Just a few remininces

I left school when I was fourteen,and I put in my time by doing various small jobs,one that I can remember was bag sewing, u must remember my early life was before all this modern machinery that makes life much easier.

Bag sewing was getting as much grain into bags of grain and then sewing them up to be carted to the nearest grain stack, some of these open bags would be in clumps of up to a 100 or more, depending on the quanity of the crop being harvested, being in the middle of summer, the flies were every where if u had your mouth open they would even fly in there to investigate your tonsils. I used to only sew about 300 in a day and think the pay was , $ 6.00 a hundred,not like this job very much .

The rabbits were also in abundance too in those days so would set traps and earn a few bob that way at that time they were 13 cents a pair, a truck used to come around twice a week and pick them up and pay us

sometimes he not come early enough and the carcases be full of maggots and sometimes go bad, now days they have chillers scatered around various places.

got a job with a cockie (farmer ),this was a new experience for me , driving tractors, I thought drive tractors like a motor car, changing gears, soon found tractors like a motor car, changing gears, soon found out how wrong I was.

the paddocks were anything up to 200 acres and when cultivating would split up in what we called lands, well when I started first day the boss told me when marking out these lands pick two objcts in the distance and drive towards them, as he like to have furrows straight, any way I did as he said , but one object I picked out was a cloud, and they never seem to stay still , so you can guess what my line was like, boss not very happy, wonder why.

When I was out of work I used to go fishing as the ocean was only 3 miles away, used sometimes climb the cliffs get halfway up and find that not able to go up or down ,what a dilemna, but am still here so must have got up or down somehow.

I was the only boy in this township ,had at that stage two older sisters, an Uncle had a scrub block out in the donger about 26 miles from home , he was wounded in ww1 and had one stiff leg and one only bend half way , he sometimes , or as often as he could would take me with him , as a gate opener , think must have been a thousand gates or more , lol, were quite a few.

My father at this time took up being a shearing contractor, that is he supplied all the labour involved in getting the wool of a sheeps back, and I was hired as a board boy, as the shearer finished each sheep I would pick the fleece up and try and throw it onto the wool table so that it was spread out on table nicely

then have to rush back and sweep board before shearer go back with another sheep, had to keep finger out , I can tell you , no time for slacking off.

this job would last 3 months and ended this particular year just before I turned sixteen , sixteen was the age that u could get drivers licence, with my hard earned $370.00 I went to our larger town 80 miles away and bought myself a motor bike, wow , now I had wheels.

when I was 17 going onto 18 I took up shearing myself,an uncle took me on

when I was 17 going onto 18 I took up shearing myself,an uncle took me on shearing in cockie sheds where 1000 sheep were a big flock there were only uncle and I , he had an old buckboard and used to cart his own shearing plant around

, i shore 47 first day and every day of that week ,gradually got faster and faster , and when uncle's run had finished joined my fathers team in a big shed with 5 other shearers, in the big time, lol.

on my 18th birthday I shore my first 100 sheep in one day , wacko, I was told that now I could drink whisky and chip the cook ( chip means I couldtell the cook off , ) and those days legal drinking age was 21, well I drank some whisky and was in a good frame of mind when we went for tea

so then chipped the cook ,only trouble was the cook was my mother and she took a very dim view of that and clipped me around the earhole.

When we finished that shed my cousin and I , he had been shearing for a couple of years, decided to go to the south east of our state where shearing was much later then home, now where I came from they would run maybe 1 sheep to 5 acres and where we went was 5 sheep to 1 acre ,so uyou can see the difference in the country, any way we hopped on a plane and arrived in Mt Gambier and being naive and not knowing things away form home we were all at sea

, we caught a taxi to this shed that we had 30 miles away and the homestead was on top of this hill and the shearing shed was down at the bottom

, we decided to walk down the hill through the paddock and look at this shed

, about half way down ,all these cattle came charging towards us, what to do ,no trees and nothing to hide behind, we were doomed, not having any thing to do with cattle we not know that they were only curious, and came to see what we were up to, needless to say ,it was a bit hard to walk after that ,with the extra load we were carrying. lol...............

may get in the mood to write more some day ......emu