far as I could gather from Jimmy, she was a very religious woman—she liked churches and Jim didn’t. He was signed in the British navy for twenty-one years, but he only did ten—he was put out because of war injuries. He told me that he was on a ship and it was hit. The ship was going down, so he jumped into the water and the explosions caused a lot of damage to the men. He got hurt internally. He went back home, but it never worked out. So he sold up and any money he had, he left for his son to be educated because his son was only little. His 111

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 111

6/05/11 11:33 AM

son over there was named after him. We had that in common, a son each. Mine was still with me, but Jim left his in Scotland with his mother because he was too little. I heard last that his son had hotels or eating joints in Scotland. I told these ones here, ‘You’ve got a brother back in Scotland named after your Dad.’ They know about it. Young Jimmy could be about fifty or sixty, now. After Jim left the navy he used to work on the merchant ships. He was on one old ship that come out to Port Hedland, when I was working there. I was still with Desmond at this time. I remember the old ship—I’ve got photographs of it, this old iron thing. He jumped ship there because it was full of rats and the boys were full of crabs. When they jumped ship and come on shore, all the rest of the people in Port Hedland copped it. Jim went to Nullagine from there and was working on an old goldmine for a while. Then he went north up to Queensland and he was up around there on the stations. Jim was working on the Nullarbor before I met him, on the railway line there. He used to drink a lot. Jim and his mate had been in some pub and had quite a few drinks. They were going home, and there was a creek and two roads going into it. Jim said to his mate, ‘Don’t go on the right side, I’ll be going through that way.’ The bugger did, he went on Jim’s side and parked the government Landrover right in the bottom of the bloody creek. What did Jim do? He come along and landed one Landrover on top of the other. So that was his licence gone. It was up to the magistrate in Kalgoorlie if he was to ever get it back, and he never bothered. So the whole time I spent with Jim I did all the driving. 112

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 112

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Jimmy

Jim was ten or eleven years older than I was, a little bit taller and a fairly strong-built person. We used to have our blues but he was a good man. Wherever we were, we were always together working or going somewhere, we were rarely apart. All those years, nobody knew that we weren’t married. We were man and wife in a sense and I made sure all the kids were registered in his name. We had a hard life together, too, him and I.

When I fell pregnant with Billy, my second son, we went down to Esperance and I ran into Uncle Phil, Aunty Edna and Aunty Ruth. All of that mob down there were my mother’s people that I hadn’t seen for years. Jim knew them before I met him because when he was out on the Nullarbor they were there. He probably knew more about them than what I did at the time! I told him who they were and he said, ‘I know who they are.’ Jim was working on the silos and I told him that Uncle Phil was on the silos. Jim ran into Uncle Phil and brought him home to where we were staying at some little old flats we were renting. He came home one afternoon with this big tall man and he said, ‘I’ve got a stranger to see you.’ I didn’t know what to say, you know. A total stranger coming in that I hadn’t seen for years. He was much thinner and only a young bloke when I last saw him. At Esperance he was grown up, mature and quite a big man. That’s why I didn’t recognise him properly. I stayed in Esperance and had Billy. We were there over nine months. I was in the railway camp and Jim took off down the line 113

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 113

6/05/11 11:33 AM

to go to work. I said, ‘Alright, if I’m not here tonight when you come home, you know where I’ll be.’ I left Dennis with a lady I knew. She was only a few yards up from us and she had a big old house. I packed my little case and walked up to the hospital. It was a mile to the hospital and by the time I got there I was bleeding. I walked in and said to the matron, ‘I’m ready to have the baby.’ She said, ‘Where did you come from? You walked from the camp?’ She knew I was at the camp. I said, ‘Yeah. I’m alright, I know what I’m doing, I’m ready to have the baby.’ So I had Billy that day after walking a mile. It was a brand new hospital and he was the heaviest born in that hospital. He was just an ounce or something off ten pound. We stayed on there for a little while, and I said to Jim I was getting fed up with the cold. We were living in a tent on the railway line. I said, ‘We’ll try and get an old car and we’ll head up north. You don’t need tons of blankets and jumpers to live and you don’t need tons of blimmin’ food. You can always get meat out of the bush.’ Money was coming, too, because Port Hedland was ready to start dredging by this time. So we decided to get this old Vanguard packed up, come up to Kalgoorlie and somehow we got across to Geraldton. We made a stop there. We had a little job out on the railway line to get a bit more money to get on to the next place. Went out to a little place called Nanson and stayed there for a fortnight and got the first pay. Then we packed up again and went to Carnarvon. We were going good with the old Vanguard, except I couldn’t change the 114

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 114

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Jimmy

gears because the selectors were worn. To get going we used to hop out and pull it into gear to get it started. We got to Carnarvon and went pulling stakes for beans. That was bloody hard work! They were in hard mud—clay—and if the ground wasn’t wet enough you’d have to pull them out of the clay. Sometimes, Jim used to wear big hard boots and he used to give them a real hard kick, and either they’d come loose or break off. We had to strip all the bean stems off with our hands. We did that for about a month and, while we were there, we stayed down the river at an old farm. By this stage Billy was starting to walk—he must have been about eighteen months. We used to go down the lines in the car. It was cool weather and we used to leave Billy in the back of the old Vanguard—it was like a van. We made a place for him and we would take Dennis with us down the line because the two of them in there would get into mischief. I had a little black case about a foot wide, with two catches on it and I had all my personal belongings in it. Because we used to camp at the farm, I didn’t want to leave anything personal behind. I had it sitting in the back of the car and I said to Jim, ‘Billy’ll get into that.’ And he said, ‘No, he can’t get into that.’ I had a bottle of strychnine in it. I put it in the car and we left Billy in there. When I went back down I saw this little case open and there’s Billy sucking the end of the bloody poison bottle. I went cold. I grabbed him, walked back up the line and said, ‘Jim, he’s bloody gotten into that box alright. He’s sucking the end of the strychnine.’ So we decided we’d wait to see if he got sick. No sign of 115

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 115

6/05/11 11:33 AM

him getting sick, so we were lucky. The bottle was clean and it hadn’t been opened. But that was the worst fright I ever had with the kids! Another day, he started eating green tomatoes and got sick. I thought, Oh God, what next? So I stuck my finger down his throat and made him vomit because hospitals were dear in those days. We were around Carnarvon about a month or something. I wanted to stay and hobby farm but Jim didn’t want to, he wanted to go north. He’d heard about work in Port Hedland, dredging for the harbours, for Finucane Island. So we went up to Hedland. First we went to Millstream, fencing, while we were waiting for the work to start at Hedland. And by this time I fell pregnant with my daughter Margaret. At Millstream there was some blokes cutting blackheart posts—Gig Hill, Kenny Reid and an old Aboriginal bloke named Willywally. They were carting the posts over from the Fortescue, from the foot of the ranges to the west of us, and at Millstream they put down the strainer holes which were three-feet deep. I had to dip down and scrape the bottom of the hole out. With an extension, I used the last little saucepan in a pack and lay down on my belly to scoop the bottom of the holes out. I used to roll the posts along. They were a foot thick and heavy. I’d get on the other end and tip them in, stand them up straight and hammer all the dirt around it. It was heavy work! Jim used to come along behind me with a hand auger, and he had to put five or six holes through the wood to put the wires through. I had some little drums to cart water and I was getting 116

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 116

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Jimmy

the water from the shearing shed, and I said to Jim, ‘Ask Ray Kennedy to bring us out a forty-four-gallon drum of drinking water on the trailer.’ You see they had a big trailer and we had none. Anyway, time lapsed and we worked on. We went to the shearing shed and Kennedy was there. He came out from the homestead with a twelve-gallon drum and he said, ‘Here, cart your own water.’ It was right in the middle of the summer and by this time, I was quite sick with Margaret. So I said to Jim, ‘For all the money we’re getting from Ray Kennedy, get him to pay us off. I’m not carting water and working out in the heat in the condition I’m in, to please him.’ And that was it—we pulled the pin and went to Wittenoom.

My sister Barbara was at Millstream working at Kangiangi outcamp, with our Uncle Harry, and we called in there. We found out they were out there because Uncle Phil in Esperance was telling us they were there, and they shouldn’t have been together. I think they knew that once I went up there they might be in trouble because Jim was with me. I stayed there for a while with them at Christmas in 1964. Roy was dogging around that area, too, so he came in now and then. Jim and Roy were supposed to come back up from a trip to Roebourne, but Christmas came and went. I was just about ready to go down and get them. We had the old Vanguard we’d brought from Esperance, and the brakes weren’t the best, so I was saying to my sister, ‘If Jim isn’t back up by 117

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 117

6/05/11 11:33 AM

lunchtime I should be going down to see what’s wrong.’ They could have broken down or anything. But he turned up, so I didn’t have to go down the big hill to Roebourne. We remained there for a few more days and then we went to Wittenoom. Barbara and Harry remained on at Kangiangi for a considerable time. While we were with them, we heard what had happened to the family after Mum died. Naismith stayed with Barbara and Roy, and they used to muster cattle around Millstream and the Chichester Ranges. Lots of times he used to come into the hotel. When he left and went back to Kalgoorlie he left a bill to Roy. My brother took years to pay that bill off. Naismith was supposed to be the one that was responsible for them but he wasn’t, he just left them. Barbara asked me what I thought about her going with Harry before she had children. She asked me what was the best thing and I said to her, ‘Well, Barbara, you’ve got a mind of your own, don’t ask me. What you do is your own business.’ That was it. She made her own choices. I never said to her not to and I never told her to do so. We both shook hands and I said, ‘Barbara, you’re my sister and from now on we’re friends. We’re good friends and that’s it. I’ll never go against you. I’ll never argue with you or any other thing.’ And that remained till the day she died. We had our blues, Barbara, Harry and I, on different occasions, but they seemed to mend themselves in funny ways. Not so much with Barbara but with Harry most of the time. My uncle, I was down on him for some things, you know, at different times. He used to be silly, the things he’d come up with. I had a blue 118

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 118

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Jimmy

with him one night out in the bush. Remember the little iron tables and chairs you used to get for the kids? I hung one around his neck one night. I made him feel sore! He backed down after that and left me alone then, he treated me with respect.

Jim worked at Wittenoom in the mines for four weeks. The first fortnight we were living down on the golf links under a tree. The golf links were made out of asbestos tailings and we used to roll out our swags on it. We knew nothing, then, about asbestos. We had no stretchers, we had to lay on the ground and sleep. When I rolled the swag up in the morning, I used to brush the threads of asbestos off with my hand, so it didn’t roll in amongst the gear. The second fortnight we managed to get a company house in town. It had a fridge, some chairs, a table and a bed. We didn’t have much money because Kennedy didn’t pay us much. We’d not long come from Carnarvon and we were only working our way on whatever we could find. The next pay Jim got, he come home with a penny in his envelope. One penny! The rest of the money went on the house and stores booked-up. I looked at Jim and I said, ‘This is no good. We can’t live here on this. We’re going to have to book-up more food for the next fortnight and we’ve got rent for the house, and it’ll be the same thing again.’ I knew an old friend in Wittenoom at the time, a friend of my family and I went down and saw him and asked him if he would lend me some money. He gave me ten pounds and that was all we 119

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 119

6/05/11 11:33 AM

had to our name, except our vehicle and a few items we had for camping. I went down to the garage and bought some fuel, oil, and a fanbelt. I got one pound change, so I decided to head off to Port Hedland. We had trouble starting the bus and we had trouble with a tyre on the way out. We got to Hedland and got a place to stay. We knew some people and stayed in an old scrapyard. It was free for me to stay there and just caretake. There was another lady there but she was staying up the back in a big caravan, and I stayed down the front in the dwellings. It was hot as hell and I was still crook with Margaret. Jim got a job rigging for a while, until the unions decided that they wouldn’t recognise his rope splicing. His British navy splicing was different from Australian navy splicing, and they wouldn’t recognise his. They wanted Australian splicing. It wasn’t much different, just the opposite way around. Anyway, they put him off. He got a job as foreman on the dredge, the Alameda, until Margaret was born. I had it a bit rough having Margie. Jim had to go to work on the Alameda, and there was no-one there with me. I was getting bad pains and luckily I knew somebody in the caravan park who could look after the family. I went into hospital and the midwife was Scottish, and I don’t think she’d had any children. She was trying to make me have Margaret too soon. I was ready, but not ready enough. I said to her, ‘Look, leave me alone. I’ll let you know when I’m ready.’ But she kept on. I said, ‘Get the doctor.’ The doctor came and I told the doctor what I wanted. ‘Give me something to make me sleep—not too soundly, just enough to put me 120

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 120

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Jimmy

off for a little while, and when I’m ready, I’ll ring the bell.’ So I went to sleep. I don’t know how long I slept for but I woke up, rung the bell and said, ‘I’m ready now.’ And I had Margaret. They cleaned me up and put me in the ward with my little daughter. I was so tired but I nursed her, and was proud of her. I couldn’t even feed her. I just went straight off to sleep. I must have slept all that day and that night. I was asleep for a while. When Margaret was born, Jim wanted to go and wet her head because she was the only daughter. They wouldn’t give him time off, but being Scottish and stubborn, he took his own time off, lost his job and got on the bloody beer. He got drunk and arrived at the hospital. By this time I was pretty weak and down. Jim said, ‘I’ve got a name for our daughter.’ ‘What?’ I said. ‘Alameda,’ he said. ‘What? She’ll never live it down when she grows up! No, I want to call her Margaret.’ So Jimmy decided to give Margaret a second name, his grandmother’s name, McKerra. Margaret McKerra. In later years when Margaret grew up, I said to her, ‘How would you have liked your dad calling you Alameda?’ And she wasn’t very happy about that! When I went to register Margaret in Hedland, they asked my father’s name and I said it was Burgess. I already knew that wasn’t his name, but I didn’t have any other name to give them. The Clerk of Courts looked at me and said, ‘Your father’s a duffer and his name isn’t Burgess.’ I looked at him and replied, ‘Well, I can’t help it if he’s a duffer. I’m his daughter and I can’t do much 121

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 121

6/05/11 11:33 AM

about it!’ That’s when I woke up. They already found out what he was. My father always taught me to be honest, even if he was a duffer. I could see his point—he used to duff meat for us kids in the bush. I don’t blame him for that, I respect him for that—I admire him for it. But I didn’t know that other people realised our name wasn’t Burgess. So Margie was registered and I said to Jim, ‘I need money.’ And he said, ’Go up to the bank, we’ve got twenty pounds in the bank.’ He was getting big money and I didn’t know what he did with it. I went up to the bank and I was twenty pounds in the red! He’d spent it all. By this time we’d sold the old Vanguard and bought this old army Chev. So we packed up. We went out to the Yule and Turner Rivers. They were putting down bores for the first water supply for Hedland and the guy’s name was Joe Strain. My brother was out there working, so we stayed there for a few weeks but things weren’t working out. There was no money, no boss, nothing. Roy was pulling the pin, so we decided to roll up our swag and go back to Roebourne. There was no housing and nowhere to stay around Roebourne. We stayed out at Cossack, sleeping on the beach. We knew Bill Armstrong; he was the union rep and he got Jim a job on the state shipping. That was good, so we decided we had to look for a place to live. We’d gone out to Port Samson to see Fred Macleod, the wharfinger, to get Jim put on the list. On the way out I said, ‘You watch for the biggest gum trees on the road out and we’ll make our camp.’ So on the way back we stopped and had a look at the only three big, bloodwood trees on the side of the road, and 122

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 122

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Jimmy

chased some cows out and that was where we camped. There was just grass and spinifex. We put an old sheet of iron between the trees for a table, to keep things off the ground. As time went by I kept cleaning, raking and tidying up, and then we built a little bush shack. It was really nice and comfortable, and warm. We used iron for the walls but the shade area was the shade of the gum tree, and I had a little brush fence around it. I had a kerosene fridge and an old wood stove. I had everything I wanted and was quite happy. We were all happy in that camp because when the little creek would run, we used to jump in and have a swim. It was really great. We had a storm there and the rain came up and water ran all over the ground, it was two foot high. One night it rained, not a cyclone but a heavy storm. We were only under canvas and all on camp stretchers. There was water just below the bed line! Everything was getting washed down. Jimmy thought there was a snake running around his leg and it was a flaming piece of rubber. It was so funny. The rain watered everything and next morning it was gone in an hour or so. Next day the ground was beautiful, clean, nice and moist, and everything was coming green. That was great, yeah, it was beaut. That was when we started to build our little hut so that when the rain did come we had more comfort. Otherwise we were right in the environment: rain, wind, dust, everything. It was good, we enjoyed it.

123

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 123

6/05/11 11:33 AM

When we were at the old camp on Roebourne side of Wickham, one hot summer morning, Jimmy and I were fishing from Pope’s Nose Bridge just before Point Samson. Jimmy was on the bottom side which went to the open sea and I was on the top side—this is like a big lagoon. The tide was coming in and we had heavy lines as we were hoping to catch big cod. The bait was smaller fish we’d caught at Tony Mia. We always kept some smaller ones for bait. I was fishing away and taking no notice. Next thing he is singing out to me. ‘Flo! Flo! I’ve caught one. Come and give me a hand.’ This was mixed up with a few of his choice words. At that time he’d lost his second finger in an accident and his hand was all bandaged up. I wondered what he was dragging. I thought he was dragging a kangaroo along. He had caught this big fish. When I held it up it was above my head to the ground, and it had a huge girth on it. He had pulled it in, and was trying to carry it over to where I was. It was a bloody big Spanish mackerel. We took it home and measured it. I was five foot six and Jimmy was taller than me; it was longer than that. It would have been nearly seven feet in length from the tip of its tail to its nose. This was too big for us to handle—we never could have eaten it, and we didn’t have a fridge to fit it in, or a pot big enough. We only had a little kerosene fridge and that was already full, so we gave it to Max McKay in the pub in Roebourne. I believe he had it stuffed and mounted. I hear people talking about big mackerel now, and I’ll bet there was never one caught that was that big. I would like to know the weight of it and the size. We did weigh it on old-type spring 124

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 124

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Jimmy

scales with a hook on it, but I’ve forgotten what it was. It is a shame I didn’t keep a record of it, like a photograph. In those days we didn’t think of anything like that. We were so busy trying to make a living, let alone muck around and worry about fish sizes.

When I got the camp going, I used to go out hunting for goats in the hills. That’s when I really learnt to shoot. I ended up good, too. I had a single shot .22, and I used to line the goats up and drop them running along the hill. Sometimes I’d wound them and have to chase them over the hills. We used to keep the meat for ourselves and I used to do the skins up to make rugs. The tourists used to come and they would say, ‘Oh, what a lovely skin!’ I thought that was alright, so I started doing them up and when they came, sold them. I used to get about twenty to thirty for different skins. I was earning a few dollars there. For the tanning I made little pegs out of thick wire cut on a slant so they would be sharp to hammer into the ground, then turned the heads over to make a loop. It would then be easy to push something like a screw-driver or a heavy piece of wire through and just pull them back out when the skins were dried. Before I pegged them I put salt on them. Just the ordinary cooking salt you buy from the shop. This had to be done quick as I could before they went rotten. When they dried out, instead of pulling them up, I took a sharp knife and cut them square as I wanted them, then with a little sharp knife peeled all the meat and tissue 125

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 125

6/05/11 11:33 AM

off the front. When that was done there might be a little tissue left so I scraped it with glass, mostly from broken bottles. I had to take great care not to cut myself. I did this scraping so there was no tissue left and the skin would be pliable. After the skins were dried, for most of them, I would wash the hairy front with scented soap, like you would wash a carpet. This was to stop the goaty smell, then they got laid out flat to dry again. To finish off I polished the back with tan boot polish. I found this to be the best way, as it is oily and helps to keep the skin pliable. One day I got a beautiful angora goat. He had long silvery hair. I scrubbed and scrubbed with soap. When washed the hide was really beautiful, but it had still had a billygoat smell. People said ‘You will never get the smell out of it,’ but I did, by using hair shampoo, then brushing it with an old hair brush. When it was finished, I was paid sixty bucks for it. Billy and Margaret just ran wild while we were working. One day a willy-willy came along. I could hear it coming. It sounded like claps of thunder through the bushes and dry trees,. I ran like hell, and I just grabbed them and got up in the truck with them. The willy-willy could just pick them up. An old Aboriginal lady told me she had a little silky terrier and a willy-willy picked it up and dumped it. I don’t know if it killed it. I met a couple of old Scottish blokes at the camp there. Jim used to go in, meet the guys and have a beer. Jim must have met Jock McLeish at the pub, that’s about the only place I could think of because I never went into the pub very much. He brought Jock out for a meal and somewhere to stay. Jock was working on 126

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 126

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Jimmy

the boats with Jim and, when he came to my place, I was still carrying my youngest son. I was about five or six months gone, I’d just gone off to bed and they blew in. Jim came and dug me out of bed to cook a feed. Next day I said to him, ’Look, next time they come, let them cook their own tucker. I’m not getting out of bloody bed to cook tucker for anyone who comes along at all hours of the night.’ So it never happened again. That’s when I first met Jock and he’s been a part of the family ever since. The other one was Andy Peacock, he was working at Mardie Station, fencing. He used to come in and spend a little time in Roebourne and go back. He went from here over to Nullagine chasing gold. He used to write real good letters to Jim about the big gold strike he wanted to find. Before Andy left his eyes were getting bad. Jim asked him, ‘What’ll you do if your eyes get crook?’ He said, ‘I won’t be any burden to anyone.’ We were in Wittenoom fencing and he came back from Mardie and was going over to Nullagine. He called through and saw us and it was the last time I saw him. Next thing we heard, he’d destroyed his dog, burnt his caravan and shot himself. He was so independent, he didn’t want to be a burden on anyone. He always talked about a brother he had in Darwin and a sister back in Scotland called Effie. Any money or gold left, he sent that to her and the rest he destroyed. He used to tell us stories about when Wittenoom was opening up. He used to have horse teams and drag the ore out of the gorges there. And when he had a motor car years ago, he used to tow it around with a horse! When he went to Mardie we kept in touch and, Jimmy used 127

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 127

6/05/11 11:33 AM

to write to him. In those days mail was hard and took a long time because there were old dirt tracks. It took two days to get from Hedland to Roebourne. It was rough with corrugations and dusty. When Andy was on at Mardie he used to send in for his groceries from Four Square, which was the Gus Jager’s store. On his grocery order he would have all the food he needed. When he wanted to buy some whisky he and Gus Jager had a code. He used to write down so many bottles of sauce. Bobby was born when I was staying out at the camp there. I was well on the way with Bobby. I decided I was getting too close to having Bobby and I said to Jim, ‘We’ll have to get some meat and fill the fridge up, so that you’ll have meat while I’m in hospital, for the kids and yourself.’ Jim was working, so he couldn’t go out and anyway, he couldn’t drive. So I went out hunting kangaroos, towards Pyramid Station and came back with nothing. Went out towards Cherratta, we got a little emu for meat. On the way in, I hit a bump and that night I said to the old man, ’I’m on the way.’ You know, you start bleeding. Jimmy had to work a boat, so I had to find a place for Margaret, Dennis and Billy. I gave Margaret to a family to look after and I took Billy and Dennis into Roebourne and left them with the Todds. They were camped out just behind the mill. I camped there too, once. How I got in there was with Victor Whitby and Maureen.They were courting and coming back from fishing at the Pope’s Nose. I hopped on the side of the road before they arrived, thumbing for a lift. Jim had already gone to work and I wasn’t going to drive in, I left the bus at home. I thumbed a lift and they picked 128

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 128

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Jimmy

me up. I said, ‘Drop the kids off at Lyla’s, and take me straight to the hospital in Roebourne.’ Lyla and her husband knew they were going to look after Dennis and Billy, I’d already asked them. I said, ‘I’ve got to dump them, I’ve got to go up to the hospital quick.’ So that’s where I had Bobby, in Roebourne. At no time did Jimmy ever take me to the hospital to have a baby, and it took him a while to get to see me afterwards. I didn’t have it easy, getting up to hospital to have my children. There was no-one there to take me except friends or somebody I knew. I had it tough. I never had no-one to mollycoddle me. I got there and got home the best way I could. Jim liked to drink a lot, too, so I had to control the money. It’s a bastard thing to say, but if I didn’t control it, we’d have nothing. The drinking happened when he was working dredging in Port Hedland. I was staying in the caravan park and he was on the dredge working nights. I never saw him for days and I never got very much money from him. He wet Margaret’s head when she was born and he got put off. So I just shut off because any money he got, if I could get my hands on it before he got to the pub, I spent it on food or things for the house. That’s why I never had hardly any money in the bank. I made sure that the family was provided. If I had it in the bank, he’d get around me to take it out. You know what husbands do, they coax saying, ‘Give me money,’ and they end up bloody blowing it against the wall in the pub. Most of the time I was looking after my children and I also had to be the backbone of the home. Whenever something needed to be done or we had to go somewhere, I was the one who had to 129

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 129

6/05/11 11:33 AM

go and do it. When I was living just out from Roebourne, on the road going to Point Samson, I used to cart water and then I used to go out in the hills and hunt for meat. I was lucky to have Jim. He’d be home and he’d look after the kids for me while I was out, and if I couldn’t carry the meat back I used to go out and pick it up with the vehicle. Then sometimes at night, when I was very tired, the baby’d be crying, I had to be the one that’d be there to make sure he was okay. It got me down. I’ve been in tears many a time over the kids. I’ve been that way that I’ve needed the hospital and the doctor would say, ‘Look you need a break from the family. Get somebody to look after the kids.’ Well I had nobody to look after them. Working on the boats loading asbestos, Jimmy was a hundred foot down in the holds with no drawing fans and it was like a smoke fog in there. It was asbestos dust. What chance did he have of missing it? He used to come home all grey and you could scrape it off his skin and his clothes were full of it. And same when it used to be in the mines. They used to work in little stopes, no water and they used to be dragging big jack-hammers up in there to drill holes and catching all the dust with no mask. So you were completely exposed to all that asbestos dust.

Then down comes the new shire clerk that was at Roebourne. He was an Irishman and he was crooked. We had a miner’s homestead lease at the camp by this time and we paid for everything. He 130

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 130

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Jimmy

came down and he said, ‘You’ve got to get out, there’s going to be a township built here.’ He didn’t even give us time to do anything. There was nowhere else to go—it was our home and we didn’t want to go. Down he come again when Jim wasn’t home, this time threatening to blimmin’ come down and shoot me off the place. I said to Jimmy, ‘We’ve got to go. I don’t know what we’re going to do but we’ve got to get out of here.’ It was a beautiful little spot. When we packed up we were so down, all of us were nearly in tears because we were getting put out of the only bit of a home we’d had. We’d been there three years by then. We went away up bush and when I came back down a few years later to look at the beautiful camp I had, it was a real mess. The people that came after us took away soil, tons of soil, from it and made a real mess of it. I was so disgusted with them, you know.They were using it for trail bikes and they never kept it tidy. And that broke my heart. That put me right where I am today. I should have had a beautiful home and I ended up with nothing because I was chased out. Where we were camped was miles from the site of  Wickham, so they didn’t need to chase us at all, they should have left us alone. The eldest boy was going to school. The school bus used to go from Point Samson, pick him up and take him to school at Roebourne, and drop him off at the door. I had a good camp, but I had no water and we were expecting the water pipeline to go through. It went past a quarter of a mile down, on the flats, and we were planning to pay for a small water line to be put there, and turn the place into a little farmlet. By this time, 131

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 131

6/05/11 11:33 AM

I’d be working and making a lot of money because there was new industry starting. We’d have been right, if the shire clerk at that time had left us alone. Everyone that knew us at Roebourne reckoned that he should have never put us out of there but it was too late, we had gone bush. My front teeth were crook and I had to get a filling. There was nowhere to get a filling, only Perth. There weren’t any dentists up here then. I couldn’t afford to go to Perth, so the only thing I could do was go off to see Dr Manton. ‘You should get a filling.’ I said, ’Where can I get a filling, doctor, there’s nowhere within miles of this place. The only thing is pull it.’ It used to ache. That’s how I lost my front tooth, I had it pulled out at Roebourne hospital. I felt embarrassed because I always felt that somebody’d think that I’d been hit in the mouth and had it knocked out. You know, you’re too frightened to smile. I went away from where there was big money and everything, and went bush. We had the old Chev and I also had a little old Holden panel van. Real nice little car. I had to get my sister Barbara to help me to shift because Jim didn’t drive. She’d drive one and I’d drive the other one. I had to do that, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to move.

132

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 132

6/05/11 11:33 AM

bush to town

bush to town

We were on Mt Florance for a while and that’s when we bought the Bedford—the Chev broke down.The guy that had Mt Florance, Peter Richardson—his brother had Pippingarra Station—said, ‘There’s a little Bedford for sale, comes from Pippingarra and it’s in fairly good nick.’ It must have been eight or nine hundred dollars at the time. It was lots of money to us in those days. Jim and some friends went up and brought it back, and that’s when we moved from Mt Florance. We weren’t getting enough work. My brother-in-law, Harry, had a job and we went partners with him, fencing. We had a blue with Barbara and Harry, they split from us and we were left on our own. We moved to Mulga Downs and we worked three years for eighty dollars a mile to pay that truck off and put another motor 133

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 133

6/05/11 11:33 AM

in it. We daren’t leave the fencing until we’d paid it off. I think Jim said we did three hundred miles of sheep fencing on that place, in three years. We asked for a hundred dollars from Jimmy Hewson and he said, ‘Leave the top wire out, then.’ That was the most convenient one, that was the easiest of the lot. If he’d said leave the bottom one, I’d have agreed. So we decided we’d still carry on putting the top and bottom wire in and we were only getting eighty dollars a mile, right up to the day we left. That station belonged to Hancock and Wright, he was making millions and we were getting eighty dollars a mile. My eldest boy was going to school in Roebourne when I left and went bush. He was the first of my family to go to school in Wittenoom. I had him staying with some people in town and they used to send him off to school. Most of the time we spent out in the bush, fencing.

When we were up in the bush we ran into Barbara and Harry again. They weren’t getting much wage as things wasn’t going right, so we coaxed them into working with the Agricultural Protection Board (APB). They were still on Kangiangi with some horses, and took the job dogging together. Instead of horses, they supplied you with a vehicle, fuel and everything to go, working on a government wage. So they stayed with the government. Barbara was still with the APB when she died in 1990. Barbara was a good shot with a rifle and a good horsewoman. 134

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 134

6/05/11 11:33 AM

bush to town

She was very good with cattle, too. She would do a man’s job with the cattle when she was a bit younger. At Millstream she used to go out mustering cattle and it was nothing for her to throw a rope around a bull, cut it, brand it and let it go. Barbara was a very practical girl, though she looked little and delicate. She wrote ballads—I haven’t any of those, but I have a cutting of her in the paper. She lived a rough life. Barbara never had anything fancy. She was very plain. At one stage we’d finished a contract, got paid our cheque and went in to Wittenoom for stores. You could still get stores, fuel and things there. Jim took crook—it was the Hong Kong flu. We went back home and he was too crook to work. Instead of me taking Jim to the old doctor, I went into town, bought up all the medicines for flu and a bottle of whisky. What I used to do was make an egg flip with whisky in it. Right alongside Jim’s bed we had the kerosene fridge. So I used to make up this big jug of milk and whisky, and Jim could reach in, get it and have a drink. That fed him and kept liquids in him. I’d just rub his back and front, give him some aspirins and let him rest. Jim was crook and he reckoned it was like a haze in front of him, he couldn’t see. Me and Billy, who was only a toddler, used to go down the line, take the rest of them with us and do a bit of fencing. Then the next thing, the rest of us got a touch of it, but I didn’t get as crook as he did. I wasn’t game to get up and drive pickets like I normally did, you know. And the rest of the family got chickenpox. They’d already had the vaccination needles, but they still got chickenpox. 135

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 135

6/05/11 11:33 AM

In the meantime, this Aboriginal lady got crook. I knew her well and they were looking for us to see if I could help them. They couldn’t find us, so she’d gone to old Dr Oxer. He was in town and instead of treating her flu, he gave her the vaccination needle on top of the flu and it killed her. A good thing I didn’t take Jim in or we’d have had the same problem. If there was something in Wittenoom going, we went along. If we were in, we’d go to the dance or we’d go to the pictures. We never completely cut ourselves off from things like that, like my parents did. We kept in contact with the outside world. We always associated with people because it’s damn lonely otherwise. I wanted my kids to be educated because I didn’t get the chance of going to school.

I was always looking for minerals. When I was working on the outer paddocks at the Chichester Ranges on the fence lines, I always had my eyes on the ground. I did find a couple of things I liked very much. I found some nice ribbon stone and some rose quartz. I picked up a nice piece of rose quartz, but I could never find where it came from. Somebody might have carted it and dropped it on the fence line. My grandparents were old prospectors and miners, and my parents and I seem to have that built-in thing. But Jim didn’t have much patience for prospecting. He wasn’t interested. While we were up there we got onto some wild honey, or 136

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 136

6/05/11 11:33 AM

bush to town

what they call sugarbag. That was one bushtucker we never had when I was growing up. We used to get the little wild bees, little tiny ones, they’re harmless poor little things. You know where they’ve gone down in the trunk of the tree, and you cut out a blaze off the side and there’s a hollow. We got the honey out through the side, then you don’t have to cut down the whole tree. We were anxious to eat it at the time because people were telling us about taking the sugarbag. We got onto a couple and cut them out of the tree. It was yummy! On Mulga Downs, on top of the Chichesters, it was really cloudy one morning. It got really dark by mid-afternoon and I told the old man that it was time to get home and seek better shelter for ourselves. We only had two old bits of tents. The tents leaked like anything, so we decided to sling everything on the old truck. We knew this cave was up there because we’d already been up and had a look up that way. We decided to get up there and get in the cave. The old man, soon as we got there said, ‘Before we move in, I’ll fix it, in case there’s some snakes.’ So he made up a small plug of gelignite and threw it into the back of the cave. That was alright, but it lit the kangaroo manure. See, kangaroo manure in those caves, over the years they’d been camping in it and it must have been a hell of a depth. The manure caught fire and it smouldered all night. The next morning was sunshine, so we went down back to the camp and back to work. We thought it was a cyclone coming. You don’t mind for your own self, but when you’ve got little kids they’ve got to be sheltered. After three years fencing on Mulga Downs I was so fed up. I 137

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 137

6/05/11 11:33 AM

said to Jimmy, ‘Look, I don’t want to go back out there.’ I was sick of it. I was working, had my family to look after and was carting water, pickets and wire. Every evening when I’d come home, I’d have to bath the family and get a meal cooked. I was so tired, I just wanted to give it away. We came down to Roebourne again and we got a job. We had nowhere to stay and the caravan parks were overflowing. Doug Stowerby was on Warrambie and we ran into him and asked if we could stay at the racecourse. He said yes, so we stayed out at the racecourse at Roebourne. The first job we got was cleaning up the new transportable units for the single men. We had to clean the tapes off the windows, all the dust out of the inside, and get them ready. It was big money, it was more than what we were making off fencing. We were staying in the old jockey quarters when a cyclone hit. There were two young chaps from Juna Downs and they had nowhere to stay in Roebourne, so they stayed with us. We were all in this tiny building, about ten foot by twenty foot, with all my gear and my family. It was the strongest building at the racecourse at the time and in the same building we had mice and snakes. The old man was standing against the back wall and there was a snake coming up the wall, along the piping. It was a brown snake. So I killed it but it was not only him there, there was another one in that same place. There was a hole in the doorway under the concrete and that’s where they come to look for a feed. It was full of mice. Gee, it was rough. That particular cyclone stripped the roof straight off the tote 138

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 138

6/05/11 11:33 AM

bush to town

and it went over the top of where we were. We could see little pieces of tin flying like cigarette papers blowing away. We had a window facing away from the wind and we could look out towards the airport. That was the first cyclone we experienced in Roebourne and there was two cyclones together, Sheila and Sophie, in 1971. At the same time, there was a gambling thing going on at the racecourse. It was illegal and a big bloke who used to have the caravan park, Harry Broad, he was in on it, and somebody else in town. There used to be a clique of them. People used to come out while we were in our little tin place and pee along the wall outside. There was only a corrugated wall between us and the ground on the outside. I said to Jim, ‘Tell Harry Broad, get them to go over to the back of the stables, if they want to go to the toilet, not here.’ When Jim told him, he said, ‘Look, if you’re not satisfied, you know what to do.’ I said, ‘Alright, Jim, I know what to do. Come on, we’re packing up.’ I packed up and it’d started to rain by then. Big rain came, the river ran and we couldn’t go nowhere. It was dry enough for us to move out of the racecourse and up the river. We moved up to some hills and camped there, under canvas. Ooh, we was there for a month before the roads started to dry out. We tried for a house in town but there was no housing available. So the only thing we could do was roll our swag and go back to Wittenoom, and I tell you, that nearly broke my heart. I stopped over on the river at the other side near the caravan park. There used to be an old guy we knew there, Charlie Suckling and old Jock McLeish. We said 139

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 139

6/05/11 11:33 AM

goodbye to them and my heart was breaking. There was nowhere to live; they wouldn’t allow you to camp in the bush, there was no place in the caravan parks, they were all full. They chased me back to the bush with my family. I went back there and I spent another two or three years in the town of Wittenoom. There was a school there but I didn’t want to stay. I wanted to go down to Roebourne because of work. There was no work in the town. I didn’t want to go back fencing, so I hung around the town and did odd jobs for people. Not long before, the east chute in the mine where Jim used to work had caved in. And that was when they decided to close down Wittenoom and stop mining there. It had been lucky none of the fellows were working. It was on a weekend where they had previously worked that week; that’s where it sat down. There was a lot of machinery in it, like air tracks and everything. They are still sitting there. That’s the way they left it when it closed. And the town just slowly started dying. And as the town got on, the houses deteriorated. Some got burnt and had squatters camping in them.

I went back into an old state housing house. The walls were crumbling, there was no outer wall, only the lining, in this house that we moved into and we had to clean it up. The stove had the guts all rusted out of it and the flaming yard was all buffalo grass. The floors were all cracked and I had to clean it up and make it livable. 140

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 140

6/05/11 11:33 AM

bush to town

What maintenance we did, we did ourselves and that’s where we lived for two or three years. Jim got a job on the Juma Motel, which Arthur Davis was building. He was getting a bit of work and I was looking after the racecourse. I took a big pick and dug out the buffalo grass around the houses to earn a dollar gardening and I used to keep the post office and the school clean. I had a little contract to put lawn in front of the grandstand at Wittenoom racecourse. They’d cleared it all and made me put lawn in and water it. So I did the contract for twelve months and I got paid at the end of the year. I got a few dollars out of that, plus what I did around town to keep us going until we got a house in Roebourne. The kids, and all other people’s kids, used to play in the flaming dirt around the houses and that. The foundations of the houses were built up to about two or three feet and were all made out of asbestos tailings. The little buggers used to play in it, not knowing the stuff was any danger to us, you know. I decided to go to Hedland and apply for a house. By this time I was getting sick of being in Wittenoom and said to Jim, ‘We’re going to Hedland to see if we can get a house. If we don’t get a house in Roebourne, we’ll get one in Broome.’ So we headed off from Wittenoom to Hedland. We was supposed to be back the next day. I was working at the school and told them I was going to leave to go to Hedland and apply for a house. I told the headmaster I was going up as I could have trouble, and might be late getting back. He gave me time off so I drove, as I was the only one that could drive the vehicle in the family. 141

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 141

6/05/11 11:33 AM

The morning I left I felt okay but on the way to Hedland I took crook. At night we camped on one of the rivers, I think it was the Turner. I was running a hell of a temperature. Jimmy was giving me aspirins and a cool drink of water. I was boiling, yet freezing and I sat up all night. Next morning Jimmy made me a feed of bacon and eggs and made me eat it. I managed to force down a little bit and had to drive into Hedland. I stopped at Pippingarra just out of Hedland so that we could get cleaned up, it was dust roads. We didn’t stop at the homestead, we stopped at the mill and in the meantime Jimmy walked over to the homestead. He came back over with Johnny Richardson. Johnny looked at me and said, ‘Jesus, you look crook!’ I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ He said, ‘Tell you what to do—when you go into Hedland, there’s two chemists in Hedland—go around to one of the chemists, he’ll fix you up.’ I said, ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think they can fix me up.’ So anyway, everybody got ready and I drove in. When I got there, I couldn’t see, it was like a white haze. I was looking for the hospital. The old man didn’t have a licence, so I was stuck. I had to get myself to hospital and I had the family with me. The first place I went into was the hotel. The hotel and the hospital are in line with each other along the sandhill, but I was in the wrong spot. I got to the hospital, stopped there and was sitting where you wait. I said to the receptionist, ‘I want to see the doctor as soon as possible. I’m crook.’ So I sat there. They decided to put me into a little room and I was there for a while, shivering like hell. I don’t know how long I was there but the old man said, ‘I’m going down to the pub. I won’t be long.’ The .

142

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 142

6/05/11 11:33 AM

bush to town

kids were sitting in the van and I’m inside, crook as a dog. They checked me out and I told them, ‘I’ve got to take the children to some people to look after them.’ They said, ‘You aren’t going nowhere.’ I said, ‘Well, you’ll have to ring up the Esplanade Hotel and tell somebody to tell Jim to get up here and pick the kids up.’ I was just inches off death when I got to the hospital. I didn’t think I was going to come back! They gave me antibiotics, put me to bed and next morning I got up; it was just as if I’d been in a shower. Everything was saturated with perspiration but I felt better. One of my lungs collapsed and the other one would have collapsed too. Anyway, Jim must have got somebody to help him shift the bus and they went back out to Pippingarra and camped in the river, in the sand. It was quite a good camp. I was in hospital there for a week with double pneumonia. I went in there with a bit of weight and when I come out, I was like a blimmin’ matchstick. The family came in and asked me about when I was coming out. I said, ‘I don’t know,’ and decided to find out. They wouldn’t let me out unless I had somewhere to go in town. So I made an excuse I had somewhere to go and I got out of hospital. Then I went away down the blimmin’ coast and camped. I was waiting to go back to hospital before I went home. I went back and they told me everything was okay. So I went back to Wittenoom and when I got back the headmaster had two young people doing what I was doing. He said, ‘Oh, they’re doing a better job than you.’ I said, ‘Well, if they’re 143

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 143

6/05/11 11:33 AM

doing a better job than I am, keep them.’ Oh jeez, I was upset, so I really stormed out of there. Two of them were doing what I was doing. So I lost that job. I still carried on with the post office until a house was available. We were there two years before I got a house. The eldest one was going to school, Margaret and Billy were going to kindy and preschool. So a house came up. I didn’t get one in Broome, there was a housing shortage, and the housing commission in Hedland told me there was none there at that time. They said, ‘Well, you’re better off getting a house in Roebourne.’ We left the house in Wittenoom, packed up everything and then the guy on Hooley Station wanted a little bit of fencing. It was over Christmas school holidays we decided to go right out the far end of Hooley Station on the Chichester Ranges, miles from anywhere. We were working and there was wind coming up from the north-east and rain falling quite heavily. I said to Jim, ‘We’d better go over to the camp, there might be a cyclone coming.’ We had a big tarpaulin pitched out over a rope. There was nothing around it, just the fly, straight out. We just got over. We had another tarpaulin belonging to Jock McLeish with us and we tried to put it over the old Bedford. We had the tarpaulin right over, right around and down. I had a lot of rope and we tied it down all the way. We all got in the back of that. There was me, Jim, the four kids, a cat and a dog. All in the back of this old truck. We was like a Noah’s Ark. We were between two creeks. A big creek on the east side of us, a fairly deep one, and there was a wash on each side. We 144

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 144

6/05/11 11:33 AM

bush to town

thought it was high country when we camped and that it hadn’t been flooded there in yonks. It started pouring and blowing like hell. The truck was really rocking, too. It was lucky I left the old truck in gear, had the brake on so she couldn’t move. I thought if the wind come around behind her it would’ve pushed her down the hill into the creek, and we’d have gone like a ship going down! But it didn’t happen. Lucky it was daytime and old Jimmy says to me, ‘If it gets any rougher and the water rises any further, we’ll get you out and you can get up the tree. We’ll tie you on to the tree, you and the kids.’ I said, ’I don’t think so, we’ll be alright.’ So the water came a foot deep there, and the other tarp that we had pitched was nearly blown away. All our gear was blown away, we were walking around looking for some of it. When things started to settle down, we started to pack up. I said to Jim, ‘I don’t think we’ll stay out here. We’ve got to start moving to high country.’ Somehow we got out of there to the high hill country. The storms kept coming up and it was raining. I said, ‘We’ve got to get in from here, it’s too far out.’ It took us all day to go twenty mile. We used to go along on the hard country with the old Bedford. When it came to the rivers we used to build bridges across because the rivers had all been running. We’d build bridges with spinifex, bushes and bits of log and whatever we could find. I used to say to the mob, ‘All of youse get off the bus, I’ll take it across.’ I used to get far as I could back on high ground, I’d get the old girl wound up and fly across to the other side. I flew across creeks without stopping. I 145

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 145

6/05/11 11:33 AM

don’t think it even touched the blimmin’ bridge that we’d made, you know. That’s how we got back. We got right back to Hooley by doing that. On the road there were two ruts. They’d been run in that long with people going along, and the middle of the road was peaked. When we went over it with the Bedford, the deck on the back caught in the mud. So we had to get out, get under, and shovel the peak of the road out so the bus could get moving. That’s how we had to get along the road. When we was a mile and a half or something from Hooley we walked into the homestead. I said to them that we needed to get paid for being out there but they had no money. So we went back into Wittenoom. You couldn’t go on the dirt roads because they were closed. We camped in the old caravan park and waited until the roads opened. Somebody gave us a little job and we got enough fuel money to go to Roebourne when the roads opened. We come down, and camped again out at Cossack. Funniest part, we went into the old schoolhouse at Cossack. It had a roof on, then. We stopped there and we were catching and eating fish. Then a house came up and instead of sending the mail to the post office in Roebourne, they sent it to the post office in Cossack. There’s no post office in Cossack whatsoever. Anyway, I got the mail, went and checked the house out and I went back around to the housing people and said, ‘I asked for a house, not a duplex.’ They said, ‘Well, if you’re not going to take it, we’ll put you back down at the end of the list again and you’ll be three years again, waiting.’ So I had no choice. It was a three-room house I was 146

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 146

6/05/11 11:33 AM

bush to town

put into, with three boys and a girl. I said to them, ‘If there’s any chance of getting a four-room house, let me know.’ Never got one, all the years I’ve been in Roebourne. We had to put down a deposit, like a bond, so we borrowed the money. The only person we could borrow money off was Bill Armstrong, the same guy who employed Jim on the boats. I went around and said to Bill, ‘Look, I’m stuck. I need money to move into a house.’ He gave me the money and I said, ‘We’ll pay you back as soon as possible.’ We got into the house and I told him to give us time to get into the house and get started working. We moved into the house in Andover Way and Tozer Street in Roebourne, and Jim got a job working for the Roebourne Shire. There was a lady living down from us, she got to know us and she came up one day and said, ‘Do youse do fencing?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, we do fencing. At the moment, Jim is working.’ She said, ‘I want a fence around my house,’ and I said to Jim, ‘There’s someone wants a fence around a house down town.’ We went down, got this fencing job, and it was more than we got in a week’s work on Mulga Downs! We thought it was good! So Jim pulled the pin with the Shire and we went fencing. We went fencing for Homeswest and government jobs for the Shire. We was there ten or twelve years or more, fencing in Karratha, Wickham and Roebourne. It wasn’t long and Margaret was going to school. There were three of them going to school and I still had Bobby at home. Next thing he was going to school. I used to get them off to school early in the morning and go to work with Jim. At one stage the 147

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 147

6/05/11 11:33 AM

kids came home from school with nits in their hair. I was so disgusted! Jim said to me, ‘That’s nothing. Just get some kerosene, wash their hair in it and just comb it.’ So that’s what I did and it killed the nits. I washed all the bed clothing and got rid of them. I know that everyone gets it but when my kids came home from school with it, I was ashamed and embarrassed. It was terrible, disgraceful. So anyway, I got over that and, as time went on, I got used to it.

Jim wasn’t much help with the kids. He used to go crook at them but he was never hard on them. If they didn’t do it, he’d give them a whacking but he was never hard on them like my father was. He always said, ‘I was never cut out to be a father.’ He wanted family but he couldn’t accept family. Responsibility was his hardest part, you know. I spent quite a few years working with Jim. We used to work damn hard. I was doing a man-sized job. I used to go home and still do the same old routine—the kids had to be bathed, the meals had to be got, their clothing had to be ready and they had to be prepared for school early in the morning. I had no time to myself. And through having to do this with the family, I’m a better person because it made me more determined and independent, you know. I didn’t have anyone to think for me. I used to work very hard alongside of Jim. A lot of the people used to reckon, ‘Old Jimmy’d be sitting or standing smoking a 148

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 148

6/05/11 11:33 AM

bush to town

cigarette and be talking, and you’d be working.’ I can’t say much because we both worked together. That’s how I found it with him, you know. He was always a ladies man. I never took any notice of it, in the end. But he was jealous of me and that’s why I never bothered much. He was a good man, I can’t say nothing bad about him. That’s the way I want family to know him; he was a good man. The only time I enjoyed was the weekends. After I got everything done at home, I used to get out and do some fishing. We used to go out to Antonymyre and go fishing. That was the time I really enjoyed because it was away from the thought of work and everything else. Every night we used to roll the swag out and camp on the beach. During the winter months it was beautiful. Make a little shelter, a fire and the swags—it was really nice. The children enjoyed it. My daughter still goes fishing and camping, and my sons do the same thing, they haven’t changed one bit.

The fences in town were easier and quicker than on the stations. You had to put five posts in and stays, and the rest were pickets. It was just ordinary rabbit-netting wire and cable wire, and it was quick. Out of that, we’d get about three or four hundred bucks. We used to work like hell. For a little while we made good money, but most of the time it went on expenses like keeping a house, keeping the kids at school, fuel and food. We didn’t save nothing because we were only private contractors. We were only 149

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 149

6/05/11 11:33 AM

working for ourselves and from one contract to another.You might get a good contract today, say you might make a thousand dollars and probably you’d wait another two or three weeks before you had another big contract. Everyone says that living on fencing like that never saves money. We never! I could never have a day off and let Jim go and work on his own because he couldn’t drive! A lady said to me one day, ‘Do you like doing it?’ I said, ‘Yes, well if I wasn’t doing what I’m doing, I’d be stuck somewhere in somebody’s dirty old kitchen scrubbing floors, wouldn’t I?’ I was happy, but tired. I went into the hospital with a poisoned finger while I was lacing wire at Bulgarra Oval. Jim had to look after the family the best way he could and the whole time I was in that hospital all I did was sleep. It must have been a week before I woke up. I was exhausted. The girls in the hospital said, ‘Gee, you must be tired!’ I said to them, ‘I’m sorry I’m sleeping.’ They said, ‘That’s okay, you can sleep as long as you want.’ I think over the years I’ve been working, I’ve spent more time and energy in rearing my family and thinking for them than looking after my own self. Most of the time I neglected myself— my hair, my waist, just wearing an old shirt, a hat, jeans and a pair of boots. That’s all that was me. Sometimes I think how the hell I ever did it. I don’t know how I did it, but I did.

150

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 150

6/05/11 11:33 AM

bush to town

While I was still in Andover Way and Tozer Street, Barbara and Harry came down. By this time things were starting to settle. It was when we’d heard Jim’s wife in Scotland had passed away that I wanted to find out who I was. I asked Harry, ‘I want to get my name right. I’ve got a family and I don’t even know my name. I can’t get married without my right name.’ ‘Well, try under Reynolds,’ he said. Jim could write better than I could, so I got him to write off to the Births and Deaths in Perth under that name. When I heard that there was a birth certificate for a Florence Jane Reynolds, I couldn’t really believe it. I couldn’t feel as if it was really my name. If that is my birth certificate, then Florence Jane Reynolds is the only name I’ve got. I’d spent thirty years thinking I was Burgess, then another ten years or so not having a name. Even the Clerk of Courts in Hedland knew my father’s name wasn’t Burgess. By then I suspected there was another name somewhere and I couldn’t quite find out what it was. The dates seemed to be right. My mother told me my birthday was on the fifteenth of June. On my birth certificate it’s on the sixteenth of June, 1932, and I was born at King Edward Hospital, Subiaco, Perth. My father’s name was William Edward Reynolds. His name was William Edward alright, but I thought Reynolds was Mum’s family. Mum put herself down as Ella Woods, aged nineteen. Ella was her second name, she was Frances Ella. But her name was not Woods. Aunty Ruth’s married name was Heywood. Not Woods, but Heywood. Mum made the name up. 151

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 151

6/05/11 11:33 AM

When I got my birth certificate, I was very confused. I still feel it’s not my right name. Some of the things seemed to be right and other things didn’t make sense. Mum’s relations were all Reynolds, but she’d put down her name as Woods, and Dad’s name was down as Reynolds. The only way to find out was to ask. I kept asking members on my side. Some of them wouldn’t tell and Uncle Harry, he only told me that Reynolds was the name to look under. He wouldn’t tell me much about my parents. Later I managed to get my brother Dougie’s birth certificate. That had the same details as mine, so his name was Reynolds, though he never knew it. By the time I found out, I already had a son named Burgess, not knowing that my name was Reynolds. You see, they mucked my life up as well as their own. I hadn’t had much contact with Mum’s family over the years. They spent most of their time in the bush, prospecting and things like that, especially my grandparents. I think in later years they might have moved back to Kalgoorlie, but I’m not sure. There was a big gap from the time I left them when the war started, right up till I met up with some of them in Esperance in the sixties. In that time, my father did not want me to go near them. He reckoned they were no good, he tried to keep me away from them. I realised later on he was keeping me away because I’d probably find out too much about him. He didn’t want me to find out about the Aboriginal side of the family. He wanted to think he was better than that. But I more or less worked it out for myself as I got older, especially when I got to know Aunty Mary and some of them. For a while I thought 152

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 152

6/05/11 11:33 AM

bush to town

there might be some other background because if anyone looks at me they think I’ve got some Asian. But it come off the Aboriginal side. Like I said, Dad was against us playing with Aboriginals when we were kids. Years later I realised he was trying to shield us from our Aboriginal background. I started to resent it a little bit, these white men taking Aboriginal girls and having families and then just leaving them behind. I don’t know why but I’ve got over it now. I think people are more conscious about discriminating against others and saying things like, ‘You’re part-Aboriginal.’ I did resent it because I was neither one nor the other. I could not say I was European, I could not say I was Aboriginal.Yet I had to take either choice, I had to be either one or other. I always call myself the middle. I started to get to know Aunty Edna and Uncle Phil in Esperance, I had a brief acquaintance and wasn’t sure of them at that time. Then we left and come north. And then I found out they were in Hedland in the eighties. I went up there, saw them and I got to know them a little bit more. When time went on I decided to go to Kalgoorlie for their golden anniversary. A cousin in Port Hedland asked me to go down and we went because I was still trying to get to know them. Then the second time I went down, I started to ask Uncle Phil a few more questions. He wouldn’t give me many answers, he shut off and I never pushed him. I went back again and asked Aunty Edna a few more questions. Aunty Edna and I used to talk together and she used to tell me different stories. I’d ask her what happened, what went wrong and I’d tell her why I’d like to know. ’I’m getting up in years and I’d like 153

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 153

6/05/11 11:33 AM

to know what’s been happening.’ She used to tell me all these little things about my sister, when Mum got married again, what happened to Edna while I was away and she’d tell me little bits all the time.

154

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 154

6/05/11 11:33 AM

the puzzle

the puzzle

Finally I found that Dad was Mum’s uncle, her father’s brother. That was a hell of a shock to me because it’s not very good when you know you’re inbred. It makes you feel terrible. That’s what hurt me so much. Jim had always made remarks about people being inbred and when I found out I was, it was terrible. It took me a while to sort out what happened but with information here and there, I found out. It was unreal. Apparently my father was much older than my mother. She was nineteen when I was born, just like she put on my birth certificate, and he would have been nearly forty. They ran away together. That’s why they were in the north because if they’d gone back down south to where their brothers and sisters were, there’d have been big trouble from them. Their family was very unhappy 155

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 155

6/05/11 11:33 AM

about it. I think that might be what Dad and Uncle Harry had the blue about when I was a little kid. On my birth certificate it says that they were married in 1930, but that’s not right, there’s a law against it. I think it was made up as there’s no record of any marriage at the registry—we checked. So it turned out my name was Reynolds. Exactly the same name as both of them. But Dad was using a false name. He said his name was William Edward Burgess but it wasn’t. Dad used the name Borgas and it turned into Burgess, I was told. Borgas had been his mother’s maiden name—she was German. Originally, from what I can work out, the Reynolds family came from South Australia—they were pioneers. In those days there weren’t very many women so they married into the Aboriginal families. Mum’s grandfather married Margaret Bland, a Njunga woman. And that’s where they were, around Esperance for a long while—until the war broke out. I found out later from Aunty Ruth that my father’s parents had stopped him from marrying this other lady. She was a widow, Mrs Brown or something. They reckoned she wasn’t good enough for him, and from what I heard, she was quite a nice lady—a good sort of person. Anyway, they stopped my father from marrying this lady, so my mother and him ran away together. We all think it might have had something to do with my grandparents. Families become one family and bred between each other. That’s how it happened. Mum wasn’t the eldest. There were two others—one died from quinine poisoning, the other from an accident. My mother would be the next eldest and only a young girl in her teens when 156

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 156

6/05/11 11:33 AM

the puzzle

she ran off with my father, so no wonder they were upset. That old grandfather who I can remember was my father’s brother! When I found out about Mum and Dad, I started to realise why Mum was so angry when I said that Barbara and Uncle Harry shouldn’t be together. I didn’t at the time know what it was about, but now I see. It didn’t seem to worry Mum, that’s what I didn’t like about it. She was more or less encouraging it. If she wanted to protect Barbara she would have stopped it right away. Harry wouldn’t come north when my father was alive because he was going to shoot Harry. Dad was Harry’s uncle too, of course. But as soon as Dad died, Harry came right up north with my mother, and next thing it was him and Barbara together. Sometimes I feel Florence Jane Reynolds is not me because I always remember myself as Burgess. I was happy when Jim and I got married in the beginning of 1980 because it changed my name. I used to hate the name Reynolds because of what happened. Dennis, my eldest son, often went under Jim’s name’ but I hadn’t ever changed it. His registered name is Burgess and that’s no-one’s name. He does use our name, the rest of the family’s name, when he needs to because he’s still a part of family. But he’s got his registered name as well, so if he has a child he has to register it in his name. He’s quite happy to go along with the name he’s got. For a long time I felt the loss of Dougie and I found out that my youngest brother, Roy, felt bad about him, too. We don’t even have a photo of him, just a memory, you know. I didn’t even know where he was buried until Neil Shotter, George’s son, 157

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 157

6/05/11 11:33 AM

made some inquiries for me and found out he was in Karrakatta Cemetery in Perth. Roy sent off for the papers and we got a big shock; we found out that our father was buried on top of him in the same grave, and still under the name of Burgess. And more of a mystery, when he sent for the papers, he found out that Dad actually died two years later than when the family were told! It’s a real mystery, we can’t make it out. According to what I was told at the time, the family were in Meekatharra. They were living there and the youngest ones were going to school. Dad got sick, so they sent him to Perth. About Easter 1954, they got a telegram from Jim Shotter advising them that Dad had died. No-one went to the funeral and they just sent me a telegram in Mary Kathleen, telling me he’d passed away. I didn’t feel any grief, nor did the family. They were all relieved with the thought that he was gone. When they sent Dad off to Perth and got the word back to say he’d passed on, they packed up and went to Kalgoorlie. Straight after that, Mum married Naismith. I was told that he was in jail and she bailed him out to marry him. The only thing I could put it down to was she did this to put the family name right. As soon as she was married, she went down to Perth with my aunty and had the children’s names changed to Naismith, all barring mine. When I came back from over east and found them all changed to Naismith, I didn’t know it was for that reason. Roy, Edna and Barbara all ended up Naismith, and they were all Reynolds, the whole lot of them. Seeing that Naismith didn’t do 158

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 158

6/05/11 11:33 AM

the puzzle

any good to the family, it was hard on them, especially Roy, to get stuck with his name as well as his debts! So we all thought that Dad was dead in 1954, but according to the official papers, he didn’t die until October 1956. It made me feel funny, when Roy told me about it. That means he was still alive somewhere when I came back and met the family in Hedland, when Mum was married to Naismith. I said to Roy, ‘Mum must have known. I think she did.’ I think she knew more about it than any of us and she didn’t want him back, so he stayed away. He was away two years before he died. He could have been in a home, could have been anywhere. I have an idea that Edna might know a bit more because she was at home when all this happened, but if she does, she won’t tell me. Jim Shotter must have known what was going on because it was him that sent the telegram to Mum saying he was dead when he wasn’t. Jim’s dead now, so we’ll probably never know. About this time we heard that Jessie, Jim’s wife in Scotland, had passed away, and I said to him, ‘You’d better write and get the paperwork to say she passed on.’ That was in 1979. It was that next year, March 1980, we got married. I said to him, ‘That’s fine, we’ll get married, Jim. It’s not really for myself,’ I said, ‘it’s mainly for the family.’ I had to con him into this, he wasn’t keen and we went down and bought the wedding ring at Wickham. For a fortnight you had to put marriage banns up at the court in Roebourne, to let them know you’re getting married. We set a day, got cleaned up as if we’re going shopping and went up to the court. The Clerk of Courts married us and Val Cooper 159

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 159

6/05/11 11:33 AM

was our witness. We went down and had a beer at the pub, went home and nobody knew about it. We lived as a married couple and that’s what people thought we were, so it made no difference. No difference at all. When I came north I just made sure that they did call me Mrs Corrigan. And it made no difference when we got married, after twenty years together. It was just like having a cup of tea and a yarn, it was so simple. So marriage is nothing, it’s just signing a piece of paper. I automatically registered all my family in Jim’s name when they were born. When Jim passed on, to be married helped me a lot in getting his estate together because he didn’t have a will. If I hadn’t have been married, I wouldn’t have ever got the money that was due from the asbestos people.

We bought things with the money from fencing. First time I ever had a new bus in my life—I bought a little Daihatsu, a little tiny four-wheel drive. And when I first drove it down town, I felt too flash! I did! I felt out of place—I was so used to driving old bombs. People would say, ‘How’re you going with your bus?’ I’d say, ‘I feel too flash, I’d rather my old bomb.’ And we had that for a little while but there was no room in it for the family. So we decided to trade that in again and bought an old Toyota diesel. It was the worst thing I ever did. By this time fencing contracts were starting to phase out because a lot of contractors were coming north during the winter months, cleaning up all the good jobs; 160

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 160

6/05/11 11:33 AM

the puzzle

the towns were winding down and jobs were winding back. So we went on the dole then, didn’t we? Both of us. We was paying for this flaming Toyota. We got that paid off and then we decided we’d buy a caravan and move out of town. I hated the duplex I was in. It was full of cockroaches. We moved out bush for a little while, then we moved from the bush to the light industrial area in Wickham. I didn’t like it there, so we moved to the racecourse again—I had intentions of going north. My family didn’t want to go especially the second eldest boy and we were hanging around for him to make up his mind. We were there at the racecourse and Cyclone Chloe came. I came back from the hospital and went to the post office, and asked the postmaster, ‘Where’s that cyclone?’ He said, ‘Everybody in Dampier is battening down, but we don’t know where it is.‘ The wind was getting stronger, so I went back to the family. I knew some friends in town that had a big shed in the light industrial area. We got access to this big shed and put the caravan and bus in there. By this time we had an old trailer, too. The first night it was blowing and the next day in the afternoon it was getting stronger and stronger. It was a good shed, mind you. Only thing, it had no concrete floors, the front door was facing towards the wind and it had nothing to hold it when we pulled the doors together. Luckily we found a bit of three-by-two and dropped it into the catches to hold the door from blowing in, and I backed up the old Toyota against it. Towards evening, you could see the struts in the shed straining. They were pinging with the pressure. We were in the 161

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 161

6/05/11 11:33 AM

caravan, so we decided to get out of that and get in the Toyota. All the pillars on the posts in front of the shed were big square blocks. They were three feet deep in the ground. Believe it or not, the rain fell that hard and the wind blew that hard that, it blew the bloody dirt out from around the concrete all the way around the uprights and the corners. When you’d get a gust, you could see the blocks and the shed going up and down with every gust! We were sitting in the Toyota and Jimmy says to me, right when we were going through the eye of it, he said, ‘Fuck this Flo, I think we’ll get out and crawl through the back.’ There was a gap and we could dig a hole and go underneath, and there was a little bit of an embankment, a heap of dirt, that we could get behind for shelter. I said, ‘No, we’ll hang in for a little while longer, it might go through the eye shortly.’ We turned the wireless on. It was not quite midnight and the wireless said, ‘The eye of the cyclone’s right over Roebourne-Samson area.’ I said to the old man, ‘Wait. Count till you see a wind gust.’ I normally count them—they get very close and then towards the end they start spreading out, getting less. I said, ‘Before long it’ll be turning, we’ll be getting out of it.’ A few minutes later, it just went dead. There wasn’t a breath of air. One gust and it was finished. Everybody got out and we could see the stars above us. I said, ‘Well, that’s that, we’re in the eye, now.’ The people who owned the shed came down to see if we were alright. I said to the old man and Billy, ‘We can get back in the caravan now and rest in peace,’ because the wind came from the other way, from behind 162

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 162

6/05/11 11:33 AM

the puzzle

the shed. It was frightening. In all the years I’ve been up in the north, it’s the worst cyclone I’ve gone through. I’ve met a few in the bush and that was the worst. Roebourne went right through the eye. The next day we decided to shift out. The flood was still rising and we thought it was going to come up through the shed. They was saying there was a wall of water, twenty foot high because the dam wasn’t quite finished, and it held back and sort of came down in a gush somehow. So we moved up to the high country at the back of the light industrial area at Roebourne. We moved behind the next shed, further up on the hill because there was this flood coming. It never came—one half come down the Harding and the other half went east Harding way. They were evacuating people from the caravan park all morning. After the river subsided, we went over to have a look at the racecourse, where we were living and there were two big transportables sitting there. There was a toilet block, about six metres away from where we were parked at the racecourse, and the wind just picked that up and landed it right on top of where we were living. There was an old caravan belonging to somebody out there, and all you could see were little bits all the way across the flat. I had an old movie camera and I’ve got film showing all the bits and pieces with my daughter and the old man walking through, having a look at all the junk. It was a mess. If we’d stayed there we’d have been killed. It was lucky we moved out, just lucky. In Roebourne, it blew roofs off houses, twisted light poles, damaged the village and the main part of the town. The people 163

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 163

6/05/11 11:33 AM

that lent us the shed, they have a brick house, and the lady was telling me that in the front room she could see the wall moving like it was breathing with the pressure. There was a lot of pressure, it was lucky it was only short. If it had blown a bit longer, some of us would have been killed. It was getting very destructive. I went back down to State Housing and said, ‘Look, I’ve got nowhere to go.’ I didn’t want to move out of town, so I said, ‘Can I get a house back?’ So they gave me a house in Sherlock Street. Blow me down, they gave me another duplex exactly like I had. Instead of being down on the ground on a concrete floor, it was up on stilts. I didn’t like that old place but we moved in there. Because I hadn’t been told anything by my mother when I was growing up, I tried to do better for my kids—especially my daughter. But when I came around to explaining to her the things she should know, she said, ‘Mum, I’ve already learnt it at school.’ She already knew much more than I did! She got taught at school, but there were some little things I taught her myself. I rammed into her head the things that I’d gone through. She had her eye on a couple of boys—one I didn’t like because he wasn’t the type that Margaret would be able to settle down and be comfortable with. See, Margaret’s more country-like, and he was more city-like. I was trying to tell her, ‘No, Margaret, he might be nice and everything, but I don’t think you’ll get on.’ I managed to stop her going with him. She got a job in Karratha, ran into Steven and was going with him. Luckily I knew Steven’s mother and father. I was quite happy for her to go with him for quite a long time before she got married. She had two children 164

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 164

6/05/11 11:33 AM

the puzzle

when she got married, just before the old man passed on. But the boys, well they’ve made their own choices, I can’t pick the girls for them. All I could advise was, ‘If you pick a girl, make sure it’s some girl that’s used to the country and used to your way of life. You’ve got to have somebody suited to your way of life, so look around.’ Barbara and Harry came down to Roebourne when I had the house in Sherlock Street, and Harry was very sick at the time. As they were going back and I said to Barbara, ‘You want to go and see about yourself—you look sick.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’m right, I’m okay.’ She was sick. That was about three years before she got really sick, whether she knew or not, I don’t know, but I think the cancer was getting at her. She was very thin. Harry died and was buried in Wittenoom, and Barbara went on dogging with her youngest daughter. The eldest one, she’d left home and got herself a boyfriend. She was down in Perth and wouldn’t go back to the bush. She’d come home, see her mum, spend a bit of time and then go back. She was fed up with the bush. But Teresa, the youngest one, she stayed with her mother right up till she died. Barbara spent a lot of time dogging in the bush on her own. She was so small and fragile, they had to make a special thing to fit the dog traps. She used to have a little bar—a guy on Mulga Downs made it for her—so she could put weight on the end of it and press the trap open. She was a pretty good dogger, too—she got a lot of dogs. She used to have a terrible run—right from Mulga Downs to Hillside and across to Juna Downs Station, up on top of the ranges from Wittenoom. I felt sorry for her and 165

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 165

6/05/11 11:33 AM

used to say to her, ‘Give it away Barbara.’ She was quite happy to dodge around in the bush there, dogging, but she was battling. She had it hard. I’m proud of her—even though we’re neutral friends. We had our ups and downs, you know. Neither of my two sisters and myself were close. Jim and I spent a couple of years together in the house in Sherlock Street and the family all started to drift off, doing their own thing. We were still on the dole and I was getting sick of doing nothing. Jim didn’t have much interest in minerals. I tried to get him to come out fossicking with me, but he wanted to go to the pub! At one stage me and Jim went up to Yandeyarra, the Aboriginal land, because I wanted to go and have a look at some country. I went into Yandeyarra, got to the gate and I didn’t know whether to go in or turn around! I decided to go in and Billy Coffin was there. We used to know the Coffins years ago, he knew my mother and father well, too. I told him who I was and who my parents were and he made us welcome. He took us in, made a cup of tea and had a yarn and gave us a bit of beef and stuff. I was telling him what I wanted to do and I was asking him where their boundaries were. There’s no pegs and fences and I just took a guess. The country all around Wodgina and Mt Frisco, it’s all taken up by Aboriginal people. I wanted to go and have a look for a hill of garnet but somebody beat us to it. I found the garnet when I was prospecting with Desmond—we sent it away and they came back saying it would be of some value in the future—that was in the fifties. When I went to look, it was gone. If it had been still there 166

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 166

6/05/11 11:33 AM

the puzzle

it would have brought a lot of money for me but I missed out. I come back through Yandeyarra, told them that I was on my way back out.

Jimmy used to complain that his chest was sore all the time. We never thought it was any more than indigestion or ulcers, but we could see he was losing weight and he started to change. I kept taking him to the doctors. I took him to Perth because I wanted to go down and see the asbestos people. They checked him out and they told me he had a cloud on his lungs. They wanted him to go back but he didn’t, so it never happened. Then I took him back to different hospitals and they checked him out. Every time I took him to the doctor I’d say, ‘What did the doctor say?’ He’d say, ‘Oh, there’s nothing wrong with me, I’m fit as a mallee bull.’ He wouldn’t tell us. My daughter said to me one day, ‘Mum, I want to get married before anything happens to the old man.’ She kept on saying there was something wrong with him. I kept on taking him to try and find out but he wouldn’t tell me. I knew there was something wrong because I’d notice changes with moods. And he used to complain about headaches, and none of the doctors could tell us, or they probably told him, but wouldn’t tell me. I had a big tandem trailer and I said to him, ‘Look, Jim, I’m going to build a van on the back of that trailer.’ He said, ‘No, you can’t.’ I said, ‘I will and I’m going to do it.’ So I took it down to a 167

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 167

6/05/11 11:33 AM

bloke I knew in Karratha and I had it built into a van for myself. I got the guy to build beds down each side and across the front, I built a thing to pack stuff in, like a big trunk. I put a stove in it, a fridge and that was my van, and I took off. Oh gee, it was heavy! It was lucky I had the old Landrover. I said to Jim, ‘We’re off bush. We’re off out to do something, even if it’s prospecting or something. Do something interesting in life, instead of sitting in this house, wasting. It’s costing us money to live in the house, it’d be cheaper for us to get out bush. It’s only you and I—as long as we’ve got water and that, we’ve got our comforts, got everything we want.’ We ended up looking after some chooks for Bill Jefferies for a while, and then we had a message from Mulga Downs. They wanted so many kilometres of bullock fence to be done. So away we went and did one portion of it, that’s all I wanted. Jim was starting to get sick—he was too sick to work. I knew that and most of it I done myself. They said, ‘The strainers are out there.’ We went out and I bent down to pick one up and I couldn’t lift it! The strainers were off the big railway line. I said to Jim, ’Look, I’m not putting them strainers in, I’m going back into the station. Either they put the strainers in or we don’t do the job. They asked us to come and do the fence, well I’m not doing it until they put the strainers in.’ So we made them put the strainers in. I got them all stood up and we did the pickets and the wiring: we were running three barbs and a plain. I used to go along and run it off the back of the old Landy. About two rolls of barb in the strain, you know, it’s a long way. I used to strain it up and go 168

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 168

6/05/11 11:33 AM

the puzzle

back and tie it up. My arms were all cut—I’ve still got marks from barbed wires on my arms! Yeah, we worked there for, ooh, must have been a month or something. I got to know some people up there—Mitchells—and they were the ones used to come around and see me. He was a windmill man and I said, ‘Mitch, when you do your round, don’t forget to call and see how we are.’ He used to enjoy coming to see us because every time he’d come I’d put a billy on and have a cup of tea. When I was working there I’d go early in the morning, fencing. I used to get up about three o’clock in the morning. It’d be hot and I’d be away before the sun got up, and I’d stop work about nine or ten o’clock because you couldn’t stand on the ground. I used to come back in the van and the pump tank. I used to go and stand on the side of the old Landy and dip a big bucket of water and just pour it over my head! You could see the steam rising off me from the heat! Gee, it was beautiful! And we used to take a bucket of water up to the camp and throw it all around the ground to make it cool round the van. That was alright. One day we’d finished the first section and the guy from Marillana came across. My sister was sitting at the camp that day and he came up to the camp, and I said to Barbara, ‘Who’s that?’ She said, ‘Oh, Patterson.’ We’d never met him before. ‘Oh, you can do the rest of the fence now. You’ve finished that half, go ahead and finish the rest,’ he said. I told him, ‘Yes, when you clear the line so I run the wire and be able to lift it, I’ll do it. Until then, I won’t be doing nothing.’ He said, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it,’ so I said to Jim, ‘This is good, come on, we’re packing up—let him 169

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 169

6/05/11 11:33 AM

do the rest.’ So we packed up and left, and that day Mitch came around on the windmill round and we was gone! He was looking for his cup of tea! I laughed at him when he told me about it, yeah. In the meantime, we only got nine hundred dollars out of it. We did it for so much a kilometre, and I think we felt that he was cheating us. The next guy come along and he was getting twice the amount we was getting. I think he was getting six hundred a kilometre, and I said to Jim, ‘Look, that shows you, that guy was getting us to do that job because he knew if we asked him for more money, he’d make excuses.’ I wasn’t very happy about that. We were out of a job, then, so we went over to Hooley Station to see Murphy, and Murphy gave us a bit of work on Urala Station, down near Onslow. We were down there for a while, we did a little bit of fencing for him, like repair work. We got paid the first go. The second time, we were battling to get paid, but we eventually got paid, and then the last stage, he’d cleared a line and he took us out to run a barb. We checked out the area we had to fence. He’d cleared the line but forgot about the trees growing up through the fence. We were only getting a hundred and eighty dollars a kilometre. I said to him, ‘Give us three hundred dollars a kilometre, we’ll cut the trees out, make it up.’ No, he wouldn’t come at it. We were on our own, just Jim and I, and it was hot, storms were coming up and we weren’t very happy about the set-up because we had to get our own meat. He said, ‘Oh, there’s plenty of kangaroos or emus out there, get your own meat.’ They 170

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 170

6/05/11 11:33 AM

the puzzle

should have supplied a bit of beef or mutton, if you’re working on the station. He took off to Broome, and on the way he had trouble with his helicopter. In the morning we got up and made a shade for ourselves. We leaned on the back of the old Landy, looked at each other, and by this time we knew about a job on Minderoo Station that was twice the money just repairing a fence. So I said to Jim, ‘I think we’ll go and see about that job on Minderoo.’ So we rang Ben Forrest on Minderoo and told him we wanted to do his fence, and he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, just come up.’ So we took off and did that. Murphy never knew about this—we never said nothing. I said to Jim, ‘We’ll go—to hell with him—he’s not caring about us.’ So we went back, picked up all our camp and gear, and just disappeared. Went into town to my daughter’s place and then out to Minderoo. It was going good there, doing repair work and getting good money. Next thing, Murphy sent a message to my daughter, asking where was Jim and I! So we had to explain where we were. We’d pulled the pin. We were told later, if we had have gone on, we’d never have gotten paid because he’d sold the station. So we did the right thing. And later we heard he’d been killed in a helicopter accident. A young bloke called Ricky was running the station on his own. He was only a young lad about seventeen or eighteen, the son of some people Murphy knew in Queensland. I know them well, they’re good friends of mine. Young Ricky was working on Urala Station, and when we camped on the station he used to come over for a feed because I had more food than they had in the 171

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 171

6/05/11 11:33 AM

station. I said, ‘Ricky, why don’t you shoot yourself some sheep or a beast, or something? Hell, you’re working on the bloody place—take a feed and put it in the fridge.’ He said, ‘No, no no.’ I said, ‘Well if I was in your shoes I would.’ They had nothing on that station. There was no food in the place and there was hardly any gear to work with. He was on his own, and he used to go away and I’d say to him, ‘Ricky, one of these days you’re going to go out with that old Toyota, you’re going to jack it up, it’s going to come down on you and your bones’ll be bleaching in the sun. You want to be very careful.’ When I left, I come back to Roebourne and I was sorry—I should have stayed in Onslow and went back to Urala because it was Christmas, and young Ricky was on his own. The rest of the family were all doing their own thing, you know, they weren’t interested in me. I said to Jim when we was in Roebourne, ‘We should have gone back to Urala and spent Christmas with young Ricky. He’d probably have enjoyed it.’

Jim and I, we’d just finished doing some work in Minderoo Station, and then we went to Margaret’s wedding. She had her wedding at her house in Onslow. She’d been there for about eighteen months. By this time they had two children—the youngest one was only a baby, the other one was toddling. Like Margie said, she could see that there was something wrong with her dad, ‘Mum, I want to get married before the old man passes on.’ She wanted the old 172

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 172

6/05/11 11:33 AM

the puzzle

man to give her away, and for him to see this happening. And it was good for her—just got in in time. After that I was looking for a job, mainly for myself. I wanted to keep motivated, so I rung Mulga Downs and he said, ‘Oh, I’ve got a dogging job. Have you been dogging before?’ I told him, ‘My father and mother were doggers, my sister is a dogger. I should know what I’m doing, it’d be no problem.’ He said, ‘Alright, there’s a dogging job.’ So I took this dogging job on for about two months because they were mustering sheep, and the guy that was dogging went mustering and shearing. They asked me to step in, like relieving. I done alright at that. I got a few scalps in that time—I got some cunning dogs that they couldn’t catch. But when I was dogging, Jim and I used to talk about ourselves. I said, ‘What would happen if anything happened to me, Jim?’ He said, ‘I’d just disappear, just like that.’ He asked me, ‘What would you do if anything happened to me?’ I told him, ‘Well, for a start, I’d be lonely. I’d miss you a terrible lot. It will hurt and I’m going to be awfully lonely.’ He said, ‘Oh, you’ll get yourself another boyfriend.’ ‘Well, put it this way,’ I said, ‘I’m too old, and if somebody came along it’s not because I want somebody to come along, it’s out of sheer loneliness that’s going to make me look for other company. It’s natural. I’m not saying I won’t meet somebody, I probably will. I’m not denying it.’ He was very jealous of me—he always thought I might run away with somebody! I think that’s what was going through his mind. But I was telling him the truth, and I often think about it. It was good we talked 173

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 173

6/05/11 11:33 AM

and I feel good about it now. I never denied that I wouldn’t meet somebody after he passed on, because I knew somebody would probably come along like myself—lonely as well—and we’d both become friends and a part of each other’s lives. When the dogging was winding up they wanted the back fence on the top of the Chichesters pulled up. We already had good rains and the roads were starting to dry up. The ground was still nice and soft, so I said, ‘Oh, this’d be good.’ Because he was going to pay us a dollar fifty a picket. I thought about this and I worked out how much I could make out of it. So we checked it out and we had hard ones and good ones. The only hard part was, he wanted all the wire rolled up. We did this; we rolled one portion of it up. My boys came up and we had to do the rest of the section, and I said, ‘No, I’m not rolling up any more wire.’ We chopped the wire in lengths and we buckled it up into lots. It was very thick bush country and you could lose the wire quite easily. So we used to cut it up in little lengths and we’d chuck it away; just cart it away into the bush and lose it. We went along and pulled pickets, and made a mint out of it. We cheated. He cheated on me in the first go, so I thought, I’ll cheat back, now, and I got my own back on him. He never went on that section. We used to take the posts and stack them all into heaps of tens, where they could pick them up. Each bundle was ten pickets, so they knew we weren’t cheating on the amount. So that’s what we did. We made a packet! Jim couldn’t work very much—he was getting sick—but it was good having the boys help us. I made eight thousand dollars, in a few weeks. 174

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 174

6/05/11 11:33 AM

the puzzle

We was on a pension and I was getting worried we’d have our pension and the tax catching up with us, but we made it that way that we would pay tax as well. So we were paying provisional tax, and when it was sorted out, they paid us back tax. We were lucky—it fell just from one financial year into the next one, so we split it right in half, so it was nice. We made all that money and got all my tax back, and I thought that was good. I enjoyed doing that because the country was really nice. We used to hear the dingoes and cattle, and the camels. They used to come around the camp at night. The country where we were working was beautiful. The mulga trees were nice and green, you know, and I felt happy because everything around us was happy. There was something about it. I enjoyed being out there in the bush, and was sorry when I left. I wanted to stay longer, but there was nothing to keep us out there.

By this time I had all this money and I wanted to sell the caravan I’d built and buy a campervan. I had the idea that Jim and I could travel around Australia. I said to Jim, ‘We’ll go to Perth and get this campervan.’ I went down and the campervan was about eight thousand dollars. When I got to Perth and checked my bank, I found out there was a thousand dollars less in the bank. I managed to get the bank talked around to allow me the money. When I got back from travelling I had to pay it back. I got the van, came home and went out to Hooley Station for 175

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 175

6/05/11 11:33 AM

Jill and Allister Bryce and done a leg of fencing there. They asked us to come back to do a little piece of fence to stop the cattle going through into Mt Florance. So we went back. Bobby come with us then and we finished that up. It was the last bit of fencing we did. One day Jimmy’d been coughing and he coughed up blood. I asked, ‘Are you coughing blood?’ He told me, ‘No!’ I said, ‘You are,’ It was awful-looking blood. Dark, dead-looking, blue blood and then red blood, together. I told him, ‘I think you’d better go down to Wickham and get some x-rays. See what’s wrong.’ So he went down and got some x-rays. Time went by and we got a letter in the mail saying that he had to appear at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Perth. I knew then it was something more serious than what we expected. He had to go down as soon as possible, so I had to make preparations. I’d already used my pension fare down that year and I had to go down like a minder with him. We went through a lot of channels in the health, welfare and hospital, and I got the tickets. I got him down there and they put him through a terrible lot of x-rays. When they came out I said to the doctor, Dr Muss, ‘Could we have a look at the x-rays?’ He brought the x-rays up, hung them on the light thing and pointed out to us what was wrong. We both looked at it and that’s the cruellest part, we both knew what was going on. Jim could look at himself and see what was wrong with him. He had a tumour in his head on one side and two on his lungs, cancer tumours. The ones on his lungs, we didn’t know how long he’d had them for. You see, you have asbestos and you get a cancer in the lung. He used to smoke, too. 176

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 176

6/05/11 11:33 AM

the puzzle

They’re starting to say smoking and asbestos didn’t go together. I didn’t know what was wrong in the first place, like I said, Jim had his changes. Even my daughter noticed there was something different about her father but we couldn’t work out what it was. In the end we found out. They put him through all these x-rays and then the doctor said to me, ‘Your lives are going to change dramatically.’ He never said any more than that. They sent us home for a fortnight to think about it and I said to Jim, ‘Well, what? Will we go back or what?’ He said, ‘Oh, I’ll go back and I’ll take the radiotherapy.’ I never saw the machine. They used to take him through and I’d wait in the waiting room. When they started putting him through that, he started to change completely. Jim went from a person I knew into a person I didn’t. He couldn’t walk very much and he used to forget who I was. To him, I was a total stranger. I was staying in the quarters down there and one night he woke up and he just didn’t recognise me. It took me all my time to convince him to calm down and start to think. I was really hurting. My daughter had gone down and back up because her husband had to go back to work. She called in and saw us but there was nothing she could do. I had to do it all on my own, so I used to take him over for check-ups and treatment until it was finished, and then when I was ready to take him home, I missed the plane didn’t I? I had to battle to get everything organised to get out to the plane and I missed it. He was upset and I was upset. I said, ‘Never mind, I’ll get you on the next flight out tomorrow.’ 177

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 177

6/05/11 11:33 AM

So I got on the next flight out. He wanted to go home, that’s fair enough. Because home is home. After we got home he took a turn for the worse and he ended up in Wickham hospital. I didn’t know but by the time we left Perth he’d already been bleeding internally, and them bastards didn’t tell me. I had no idea what was going on, until the doctor told me in Wickham, and they said there wasn’t much they could do about it. Nothing at all. He knew about it—we all sat together, we talked about it, all the family and his friends. We all sat at the table at the hospital there, we all knew his time was limited. They wanted to send him up to Port Hedland. I got really upset. I said, ‘No way, he’s only got a little time and the time he’s got left he wants to be where he is. They’re not shifting him. If it means they’ve got to go and get more staff, leave him at the Wickham hospital.’ It was only two days or so after that he passed on. We knew it was coming but gee, tell you what, it was sore on me. I went through from the beginning of where he was really crook right up to the end. And the night he passed away, that evening I went and saw him. I had to go from Roebourne out to Port Samson to see some friends. That was the only comfort I had, was to go and see somebody and talk to them. I couldn’t go by the Wickham hospital without going and seeing him, and I saw him for the last time. He was asleep and I said goodbye to him. That was the last time I saw him alive and it really hurt me. It’s like reaching out and the further you reach, the further he’s going from you. It’s cruel, it’s awfully cruel. 178

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 178

6/05/11 11:33 AM

the puzzle

Margaret was very close to her father and after he passed on, she took it hard for a long time. I was getting concerned. I used to see Steven personally and talk to him on the phone. I’d say, ‘Take it gently with Margaret—she’s hurt and it’s going to take her a long time. It could even kill her, you know, the grief. You’ll have to bear with her. I’m still hurting, too.’ But the funny part of it is, while I was hurting, she was hurting and if anything’s wrong with me, she knows. And I know if something goes wrong down there with her. We seem to have that common thing—we’re very close, she and I. When Jim was working in the asbestos, that was the time when nobody knew the dangers of it. Like I said, there was a terrible lot of us out there that worked with it, lived with it and God knows what else, we knew nothing about it. The companies knew about it but if they said it was dangerous working, nobody would have worked, would they? So they had to shut up. It was the asbestos. Just recently I got the final letter telling me. I reopened my case because I only got paid compo for Jim from off the wharf in Point Samson. I reopened the case again, asking for insurance because they were insured to work on the ships at the time, for death or anything. I found out Jim’s got insurance money laying there, that now belongs to me and I got it. I didn’t get much but I got a trip away out of it. Jim had been in Australia quite a long time, but he was Scottish. He never tried to get his citizenship, he just left it. And just before he died, him and I put into make him a citizen of Australia and everything went through, but he didn’t get it while he was alive. It came 179

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 179

6/05/11 11:33 AM

through after he died. I rang up Frank Gow in Karratha to ask him if I could stand in for my husband and he said it was too late. So that was it. Jim just missed out on being Australian. He was still a Scottish citizen when he died.

180

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 180

6/05/11 11:33 AM

’till the day I drop

’til the day I drop

When Jim died, we didn’t have a house—I was staying with my son. I wanted a house of my own and a house came available in Roebourne. I went up several times and asked the lady at Homes­ west, and she said, ‘Oh no, it’s not vacant.’ I kept going and one day I got stuck into her. ‘Listen, that house is vacant and I need a house. I want that house,’ I said. She wanted to put me up in the village and I wouldn’t go. She kept putting me off. So I went down and I walked into her office: ‘It’s not who you know, it’s what you know,’ I said. I was really wild with her and I stormed out. The next day, I got my house, didn’t I? Things like that happen to me, 181

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 181

6/05/11 11:33 AM

but otherwise I haven’t had much trouble with people. We’d both been on the pension and were getting quite a bit of money, and when Jim died they dropped my pension back to two hundred and fifty dollars a fortnight. I went and saw welfare about that. ‘I can’t live on that—is there any more I can get from Veteran Affairs?’ Veteran Affairs said that’s all I could get. He said, ‘You’re better off going on the widow’s pension.’ So I was transferred across to the widow’s pension. When Jim’s estate came through I was still on the widow’s pension. I would have gone back to work in the bush, fencing, but the trouble is that no-one would go with me. None of the boys would go with me, so I just stayed on the widow’s pension. When Jim was alive there were various things I was wanting to do and he kept telling me I couldn’t—too much for me. This book, I’ve had it in my mind for a long time, but getting hold of the right people and the sources to write this book was taking me a long time. I started, but found out I couldn’t do it on my own and I felt frustrated because I needed help. Same with the Seniors Club—I had the idea it could work but he was always telling me I wouldn’t be able to do it. When Jim passed on and I was waiting for the money to come through for. I found myself at home with too much idle time. I thought this was the time I should try and see if I could do this. And that’s what I did—I formed the WIROS (Wickham Roebourne Samson) Senior Citizens’ Club. I went out and asked different people. It took me a while—it was very hard. I got sent from one place to another, and then I was 182

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 182

6/05/11 11:33 AM

’til the day I drop

introduced to a young lass on the Shire and another lady. Anyway, there was her, me and the lady from the Shire, we got this thing up and going. Went through a lot of government loops that they knew about, and then along came our first meeting. We had to have a committee meeting and it was held at the Roebourne hall. We’d asked the old people to come along. I held my breath, ‘Oh gee, I hope somebody’ll come.’ Blow me all, about five or six turned up to form the blimmin’ club. When I started, everyone was saying, ‘Do you think you’ll get enough oldies?’ ‘I must get enough oldies,’ I was saying. ‘It’s got Point Samson, Wickham, Roebourne. Somebody’ll come.’ Once it formed, we had meetings once a fortnight. I’ve been the vice-president since the beginning. They were going on about it being the wrong fortnight to have the meeting, so I said, ‘Right, we’ll make it every fortnight on the Friday straight after the pension.’ That went down well—everybody was happy for quite a long while. I left the door open for all people—if they’re sixty, a hundred, fifty or only forty, black or white. Every year now the Shire has contributed, and they have a Christmas dinner in Roebourne for all the oldies. They all come to the Christmas dinner, you know. I know quite a few of the old Aboriginal people, and it’s good to see them coming. That’s one of the good things to come out of it. I was able to get bingo. When you go in a pub there’s these little tickets—we saw it at Whim Creek one day, and Frank Wood suggested I ask the publican about it. I had to see a guy at the Kats Club in Karratha to get these bingo tickets. The club had enough 183

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 183

6/05/11 11:33 AM

money in the fund to get the tickets, and that’s been my contribution to the club. Gwen McCoy, she’s another lady, she does a lot of catering and a lot of raffling, she’s good. So between her, me and a couple of other ladies, we’ve got a bit of money saved up. When I heard last, they’re looking at buying a bus for the club. So that’s coming along good.

After Jim passed away, I got some money from the estate, you know, asbestos compensation. Jim’s mind was quite good. He’d said, ‘If we get this money, we’ll get another bus.’ He wanted to get rid of the little camper and get something else. At the time we were thinking of something for the two of us, but in the meantime he passed on. So I said to myself, ‘I’ll keep his word, I’ll get a bus. I’ll sell the camper, too many memories.’ While he was still alive, I said, ‘If anything happens I’ll go over and spend time with my brother.’ After he died and I’d settled down and been paid for his Asbestos disease (I called it his stake) I squared up all the debts and paid for the funeral, and there wasn’t much left. I decided next year to get out of Roebourne to get away on my own, to give myself time to get back to my own self. It is hard when you lose someone, there are memories everywhere, but you have to get on with it. I had to think about myself because all the rest of the family was okay. They were working. It took a lot of thinking to go on a three month holiday; to go see my brother Roy in 184

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 184

6/05/11 11:33 AM

’til the day I drop

New South Wales for a month, then up to Queensland for two months. I went to the air office and I made preparations for my trip. I wanted to go to Queensland, and go down to Sydney to my brother’s, but it was going to cost me a lot of money. So the girl said, ‘You’d be cheaper to go to Perth and fly from Perth to Sydney.’ It cost me nothing to go from here because I’ve got a pension fare once a year. I flew to Perth, and by this time, I’d already caught the flu. I got down to Perth and Dennis, my eldest son, picked me up. I had to wait till about midnight to catch the flight to Sydney. I came back to the airport and I was starting to get really crook. When I was flying to Sydney, I had my fingers in my ears to stop the pressure; it was painful! I got off the plane and Roy said, ‘What’s the matter, you look crook?’ I said, ‘Yes, I am. I’ve got the flu. I had a bastard of a trip over on the plane.’ And it was cold, too. Roy picked me up at the airport and I stayed at his place. I was there for a month, and I used to go out with him and his second wife—he got married not long before I went over. He came over to Jim’s funeral, went back and he got married. I got to meet her and we used to go out together. He’d be looking for work and I’d be looking for cars. Roy and I’d go down along the car yards that went for about ten miles long. We used to go along and have a look, and say, ‘Oh, that’s another good place, we’ll go in there and have a look.’ Every one we looked at was blimmin’ rust buckets! It’s a good car but you walk around and put your finger in the hole in the muffler, it was like tar, burning oil. I’d 185

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 185

6/05/11 11:33 AM

say to the guy, ‘It’s pretty black in the muffler.’ He’d say, ‘Oh, that’s just the rich fuel burning.’ I said, ‘Oh well, if it’s rich fuel, let the next guy buy it.’ Every time I had a look at a car, I used to give them a broadsider. So anyway, we went picnicking up on the foot of the hills. You know, where they filmed A Country Practice. We went up there and had a picnic. Sometimes I’d be at home and they’d be gone out—got an odd job and be away all day. It was only a little place, so I used to wander down the shops and have a look around, try and spend time. In the meantime I looked for Jim’s brother—I wanted to see him. Jim had two brothers in Australia. One in Melbourne I never got on with, and his wife; and the other one, Danny, was living up in the lakes out of Sydney. I got in touch with him, and he was going to come down, but he didn’t. I don’t know what happened; he never made it, so I missed out on seeing him. I tried to get in touch. Toward the end of the month, I was getting fed up with being in the city. I wanted to get out. I said to Roy, ‘I’ve got to get up and see some people in Queensland. I’ve got to move on. I’ve got to go home and I’ve promised these people I’d come and see them.’ He took me up to this big shopping centre and I booked myself on a bus from Sydney to Warwick. Anyway, I got to Queensland and the people met me, and I felt so pleased with myself. It was a tiny town, and away we went, out to a little farming district, Killarney. All you could see was farms and hills, and no houses around—it was great. I settled in 186

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 186

6/05/11 11:33 AM

’til the day I drop

there. I’d met these people in Western Australia. Jim and I knew them. That’s when I got to know the Bull family. They’re good friends of mine still. They had a big new house they’d just finished building, and I had my little caravan to live in. I spent good times with them. I bought the Jackaroo there and had it a little while before I left. I used to jump in my bus and go up around the ranges on my own. Young Ricky Bull got a job on a farm about forty or fifty kilometres from us and I used to go down and see him. I got to know him when he was working on Urala Station. He was like one of the family. I got brave—first time in my life I drove into Warwick— they’ve got stop lights and go lights! I said to them one day, ‘I’m going into Warwick. I want to go in and do a few things, do a bit of shopping and have a look around.’ So away I went and I had a bit of a problem, but I made myself follow people through the lights, and follow them around. I knew the town because Ricky’s mother had driven me around and I used to do what she used to do—follow her ideas, so I knew which was the right way and wrong way. And if I went the wrong way, I used to go way down the other end and make sure I came back up the right side. I used to park in the main street of Warwick, there’s angle parking. I done that when I got my bus because my bus was good—the brakes and everything. I could handle it quite good in the city of Warwick. But I couldn’t have done it in Toowoomba—too big. Toowoomba’s a bit like Perth—a very big town. 187

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 187

6/05/11 11:33 AM

When I left—I was there three months—they put on a party for me. It was a special party, a farewell one, at the house I was staying at. They got a guy they knew that played music and things. I felt good inside—all the people I knew and they didn’t want me to go. I had to make a farewell speech and it was great. On the day I was leaving, the people I was staying with, they started blubbering and I said to Ricky’s mother, ‘Don’t do this. Don’t do it—I’ve got to go home to my family.’ They wanted me to buy land there. I’ve still got a photograph of the block they wanted me to buy. It was getting towards the end of November, and I wanted to be home and settled by Christmas. It took me well and truly two weeks to get home from Queensland. First day out I camped in the bus. It wasn’t far from Toowoomba, a little town. Once I started to get my confidence I was right, you know. All I had to do was ring them back in Queensland, and ring my daughter in Western Australia to let them know I was in a certain spot. If anything happened and they didn’t hear from me in twenty-four hours, they’d either send the police or ring the nearest pub to send somebody. When I was driving to Longreach, I passed through a town and went the wrong way. I turned around and asked people where it was. I corrected myself, went back to where I started, got out on the right road and I got to Longreach that day. It was quite a nice caravan park with some old people. I spoke to them and had to do a bit of washing and get cleaned up. I rolled my swag out there that night and had a rest next to my bus, and I went and had a look at the Stockman’s Hall of Fame. I had trouble with 188

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 188

6/05/11 11:33 AM

’til the day I drop

my back, so I went up to the hospital and tried to explain what I wanted—hopeless. I didn’t get anything done what I wanted. So, I headed off that same day. Travelling, I was quite surprised by the changes since I was there last. When I was going through Winton in the fifties, it was a tiny little place. I came through and it was quite big. Lot more shops and things going for it, you know. Years ago, there was all this mesquite bush growing around Winton; you couldn’t walk through it, it’s got big white spikes on it. You could hardly see the town for mesquite bush, then! And when I went through, they must have cleared it all up. Today it’s different—they’ve cleaned it up a bit and it’s quite big. I went to Mary Kathleen. When I worked there in the fifties, it was booming! This time I had to go in off the new highway— there was a bit of track going and I went right in. It was a pretty little place, and all the housing and everything, gone. Just disappeared. The mine’s closed and they’ve cleaned it all away—it’s gone back to the bush. Another little place before you cross the Northern Territory border, is a little place called Camooweal. When I saw that years ago there was just a hotel there and a fuel depot. When I come through this time there was shops and butcher shops, and different other things. I went down and camped at Alice. Alice Springs has changed so much; it’s quite a big place. When I first saw it years ago in the fifties, you could drive around and there was no stop lights and no parking meters. This time there was parking meters and stop 189

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 189

6/05/11 11:33 AM

lights, so you had to watch your p’s and q’s. I was quite shocked when I got to it. We didn’t go to Ayers Rock in the early years, we went to Alice and out to Stanley Chasm. That was as far as we went, but this time I went right down to Ayers Rock and had a look. I went quite a few kilometres out of my way. In one day I done that trip in and out. I stopped at Alice and I went to Ayers Rock. I was going to stop at Ayers Rock caravan park, but when I looked I didn’t like it, so I came back to the roadhouse at the turn-off and camped the night. That was a long day for me—I didn’t have much time to lose. From Ayers Rock I stopped and parked facing the car down the road which goes to Yulara into Western Australia. I looked down the line trying to work out which way to go. There was a dirt track and a bitumen one. I decide to turn around and stick to the bitumen, as I was on my own. I thought if I broke down or had flat tyres and all, there wouldn’t be much help. I decided that I’d go back from Ayers Rock, up to Katherine and down west. It was a long trip. On the bitumen highway, you could stop off at a roadhouse at night and ring. On the Gunbarrel Highway I don’t know where the next telephone stop was. I gave that a thought. And there was another way I could have gone from Alice Springs. There’s a shortcut, out near Halls Creek, and that’s a dirt track. The next day I headed north, right back up Barrow Creek. I stopped the night there and next day got to Katherine. I had a look around there, went to the bank, got a few things to eat on the road and I went for a swim at the bottom crossing. It was stinking 190

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 190

6/05/11 11:33 AM

’til the day I drop

hot up there, then. There were thunderstorms on the road, all the way along coming back to Katherine from Alice. I headed off and camped at Pine Creek, by the river. Funny thing—I camped away from under the trees—I don’t know why, but I did. There was a young couple that was travelling that way—they camped on one side of me. They had a flash four-wheel drive and a little tent. Another group had an old car, and they crawled into the back of the car. It was a station wagon. There was about two couples— two slept in there and they had something on top—two slept on top. First of all, they camped under the trees. All the flying foxes come up—you know what flying foxes do! And next thing they moved. That’s alright, they moved out, got themselves settled. It was stormy that night. It didn’t rain but I don’t know how they slept—it was quite warm and humid. I was gone before they were and I came all the way that day to Kununurra. I stopped and had a look at Kununurra, headed out and went into Wyndham. I wanted to have a look at the crocodile farm. It was not what I’d expected, there wasn’t much at all. I had enough petrol money to keep going. I headed off from Wyndham and got to Halls Creek that day. I didn’t lose much time on the road. I’d call into the roadhouse and tell them I wanted to roll out the swag. I just wanted a shower and I needed no light. The most I was charged was ten dollars. I was gone at the break of day—I got my breakfast at the next stop. All I had to do when I woke up in the morning was roll my swag and chuck it on the bus. Then the next day, after I left Halls Creek, I got to Broome. 191

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 191

6/05/11 11:33 AM

I remember having a long trip, and when I got there I had a look for someone. I had to go to the Shire, and find out where he was. I was sent back up the road nearly fifty kilometres out again—and when I got there I couldn’t find the person! There were little farms, and I saw one called Ramirez, so I went into this place—I knew the Ramirez family from Hedland. I went in: check my luck and blow me down—they knew me. I got out of the bus and they said, ‘Shit, you look tired!’ I said, ‘Yes I am, I’ve come a bloody long way. I’ve just come back from over east.’ And I was, so I spent two days in Broome before I came home. I had two nights and a day there. I freshened up enough and drove from Broome to Port Hedland, and stopped off at my cousin’s place. She was away—her husband was there and I had a cup of tea and a yarn to him. I had a swim to freshen myself up because they had a pool in the backyard. Jim and I used to go there before, we knew them well. He was going to work, so I said, ‘Well, if you’re going to work, it’s no good me hanging around,’ so I took off, and I stopped the night in Whim Creek. That’s when I met Frank Wood again. Before I went over east, I was at a friend’s place in Roebourne, and I was talking to Frank. He said, ‘Come up and see me some time.’ But I just gave it a miss, I had too much stress then. So that’s what made me call in and see him on the way back because I had my mind cleared. I’d been away and had time to think. I was thinking to myself, I’ve got to start somewhere. I’ll go in and see the old bloke before I go home, pay him a visit. I asked the publican if he’d seen Frankie Wood because he was bound to know where he’d be. He said, 192

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 192

6/05/11 11:33 AM

’til the day I drop

‘He’s just over there at the airport, at a party.’ Some people have got a little block and they had a barbecue. So I went over there and I run into Frank, and that’s when he asked me to be his woman. And I thought for a while, ’Oh yes, I suppose so!’ So that’s where we began. And ever since we’ve been friends, it’s been good for me. At the start it was hard and it took us a while to get used to each other, but now we’re good friends. I knew Frank when Jim and I used to be fencing. Frank was our opposition. We were all doing the same thing, fencing, and we all knew each other. If Frank had a price on a job or we had a price on a job, we weren’t under­ cutting each other. I knew Frank was alright. I knew that in my own heart. We have two things in common—we’re both grandparents, we both have families. I always say to him, ‘Because you’re with me, don’t neglect your family. I’d like to meet your family.’ I’ve met three of them. They’re good-looking people—very quiet. When I was on the trip over east, I found out I could do things for myself. Even Frank and I have clashes over it. One day I said, ‘Listen, Frank, I’m independent. This is the way I’ve been built—it’s built into me, and that’s the way I’ll always be.’ He said, ‘I am too.’ I said, ‘Right, we know where we stand, now.’ Independence. So he respects me for that. I was never used to someone doing things for me and helping me. I found it hard at first but now I’ve got to like having him take care of me. The best thing that ever happened to me is Frank. It’s done me a lot of good because sometimes when I’m down and lost, 193

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 193

6/05/11 11:33 AM

I’ve got somebody to talk to. I don’t talk much about Jim to Frank, although he’s mentioned Jim a few times. We always talk about what we can do or something like that. We talk about fencing and we’ve both got the same interest in minerals. Frank’s trying to teach me to ride a bike. I bought an old bike for ten dollars, and I’m trying to get myself to sit on it without losing my balance, and do you think I can? It’s terrible! I want to ride a bike and I can’t. So I keep practising.

After my trip over east, I settled back into the WIROS Club at Roebourne. Now and then we have an outing somewhere. I went on the bus to a beautiful lunch—tables nicely done. We’re sitting at the top end of the table, Frank and I, and Wally Budsky was near us. We’d all finished eating lunch and Wally ordered a glass of red wine. Somebody said something to Wally in German. I don’t know what it was, something to do with food or the time of the day. Nobody took any notice and old Wally went white. Then we started to notice something was wrong. Wally was starting to get stiff and doing nothing—he was having a massive heart attack. We got him out of the chair and laid him down. Frank got a spoon, a bit of cloth and shoved them in his mouth to keep him from biting his tongue. All we could do was get cold water and keep him cool and try to comfort him as much as we could. They rung the Flying Doctor but they were in Meekatharra! So the publican decided to get his Toyota and put a bed in the back and 194

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 194

6/05/11 11:33 AM

’til the day I drop

load him on. In the meantime they got the ambulance to meet them halfway between Whim Creek and Port Hedland. They took him to Port Hedland and about three days later he died. Massive heart attack, he never come back. He was the one that gave the club the name. When my father and my mother died, I never got a razoo from none of them. The same thing happened when I left home. I got nothing from my parents, nothing from my brothers and sisters. In a way now, I’m glad that’s the way it is—there’s no fights. The only thing I would have liked, is my mother’s photographs. I know she had a whole lot of them, and Aunty Mary was the last one with them. When Mary died, everything went. They could have gone in the rubbish, they could have gone anywhere. Anyway, I’ve arranged for Margaret to take care of my affairs because she’s the head of the family, even though she’s in the middle. She’s the one with the good head on her shoulders, and the one I could trust. I made out a will and got everything finalised for myself. So if anything happens to me, she has to sort it out; that whatever I’ve got left goes between the four of them so it’s equally split. I think she’ll be fair with her brothers. She’s the only daughter, so that makes it a lot easier, being the only girl in the family, so they have to bend to her. I was up at Wittenoom again, not long ago, and I went and saw my little grandson, and I had mixed memories. I saw that town when it was just starting and now I’ve seen it dying. There was pools all the way up the gorge. In the summer months people used to go swimming and have barbecues and picnics. A 195

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 195

6/05/11 11:33 AM

lot of those houses have been pushed down and buried. And they had a beautiful hospital and school there, now that has all gone. Everything’s been all vandalised. After a certain time they weren’t allowed to take away anything from Wittenoom associated with asbestos. They dug big pits and buried it. I had good times and sad times in that place. I’d like to see something really good happen to it, for them to relocate the town further away from the gorge mouth and then keep it going as it is. It’s part of history, you know. Since I have been on my own, I’ve done things. Jim wasn’t much help—he wasn’t very encouraging. I had always done mostly hard or manual work. If I did anything it was fencing or something like that. Since he’s been gone, things have changed for me. I’ve managed writing a book and got my club going. I’m not president of it any more, but it’s still going. I’m doing more things in my life at my age, so that it’s not too hard on me. But I’m finding it hard because of problems with my knees, if I overdo it. But I keep up with trying to do things. I’m trying not to let things like that get me down—I want to keep moving so I don’t want to seize up. If I stop, I get bored to tears and the rest of me doesn’t work properly, you know. I said I would keep going until the day I drop, and I will—even if I’ve got to crawl! I have a family—in my own heart, I’m proud of my family, all of them. I’m proud of my kids and grandkids. I’ve gained that much. I’ve gained a good family, so I think I’ve done well.

196

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 196

6/05/11 11:33 AM

epilogue

epilogue

I had wanted to write a book for years, but my husband Jimmy said he reckoned I couldn’t do it—that I hadn’t been to school so knew nothing. After he passed away I had a chance to prove myself. That’s when I went over east and bought my new bus. Then came my friendship with Frank. He encouraged me. I was worried about my education though. I didn’t know what my standard was. Years ago when I went for jobs they would ask me what it was and I just didn’t know if it was average or what? I had to say that I hadn’t been to school, and I wouldn’t get the job. The worst time was when I wanted to join the army. I could have driven a truck or been in the cookhouse or whatever, but there you are, no education, no nothing. I was blocked. It was so hard for me. It’s no good if your heart is set on something and 197

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 197

6/05/11 11:33 AM

they don’t want you because you’ve got no education. It knocks you out. I was set right back. If I’d been able to spell I would’ve had my old book written a long time ago. Jimmy kept putting me off saying I couldn’t do it. I had no brains. I was talking to Frank about this and he said, ‘Why don’t you go over to the college in Roebourne and find out about it?’ I went over to the college and asked them if I could enrol in a course with them. They told me there were courses I could do. I had learned a lot when I was fencing, with the measuring of things and later Frank got me a little calculator. I found out how to work out figures like with money and stuff. That helped a lot and put me on the road. So I settled on how to read and write and spell. Mostly there were about a dozen old Aboriginal people going to school there. The teachers were an older Aboriginal lady and a white one. The classes were in the morning, and they taught reading and writing, cooking and sewing. I didn’t worry about the sewing or cooking as I didn’t have time. I felt these weren’t a problem for me. It really worried me that I couldn’t spell and put things together properly. I was just worried about getting a standard and if I could catch up to have one. I went two or three days a week in the mornings until just after lunch. The teachers were very helpful. They would give me things to do on my own, and they would check it out to see how I went. I reckoned they were pretty simple things a kid could do. They found out I could read alright. My writing was pretty good, but my stumbling block, and hardest thing, was spelling. 198

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 198

6/05/11 11:33 AM

epilogue

It always has been and always will be. One really good thing I learned was how to use a dictionary. I had an old one I’d picked up somewhere and they gave me another. I use it a lot. I did a little bit of computer. What a pain in the butt that is. I did learn to type a bit though. I was doing the college for quite a while; three years in all. Now I can say I went to school. They gave me a certificate for each year. I am very proud of these. It brightened me up after all the put downs from my father and Jimmy. That proved a point, and now after all these years I have a standard in my life. Now I try with what education I’ve got. I use it as much as I can. I need it. I have to use my brains. At the college, the teachers helped me to start a poetry book. The girls liked them and said they would make good poems so I kept going and when I went up to Frank’s place I found I had time to go on with the pieces I had started. I went down to the library in Karratha and asked around if someone could help me. At first Anna Vitenbergs started to help me. I explained what I wanted. I needed someone to get my story onto tape, and also bring it out of me by asking little questions. That’s how it started, but she became too busy as she had things to do so she passed me over to Loreen Brehaut. Loreen and I got on really well. I used to go down from Roebourne once a fortnight and together we put it onto a tape. She would take it home and type it into a manuscript for me so I could get it published. We had the launch in Roebourne. I felt so pleased with myself; because I had done something my heart felt really big. 199

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 199

6/05/11 11:33 AM

I had also started painting in an old sketch book that I took out to Frank’s camp at the back of Whim Creek. It is really picturesque there as Frank built his camp with local rock and some iron additions. There are ranges in the background to the north. I sat and sketched it with its windmill and gardens. Before that I’d done animals and birds—horses, kangaroos, dingoes, emus, wrens and honey-eaters. A friend had a look at them and asked me how I’d learned. I told her I just did it. I hadn’t been to school and no-one had taught me. ‘Well I think you should have a go at painting. You have a good eye for shapes and colours,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t do that! I can’t paint.’ I didn’t think I could do it. ‘You will never know if you don’t try.’ she answered. She gave me some paints and brushes and a little board, and said go ahead. When I did I felt comfortable with it. I picked up the paint brush and soon found how to mix the colours to make them look like colours of the bush. I still have that very first little painting I did. It is on a wall in the lounge room of my house. It is of a little round sort of hill in the ranges. I don’t know its name, but I’d taken a photograph of it. That same year I found some more photos I had taken of the bush around Tom Price when I was up there. There is a place called Turtle Pool, with a lot of granite rocks and water running down. I decided I’d do a painting of this place. I didn’t think much of it, but I put it in as my first time at the Cossack Art Awards. The only help I had was with the water. My friend said, ‘Which way does the water run?’ I had a think about this, and I couldn’t work out which way to do it. She made it hard for 200

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 200

6/05/11 11:33 AM

epilogue

me. I thought now how do I do this? Then I realised the water is running down, and it is the way the ripples go. When the water is running over rocks it is whitish with a little bit of foam. Anyway I got it right. When I went to the opening night of the exhibition I was sitting alongside of an art teacher. That was my first time there— the first time I’d ever been to an exhibition. She said, ‘It is very hard to win an award.’ I replied, ‘Oh well it doesn’t matter—I’ll see how I go. I hope I just get recognised.’ Soon after this they called my name out. I could hardly believe my ears, and then others near me told me to go up and get the award. So I went up and talked to the sponsors from the Shire of Ashburton, and the judge who was Alan Dodge, the Director of the Art Gallery of Western Australia. I won five hundred dollars that night. I was very happy and encouraged by this, so I kept painting. The second year, 2000, I painted a sunset over the ocean where we had camped by some tamarisk trees. The sun was going down in between an island and the mainland. This was another big surprise for me. The prize was a thousand dollars. Robert Juniper was the judge this time. They have different judges each year, so this spreads the ideas around. I had put two in, but the sunset won it. I won again the third year, 2001, just after Cyclone John. I had painted the old Whim Creek pub. When I went there just after the cyclone they wouldn’t allow me in, but the next time they said go up there. The beds were there but no roof. There was just sky above your head. I called it the starlight hotel. The pub 201

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 201

6/05/11 11:33 AM

was a real mess. The roof of the top storey had blown away. It was all over the nearby hills, and near the pub the trees had no limbs left. There were bits of trees and pieces of iron lying about. The judge, Ken Done, awarded it the prize as he said he was looking for paintings that told a story. Then my name was called out again for me to be presented with a joint prize, together with Edith Lucas from Tom Price. This was for one I’d done of the Hammersley Range. I’d done this one earlier and had it on display in a gallery in Karratha, but nothing happened so I brought it home. I hadn’t expected to win anything so was very surprised when my name was called out and I had to climb up onto the platform to be presented. I was excited and had heart palpitations. My heart was really thumping. I hadn’t liked either of these two paintings. For some reason they didn’t appeal to me. I had won a lot of money. I put this money to good use in repairing my vehicle, and when I bought my house, to help with the deposit. After that there was the Airport Exhibition at Karratha. I had to put ten paintings in this, and they stayed there for about a month. I only sold one from there. It was one of a dogger’s hut. The person bought it after the exhibition and paid it off to me. That was in my fourth year and I had the exhibition at Cossack again too. I didn’t win anything that year, but Frank who helped me a lot with painting, and only started painting after me, got a highly recommended. He’s gone on to win more prizes since. In the meantime I sold a painting from that exhibition to a Perth doctor. I was having treatment there for cancer so couldn’t 202

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 202

6/05/11 11:33 AM

epilogue

get to the exhibition. When I came home I sold another for nine hundred, and got more for a set of four I sold to the Shire. They were all of Roebourne buildings—the court house, the jail, the post office and the old shire offices, all built early last century. I sold quite a few others privately as well. I put a lot of money into framing the paintings. I paid nearly three hundred dollars for one of the frames. They were big paintings. Then I started to find my way around it a bit more, to do it cheaper. I have framed some of my own paintings too. I came across some good old frames, sanded them back and re-varnished them. That helped a lot. I found a place in Karratha where I could buy the materials made especially for framing. Frank and I made some of these up, but found it was too hard as we needed the right gear and couldn’t afford it.

I’m looking forword to selling more. I’m going on painting. I have two paintings at Whim Creek. If they sell, I will give the owner commission. If they don’t sell they will remain a part of the Whim Creek property. You get at a stage with a painting and you know it’s not right. Sometimes I know what I want to do. It is so pretty in my head. To get it out of my head and put it on board is a different story altogether, my hands won’t do what my head tells them to do. Frank experiments with his paintings. He wants very little to go by. He puts the main things in, and then puts the rest in out 203

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 203

6/05/11 11:33 AM

of his head. It is a good idea. I have done it a bit. I copy the basic outlines even from two photographs and then fill it in out of my head. It’s a bit like baking a cake, if you don’t get the measurements right it comes out flat. There’s not much I can say about painting. I feel lucky and gifted. It is very hard to explain to people, it’s about just getting on with it. My ideas are a bit different, but I have a natural flair and I’ll keep using it for as long as I can. Since I found out about my potential, it motivates me to go on with myself. I’m not going to give in. The majority of my life has been wasted on working and doing other things instead of being able to do what I should have been doing.

For a long time I had wanted to own my own house. There wouldn’t be many old people of my age get a house for a start. It must have been about seven or eight years ago I went to Homeswest and asked them if I could buy the house I was renting. They said yes, but it had to be valued first. By the time all that was sorted out, I went to the banks, and was told that I couldn’t get any loans because I was too old. This caused me some tears. At home after a good think, I convinced myself there’s got to be a road round this, so it was back to the drawing board and I decided on asking for my first home loan from the government. I knew someone older than me had got one. I thought if she could get one I can get one. When I asked for my first home 204

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 204

6/05/11 11:33 AM

epilogue

loan, they said I had to have money in the bank. I was lucky I had some from the prize money I had won with my paintings, and the ones that were sold. My first application was accepted, and the rest of the mortgage money was through the Aboriginal Home Loans. It took nearly eighteen months of wrangling and carrying on with paperwork before it was all approved. It took a lot of pushing to get things done, and I’ve done a lot to it, but I love that little house. My son Billy, his wife Josie and their two children, Mason and Becky live just across the road, so I still have them close by.

Frank had been working to save the old Whim Creek Cemetery. It had quite a history. I first arrived at the Whim Creek Pub with my mum and dad. In those days there was only a post office, and an old-fashioned fuel bowser. They used to pump the fuel with handles. You could get stores there, and there was a little wooden bar. The beer was in wooden kegs, which they wrapped up in wet hessian bags to keep it cool. In those days there were only dirt tracks all corrugated as hell. It would take a week to get from one place to another. It was a good stopover for a lot of people travelling between Port Hedland to Roebourne. The time we stopped there was 1946 or ’47 and we decided to go and have a look at Balla Balla, to do some fishing and have a look around. When we got to Balla there was a part of an old barge or lugger still sitting at the end of a ramp made of railway 205

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 205

6/05/11 11:33 AM

sleepers and tracks they had built there. It was for loading copper and wool after putting off stores. We sat on top of the deck and caught fish. Today, so many years on, it is no longer there. Just as you get there through the marsh to the fishing spot, there is a high spot where there used to be a settlement with houses for wharfies, and mine workers. You can see the footings of an old hotel, and the remains of a rubbish dump with lots of broken bottles. It was blown away by cyclones, and those are the few remains left. It is only about a half a kilometre from the water. The copper used to go out by rail in little train carriages. Steam engines pulled them along the rails. These were powered by burning wood and some coal. Water was drawn from wells along the track. Coal was brought up on the ships, and wood cut from surrounding bush. The cargo had to be loaded onto the barges first because ships couldn’t get in there. The river mouth was too shallow. The cemetery started because of the mining. In the old days there were more than a few hundred people there. It was quite a township. There was a dispute at the mine site. One of the earliest union meetings in WA was held at the Whim Creek Hotel in 1911. After the meeting there were altercations and one man was stabbed and died soon afterwards. All the witnesses to the said murder boarded a ship out through Balla Balla. This was to take them to Fremantle and then court in Perth. A severe cyclone came up and the ship was struck near Depuch Island, just off the coast. They all drowned, and none of them got to court. But the 206

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 206

6/05/11 11:33 AM

epilogue

murderer was tried in Perth and found guilty. He was given three years in prison. Among some of the bodies recovered was the publican of the hotel. He was buried at Balla Balla Causeway and today his headstone is still there. Some were buried at Depuch Island. The murdered man was buried at the Whim Creek Cemetery with a headstone, engraved ‘Killed at Whim Creek; buried by a fellow unionist.’ The only one to be hung from the Whim Creek episode was the one who shot the resident policeman. There is a list of people buried in that cemetery, two pages of them—most of the graves are unmarked. I’m not sure if they are all within the boundary. Frank had been interested in the cemetery for as long as he’s been on his lease. His lease is south of Whim Creek about ten kilometres in. He started negotiating with the Shire to get the cemetery fenced. He tried to get materials for it, but these didn’t turn up, so he did it himself. The materials he got were all recycled; star pickets, gates that he could rustle up, and rabbit netting. Then he did another fence on the outside with barbed wire and pickets to keep the kangaroos and cattle out, because once the water is on to the trees, the animals would go in there to pick the leaves off and eat them. The kangaroos would dig around the butts for water too. Everything was in place waiting for a bore. We carted water for years for what trees there were. We had bought these trees for the cemetery and planted them round the boundary. From the time we started out, to get that cemetery up and going, we planted three lots of trees. 207

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 207

6/05/11 11:33 AM

In December 2004 another bore was due to be put in. The bore was to have casing, and a solar-powered pump. They had a little tiny bore down before, but it wasn’t cased and when they put the pump down it got stuck. Michael—the pub owner at the time—tried to dig it out with his back-hoe but it all fell back in. It wasn’t successful, and in the meantime Frank and I were carting water. We had to use my bus to cart it. In 2005 great changes happened. The copper mine went ahead. They started getting the raw copper, making it into sheets and shipping it off. There are lots of people there now. The new managers have put in a lot more chalets for workers and tourists. I’ve been told they are going to put the bowsers back in. The place has come alive again. The new owners manage the pub. It is heritage listed so all they can do is open it up for meals and a beer for the tourists. They have to leave it as it is. I had been lobbying them to get a better bore onto the cemetery. I explained to them that it isn’t only for our benefit that we do up the cemetery—it is for other people as well. It is part of where you are. I rang the Shire representative and asked and she said, ‘Someone has to write a letter.’ I said ‘I’m not very good at this sort of thing.’ So she wrote me a letter. I read it, and I liked it so I signed it and posted it off. Next thing I got a visit from Straits (the mine owners). They came to my house in Roebourne. I made progress with them there and then. The first bore they put down was too small and it caved in, so they had to go again and the second was about the size they needed. They have solar up there and a pump and the tank is to 208

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 208

6/05/11 11:33 AM

epilogue

be linked up to the reticulation to water the trees. It is all ready to go in the future. Frank and I were called up to go to the opening. They have a site-board up there to say where the cemetery is. There has been a plaque made to thank Frank for all the work he has done, and another on the wishing seat Michael and he put there. It is a rock shaped like a seat. They brought it in with a front-end loader. The inscription on the plaque reads, ‘The Shire of Roebourne gratefully acknowledges the outstanding work of Frank Wood in maintaining this important historical site’.

In 1999 Cyclone John came down the coast just north of us. We were all prepared—Karratha, Point Samson, Wickham and us here at Roebourne. They evacuated all the low lying places as it was expected we could get a hell of a dumping, but it turned and went back and headed toward Whim Creek. As soon as I heard this I rang the pub at Whim Creek and told them to go and get Frank and bring him in. He was at his camp by himself with no transport or communication. They knew where he was way out in the bush, with about ten kilometres of gravel roads and a couple of creeks to cross. If these came up, he would be stranded. He got to the pub by the time the yellow alert was on and was able to help in calming them, and tying things down. The wind was blowing hard. He and the gardener decided to shelter in one room of the motel chalets, when they saw the cook wandering 209

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 209

6/05/11 11:33 AM

around in a daze. He had been going to shelter in the bathroom in his quarters. When he opened the door the rest of the house was gone. The strong pre-cyclone winds had taken it. There were men and women walking about too. They got them into the motel as well, but when the walls started to rock, they knew they had to get out of there, so all decided to go to the sea container that had been used before in Cyclone Joan a few years back. A pick-handle was shoved in the door in case it slammed shut and locked. They didn’t want to be locked in there. A rope was tied onto it for them to hang onto so they could have a look at what was happening. Even then, the sea container went walking. It had cables over the top tied to 44-gallon drums of concrete to hold it down, but it was walking along like a cripple. The drums were lifting up and moving forward. One would lift up and move along, then another would, so the whole thing was moving. If it had turned over they would have been in a real mess. The noise was horrific with the wind gusting everywhere in all directions. Frank had been through a cyclone before, and knew what to expect. There were six people; the publican, Peter, his wife Ingrid, the staff and Frank. The container stored a lot of things too. They had to stand up all the time as there wasn’t much room in there. When anyone wanted to go to the toilet they had to wait for a lull in the winds, then go out and squat outside. They had to hold hands, so the ones inside could hang on to them to stop them blowing away. When it was all over they came out to find a terrible mess. 210

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 210

6/05/11 11:33 AM

epilogue

The quarters were all blown away, the chalets had lost their roofs and the roof of the hotel was off. Trees and sheets of iron were everywhere. A lot of it had to be completely rebuilt. It was lucky it happened in daylight. They gathered in the hotel. There was some old wine that was used for toasting. Frank was the toastmaster. He said they were all happy and making jokes to relieve the tension. They had to search around for water as the rainwater tank was filled with rubbish, but there was some in the fridge. The yardman had a little gas stove in his caravan so they made cups of tea and coffee, and were living it up with wine, coffee and biscuits. It took a couple of days for the main roads to be usable. I had to wait for this before I could go up and have a look at it. On the way all the trees in the gullies had lost their leaves, blown off by the strong winds, but what a sight the poor pub was. I walked around and had a look. Mattresses and all that were on the beds, but the roof had gone. It was so funny. I couldn’t help but see the funny side of it. Anyway it took them a little while to get it all back in perspective. Frank said the saddest part was helping with the stuff that was ruined. Ingrid’s stuff was the worst, records of their marriage and children. The wedding gown and children’s dresses had to be thrown out in the rubbish. Frank’s place, which he had built himself, had very little wrong.The carport that had been invaded by white ants had blown away, and there was a sheet of iron off the roof. The main building is still standing today. He told me that the wind blew so hard that at the bottom of the main door, the dirt had been packed really 211

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 211

6/05/11 11:33 AM

hard. He had to chisel this away to get it open. The rabbit-proof fence around the camp was packed with leaves and pieces of spinifex. All the trees from the pub to his place were stripped and the ground cleared in a strip about ninety metres wide. There was no spinifex or anything—all wiped clean like a table. Not level but cleared. There was one big bush, a huge wattle, where I used to tie my dog in the shade. I never would have dreamed it could blow away, but the wind just picked it up and it disappeared. We looked everywhere for it but couldn’t find it. I told Frank he was very lucky where his camp is. It is in a sort of hollow. While the cyclone was on, I was in Roebourne and all my family were away from me. I sat and watched from the front doorway. This was before we had the new front fence built. I looked across the road. The lady there had a big tree growing in the corner. It was leaning over with each gust of wind. At each gust it went a little bit more. As I expected, it blew over. It was lucky there was nothing in the road, for it to fall on. The rest of Roebourne had a lot of trees down and limbs blown off others. Water in huge puddles everywhere and roads covered with dirt. The Harding River was running a banker. Power was off too. We went for a drive round after it, and found it a mess. Some people’s sheds had blown over into other people’s yards. Cyclone John wasn’t as bad as Chloe, which hit the district in 1984—if John had come right over us though, it would have been double the strength of Chloe. Cyclone John dropped a lot of water, but it didn’t do the same damage. These were the last big rains we had until 2004. 212

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 212

6/05/11 11:33 AM

epilogue

When I first noticed that I was bleeding I didn’t think it was very important, but I went to see the doctor and she said, ‘Don’t worry about it; it is only a little bit of a haemorrhoid.’ Then I let it go for quite a while. Some time later, I was pulling the carpet out of my bus, because there was rust, and I started bleeding badly again. Then every time I went to the toilet it was sort of burning and I could feel something there. I went back to her and she checked me and sent me off to Nichol Bay Hospital to see the doctor. He checked me and said, ‘Something is there.’ I said, ‘Whatever it is, I don’t want it, get it out.’ He gave me a little operation and sent a specimen to Perth, and I didn’t think anything more of it. I was a bit sore from the operation that was all. Just a week later I went up to Whim Creek to see Frank and on the way back I stopped at the post office. The doctor pulled up, and said to me, ‘I’ve got some bad news for you Flo.’ I asked her, ‘Whatever happened? What have I done now?’ I’d already got my mail. She tried to explain to me in a roundabout way, and then said, ‘You’ve got cancer.’ I stood there and didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know whether to go crook or cry or whatever. Anyway I went off home and had a damn good cry. You know it was a shock to me. I was still crying but I said to myself I’ve got to stop this. Fight it with whatever I can. I had to go back to see the local doctor and then go to Nichol Bay again. 213

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 213

6/05/11 11:33 AM

The specialist there talked about the best way to treat the cancer I had. He said, ‘Either you can go for an operation or you can go for radiation and chemotherapy. If you go for the operation you are going to have a bag’. The last thing I wanted to do was to walk around carrying a bag for the rest of my life, because I’ve got too much going on in my life, I want to do things, so I took the radiation. They sent me off to the Sir Charles Gairdner. My first treatment was July 2002. I was down there about two months having chemotherapy. There are units where country people on therapy can stay. It was going alright. I used to go home and then back there for a week for the radiation. I was thinking I was feeling alright, and at last it was finished. The morning I was leaving to go home I had to go over and have my last radiation. I’d had my chemotherapy two days before. I didn’t really want to go for the rest of the radiation, but I did. I had my bags packed and a friend to pick me up to take me to the airport. On the way to the airport I wanted to have something to eat so we stopped by at Hungry Jacks and had some nice things to eat. Back in the car, I suddenly needed to go to the toilet. We couldn’t get a toilet between where we were and the airport, so when we arrived I left her with the luggage and rushed off. I found I couldn’t control myself because of the treatment. I was completely out of control, but I cleaned myself up as best as I could, and explained to the staff at the airport what had happened to me. I managed to get onto the plane. Frank picked me up from the airport in Karratha. I didn’t have 214

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 214

6/05/11 11:33 AM

epilogue

much energy, just enough to get from the plane to the terminal. When I got home the next morning I felt very, very sick. I felt as if my life was slipping away. I said to Frank, ‘I can’t hold on very much longer. It is getting too much for me. I’m going. Could you take me to the hospital?’ I was burning from the radiation. There was a lot of pain. I got out to the car alright, but by the time we got to the hospital in Roebourne I found I could hardly walk. I sat on a chair near the desk and the doctor was there. I said, ‘I’m not feeling right.’ She checked me and next thing I was put in the ward and the doctor gave me an injection, because I was burnt out. My white blood cells were burnt out. My temperature was way up. She told me I had a bug flying round in my body. After the needle the next thing I remember was being loaded onto the Flying Doctor’s plane that afternoon, and straight back to Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital. I was glad when I got there and into a ward. In the plane it had been freezing. I was put on a load of drips and after a week and a half on morphine I got back on my feet. They moved me back to the main ward.The doctor who gave me the chemotherapy came up to see me. I looked at him and I said, ‘Why was I so sick? I nearly died.’ He said he gave me a good dose of chemotherapy to kill the cancer. When it came time to go home I felt sick so this time I made them get me a wheelchair and make sure there was somebody with me on and off the plane to make sure I was alright. I didn’t want all that trouble again. I think I did well the time before all on my own. During all the chemotherapy and the radiation my hair was 215

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 215

6/05/11 11:33 AM

okay. It was long and I had washed it and combed it that last day before I left Perth but back in Roebourne, the next morning when I got up, it was falling out in handfuls. It was so quick. I couldn’t do anything about it because I was so sick. Frank said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and he took the scissors and cut most of it off as best as he could. After that I wore scarves and a hat. I hated it, but I was on the other side. When you’ve been good all your life and suddenly you run into something like this and you’re coming out the other side, it is all as much of a shock as it was in the beginning—losing your hair and stuff. I managed to cope with it, but I was grateful when I started to feel better. When I got home I had a lot of catching up to do with myself. I was tired from the treatment and travelling. It took me months and months to get over it. My hair grew back—at first it was just a little fluff, then it grew back nice and curly for a few months, then suddenly it went straight. Every six months I had a check for cancer. I had to go down to Perth, so I asked if I could have it done up here, and I’d been saying to them, ‘I’m not the only one up here. There are lots of people who need to be flown down to Perth for this few-minutes’ check. When the specialist comes up he can do me and all the others who need to be done.’ Those fares could be used for someone who was really sick and needed to go down. For me to go down for that little check was a waste of money. It was terrible. I would have to pack all my gear and get onto the plane. Before I went there I’d have to organize where to stay—with friends or whatever. I was lucky to have a 216

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 216

6/05/11 11:33 AM

epilogue

friend down there. I would ring her up and she would pick me up and take me to wherever I had to go, and she would let me stay in her house. I’ve been very grateful for this. The doctor who was here at the Aboriginal Medical Centre (AMS) fixed it. He said, ‘Well, I’ll write a letter.’ Next thing I got word to say I had to go to Nichol Bay Hospital in Karratha for an appointment to see the specialist. I think I made an avenue there.

When I felt much better I started to worry about my teeth. I had a pair of dentures I couldn’t wear properly. I’d had a lot of my teeth out long ago. We had a few trips to Hedland to get new ones made. I would stop at Whim Creek and pick up Frank, then leave him there on the way back down and go home on my own. At last they were ready. I had them in my mouth for a while as we came back down, but I took them out because I felt uncomfortable with them. I put them in a handkerchief on the seat over next to me. When I got to my gate the phone was ringing. I grabbed the stuff I had on the seat with me, and I forgot the dentures. Someone was ringing from Whim Creek to say Frank was on his way to Roebourne. It was only a little while after that he came. I couldn’t find my dentures so I went looking in the driveway and there I found them. Frank had run over them, and they were all in little pieces. 217

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 217

6/05/11 11:33 AM

I thought ‘Oh my God, now I’ve got to go through all of this again.’ I rang the dentist up and she started laughing. She thought this was a great joke, and said, ‘We’ll have to put them together again.’ When I took them up to her she was surprised at all the little bits. They had to make new ones. Then I had to go to Hedland for my eyes. I saw the guy in Karratha and he checked them and said, ‘You’ve got cataracts.’ What was happening with my eyes was that I could see most things, but distance was a problem. I could read things near, then after a while I’d have to stop. The cataracts were getting worse. I could read the newspaper with my glasses on, and then I couldn’t. I was about at my wits end. I planned to get my eyes done because if your eyes are good you can do a lot of things— spend more time painting or writing, but if your eyes are crook you can’t even see a dictionary. I could hardly see the letters on the page and it was so frustrating. Sometimes I had to ask Frank how something was spelt because I just couldn’t see it. Apart from that, and my knees, my health was pretty good. My knee had been getting pretty sore. It was painful to get up and down from chairs, and walking any distance was hard too. It got that Frank had to do most of the walking for shopping. I was pretty well housebound. It was a real burden, but at last I had an appointment in Perth to have an operation on it, in St John of God hospital in Subiaco. When I came back we walked down a chute and into the plane. I sat in an outside seat near the window because I knew I wouldn’t be able to get up and down. I didn’t want people to have to climb over me. I was sitting in it when 218

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 218

6/05/11 11:33 AM

epilogue

some toffee-nosed young bloke came along and insisted on me letting him sit next to the window. When we got to Karratha he had to wait until all the other passengers had left, as I had to be the last person off the plane. I had to be lifted down on a platform and in a wheelchair. He seemed really ignorant. I had only been trying to help when I wanted that seat. I thought, ‘Serves you right, young fellow.’ It took a while to get over the operation. I had to go to physio to make my knee work. It was stiff and I had to work on it to get it going again. I had a set of exercises to do; mostly bending and stretching my leg. This took patience, but it is fine now, and I don’t have trouble with the other one.

The book was just about finished when my brother and his wife came to see me. He was more or less on a mission, to see me and the old places where we had grown up round Newman. He came all the way from Victoria, not far from Melbourne. They both drove and took it in turns all that way across as he was pretty sick. He spent some time with Uncle Phil in Kalgoorlie. They would have gone out in the bush remembering old times, because they both liked it, then up through Meekatharra to Newman. I don’t know how he found it, but he found one of our old camps where we were little. He was telling me it didn’t look the same as it was. Also he wanted to see Marble Bar, but he didn’t get there. He came here to see me instead, because he knew, and 219

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 219

6/05/11 11:33 AM

I knew, it would be the last time we would see each other. When he came to my place he arrived early in the morning and he spent a couple of weeks here. He was thin as a matchstick. He used to be a tall, well-built man. My heart went out to him for his willingness to keep pushing on in his life. He had asbestosis, but he went on doing things, painting and all sorts he could do, to the last straw of his life. After he got here, he wanted to see Millstream. Dennis, my son, was with us, the two little boys; Roy’s nephews, me and his wife. We went out there for the day and he really enjoyed it. Roy used to be dogging round there. He wanted to look at it for the one last time. I didn’t think he would, but he did find where he had been. While he was here, we were talking about my book. I showed him my manuscript and he was quite rapt with it. I was hoping that he would live long enough to have seen it published, but that didn’t happen. At least he saw it. He was the only one of my brothers still alive. I heard him talking to Ruth while they were sitting in the van one afternoon. He said ‘If anything goes wrong with me I want you to get on with your life, you can’t keep dwelling with the past, don’t look back.’ It was a good attitude. I admired him for it. I was sad when he left. Not long after that he died. I found this very hard at the time, and I shed some tears, but I told myself, ‘You’re still living and you’ve got to get on with it.’ He left Ruth with the house and a boat. I’ve lost contact with her now. She would have sold the house and moved away. 220

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 220

6/05/11 11:33 AM

epilogue

Dennis was my eldest, born in Brisbane after I had been deserted by his father. Billy was born in Esperance, Margaret in Port Hedland, and Bobby in Roebourne. I did do a lot of shifting about. Dennis went to school in Roebourne when we had the camp near there, and then he went to Wittenoom School. Dennis married Jeanna and they had a daughter Tasha. I haven’t seen her since she was eight or nine years old. She was pretty too, with blue eyes and blond hair. Tasha was at Dennis’s funeral in Broome. She would be well into her twenties by now. While Dennis was with Jeanna he worked in the coal mines in Collie for a long time, but they didn’t get on, and he moved on to meet his partner Justine. They had two boys Jack and Luke. Dennis worked for a long while in Tom Price, on the belts there, separating big rocks from little rocks. He became ill and they found he had asbestosis. He recently passed away. For me it was sad and hard to understand. Billy went to school in Wittenoom too. After we left there we came to Roebourne, where he finished his schooling and met his partner Josie. They had two children Rebekka and Mason. Billy worked for a long time with Don North doing earth moving, using bulldozers, until he landed a job with the Shire grading roads. He reckons it is the best job he’s had. Margaret was born in Port Hedland. She met and married Steven Lewin when he was on Karratha Station doing fencing. They had moved to Onslow when Sara was born. Kelly was born 221

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 221

6/05/11 11:33 AM

in Port Hedland. Margaret was cooking for a day centre, making nutritious meals for them. Steven and Margaret went to live in Wittenoom and both worked for the Shire for a while. Steven worked in airports in Onslow, Paraburdoo, and then in Broome, where they are now. Bobby always did odd jobs with the Shire, and now drives a bus for an Aboriginal group. He had a bad accident when he was quite young. Two bones in his neck were broken. This always gives him trouble so he has a hard time with employment. He can’t really do manual work. Bobby had a partner Jenny. They had a boy Thomas, but they separated and we hardly ever saw Thomas. I heard that Jenny has married and they live somewhere near Perth. Overall I’m happy with my family. At times we had patches of trouble. I haven’t always been happy with all of them, but they’ve come out okay and now I’m happy with them.

222

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 222

6/05/11 11:33 AM

glossary

family tree Margaret Bland [Njunga, SA]

John Munro [Irish]

*

Mary

*

Jack Barbara

Phil

Eliza Munro

Ruth

James ‘Jim’ Corrigan

Billy

John Reynolds [English]

Margaret Bobby

Mary

John Reynolds

Harry

*

Ana Maria Borgas [German]

*

William Reynolds

Frances Reynolds

Florence William Edna Reynolds (Doug)

Barbara

Roy

Dennis * names unknown

223

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 223

6/05/11 11:33 AM

glossary barcoo rot blue

scurvy, bush sickness associated with ulcerations, vomiting argument or fight

broadsider

powerful verbal attack

cleanskin

an unbranded animal

clinker

lump of molten material

Condy’s

Condy’s Crystals (potassium permanganate), has many uses including home remedies

dogging

killing wild dogs or dingoes to protect livestock

dolly pot

mortar and pestle used to grind quartz and extract gold

duffer greenhide

cattle thief raw, untanned leather

karara

prickly thickets of Acacia tetragonophylla

kulyu

wild potatoes growing on the tablelands (Ngarluma)

mesquite mia pink-eye

(Prosopis species) thorny shrub introduced into Australia to feed and shelter stock Aboriginal house or temporary shelter holiday

plant

machinery, implements, tools used to do a job

stopes

sloping entry point into an underground mine

sugarbag

wild bees’ nest

224

miles_of_post_4_dec.indd 224

6/05/11 11:33 AM