VERBATIM TRANSCRIPTION OF LESLIE GRAHAM MACDONALD TAPES

Recorded and transcribed by Stanley Graham.  Strictly copyright.  No part of this manuscript may be reproduced by any means, nor transmitted, nor translated into a machine language without the written permission of Stanley Graham.

Tape identification                                File Number

Tape two green leader.                          162\lgstory.012

They had a lot of Irish navvies on this job and those blokes, if ever someone new starts on the job they try to “run him into the ground” as they call it.  Because everybody’s got to try to keep up with the feller next to him.  Anyhow, we were shovelling ballast out of trucks and there was one bloke each side of me and they kept going and going and by the time we got the train emptied I was about beat.  Then we had to start throwing this ballast back into the four foot, that’s the space between the two lines.  We were throwing it in and I was trying to keep up with them.  It was very hot, I’ll bet it was 120 out in the sun, and the last thing I remember is straightening up and turning and seeing this mountain of flesh alongside of me.  The next thing, I woke up and I was lying under the shade of a tree.  This bloke was knelt down by me side.  He said to me “You went out.”  I said “Did I?”  He said “It’s a good job I was near you.  I could tell you were getting beat and I come and stood behind you.  It’s a good job I did or you’d have fallen down that embankment.  You might have broke your neck.  Anyhow, you just lay there and cool off a bit.”  My God, I did feel bad.  My head was aching, I wanted to be sick and I wanted to go to the lavatory and me stomach was aching, I was in a terrible mess.

Anyhow, I lay there all the afternoon and when the sun got down a bit I got up and made me way back to camp.  I cooked meself something to eat and I decided to get into bed.  I thought I’d get the sack anyhow.  I didn’t think they’d keep me.  Anyhow he came up to see me, this foreman, and he said “How do you feel now?”  So I said “I don’t feel so bad.  I’ll be alright in the morning but I suppose I’m fired am I?”  He said “Oh, I didn’t say you were fired.  Do you know anything about blacksmithing?”  I said “Aye, I do.”  He said “Can you sharpen a pick and temper it?”  I said “I can.”  He said “I’ll find you a job where you won’t be up against these tough necks.”  So he set me on sharpening picks and there seemed to me to be hundreds of picks there for sharpening.  I spent all me time sharpening picks and tempering them.  Fellers were bringing me their favourite picks to sharpen and telling me how they wanted ‘em sharpening and all that sort of thing and I was a very popular feller in the gang.

I stayed with them about six weeks and I was on that job the whole time.  I got to know this foreman chap fairly well.  I wish I could think of his name.  He was a damn fine feller.  He was a coloured lad but by God he was a decent bloke. 

Whilst I was at this camp I met old Abdhul Fazeldene.  I don’t know whether I’ve mentioned this before but I did meet him years before when we lived at Eulomogo.  He was one of these fellers who used to travel up and down the country selling all kinds of things, wearing apparel, mouth organs, pipes, razors, anything you liked, old Abdhul would have it.  He camped with us for a couple of nights.  I know it was over the weekend because some of the fellers were trying to take the mickey out of him and I got into a fight over him.  Because he was coloured they were talking very disrespectfully about him, treating him as though he was something less than the dust and I got into a fight with a bloke.  Anyhow, I was lucky, I picked a feller I could beat.  I beat him and they left Abdhul alone.

This chap had a disease, I don’t know what it was but there were spots all over him, the skin turning white and he told me what they called this disease and he said “When I turn white all over I’ll die.”  If he is dead, he’s only just recently died because strangely enough I saw in a book, not very long ago where Abdhul Fazeldene had taken a flock of goats right across the dead centre up into the cattle country in Arnhem and whether it was Old Abdhul or whether he had a son or not I don’t know but it was Abdhul Fazeldene.

Well, the re-sleepering job cut out and the gang was paid off with the exception of about four or five of us.  I was offered a job to go to Byrock on a bridge building job and I took this on.  I went there and I had to report to the ganger, a man named Sloane.

We camped in Byrock.  The two bridges we were working on were on the Byrock to Brewarrina line.  We used to go out every morning on what they called the ‘Sheffield truck’.  That was a truck that you stood up on and pumped the handle up and down.  You could knock along at twenty or twenty five mile and hour on these on level ground.  That was our means of getting too and from work.  We built these two bridges, it was only a matter of taking the bearers out and putting new bearers and rails in each one and doing up the approach to the two bridges.  When we finished them we were told there was a job in Coonamble and if we liked we could go there.  I decided to go and two of the other chaps as well. One decided that he wasn’t going.  We loaded our things on to a truck and we went off to Coonamble.

The job at Coonamble was putting in some cow-catchers.  That’s a sort of a grid to prevent cattle from crossing from one property to another when the fence runs up to the railway line because the railway line wasn’t fenced.

While we were there the Coonamble football team was in a final, they were a rugby league team.  The day before the match they found they were a man short.  They knew there were some young fellers on this job at the railway and they came down to see if any of us played football.  I said I’d played before and they said “Would you like a game tomorrow?”  I said “I don’t know, I can’t play rugby league because if I do I’ll be disqualified from playing rugby union.”   They said “Well, who’ll ever get to know that you played rugby league.”  I thought that’s right enough so I said “I tell you what to do, you book me as A N Other and we’ll trust to luck.” 

Anyhow, they did this and they asked me where I played.  I said I didn’t mind where I played, I’d play with the forwards or scrum half or I’d play on the right wing, I didn’t mind where it was.  Anyhow, they put me on the right wing.  These lads that we were playing against were all college boys.  They certainly could play football but we had the better of them at any rate, we won about twenty odd to nine or ten or something like that.  I scored two trys and kicked three goals and I was a hero for the side and it was all very enjoyable. 

We’d played this game in the morning.  I had to get the morning off to play because there was a luncheon afterwards.  As the pubs closed at six o’clock at night it was decided that the game would be played in the morning and then they’d have the luncheon and then the teams could have a few drinks if they wanted after the luncheon was over.  Anyhow, we attended the luncheon and we had a few drinks after lunch and we were still having a few drinks when the pubs closed at six o,clock.  There was one of my pals from the railway gang, a feller named Dargen[?] who liked his ale.  At six o’clock he was well and truly canned.  We stayed in the pub until about seven or half-past.  They kept having one for the road and one for the road.  Anyhow, they threw us out about half past seven.  To get home we had to cross over the bridge over the Castlereagh River.  This feller, Jimmy Dargen was using some pretty bad language.  In fact we all were but he was the worst of the lot of us.  We were trying to quieten him down.  We were just crossing this bridge and I saw a trooper coming the other way, or I thought it was a trooper.  So we said “Jimmy, watch yourself, don’t swear until this feller passes.”  Just when we got almost up to the feller he started to come out with a mouthful and I put me hand over his mouth.  He knocked me hand away and said something like “Don’t do that to me you bastard or I’ll chuck you over the bridge!”  Of course, the copper pounced on him.  We started to argue the point with the policeman and it turned out that I knew this feller, he come from Dubbo.  I said “Now look, we admit he’s drunk and we admit he used some bad language but there’s nobody about.  Nobody’s heard him but ourselves and you and we’ll undertake to get him home without any further trouble if you’ll let him go.”  So he said “Well alright, if you’ll do that we’ll say no more about it.  Off you go.”

Just as we were walking away this feller Jimmy Dargen says “What the bloody hell does that so and so want to interfere with us for?”  Of course the copper turned round and said “Right, for that I am going to take you in.”  I very foolishly started to argue the point and wrestle with him.  Anyhow in the finish he’d forgotten Jimmy and him and I were wrestling in the road.  We got against the rail of the bridge and I was trying to tip him over the rail and into the river, or down into the river bed, there was no water there.  But anyhow, he got some help and we were taken in.  They come up from the pub and bailed me out some time in the night.  Next morning we couldn’t find Jimmy anywhere.  I went down to the gaol to see whether he was in the gaol and they started a argument with me these troopers when I got down there and I could see they were going to slam me in again.  They were trying to pick a row with me.  They made me turn me pockets out and all sorts of indignities they subjected me too.  So we got into an argument and eventually they slammed me in again.  They never told me anything about Jimmy.  So they came down again and got me out.  Jimmy hadn’t turned up and they’d told this chap that came down to bail me out that they didn’t know anything at all about him.

So next morning, Monday morning we were up before the beak.  When my case come up I was accused of being drunk and disorderly, using bad language and assaulting the police.  I thought Oh God, I’ll get six months here.  They asked me how I pleaded and I told them what had happened.  I apologised for what I’d done but I also told them about the police picking a quarrel with me the second time when they took me in.  Anyhow it ended I got fined a pound on each count and six and eightpence costs.  I was just turning to walk out of the court after paying me fine when I hear somebody going ‘psst’.  It was old Jimmy up in the dock and he was making signs for me not to go because it turned out he had no money to pay his fine.  He was charged with being drunk and disorderly and using obscene language.  He was fined five bob.  I had enough to pay and so paid his fine but he got away with a fine of five bob and I got two pounds six and eightpence all through trying to help him.

Anyhow we went back to work and not very long after that the job cut out and I went back home for a day or two.

When I got home I found a letter waiting there for me from a man named Bishop who had been a partner with Bailey, Bishop and Bailey, hay and corn merchants.  He told me in this letter that they’d dissolved the partnership and they were both going on their own.  He was taking over the business in the Narromine area and Bailey was taking over the other end of the business.  He wanted to know if I was interested in a job as a plant manager because Mr Bailey had no one to run his chaff-cutting plant.  He told me that if I was interested should get in touch with Mr Bailey either by phone or by letter but he also said that he thought if I went up to see him everything would be alright as he was sure that the terms and conditions would satisfy me.  So I didn’t bother to write to him,I told them at home I was going off looking for a job.  I didn’t tell them where I was going, I caught the train next morning and went up to Trangie and Mr Bailey. 

He was delighted to see me.  He said he certainly had the job and he hoped I would take it and he hoped I would be very happy with them.  I knew him but I didn’t know his sons or his daughter.  He took me and introduced me to his sons, there was Abe, who was the youngest, Maurice was the eldest lad and the daughter, I forget her name now but she was a nice bit of homework.  He took me up and showed me the plant.  It was up at the place where he lived, a little bit of a farm about a mile out of town.  He had a big warehouse in the railway yard where he kept his stocks of hay and corn.  The first thing I had to do was to go over the plant as it was a second-hand one that he’d bought and put it in good working order.  In the meantime, they’d be raking up a gang.

Well, I did this, there wasn’t very much to do.  Both the chaff-cutter and the engine were in pretty good order.  It was a Fowler eight horse power engine and it was the sort of job that I fancied.  I liked them better than the American engines.

When we were ready to go I said to him “What about it?  What have we got in the way of a gang?”  He said “Well, I think the best thing we can do, you and me will go out and look at one or two of the places where we’re going to cut at so that when you get going you won’t want any help or information from anybody for a week or two.”  So we went out to these farms and had a look and there was about a thousand ton of hay on three places.  That was sufficient for us to make a start with. 

We got the gang together, they were a pretty rum crew but we got them away from the pub as best we could and got ‘em lined up at the house on the Monday morning.  We set off for the first farm. 

We got into position, got the machine going, with a new crew it always takes a week or two to get them to settle dow but these fellers, although they were pretty rough and a drunken mob, were alright when we got them going.  Some of them didn’t know their jobs too well but they soon picked it up and we got going pretty well.  In a very short time I would have backed that gang to knock out as much as thirty ton in a day easy.

Well we went on cutting hay, cutting out, going to town, getting drunk and back again to work round the various farms and eventually we got down into old Bishop’s country down around the Narromine area and out to Peak Hill.  It was whilst we were coming one day from Peak Hill that I had an experience that scared the life out of me.  There was still a lot of things I didn’t know, I found that out.

Coming back on the Narromine road from Peak Hill there was a long downhill slope.  It wasn’t very steep, it might have been about one in seventy or eighty or something like that.  It wasn’t what you’d call a steep hill.  About half way down this hill we had to turn off the main road on to a farm road.  This farm road was almost at right angles to the main road, not quite, but almost.  Where the intersection was there was a bit of a cutting and on the right hand side there was a bit of a bank, not very high, about two or three feet high sloping gently away off the road.  When we got to the top of this hill I got the idea, very foolishly, why go down the hill in gear?  Why not run down free-wheeling?  I forgot for the moment about the turn-off because if we’d have gone to the bottom everything would’ve been alright.  I forgot about the turn-off and slipped it out of gear.  As it gained momentum, which it did at an alarming pace, I tried to get back into gear again.  I couldn’t, I tried racing the engine, tried to get me speed something like so that I could get it into gear but it wouldn’t go in.  I probably would have done if we had gone a bit further but we were coming to this intersection and I thought I’ll try and turn.

I kept out as far on me wrong side as I could to give me self as big a turn as possible but by this time we were belting along at about twenty, twenty five mile and hour.  It must have been all that.  That’s a lot for those big heavy engines.  Anyhow, I threw the wheel over, the feller that was steering, he’d let go and he’d jumped of.  I started to make the turn.  I got about half way round and I could feel the engine lifting on the near side.  I thought gor blimey we’re going to turn over but just at the moment when I think we would have turned over, fortunately for me, we hit this bank.  Of course that threw us back on a level keel again.  But when we hit the bank with the chaff-cutter, pots and pans and bloody luggage and everything went flying all over the place.  The old steamer that was behind suffered the same fate and the truck between the steamer and the chaff cutter that carried all the gear, that was a flat topped truck, everything shot off that.

Anyhow, we pulled up about a hundred yards away from the road and apparently, apart from a bit of bruising and one or two things broke, no real damage was done.  We set too and loaded up again and went off to camp.  While it was happening I think I was the most scared man in Australia.  I could see this bloody engine tippling over and falling on top of me and all sorts of things.  I was lucky to get away with it.

It was whilst we was at this farm that I saw one of the worst dusters that I’d ever seen in me life.  We were working away and suddenly one of the fellers shouted to me “What about it?  There’s a duster blowing up!”  I looked in the direction he pointed and I couldn’t see anything only a big red wall.  I stopped the machine straight away and we couldn’t do anything about fastening anything down.  All we could do was stick our head into a bag and get somewhere out of the main blow as well as we could and wait for it to blow over.  One thing I noticed before it got to us, there was whirlwinds and there seemed to me to be dozens and dozens of these whirlwinds and they sort of started in a big circle and got smaller and smaller and were taking what appeared to be solid pillars of earth up into the air for hundreds of feet.  Eventually it struck us and we had to lay there for about half an hour before it blew itself out.  When we got up we were almost choked.  Even though we had our heads in chaff bags we were still spitting red and everything was blown all over the place.  Half the stack was blown away and there was a terrible mess.  The people from the farm sent some men out to help us to clear up but they’d had their own troubles.  They said that it had blown the roof off one of their outhouses and the farmer told me, he was an old chap who had been there for many years, he told me he had never seen one like it in his life.  It was terrific.

We run into a bit of trouble also while we were here with the engine.  During the cleaning out, some mud had got left in one corner of the boiler down on the foundation ring and a rivet started to leak.  When I looked in the firebox I could see a definite bulge.  Well the only thing that could be done would be to bore this rivet out and put an oversize rivet in or if it was very bad to have a patch put on the boiler.  I got in touch with Mr Bailey about this and he sent his son out.  He came out next day and he asked me what I was going to do about it.  I said I was going to continue using it until we cut out and he said we might bust the boiler.  I said we’ll not burst the boiler.  We’ll continue using it and then we’ll get it into Narromine to Jimmy Mullins and get it repaired.  Anyhow this leak got worse so I decided to have a go at caulking it.  I was working on it late in the evening.  I couldn’t see very well in this firebox so a lad said to me “Why not bring the boss’s car up, it’s got big headlights on it.”  It was the first motor car I’d ever seen with electric lights on it.  I didn’t know that these electric lights were run off a battery, I should have known but anyhow I didn’t know, I thought there was some bloody magic that give these lights.  He said “If you like we’ll bring the car up and shine the headlights in and you might be able to see.”  So I said “Right, we’ll do that.”

Anyhow, we brought this car up and we stood it in position with the headlights on so that I got some reflected light into the boiler and I could see quite well.  I worked on this thing for about, oh, I must have been three or four hours on the job, and we were using the lights of this car for all sorts of things.  Well, eventually they started to get dimmer and dimmer, these lights, and eventually there was no lights at all hardly.  Well, when we come to start the car, we couldn’t start it, the batteries had gone flat and we couldn’t start it at all.  We did eventually get it started by pushing it and took it back home and said nothing about it.  But I’d learned me lesson about electric lighting on motor cars.

Anyhow we got the engine fettled up enough to run it until we cut out on the job and I took it back into Narromine and I rung Bailey up.  He started to play hell with me because we had a leaking boiler.  I couldn’t see that I was to blame for it because I didn’t clean the thing out.  It was another fellers job to do the washing out of the boiler.  He said I was in charge and I should have seen that it was done right and all that sort of thing so I told him that he could stick the engine and the chaff-cutter and all concerned where Paddy stuck the nuts.  I asked him to give me me time and I’d get out which I did do.  So that finished me with Mr Bailey.  This, would be in the June or July of 1912 as near as I can remember. [19 years old]

When I got settled up with Mr Bailey I had a few pound in my pocket and I thought it was time I had a bit of a walkabout so I went up to Nyngan.  I stayed there for a few days having a few drinks and meeting a few people that I knew and generally buggering about.  All of a sudden I got an idea to go to Cobar.  I thought I’d go and have a try in the mines their, see what it was like working in the copper mines.  So I got on the train and went off to Cobar.  When I got out to Cobar I decided I’ll not stay here, I’ll go out to Broken Hill and get a job out there.  I had an idea in going to Broken Hill that if I didn’t get on there I could go over to White Cliffs which was an opal bearing country and try me luck at digging for opal.   Anyhow, I got the mail coach out of Cobar for Broken Hill and I put up at a hotel there and the next day I went up to the mine to look for a job.

Now Broken Hill had a terrible reputation for accidents.  I had heard a great many tales about it but I didn’t believe them because I didn’t think it could be as bad as people made it out to be.  Anyhow, I went to the labour office which is on all these jobs.  Run by a sort of a storekeeper cum paymaster cum labour agent.  I asked him if there was any work knocking about.  He said “What are you.  Are you a miner?”  I said “Yes.”  I’d never been down a mine in my life but I thought if I get down I’ll be alright.  He said “How long have you been waiting here?”  I said “Oh, about ten minutes or a quarter of an hour.”  He said “Well there’s nothing at the moment but if you wait until you see the ambulance come out of that gate and come across here, I might be able to fix you up with something.”  So I hung on for a while and sure enough, about half an hour after he’d spoke to me, the ambulance came in and went out again.  I knocked on this little window and he came to the window.  I said “The ambulance has just gone out.”  He said “Well I haven’t heard anything about it as yet but hang on a bit and we’ll see.”  After a while he came back and said that there was a job down on the fourteen hundred foot level working with a feller named Lowe.  I said “When do I start?”  He said “You start now.”  I said “Well, it’s in the middle of a shift isn’t it?”  It’d be about ten or eleven o’clock.  He said “Aye, I suppose it is.  Never mind, you needn’t go down now but be here at six o’clock tomorrow morning to go on the morning shift.

So next morning I showed up and found this feller Lowe that I was working with and he said to me “Have you had any experience of mining?” and I said “No.  I don’t know anything at all about it.”  He said “Oh, you’re not the first one I’ve had that way.  We’ll see how we go on.  Have you ever used a pneumatic drill?”  I said “No.”  He said “Well, you’ll be using one this morning.”  Anyhow we got in the cage and we seemed to drop like a stone.  Eventually it stopped and some men got out and then it went further down and stopped and eventually we come to our plat.  We got out and he said come on.  I thought well, this isn’t too bad, it was like walking down a street, electric light and trams running down the centre, plenty of room to walk in.  We walked for a good while, I don’t know how far it was but he said “This is our stope up here.” 

We had to climb up to it, up a sloping tunnel which they call a rill.  The method of working there was, you didn’t dig down into the ground.  You start as we did at the fourteen hundred foot level and you keep bringing the roof down and throwing the ore down this rill and then letting all the rubbish fill up.  We sort of dug the ore out and filled in as we went along.  They were constantly sending soil and rock down from what they called a glory hole@ on the surface.  They used to dig this rock and it went down a pass and you used this to fill in and keep the floor a reasonable distance from the roof so that you could work on it.  Drilling was carried out by wedging a bar between the floor and the roof.  the drilling bar was something very much like a long screw jack. You put it up to the roof and put some good solid stones underneath it at the bottom and then you screwed up on the jack until it was jammed tight between the floor and the roof.  Then the pneumatic drill fitted on to this bar and it had a swivel attachment.  It was one fellers job to hold the drill and the other fellers job to slowly revolve it as it hammered into the roof.  The feller that was holding, he also put the pressure on with a ratchet sort of thing.  That is the pressure on the drill, not the compressed air.

He said to me “What are you going to do?  Are you going to hold or turn?”  I said “I don’t know.  You’d better tell me.”  So he said “I think the best thing you can do is to turn.  I’ll do the holding and you watch me and when you get used to it we’ll change over and work turn about.”  So we got off drilling.  I was doing the turning and he was putting the pressure on and we got away great guns.  We drilled three or four holes and then he said to me “You can have a go at holding and I’ll do a bit of turning.”  I had a go at it and I seemed to be doing quite well, he seemed quite pleased with me.  Any way, we got about twelve hole in and he said “Well, we can’t do any more today because we’ve to wait for the powder monkey to come and fire these.”

The usual procedure was that the miner worked for one shift putting in holes.   On the next shift the powder monkey put the charges in and fired it.  On the next shift, the people they called the boodlers, they were the fellers that shifted the ore, they came along and got the stope ready for the next shift for the miner.  We carried on like that for about a week.

I had one little bit of excitement, I was very intrigued with this pneumatic drill, the way it worked.  We’d just finished boring a hole and something went wrong with the bar and Lowe was taking the jack part of it down to the underground stores to get the new component part.  He said “You have a spell while I take this down.” 

When he was away I kept looking at this thing, the drill, and I thought well, I’ll just turn it on and see how it goes.  Well, I didn’t realise but when this thing was turned on and it was laying on the floor, there was nothing to hold it and it just jumped all over the place.  I turned it on and before I knew where it was it was dancing round the stope and blowing up a cloud of dust.  I couldn’t see and I kept grabbing at it and lost me cap with me light in it.  Me light went out and I was in a hell of a mess.  Eventually I grabbed it in the dark, fiddled about with it and found the valve and turned it off.  Just as I turned it off old Lowe come in.  “What the bloody hells been going on here.” he said.  “I got a bit of bad luck.  I just kicked it with me toe and it started up.”  He said “Oh, did you.  You want to be careful.”  I didn’t tell him I’d started it myself and anyhow we carried on.

The next shift he sent me on an errand down to the store.  When I was coming back, I’d just got to the bottom of this rill that I had to climb up.  I didn’t know it but some of the labourers had been in to gather the drills that were in the stope and wanted sharpening.  I’d just started to climb up this rill.  I’d got up about eight or ten feet when all of a sudden I heard a roar at the top and somebody shouted ‘steel’.  I could hear this clattering and I took a back somersault and I thought the mine was collapsing.  I just got out of this thing in time and these steel bars came shooting down, about a dozen of ‘em, one after another and they were making a hell of a clatter.  When they got to the bottom, they hit the steel platform and skithered all over the place.  Anyhow, I went up and started playing bloody hell with them.  They said “It’s quite normal, it’s what happens here.  When we shout steel you get out of the road.”   I said “But a man might be half way up!”  They said “Oh no.  We knew you were only just coming up, we heard you come in.  You had plenty of time to get out of the road if you’d taken your time.”  So I thought that’s alright.  No wonder there’s a lot of bloody accidents here.

Well, I don’t know what happened but after the first week, when I went to draw me pay the feller that was paying out said “We’ve got a new job for you next week.”  I said “Oh.  Why is that?”  He says “Well, Lowe’s mates coming back.  He’s been with him a long time so we thought we’d have to find you another job.  We’ll find you a job on the surface.”  So I said “Oh, I’m not working on the surface.”  I didn’t really want to work at all, I was only passing me time away and it was a good excuse for me to get out so I thought I’ll take it.  So I said “No, if I’m not working as a miner I’ll pack in so best thing you can do is pay me up.”  He said “Alright, if you want it that way it’s alright with me.”  He paid me up and I went back into the town and knocked round for a day or two.  Then I decided I’d go back to Cobar.  I went down on the next stage out of the town.

Whilst I was in Broken Hill I did see some interesting things going on in the chemical world.  There was a big dump at the mine where all the rubbish from the smelter was tipped.  It was just a big slag heap as far as I could see.  There was some fellers erecting what appeared to me to be a big retort.  So I asked someone about it and they said “Oh, it’s a lot of bloody fools from Holland.  They’ve come over here and they’ve bought that slag heap and they’ve bought the smoke from the retorts” and the bloke laughed you know, he said “What a bloody thing, buying smoke!”  They went on erecting it and I thought no more about it until some time after I read in the paper that it was a chemical firm from Holland that’d bought this slag heap and the smoke from the retorts.  They’d built a big canopy over the retorts and had a fan sucking in the smoke and it said in the paper that they were making about five or six different chemicals from these fumes from the smelters.  The slag heap, they were putting that through crushers and were claiming quite a few valuable materials from that.  In fact it said that the output from the plant would pay for the installation within three years and it must have cost some thousands of pounds to have the plant erected there.

Anyhow, I got back into Cobar and I met a fellow I knew there that was working in the Cobar copper mine.  He said “Why don’t you come up and see whether you can get a job in the mine?”  I said “I don’t mind, I’m not particular but I’ll go for a week or two and see what it’s like.”  He said to me “Where are you staying?”  I said “I’m staying at the hotel.”  He said “Well, we’re staying together.  We’re batching.  There are eight of us and we’ve rented a house, hired a woman to do the cooking and cleaning for us and our keep and lodgings is only working out about eight or nine bob a week.  You can come in with us if you like.”  I said “Right, I will do.” 

I went up to the mine and got a job and I said to the feller “What will I be doing?”  He said “You’ll be in the glory hole.”  So I didn’t mind being in the glory hole.  This was a big open cut like I mentioned at Broken Hill, and it was about six hundred feet deep.  My job when I got down there I found was tipping these jubilee trucks as they came down loaded.  I just unhooked them as they came down loaded and tipped them down a pass.  This soil was going down to make up the ground in the various stopes that were being worked below.  These jubilee trucks were run on an endless rope, they were only pulled along by the rope dropping into a ‘v’ which was on a bar sticking up at one end of the truck.  When they came along to you all you had to do was lift the rope up out of the ‘v’, tip the truck and push it down to the turn-round and hook it into the return rope and that was it.   Well, it was a bobby’s job and sometimes there’d be hold-ups, sometimes you’d have to go the lick-of-your-life the trucks ud be coming that quick.  When there was a hold up you’d have a spell. 

One day I was having a bit of a spell, there was no trucks coming at the moment, there’d been some hold up at the top, and the underground manager came along.  He said “Is this all you can find to do?”  I said “I’ve not got anything to do, my job is tipping trucks isn’t it?”  He said “That’s right.”  I said “Well, there’s no trucks coming so I’m having a rest.”  He said “Well, get up off your arse!”

I said “I’m not going to get up off me arse at all.  All I’m here for is to tip these trucks and as long as I get them tipped you haven’t got any complaint.”  He said “Well don’t sit down there while I’m about!”  I said “Why, who are you?  Are you Jesus Christ or something that we should jump to attention when we see you?”  He said “You’ve got too much to say for yourself!”  I said “Well, probably I have but from now on and for the rest of the shift, you can tip the bloody trucks, I’m going up the ladder.” 

So I just picked me coat up and me ration box, I had to get out of this place, it took about quarter of an hour to climb up.  He was shouting me to come back but I wouldn’t go back I went up and told ‘em that he’d sacked me.  So, I got me money and I went off and squared up with me pals what I owed ‘em, packed me bag and got on the train to Nyngan.

I didn’t know where I was going or what I was going to do.  I started wondering what would be the next move.  I thought about going home but then I thought it’s no use going there because I won’t be more than a day or two before there was trouble of some kind.  All of a sudden I remembered me Aunt Maggie.  I hadn’t seen her for some years and I thought I’ll go down to Mudgee and visit her.  So I sent her a telegram saying I was coming and I got on the train and went down the same night.  Although Mudgee is not very far from Dubbo across country, to get to it you’ve got to go away down the Western line the other side of Orange to a place called Willarawang and then you get a train out of there which comes nearly all the way back to Wellington to get to Mudgee, that’s on the Parkes line.

Anyhow, I got to Mudgee and Aunt hadn’t arrived but I went to the hotel and booked in there.  I made some enquiries about my uncle who lived in Mudgee.  It was uncle George Johanstone that was Mother’s brother. 

They told me where he lived and I decided to go and pay them a visit.  I went to see them, told them who I was, they’d never seen me before.  Uncle and Aunty made me welcome, invited me to tea, introduced me to all me cousins and we had quite a time talking about different people that we both knew because although we didn’t know each other we knew quite a lot of people that were relations and had visited them in the past and they were interested in what I had to tell them. 

Whilst we were talking about things that had happened we got on to talking about horses.  My uncle said “Aye, talking about horses, that reminds me of the time your Father got arrested.”  I said “Oh, what for, horse stealing or something like that?”  He said “Oh no.  He came down to visit us and he was going round visiting different people in Mudgee and Apple Tree Flat.  Whilst he was here the races were on.  He called at where I had a little farm at the time and suggested that we should go to the races.  I said to him well, I daren’t go, I haven’t paid me tithes and the Father is sure to be there.  If he sees me at the races and I haven’t paid me tithes there might be trouble.”  The Old Man said “Oh, to hell with that,  let’s go to the races, let’s have a day out, never mind about the priest.”  Eventually, they decided to go.  They hadn’t been at the races very long before they ran slap bang into this old priest.  He said “Hello Johanstone, what are you doing here?  You’ve no right to be here!”  He said “I’ve just come with my brother-in-law.”  He said “It doesn’t matter who you’ve come with, you’ve no right to be here, you haven’t paid your tithes.  The best thing you can do is get back home and earn the money to pay them.”  At the same time, he hit me uncle with a riding whip he was carrying.  Father straight away snatched the whip off him, hit him with the whip and then knocked him down.  While this scuffle was going on, the police arrived and the Old Man was arrested.

Well, when he didn’t go home, Mother got worried about it and thought that something had happened to him.  She wrote a letter to my uncle and he didn’t know but what the Old Man hadn’t gone home because when he was arrested he was bailed out and had to appear later on.  He made enquiries and somebody told him that the Old Feller’s horse was still in the police paddock.  he went down to the police station and found out that the Old Man was back in gaol again, he had some kind of trouble with the police over his horse and they’d slammed him in.  So, when his case come up he was tried and fined and he came up home.  My uncle thought it was quite a joke that he’d given the old priest a bloody good hiding.

About seven or eight o’clock that same night, my aunt arrived from her farm and she had my cousin Vera with her.  We got the bags and we set out for Apple Tree Flat.  I remember it was pretty cold at the time.  It was coming to the end of winter but it was still cold.  I was very glad when we got to the farm, found a good fire burning and got in out of the cold.

I stayed with Aunt and Vera for about a week.  She was now a widow, her husband had been dead some years and Vera at that time would be about seventeen or eighteen years of age, probably not quite that old I’m not sure about that.  She was a very attractive girl and I had ideas about her but I think aunt realised that this was the case and she saw to it that we weren’t left alone at any time.  Vera seemed quite willing to do a bit of flirting but her mother had different ideas.  Anyhow we did a lot of knocking about together.  We went fossicking one day after there’d been a heavy rainstorm because they’d told me that after such a storm, you could go down on to the old diggings which were long worked out and if you just walked around and kept your eyes open you could pick up specks of gold.  So Vera and I went this morning, there was other children there too, doing a bit of fossicking and we got a few specks and I eventually come across a piece, it was about as big as a bean.  It was a queer shaped piece something very like the statues of Buddha that you see.  Anyhow I kept it and I said to Vera “I’ll have this mounted and put it on me watch chain.”   We didn’t find any more, not of any consequence anyhow but we reckoned that during the morning we’d picked up about a pounds worth of gold specks including this little nugget that I’d found.  It came time for me to leave them and I decided to go back home.

Jim had been married some time before this and my information was that he’d married a girl from a place called Cowra down near Young.  I understood that she was a girl named Min White who was the daughter of a farmer down there.  When I got back home from Mudgee I met Jim and his wife.  He’d got a job up in the Western Districts [as a post office linesman] and he had come up to Dubbo to live.  They were temporarily staying with Mother and Father at the Peppers.  Anyhow, when they introduced her to me as Jim’s wife I nearly dropped through the floor.  I didn’t want to say in front of them that I knew her, that I’d met her before, but she could see that I recognised her and of course she recognised me.  Anyhow the introductions went all right.  I never said anything, I was waiting until I had a chance to talk with her.  During the afternoon I said to Mother I think I’ll go down to the river and do a bit of fishing.  I didn’t intend asking her to come with me or anything like that.  I just wanted to get away on me own for a while to do a bit of thinking.  I was getting the tackle together and she came out to me and said “You’re going fishing are you?”  I said “Aye.”  She said “Can I come with you?”  I said “Well, is Jim coming?”  Jim heard me say this and he said “If Min wants to go with you that’s OK.  Take her down and show her the river.”  He made some remark about me only being home for an hour or two and I was running off with his wife, meaning nothing of course. 

We set off for the river.  It was only about half a mile away and we went down through Denny Brogan’s place and down into the river and there was a big couch grass flat where I used to like to go fishing under some willow trees.  We settled down on this flat to fish.  Well, we hadn’t been fishing very long when she said “What about a swim?”  I said “It’s a bit cold for a swim isn’t it?”  She said “Oh, it’s alright.”  I said “Anyhow, I haven’t got any trunks with me.”  She said “It doesn’t matter about trunks.  I’ll turn me back while you get in the water and we’ll be alright then”  I said “What about you, you aren’t going in are you?”  and she said “I’m going in too.”  Well, I thought this is a bit of a bugger.  Anyhow, if she was game I was so I said “Well, you get in first.”  She started to undress herself in front of me but when she got her clothes off she had some swimming tights on underneath.  She’d made up her mind about this before we left home.  Anyhow, she went in to the river.  I slipped me clothes off and dived in and we swam about for a while mucking about.  Eventually I said to her “It’s too bloody cold in here for me, I’m getting out so you’d better turn round and swim out the other way for a while if you’re stopping in.”  She said “No, I’m getting out too.”  So I said “You go first and get dressed and I’ll come out afterwards.” 

We did and we lay down on the grass and she said “I’m glad you didn’t say you knew me when you was introduced to me.”  I said “Well, I didn’t know what to say.”  I’d met her some few years before.  I went in to a dentist’s surgery to have a tooth pulled.  I had toothache.  I was let in and put in the chair and whilst I was sat there a girl come and she said to me “Which one is it?”  I opened me mouth and showed it to her and I think she was going to pull the bloody thing but a bloke come in and he started to play hell with her and told her to bugger off upstairs.  Well I remembered her, that was the only meeting I had with her but I remembered her. 

When we were laying talking about it I asked her whether Jim knew about this.  She said “Yes, Jim knows about it, in fact everybody knows about it but we’ve agreed not to mention it in front of the children or anything like that.  It isn’t that I’ve deceived anybody, Jim knows all about it.  Apparently she hadn’t been married to this bloke, she’d gone to work for him as a receptionist and he’d got her in the family way and she was afraid to go back to her people.  She was dependent on him and he kept her.  Altogether she had two children by him.  Eventually he died and she went back home to her people and she was living with them when Jim met her.  She was a most peculiar girl.  She had a wonderful personality, you could say that you weren’t going to have anything to do with her and by God she’d get on the top side of you one way or another.  She had a wonderful way of getting round people.  Although there was nothing wrong with her as far as I know, she was, to say the least, very daring.  I dunno whether there could have been anything wrong, I don’t like to say, but there wasn’t as far as I know.  They were very happy together and they had two children.

I noticed that the relationship between Father and Jim had improved tremendously from the days when we were working at Berrida.  They were as thick as thieves.  They always had their heads together talking about something and wherever one went, the other one went.  They used to go on fishing expeditions together, race meetings and one thing and another.  In fact you might almost say they were inseparable.  Jim bought a motor-cycle.  Well, it was a motor-cycle combination.  I remember it as well as if it was yesterday seeing him ride up one morning on this machine.  It was an American machine called a Hudson and the sidecar was one of those wicker chairs that you used to see during the victorian period mounted on the side of this machine.  He was taking the Old Man out somewhere, I don’t know where they were going, but anyway the Old Man couldn’t go and he said to me “Would you like to go?”  I said Where are we going?”  He said “Oh, we’ll go anywhere at all.”  So I said I’d go with him.  He said “Where would you like to go?”  I said “Let’s have a run out to Eschol and we’ll have a look at that bridge where you laid the ghost all those years ago and just see if we can see some of those people we went to school with and have a chat with them.”  So he said “Righto.”  and off we set.  We were going along this road, we’d been to Eschol and we were going further down to some people called McCatties that we knew.  In the old days the fences used to come up to the road and there was a gate which you had to get out and open but after the surveys were made, the road was fenced off into a four chain lane and the fences and gates were done away with.  But at this particular place, although they’d done away with the gate and pulled the fence down, they still left the two gateposts, one at each side of the road, right close up and right at the edge of the road. 

I would say then that Jim was about the worst driver that there was in the country although I didn’t realise it at the time as I’d had no experience of driving a motor-bike and sidecar.  I could see these two posts ahead of us and there was a vehicle coming down the opposite way.  I said to Jim “Don’t you think you had better stop and let this vehicle past?”  He said “Oh no, we’ll be alright.”  Anyhow, he kept going and I said to him “Look out for that bloody gatepost in front of us, you’re going to hit it!”  He said “Oh no we’ll be alright.”  Anyhow, there was a bang, he put the sidecar one side of the gatepost and he went the other and we just wrapped ourselves round it.  I shot off into the ditch, he went over the handlebars but fortunately neither of us was hurt any more than a few scratches and gravel rash but the bike was a bit of a mess.

Anyhow, he had it taken back to Dubbo and repaired.  After it had been repaired the brake on the bike wasn’t too good.  The Old Man had been passing some remark about this brake not being safe and Jimmy had had it seen to at the garage.  They tell me, I wasn’t home at the time, that he drove up on it one morning and Father was there and he said “Are we going for a Sunday morning spin?”  The Old Man said “I dunno about those brakes.”  Jim said “Oh, the brakes are alright now they act wonderfully.”  They were going down through the town, Talbragar Street runs from east to west and it joins Macquarie Street which runs direct north and south right on the bank on the Macquarie river.  It’s not a steep fall down into the river but there’s a very steep bank and a bit of flat at the bottom and then down the next bank into the river.  As they were going down Talbragar Street Jim said “I’ll show you when we get to the bottom, because we’ll have to steady up to go round the corner into Macquarie Street, how good the brakes are.”  So they were batting along and all of a sudden Jim slammed the brakes on when they got too the bottom and there’s no doubt at all they were efficient.  The bike stopped dead and the Old Man shot out of the sidecar, took a somersault over this bank, rolled down about thirty or forty feet almost into the river.  So he came back and said “Well, I see that the brakes do work alright but in the future, don’t put the bloody things on so hard!”

9,881 words.

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