I always thought that it was the Father that comes out with the shotgun, but this time it was the mother, was lucky in that girlfriends brother was with us , any how I ended up marrying this girl a couple of years later.Regarding my car ,it kept on running for a few more years.A few years after this wet year I again shore at Nonning Station, but now the price of wool had dropped considerably and also was fairly dry too. also it was in feburary the hottest month,and the dams were almost dry.

for three weeks straight the temperature not get below 108, most of time was around 120 , was little bit too warm, and remember this was before those fridges a bloke could cart around with him, and of course with all the tucker the cooks fridge was not allowed for our bottles of beer, so we just had to keep it as cool as we could any way we could.Being so hot sleeping inside the huts was unbearable , but sleeping outside was a darn side worse, as the mossies were as big a dive bombers and would give us all hell, I preferred the heat.The woolshed itself was a low iron shed and we shore on the western side so u can imagine how hot that could get inside. it was here that I first tried taking salt tablets, but with them by about 4.30 in the arvo I was on my last legs, took them for two days, but eventually gave them away ,and then I could last all day again.

Being so dry the sheep drinking from the dams would sort of wallow in the mud,and their belly wool would be full of dried mud, and dirt and mud combined would blunten our tools much faster, they say life was not meant to be easy.

When dinner time came I would just have icecream and jelly and canned fruit, the jelly and icecream would not set so we just drank it, was cold though .

One night after tea a few of us decided to go to the pub about 50 miles away , so away we go , BUT, by the time we got there all our ambitions of tieing one on had diminished but we stayed til stumps drinking lolly water, on the way home we passed a big truck carting sheep and it threw up this big stone and busted my windscreen, so what life was not meant to be easy. this meant that here I was way out in the donga without a windscreen in my car and no way of getting it fixed until we finished that shed.

the wool presser in this shed was a young bloke of about 19, he was a little on the heavy side , in fact we nicknamed him porky,,well this poor bloke had a hard time keeping the wool away, and most nights had to go back to shed and press the wool until there was enough room for next day, by the time we finished that shed we could not call him porky anymore , a good wool presser is flat out pressing 28 bales of wool a day think he was getting about 19 in normal time, and I think , am not sure ,that by this time hydraulic woolpresses were in vogue ,these made it much easier.

Yall will have to wait for next episode.......Emu