5. High School

I started high school in 1946.  The same year the school got a new principal.  Mr. Stockdale I liked immediately because at the first school assembly he announced that there were too many petty rules in this school and he was going to remove most of them.  However, he said, “if you do not behave responsibly then I will reinstate each of these petty and restrictive rules as necessary”.  Having a comparatively free life at school was up to us.

Before long a group of four bullies started to pick on me, probably because bullies are basically cowards and being one of the smallest kids in first year I became their target.  They would follow me around insulting and taunting me trying to get me to start a fight.  I am not a pacifist.  If I had had the ability to flatten the four of them I would have done it with a great deal of glee, but it’s stupid to start a fight you can’t win.  They started to wait for me on the road to school and I managed to dodge through them on my bike but when they tried to knock me off with sticks and throw sticks through the spokes of my wheels I thought it was time to do something about It.  Dad was still in the air force so I spoke to Mum who saw the principal who put some sort of order on the four boys and they were never seen together again.  Schools don’t seem to be able to do that these days.  After that, whenever I saw one of them they would turn and walk in the other direction.

My career in cricket was squashed at high school.  Cricket matches used to run over two weeks.  They first put me in the C grade team and the first week of the match I would do so well for the second half of the match they put me in A grade which would be a big disaster.  A thirteen year old skinny little boy facing up to an agressive18 year old bowler I would be so nervous, with knees knocking, wouldn’t see the ball which would just bounce off my bat at any angle until some one caught me out.  Then it was back to C grade where I was apparently so outstanding they put me back to A grade.  I really belonged in B grade but was never placed there.  So I decided to try tennis which I played until I was 72 years old.

We had a most excellent maths teacher at high school who was very good at explaining concepts.  Once I understand the concept of anything the rest is easy for me and I got 100% in maths exams a couple of times.  With science and chemistry, although I liked the subjects, I did not do so well, because I believe those teachers did not clearly explain concepts.
Although I enjoyed high school and found the work interesting I seemed to be working with a great deal of distractive pressure which at the time I thought must be caused by the onset of puberty.  Years later I found it was more to do with the death of my brother Donald.

Although the public health system knew about the deficiency of iodine in rain water and therefore encouraged country people to use iodised salt, they did not yet know how the deficiency of fluoride caused unhealthy teeth.  My teeth were not strong and by the age of fifteen many of my top teeth were broken and decaying and I had to have them removed.  It was a horrible experience especially for a fifteen year old.  In those days the anaesthetic was laughing gas which certainly didn’t make me laugh but made me unconscious with the most awful sense of spinning, seeing flashing lights and made me feel very sick.
The worst, especially for a fifteen year old, was that I had to go without these top teeth for three months while my gums healed.  During an age when I should have been developing my best smile and laughing a lot I was careful not to smile.
Mum used to say “why not have all of your teeth out and get all false teeth, they are a lot less trouble than real teeth.

Later when my wife, Heather, was pregnant, before fluoride was added to the water supply,  I made sure she took the correct amount of fluoride and as the boys grew up I calculated the amount of fluoride each required and added it to their milk.  They all have beautiful strong teeth.    

After dad was discharges from the Air Force, when I was thirteen, he immediately started to clear the Gol Gol block of land where he had installed a ‘pickers’ hut’ on the bank of the creek in which he and Colin stayed about four nights a week and Ian and I spent most weekends and school holidays with them.  We were pulling out ‘river flat box trees’ with a hand tree puller, building fences, digging a well for the irrigation pump and a trench for the main pipeline.
It was dad’s intention to grow wine grapes and peaches as the main produce but to survive while awaiting these plants to reach maturity he would grow rock melons, water melons, pumpkins and cucumbers.

Irrigating by furrows in the ground (not sprinklers) requires the channels and furrows to be carefully planned with a gradual slope so that the water would run slowly from the start to the finish and soak into the ground ideally so that there was no water left over at the end of each furrow.  Dad got a surveyor to give him levels of the ground so he could plan the course of the channels and furrows and eventually the direction of the rows of grape vines.  For a while after that I wanted to be a surveyor.
Green peas were also grown which not only gave a cash crop but at the end of the season the pea bushes were ‘disced’ into the ground which added nitrogen to the soil.

Dad got cuttings from wine grape vines of friends and planted them in specially prepared soil until they sprouted roots and shoots.  While this was happening he, Colin and Ian built rows of trellis (fences) along which the vines would be planted.  I helped at weekends by patrolling the watering of the melons and cucumbers.  When the vine cuttings were ready for planting the entire family, including Lorna, Joan and Jean helped plant thousands of these young vines.

Growing rock melons, cucumbers and peas entailed rough ploughing and then discing the ground to break it up into loose friable soil and then carefully ploughing the watering furrows in equally spaced and straight lines.  Planting the seeds, which was done by hand, watering and regularly tending the young shoots by tedious hand weeding.  When the melons started to grow, before watering, we had to walk along every row and lift out and place on high ground any melon that had fallen into a watering furrow otherwise the water would make it rot.  All of this happened over an area of some three to four hectares of land.
Watering meant patrolling the fields to ensure that the water was flowing suitably along each furrow and soaking in, if it was flowing too fast you would shovel small banks into the furrow to slow it, if it had reached the end of the rows and every furrow had had sufficient water you would stop the water supply to these rows and start it on others.  All this work was done out in the sun where the temperature was around fifty and sixty degrees Celsius.

When the melons started to ripen picking was a back breaking job.
Melons didn’t all ripen at once so you have to choose the ones ready, which is a skill in itself, pick them with secateurs leaving about fifteen millimetres of stem, place then carefully into boxes which were loaded onto a trailer hauled by a tractor and taken to the packing shed.
At the packing shed they were sorted into sizes of sixteen to the case (small), twelve to the case (ideal size) and ten to the case (large).  Eight to the case were too large for the market so we ate them ourselves or sometimes sold them from the back of the ute in the streets of Mildura to get some pocket money.
Picking and packing had to be done to a tight schedule.  We would start picking at daylight and have to have our load ready for the transport truck to pick up by four PM  so that they would be in the Melbourne market by four AM next morning.

The next day would be a watering day.

One fateful day, after the transport truck had taken our load of rockmelons, dad said to me “we have twelve cases of over large rockmelons today, do you want to come with me to Mildura and we will sell them to a wholesaler?”.
We pulled up in front of the wholesaler’s shed, he came out and dad said “how much will you give me for these rock melons?”.
The wholesaler examined them and said sixteen shillings ($1.60) a case”  which dad accepted.
I thought that was a fair price compared to what we got in Melbourne.
Dad saw another farmer and started to chat and I was bored out of my mind, so I leaned on the ute, dad was a compulsive chatter and I’m often hanging around while he chats.

A retail green grocer pulled up alongside our ute and asked the wholesaler “got any good rockies?”.
“Yes, right here” he said pointing to them still in our ute.
“How much?”.
“Thirty two shillings a case” the wholesaler replied.  The green grocer took them from our ute.

All that work over such a long time and we got sixteen shillings a case and the wholesaler got sixteen shillings a case clear profit, the same as we got, and he didn’t even touch them plus we had to pay for those cases.


“Farming is definitely not for me” I thought.


When at Gol Gol, mum would sometimes say to me “we haven’t any meat for dinner, could you go out and shoot a couple of rabbits?.”
A policeman from Mildura, who was involved in youth work, asked me one day if I would take a 14 year old boy from Melbourne shooting with me.  The lad had been in trouble with the law in Melbourne and the police had sent him to Mildura to get some experience of country life.  I took him to the North side of the Gol Gol swamp where there were usually plenty of rabbits.  He was excited by the bush and I let him have a few shots at some rabbits, which he hoped he had missed.  He was basically a kind person and didn’t really want to hurt them.

The North side of the swamp was edged with sand dunes.  It was a beautiful calm sunny day but it had been windy for a few days before.  On top of one of these sand dunes I found the swirling wind had blown a neat circular hole and in this hole were two human skeletons.
When I showed them to him he was beside himself with excitement.  One skeleton was lying on its side, curled up in a foetal position, and the other smaller skeleton was hugging it’s back like two spoons together.
Later I took dad out to see them and he said that the smaller skeleton was a woman, “you can tell by the pelvis” he said.  When we touched one of the ribs it crumbled to white dust so they must have been thousands of years old.  The whole thing was so delicately but still perfectly hanging together.  Judging by their teeth they would have been young adults when they died.
We took the lad back to his policeman guardian and told him about the find and he said “obviously very old aboriginal skeletons, best leave them alone and don’t tell anyone about them, let them rest in peace”.

 I imagined this not unusual romantic story set five thousand years BC about a young aboriginal man falling madly in love with a beautiful young aboriginal woman but she was chosen to be a wife of the chief.

 “ However they were so much in love that they ignored the ruling of their elders and kept seeing each other.  The Kadichie man, in his emu feather boots and scary mask, points ‘the bone’ at him and sings his death song.  He is curled up on the sand dune dying when she finds him and she cuddles into his back and because she loves him so much she dies with him.  The wind blows, the sand shifts and covers their bodies.  Seven thousand years later, the day before I came along, the wind blows in a precise way and neatly uncovers their bones.”

I feel really privileged to have had this special connection with these two ancient people.    
I would like a good poet to write a poem about them.


Harry Fleming and I started high school the same year and we formed a close friendship.  Harry had three sisters, two younger and one older, and I heard nothing of his mother, they never talked about her.
His father owned the shop on the corner of Seventh Street and the Bridge Road which he leased out and lived in the house next door.  He was a bookmaker by trade which was interesting for me, being from a family that abhorred gambling.
Harry spent a lot of time at our place and I was at his place a lot.  His family was close and affectionate as was ours.  Harry and I grew from boys to men together and we dated girls together.
He fell in love at a young age with Erica Massey who lived with her family on a boat on the Murray and they married in about 1954.
Harry had dark curly hair and was considered a good looking young man.  He could play the guitar, the piano and sing country and western songs and fancied the country life but he was really a city boy.
His father bought him a beautiful horse, called Gypsy, complete with a stock saddle and I was so envious.  Gypsy was bred and trained as a race horse but was considered an outlaw, and could not be properly trained to race. She was unpredictable but not considered dangerous.  That’s why Harry’s father got her for a good price.
I would watch Harry ride her on the river bank behind their house and all would be well until Gypsy decided to take control.  She would take off with Harry hanging on and go wherever she wanted.   When she’d had her fun she would suddenly prop, from a full gallop stop dead.  Harry would gracefully fly through the air in a full arc and still hanging on to the reins go splat flat on his back on the ground in front of the horse but he never got hurt.  Gypsy would sniff him and seemed to think “are you alright” or maybe “did I kill him this time?”.

Harry was going away for a couple of weeks and asked me to mind Gypsy on the Gol Gol property, but he said you have to ride her every day to keep her from getting too flighty.  That was alright while riding her in the paddock but one day mum said “I need some items from the shop, could you ride Gypsy into Gol Gol and get them”?.
The ride to the shop was good but on the way home she decided to take control.
With the bit between her teeth she leaped into the full gallop of a race horse and did her best to wipe me off by going close to trees and under low limbs.
I clung on with my head next to her neck sliding around her to the left to miss a tree and consequently losing my right stirrup.
Sliding around to the right, to miss being wiped off by the next tree, losing my left stirrup.
Then hanging on with my legs, while she galloped at full speed, ducking under branches, the stirrups bashing into my shins.
As we approached the home paddock I thought “oh no she is going to run into the barbed wire fence.  She won’t see it at this speed”.
Harry’s beautiful horse will have to be destroyed.
So I started to yell for help.
Colin came running out of the house, immediately saw the situation and ran up to the fence waving his arms.
Gypsy immediately propped, right at the fence.  I think she planned to dump me over the fence.
I must be able to hang on better than Harry with my legs because I didn’t go flying over the fence, I went splat on her neck and crushed my nuts on the pummel of the saddle.
It was painful and I had to lie down for an hour before I could eat lunch.
   


Early in 1948 I had not seen Harry for about a week when his father came to see me.  Harry had disappeared and he thought I might know where he was and although I had no idea I had a hard job convincing him.  Erica knew nothing of his whereabouts.
After a few weeks Harry phoned home and told his father that he was in Griffith picking peaches and he was not coming back.  He wanted to start his own life.  He was 16 years old.  They got me to speak to him and I promised that if he came back and finished high school, we would take off and work our way around the outback of New South Wales the following year.  So Harry came back and finished his final year at High School.
I now found myself committed to doing this trip with Harry, but my parents were really against it and wanted me to continue with my education.
I had to go against their wishes.

During the school holidays that year Mr. Fleming, to give us experience, took us to an old abandoned shearers’ quarters on the Darling River.  Although we had plenty of tinned food,  we were supposed to live off the land for a week.
We did quite well shooting and trapping rabbits and on one occasion got ourselves a couple of wild ducks.   To show that we were good hunters we decided to try for a nice kangaroo.

On one of our hunting expeditions we noticed that roos used to graze in a bend in the river and so decided to corner some at dawn the next morning.
The river bend had a lot of tree stumps about the size of an average kangaroo and while carrying out our strategy of cornering the roos at dawn we couldn’t see any.  At last Harry spied one move and took a shot at it.
The entire area was suddenly alive with roos charging straight past us, the shot had made them take off.
In the dawn light, while they kept still, we were unable to distinguish them from the tree stumps.  We had a few flying shots at them but hit none.
We then decided to track them through the scrub and came across a huge old-man red kangaroo about two metres tall.
He looked at us as we steadily raised our rifles and shot him.  I aimed for his heart but must have missed it.
He took off through the scrub.
Having wounded an animal both our fathers had taught us that you must not leave it to die in pain so we tracked it for about three kilometres through the scrub and found it lying on it’s side in a clearing.
I’m thinking “the poor bloody thing”.  As we raised our rifles to shoot it through the head it suddenly jumped up.
Standing on it’s tail, came at us slashing with its’ hind legs trying to rip us open with it’s great hind claws.  We staggered backwards firing from the hip.
We must have put eight or ten more bullets into it before it dropped dead.  He died hard.
I had a browning pump action repeating rifle and Harry had a bolt action Winchester repeater.
It was a huge beautiful animal with hands that were bigger than mine.  This was an attitude changing experience for me and I decided then and there that I never wanted to harm another living thing but of course there were times when I had to.
We cut off it’s tail and had roo tail stew for dinner that night.

     
Harry with the tail of the big red roo we shot Self in army disposal clothes    1948

When the school year ended we got a job at the Rendezvous café as waiters to earn money for our trip.  Mr. Fleming with his numerous contacts found a sheep station owner, called Poddy Finche, who was travelling in early January from one of his sheep stations in South Eastern New South Wales through Mildura to his sheep station near White Cliffs in western NSW and then to Bourke near the Queensland border. “Now you need not leave before Christmas, you can have Christmas at home,” Mr. Fleming happily announced.
We fitted ourselves out with back packs, clothes, ground sheets, blankets and water bottles from army disposals where such items were cheap and needed no ration tickets.

Ready for droving