Former home - Yarra {Reg's home 6th grade - high school}Yarra/Goulburn
In addition to the sheep my dad raised chickens. It was not a large operation with only about five hundred chickens. But eggs had to be collected on a regular basis, cleaned and shipped to the local egg board. __________ were prearranging chickens – although they too were in a ___________ area – again we had the problem of eagles, hawks and foxes as predators. Several times a fox found its way into the hen house and simply slaughtered 15 or 20 chickens, not even bothering to eat their entrails. I remember early one morning waking to hear a din in the chicken house. I grabbed the shotgun and ran up the hill to see what was going on. I found a large wedged-tail eagle eyeing the chickens. When I raised the shotgun it quickly flew off but only for about 200 yards. I decided to chase it down and _________ after it, still in my pajamas and bare feet. The eagle kept going about 200 yards and stopping waiting until I was fairly close and taking off again. I lost all sense of time and place until looking around I suddenly realized that I had traveled the 8 miles to the outskirts of Goulburn. There I was in my pajamas and bare feet on a cold and frosty morning about 100 yards from a large suburban development. A few curious neighbors appearing over the back pen set me. I turned and fled only to find that when I got home I had to immediately get dressed and ride my bike back into the city to go to school. I only did that once.
Our farm house was separated from the main roads by a substantial creek. Two large water holes in this creek were valuable sources of water in times of drought. There was spring feed and rarely did water level drop very far. However during winter quite often the creek would flood and spread over the surrounding flatlands. There would be almost three quarters of a mile of flooded lowlands to wade through before one could get to the main road. The first couple of times it was pretty miserable. One started from home a lot earlier than usual, and tried to find a place that was relatively safe for crossing the creek. Most times the water would only be up to knee-high at the ______________ but a very strong current would be running. Once out of the channel, however, about 12 to 18 inches of water would remain over the surrounding wetlands and one would have to wade through it all to get to the main road and _________ to school. Of course while wading the stream and walking through the plot of low lands one had to carry one’s bike across one’s shoulder along with book ______ or any other things that had to be taken to school on any given day. My parents would not accept that a flooded creek was a sufficient argument for not going to school on any given day. There were a few times however when the water was so great that I had to pick up my bike and trek through the wooded hills about 3 miles to a neighbor’s place. This neighbor, a dairy farmer, had built a bridge across the creek and this was rarely flooded. Once we got to the neighbor’s farm house we could again hop on our bike and head it to the school. I can’t count the number of times I turned up in school looking and feeling like a drown rat. One time, after riding through a particularly vicious rain storm, I got to school a little late. As I was walking down the corridor to my classroom, dripping water everywhere, one of the teachers came out and grabbed me, hold me into his office and gave me six “cuts” with a bamboo cane for being late. School systems were very different then from what they are today. One time when I arrived really soaking wet, the classroom teacher took pity on me. He took me down to a stall room and put on a couple of bar radiators so that I could try and dry off some of my clothes before going back to class about 30 minutes later. I guess it was no wonder that most members of my family during the winter months had a long series of colds and flues. Nevertheless it also made us fairly hardy and able to function pretty well even in severe weather conditions.
Our family was poor. Often there wasn’t enough money to pay train fare into town for my mother to do even a simple amount of shopping for food. Consequently living off the land became an important part of all our lives. In particular I learned to differentiate mushrooms and would often go down early in the morning, take a basket of field mushrooms and carry them on my bike into town. _______ someone to a hotel cook and get enough money to pay for my lunch and a little bit more to give it to my mother for the household expenses. I also ran a rabbit trap line. My father had grown up in the bush and had learned all the tricks of survival in the Australian bush. He passed them on to each of us but I think I may have got the bulk of the teaching. Nevertheless he taught me how to shoot a shotgun, recognize a rabbit hidden in a _____ bush, and to find the best places to set traps to catch rabbits. Rabbits in Australia at that time were a plague force. There were about 80 million sheep in Australia and probably about 500 million rabbits. The rabbits and the sheep contested for the same natural foods and the rabbits were regarded as a pest that needed to be eradicated. I used to set up about a dozen traps every afternoon. These rabbit traps were about 12 to 14 inches long with iron jaws. They were spring loaded and had to be disguised by burying them slightly in the ground. A rabbit walking across the trap would step on a plate which was a trigger for releasing the spring on the jaws of the trap. Rabbits were always caught by one and sometimes two legs. Each morning I would go round my dozen traps and bring rabbits back to home. Sometimes these would be for food; sometimes I would skin the rabbits and dry the pelts and later sell them to a wool, hide and skin buyer; _______ a European market for rabbit flesh grew and began to carry three or four pelts of rabbits in each day laying them on the crossbar of my bike and selling them to a local _________ works. All these activities brought in a steady supply of cash that helped pay for clothes, shoes, books, and food.
When I was about 12, dad contracted with a large rancher for my older brother John and myself to spend the two weeks of the school holidays on the ranch camping out and catching and killing rabbits. Since the ranch was in a very isolated spot, when we caught rabbits we simply skinned them and dried the skins. Each weekend dad would drive out and pick out the packets of skins and take them in to sell. We had about 250 traps. We would take them in lots of about 12 to 15, _________ them over our shoulder and setting the traps, then going back and taking another 15 and finding places for them etc. The easiest thing was to find an extremely large rabbit warren and set traps at as many holes as we could. Occasionally one would get not only rabbits but a wild cat or a fox in the trap. Once my brother went away to college, I did this contract trapping by myself. Usually I slept in a barn, cooked my own food (invariably cans of stew) and simply work my butt off setting and monitoring the traps. The two weeks would then add quite a good profit however, so my trouble was worth while.
During summer break, however, I used to work for one of the local farmers. Most of the time was spent “stooking” sheaves of wheat. A stook was an upright bundle of about 8 to 10 sheaves of wheat that would get them off the ground and help them dry out prior to processing. Processing usually meant running the sheaves through a chard cutter and bagging the chard for cattle feed. Part of this process involved the use of flat bed trucks. The truck could go to the most distant part of the field and two or three of us would labor at packing the truck with wheat sheaves. Being the youngest I was always put up on the flat bed and taught how to arrange the sheaves in an orderly fashion so that they would not fall off on the bumpy road back to the chard cutting equipment. This went fairly well until one day when I had a fairly substantial stack of sheaves packed on the truck, one of the other laborers yelled: “Watch out, for Christ sake!” and looking up I saw a sheaf that had been heaved up by a pitchfork coming over the top and along with it about a 6 foot brown snake. I jumped over the edge of the truck and no amount of ordering, controlling, or threatening would ever get me back up neither onto that loaded hay nor on any future ones. For all this effort I was paid one pound a day (at that time one pound in Australia was equivalent to about $2.20 in the US).
One of the more important activities that I had to participate in was that of “boiling the billy.” Summers were extremely hot. Working outdoors in the hay fields was dirty and very hot. While we certainly all had canvas waterbags that, when hung on the side of the truck, and caressed by a passing breeze, would keep the canvas _________ and then the water very cool. But everyone drank hot tea. The process was as follows: first clear a small place so that a fire could be built without endangering the stubble fields and wheat fields surrounding it. Find a couple of stones (not easy in rich farm agricultural areas). The pot for boiling the water, called a “billycan” would be about the size of a quart pot. Usually it did not have a lid. Water was placed in the billycan and boiled. Once the water was boiling, a couple of handfuls of black tea leaves would be thrown into the pot. After boiling for a couple of minutes the can would be taken off the fire and put to one side to allow the tea to settle somewhat and mature. Before pouring any of the tea however it was usual to “swing the billycan.” This involved picking up the pot of boiling water and tea by a handle, and vigorously twirling? it in a huge round arm circle. This had to be done quickly or gravity would simply cause the water to drop out the can. The swinging of the billy however would settle the tea leaves and one could then pour the tea into a mug relatively free of the leaves used to make the tea in the first place.
Another way of earning some cash was to set up a very primitive road side stall. It was not a stall at all, but simply a cardboard sign with lettering on it. Sometimes the lettering would have mushrooms and the price per pound. __________ I would have a wicker closed basket full of mushrooms and a small kitchen scale. We’d simply sit by the side of the road, hold up the sign and occasional cars would stop and purchase some mushrooms from us. Since farmers in that area frequently use fruit trees and shade trees for their sheep, it was also possible to set up at the road side selling blood plums, apricots, blackberries, and mulberries. Again, this money was used to help with family expenses but also to buy clothes and the books necessary for my education.
When at Cootamundra, my mother had joined the tennis club and she and my sister Marie became very good tennis players. Strange to say, this little hamlet of Yarra had four tennis courts for public use. They were dead courts but people used to come in from 15 to 20 miles around at weekends to play tennis and there was a thriving membership there. My sister was by far and away the best female tennis player. She and I also won most of the mixed doubles tournaments. The farmhouse in which we lived also had an old tennis court nearby. When we moved there it was covered with button____ weeds. At the urgency of our mother, the family took up the task of getting rid of all the weeds, resurfacing the court, and making the court usable again. This we did and my mother occasionally was able to have local friends over for a tennis afternoon. Many afternoons a couple of my brothers and my sister and I would go _________ on the court, play the ______ and then hit it for an hour or so. We all became competent tennis players. But when tennis playing _________ a little after my sister left high school and took a job in a solicitor’s office, I began to use the tennis court like a cricket pitch to practice my spinballing. The wicket in this case was the stump of an old black bottle tree at one end of the court. Occasionally, when my brother John came home from college, we would set up a cricket pitch down on the part of the floodplain below the house and would then bowl on and bat to each other. That stopped after one day when he was batting and I bowled a loose ball to him which he cracked back at me, catching me fairly in the face and breaking my nose. I was not a happy camper and did not want to participate in that particular activity with him any more. I did, however, play cricket with a local club and for the school. I eventually received a “half-blue” for cricket and one for football from the Goulburn high school. These are awards given to the equivalent of representative and best and first players each year. I was good enough at cricket at the age of 15 to be selected in the Southern Highlands representative team as person _____ batsman and spin bowler. For the next three years I was again selected in the under 17 representative team and captained the teams to very successful interregional competitions.
Goulburn High school
After my year in the one-teacher school at Yarra repeating sixth grade, I was enrolled in the public high school in the city of Goulburn. Since I had no history of performance in the local elementary schools, they didn’t quite know where to place me. At that time students were placed in grades, A, B, C, D, E, F, and G, depending on intelligence and performance. The A grades took the most comprehensive classes including at least 2 languages. At Goulburn it was French and Latin. One also took Algebra and Geometry in the early years and later one had the choice of “Pure Math” or “General Math.” In my first year I took French and Latin along with English, History, General Science, Music, Religion, and Geography. On my second year I dropped Latin but continued with all the others. In the fourth year of high school it dropped down in the number of courses taken to no more than five. But one could take the equivalent to an overload in terms of honors courses. For my final two years (it was a five-year program at that time) I took English, History, Geography, Economics, Chemistry, and General Math. I took honors in Geography and History. I was not the brightest kid in the bunch. There were about 18 to 20 of us in the fourth year and about 14 in the fifth year. In each year I was rated about eighth. I had a permanent feeling of incongruence and embarrassment, not really believing that I was good enough to be in the A stream along with some of these other brilliant students. In my fourth year I discovered girls. This began to take up a lot of my time until my English teacher really _______ me out and told me how I was wasting my life. I owe much to that teacher, Mr. Jack Plews. He was the ______________ that straightened me out. From then on I became A student and began steadily creeping up the ranking ladder. At that time statewide final exams were given at the end of the fifth year. I received a first class on these in History (fourth in the state) but only a second class in Geography – the one I thought I would do best in since it consistently had been my best subject all through high school. I got A’s in English and Economics but dropped to B’s in Math and Chemistry. Nevertheless my overall performance put me in the top 2 or 3 in the class and I was given a National (Commonwealth) Scholarship and a Teacher’s College Scholarship at the university of my choice. I had previously had no idea about going to anything other than a 3-year teachers’ college, not believing that I was smart enough to go to a 4-year university. My father could not believe that I was that smart either and actively discouraged me from accepting any of the scholarships. The Teachers’ College Scholarship had a “bond” associated with it, which meant that at the end of my university degree if I did not go to school teaching I would have to pay back the money paid to me over the previous four years. This really disturbed my father and he would not sign the appropriate documents to allow me to take the scholarship. However I went to another local rancher, whom we hardly knew, and asked him to be in loco parentis and sign the admission form for me. I was extremely grateful that he did so and I decided to take up the scholarship at a small rural residential university in northern New South Wales – the University of New England in the city of Armidale. More on that later.
My studies were proceeding fairly well in my first year when disaster occurred. Each year our high school played a home and away sporting competition with a high school at the city of Bowral, about half way between Goulburn and Sydney. This particular year the weather was lousy. We played football in the driving rain and everyone got soaked and freezing cold (but we won the match handily). At that time I had a girlfriend, from the _________. When the bus dropped us off at the high school at about 10:30pm, I walked home with her through the driving rain. We then stood in an unsheltered area in the rain and nipped for about an hour. I then realized that I had to go back to school, take my bicycle, and ride home. It was miserable. The next day I got up as usual and went to school but during the first period was so exhausted that I fell into a sound sleep. Luckily the teacher did not disturb me but let me sleep it off. That teacher was one of the football coaches that had also been on the Bowral trip on the previous day. However on waking I felt ill and was sent home. At home I came down with a ranging temperature and massive chest congestion. My mother had to walk across the fields to the post office in the little hamlet of Yarra and call a doctor in Goulburn to see if he would come out and evaluate me. We had no car at that stage and I was not able to ride my bike into the city to go to the doctor’s. He did come out and diagnosed pneumonia. After a lengthy wait he managed to get an ambulance sent out and pick me up and take me to the hospital. It turns out I had double pneumonia and was placed in what I would later learn was the “death bed.” A number of students from the school, which was across the road from the hospital, used to drop in in the afternoon as to see me but I was so out of it that all they could do was stand around the _____ side and stare. After 4 or 5 days however I did start feeling better and they moved me to another bed in the public ward. A group of girl students came in that afternoon to check on me, saw that the death bed was empty, and broke into tons of tears all thinking that I had died. There was a certain amount of relief when I called out from further down the ward and they turned and came over to visit me. It took about three weeks in the hospital and a week at home for me to recover enough to be able to go back to school. However about a month later (and this was in my final year of high school), I was riding my bike to school when a car came roaring around a bend at high speed on the wrong side of the road and clipped me. I was knocked over the side of the road into a little ravine and my bike was totaled. Evidently I laid down there unconscious until one of the local farmers noticed the smashed bike, stopped his truck, came out to look and found me unconscious in the ravine. I was pretty battered and bloody and he took me into the city and to a hospital and later advised my parents that he had done so. My face was pretty well scarred as I lost most of the skin on my ______ and down the right side of my face when I hit the gravel. Luckily none of the abrasions were extremely deep and after a couple of weeks in the hospital my skin started recovering. Although I had to stay away from the school ________ for a while because of the hideous scabs all over my face, eventually I was able to get back to school with a final ________ of the school year and do last minute preparations for my leaving certificate exams.
I should tell one other rather humorous incident. It was the Annual Sports Day, this time Track and Field. I was in the final 100 meters. The starter gave the signal: ready, get set, and just a fraction of a second before the starter gun went off I let off a ripping great fart. This sounded like the starter’s gun and we all took off down the track everyone laughing so much that they could hardly complete the course. I was embarrassed and also laughing and came in sixth in the race, feeling lucky that I was able to finish it at all. I was surprised that there was no false start but I know that the story circulated throughout the school and was greeted with hilarity by students and staff alike.
There were many other little incidents that I could put in here, some of them not very complimentary and embarrassing. One which I always regretted occurred with respect to one of the students in our class who we thought was gay and wasn’t especially close friend of an obviously gay science and biology teacher. They both _____ wore long sweeping gel haircuts and grew big bushy sideburns. One day on the way home a group of six of us from the class, including the top students in the class, ________ our class member and shaved off one of his sideburns. At the time we all thought it was a great joke. On looking back now I realize how stupid, insulting, and frightful we were. The kid actually put up a brave ___front and instead of shaving off the other sideburn at home, proudly wore one while the other one was growing back. I think we all learned something from his courage.
At high school I continued to have only a passing interest in tennis but in my final year I was encouraged to enter the school tennis championships. My partner and I won the doubles and I lost in the singles after I drove every string in my only racket.
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