From Horse and Carts to Sputniks: My First Eighteen and a Half Years

CHAPTER ONE

I was born in Cobar, on 12 June 1939, and left there when I was only two weeks old. I think my mother and I went to Winbar Station where my father was breaking in brumbies for saddle stock horses, for the station hands on the property, to use for mustering. My father’s name was John Bernard Noonan (he was known as Jack), and my mother’s name was Laura; her maiden name was Blacker (in her later years, my mother became known as Lorna).

Mum and Dad lived in a boundary rider’s hut (made of corrugated iron), on the banks of the Darling River. These huts were always similar to look at wherever you were. They consisted of a kitchen and fireplace, an eating area of about twelve feet by fourteen feet, a bedroom of about ten feet by twelve feet, a small room around the back with a copper for boiling clothes and making hot water, and a tin washtub for doing both your washing and taking a bath. Mostly, the rooms weren’t lined with anything, but if they were, it was with hessian (usually chaff bags split open) soaked in flour and water (flour and water made a good cheap glue), then nailed to the walls. When it dried, the hessian shrunk and made a firm wall, then the wall would be whitewashed or wallpapered with newspaper. The floors were mainly wooden, though sometimes they were dirty. About fifty yards or so from the hut was the long-drop lavatory (toilet). Also nearby were the stockyards and usually a cane grass harness and saddle shed; these sheds were made out of cane grass (a strong wiry type of grass that grew in shallow lagoons and the like), or turpentine bush (other names for it is hop-bush or broom-bush, a woody weed) which, when tightly bound together, makes a good type of thatch. The shed was a cool place in summer to hang water bags for a reasonably cool drink.

Me at six months                 Mum and me at Bourke

Dad worked on Winbar and across the river at Dunlop Station breaking horses until I was about ten months old. Then they took on a droving trip down the Darling to somewhere near the township of Tilpa, on the way back after delivery of the sheep. I apparently had my first accident then—I was bitten by a large centipede. My dad squeezed onion juice into the bite all night mainly to stop me from bawling.

Me about 2yo, on the Darling River

No sooner had I got over that major catastrophe, and we were camped just over the river from the township of Louth, than I crawled through the hot coals of a dying campfire, burning my hands and knees. I was taken across the river to the Bush Nurse, and she patched me up and sent me back to the caravan (horse-drawn).

The first memory I have of my life in the bush was near a little township named Byarock, on the Bourke-Nyngan road. Dad was in-between jobs and was doing a bit of rabbit trapping for the skins, and I would play and watch him skin and bow them for drying each day. At night, I remember Mum nursing me by the campfire and singing a little song to me, which went like this:

‘Cry Baby Bunting

Daddy’s gone a-hunting,

To get a little rabbit skin

To wrap Baby Bunting in.’

I was nearly two and a half years old and could now sit a horse, so Dad got me an old pony named ‘Toodles’; it was about a month later that we moved to Bourke, where we stayed for a week with a family called the Bradleys. They had a little girl about three, and she used to chase me around at bath time to everyone’s merriment, saying, ‘He has a tail! He has a tail!’ It has always stuck in my mind though I bet she never ever remembered it. My mother said I could never remember such things because I was so young, but as she never ever talked of the past unless you brought it up, she had to agree I did have a good recollection of such events.

It must have been about this time that my father left for South Australia to, as I believe, join the Armed Forces where he ended up as a cook on the building of the all-weather highway from

Dad and fellow cooks near Edith        The all-weather road to Darwin being built

Creek N. T.

Tenants’ Creek to Darwin. This road was erected or made inside a year; the stones on the outsides were put in place by hand. Looking back, it seems like a remarkable feat because much of the Stuart Highway today is still the basis of that road.

Aboriginals at Edith River crossing to Darwin

Mum and I left the Bradleys and went to stay with her uncle Dick and his family; we stayed there for some time, I believe. I can remember going around a big garden out behind his yard each afternoon to cover up his tomato bushes. He said it was to protect them from the frosts, so it must have been coming on towards winter. I had at this stage a little feral pig for a pet which I can remember playing with and virtually riding everywhere: this apparently upset the neighbours and Uncle Dick, who said it could attack and hurt me, and I believe they killed it and turned it into bacon. This upset Mum, so she told her uncle that she and I were leaving, and we moved into the boarding house in Bourke until Dad returned.

While there, I used to watch many planes fly over each day; they were always in batches going north, although I didn’t know it that they were heading for Darwin, which was, at this stage, under constant attack from the Japanese.

Mum and me at boarding house at Bourke        Portrait photo of us at that time

It was about this time that Bourke’s local doctor, Dr Cooligan, got into trouble. He had a Japanese houseboy, and this man had an elaborate wireless set-up in the woodshed; he used to count the planes and send it out in code. When the authorities caught him, it took all the police to save him from being hung by the Bourke citizens. Dr Cooligan was completely innocent, but Mum said very few people ever went to him again except in extreme emergencies.

My father, along with several other ‘Boss Drovers’, were sent back from Darwin to drive sheep and cattle out of Queensland into New South Wales to be turned into tinned meat (known as Bully Beef) for the soldiers who were away fighting overseas. Mum and I immediately went with him, she as cook for the men, and we started droving from Cunnamulla in Queensland to Tankrards Meat works and Cannery in Bourke. Ten thousand head of sheep or a thousand head cattle at a time, sheep took six weeks to complete the trip and cattle took four weeks. Dad had bought me a Welsh Pony named ‘Taffy’; she was a mare about three years old and very quiet. To mount her, I used to get on her by leading her up to a fence or a log, then climbing up on to that and then crawling on to her back. None of us kids were ever allowed to ride in a saddle as it could be too dangerous; we always rode bareback as it was safer and taught us great balance.

Not long after we started droving for the army, my mother started getting sick, and we went to live on an outstation (a boundary rider’s hut) on Belalie Station (the harness shed here wasn’t made out of cane grass or brush. It was made from flattened-out square kerosene drums). Many of the old fencers’ huts were made the same way; it kept the weather off, if nothing else. These kerosene drums held four gallons of liquid and came in packs of four in wooden crates, so when the tins were empty, they were discarded into the rubbish tips. Seeing all lighting and many small engines ran on kerosene, these empty tins were in abundance.

We had a bore drain running hot water right in front of our door. It was actually hot enough to bath in; it came out of a running bore a couple of hundred yards away from the house. The bore drain, which was some distance from the house, was cool and full of yabbies. Mum and I used to go down there and catch them by putting a stick down the yabby hole and forcing them out into the drain; the drains were only about ten inches deep and, on an average, about six foot wide which to me at those times seemed very wide. There were as many as five drains running away from some bores, helping to fill tanks up to twenty miles away. Mum’s sickness was that she was pregnant with Terry, although that meant nothing to a little boy like me; you weren’t told anything those days except maybe that the stork might bring you a baby brother or sister soon. Dad called in every so often when passing through; he was catching and skinning foxes while driving because Americans were paying up to thirty shillings a skin, so Dad was going to make his fortune on the side, as the saying goes. He was offered a pound (£1/-/-) for one skin but refused to take it because he had just got a hundred skins together to send away to the merchants Pitt, Son, and Badgery in Sydney. Just after he had sent the skins away, the price collapsed for skins, and he received a cheque in the mail a couple of months later for seven shillings and sixpence (£0/7/6d). He was devastated. He never ever skinned foxes again; he said they were stinking mongrels, and I must agree with him on that score.

It was on one these trips home that Dad gave me a hiding for not doing as my mother said I was taking ‘Taffy’ my pony and making her cross the drain all the time; my mother must have thought I might fall off and get hurt or worse drown. It was at this time that a kangaroo shooter, who lived a couple of miles away, staggered in with blood all over him; he had been loading his own bullets, and somehow, there had been an explosion and wrecked his hand. Dad saddled his horse and rode to Belalie Station (some twenty miles away) for help, while Mum soaked his hand in kerosene and bandaged it with a sheet. By the time help arrived, the sheet was red, and I was a very frightened little boy. It was Christmas, and SANTA brought me a red truck. In the afternoon of the next day, Mum got very sick, and Dad harnessed up the mare to the sulky and put me in the back and wrapped Mum in a blanket and set off a fast rate through the night for Bourke nearly fifty miles away. Next day, I was in the boarding house, Mum was in the hospital with another baby (Terry), and Dad was heading for Cunnamulla to catch up with his driving plant.

About a fortnight later, Mum arrived at the boarding house with Terry; I saw my brother for the first time. An epidemic was apparently raging in Bourke, and kids were dying, so Mum was waiting anxiously for Dad to return to Bourke with his sheep so she could be gone from the place. But this wasn’t to be as both Terry and I caught whooping cough (pronounced hooping); it is the most terrifying thing a child can get (or a grown-up, for that matter). First, you keep coughing until you are completely out of breath, then you start vomiting and you inhale and start choking on your own vomit, and little children don’t understand about relaxing. Mum must have had great stamina and fortitude to have handled such a situation on her own, a five-week old baby hanging face down over one arm and me over the other so that we shouldn’t choke when we vomited. There was no beds left in the Bourke Hospital by the time we took crook, so Mum had to do it all on her own. (These days, we have all the immunisations and vaccinations against polio, TB, whooping cough, diphtheria, German measles, and small pox. When I see young mothers withholding these treatments from their children, I could personally wring their necks). As soon as Dad and the men arrived, we joined them and left to return to Cunnamulla to pick up the next mob to bring down to the Tankrad Meatworks.

This was my first actual trip where I could ride my own pony all the time with the sheep unless Mum said it was too hot and then I had to stay with her and the horse tailer and our horse-drawn caravan. Before I ramble on much more, I will explain the fundamentals of droving; first, there are two types of drovers. The first is the drover, who doesn’t feed his stock properly and tries to make as many miles a day as possible to get the trip over with and collect his cheque. Most times, the animals arrive in much poorer condition than when they set out; these types are only used when drovers are in short supply. Now the drover travels a six-mile stage a day, letting his sheep spread out on a three quarter of a mile front to eat their fill. By about eleven o’clock in the morning, the mob have travelled around four miles, and it is put on the midday camp to rest and eat. Around four in the afternoon, the mob is moved on to the night camp and put in its break, (portable yards) for the night. This manner of moving sheep is both beneficial to seller as well as the buyer. The sheep mostly arrive in better condition than when they left their original station. A thousand sheep grow more wool in a week than cost of the droving, so in reality, it costs nothing to get a mob from point A to point B.

A sheep-droving unit consists of two parts: the men who travel with the stock and the cook and horse tailer who travel with the cart or caravan. They have the much harder job, in my opinion, after the men break camp in the morning. The cook and horse tailer have to undo and pull down the rope yards, roll them up, clean up the breakfast gear, pack the wagon, move on to the night camp, erect the rope yards again, hobble and put bells on all the horses, set the camp up again, and start getting the evening meal ready for when the men come in at sundown.

Stockmen (drovers ready for a day’s work)     Top men preferred to be called ‘Ringers’ because they were the best.

Cattle-droving is somewhat different; in that, most times, it is done with packhorses instead of a cart, and the packhorses travel with the mob of cattle most of the day (cattle travel at a ten or twelve mile stage per day instead of six as sheep do). The cook takes his horses on in the afternoon to set up the night camp and cooks the evening meal. Usually, the horse tailer goes with him to set the fires to hold the cattle for the night; they are not big fires, just half a dozen small ones or so to settle the mob down. The ringers (top stockmen) have a light and later a glow from the coals to see where to ride in the dark while they quietly sing and circle the herd all night. The shifts or time taken during the night riding around the resting cattle is broken into three; the first watch finishes about 10.30 p.m., the second is around 12.30-1 a.m., and the last about 4 a.m. When that person comes in, he gets the horse tailer up to go and bring in the horses (that is the reason for the bells on them to find them in the dark). The times I’ve mentioned were always approximate because very few men had watches. The times were set by the stars, particularly the Southern Cross. Hence the saying, ‘Call me when the Cross turns over!’ You would take particular note of its position in the sky. When it first came out at night, then say when it was facing in such a direction, it was time to change riders; at around midnight, the cross has completely turned over and faces the other way to what it was at twilight time. When it was cloudy or raining, the men were so used of times that it still worked fairly well.

Phases of Southern Cross in night sky

Example:—Twilight    Midnight    3.30 a.m.    Daybreak

It was not long after we went back on the roads droving with Dad and the other men from the army, and we were in Cunnamulla, and Mum and I were walking over the bridge, on the Warrego River, back to the camp, and I saw this little boy who was an aboriginal. I had not seen many children even though I was about four years old now. I spoke to him, saying, ‘You are a black boy’, and he punched me. All Mum said was, ‘You shouldn’t have said that!’ End of story. So to stop me from crying when I got back to the caravan, Dad took me over to a house nearby and showed me some puppies; he said, ‘I didn’t want any, but you pick one out, and it’s yours’. They were blue heeler cattle dogs. (The people who bred the heelers’, their names were Kerrigans). The one I chose was a snappy little bugger, but I loved him. Dad said, ‘He has a black eye just like you, so why don’t you call him Boxer?’ I did. He became one of the best horse-heelers and cattle-heelers I’ve ever seen and a protector of us kids in the future; no one could ever touch us without first tying him up. If we had done anything wrong, and you heard the Old Man calling ‘Boxer’ to tie him up, it was time to ‘make tracks’, as the saying goes, because you knew Dad wouldn’t give you a belting while he was loose.

Ted Campbell and ‘Boxer’ the Dog.

During the next couple of years, most of our trips were from Cunnamulla to Bourke, which was set to a very strict schedule five weeks down and one week to get back for the next mob. I knew every camp along the way; the last trip we made along that stock route was in 1945. I never went back to that area till 1968 and yet I was able to find all wooden breaks (log yards) that we used to use to bed the mobs down in.

After Terry was born, we took a cow along with us as a milker. When she went dry about six or eight months later, my parents were in a bit of a quandary as to what to feed him. Powdered milk gave him diarrhoea, so they gave him Nestle’s sweetened condensed milk; he took to it like a duck to water, and for the next three years, he drank a tin a day.

When Terry was about six months old, Dad took on an old aborigine and his wife as a horse tailer to help Mum a bit. I used to be with them quite a lot during the day; they would get their jobs done and go off hunting, and I would go with them. For a little boy, it was fun looking for lizards and the like. Whatever they killed, they kept till lunchtime, then would build a small fire and cook it and share with me; they were full bloods and had their own names for the reptiles and animals. I would get back to the camp in the afternoon and tell Mother what I’d eaten, and she would say ‘Yes, dear’ and let it go at that. Every so often, I would tell her I’d had ‘prickly pig’ for dinner. After a while, this whetted her curiosity, and she decided to find out what a ‘prickly pig’ was; she nearly had a fit when they brought the next one they got home. It was what she knew as a porcupine (echidna). They used to make a fire, then dig a small hole in the ground, and when the fire burnt down, they would scrape the coals into the hole, put in the echidna, and cover it with the rest of the coals and leave to cook. When it was ready, they would let it cool and hit it with a tomahawk (small axe), and it would split open like a walnut, leaving lovely white meat exposed; it tasted like sweet pork, hence the name.

At around this time, we started travelling further into Queensland to places like Charleville, Eulo, Thargomindah, and Quilpie for our mobs of stock; the drought was setting in and making it harder to get the mobs down the same stock routes all the time. This is where a