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My mother was also in
uniform during the Second World War. My parents were married in December 1939, just two weeks before my father's troopship left
for the war. They were separated for most of the six years of the war, including the period when he was missing in action.
They were briefly reunited in 1942 when the 6th Division returned to Australia to be redeployed to New Guinea. They had a
baby son, born in December 1942, but he lived for less than an hour.
My parents were part of that great generation who lived through the First World War, saw
our country through the Great Depression and the Second World War, and at war's end created the post-war baby boom. My father
was the oldest son and one of six children of a station master on the New South Wales railways. He grew up in the northern
towns of Tenterfield, Glen Innes and Narrabri. His family had a strong Scottish heritage, although all of my grandparents
were born in Australia. My father and all of his brothers and sisters were pipers or highland dancers. My father left school
at the age of 15, as most boys did in those days. At the time that war broke out he was working on a mobile drilling rig,
digging post holes all around northern NSW. His regimental number, NX1755, is an indication of his eagerness to enlist.
It means he was one of the first 2000 men in his state to join up. His life was characterized by sacrifice, first for his
country and later for his family.
My mother grew up as Louise Bulley, on a dairy farm at Taylor's
Arm in northern New South Wales. This picture (above) shows her at around the time she met my father. The oldest of seven
siblings, she left school at 13. There were simply no secondary education options available for her. In spite of this lack
of education, through my own school years (and I was top of my class every year in primary school), she always had the right
answer for any question I asked. What she lacked in formal education she made up for in innate intelligence and a voracious
appetite for reading.
Apart from dairy farming, protestant religion appears to have been the dominant business
on my mother’s side of the family. There were Presbyterian, Methodist and Lutheran ministers in her family, with plenty
of ecumenical intermarriage.
My mother had a superb alto singing voice. Her favourite style of music was the American
Negro spiritual, and her favourite singer was Paul Robeson. When I was a baby she sang me to sleep with songs like My Curly Headed Baby, Mighty Lak A Rose, and Deep River. She also kept my brothers and me in touch with our Scottish heritage (even though there was no Scottish
on her side of the family) by singing songs like My Ain Folk, Ye Banks and Braes O' Bonny Doon, Loch Lomond, or The Road to the Isles.
Here's Mum and Dad later in life.
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My First Home
This tent was my first home. After the war my father worked on the railways until his retirement. Having been
separated by war for most of the first six years of their married life, my parents then spent the next eight years living
in a tent in what can fairly be described as the middle of nowhere. My father’s employers sent him to Boppy Mountain,
on the railway line between Cobar and Nyngan, in the far west of NSW. Boppy Mountain consisted of a railway station and two
tents. We lived in one tent, and an aboriginal family whose surname was Morris lived in the other tent. Mr Morris worked with
my father. My parents had three sons, born in 1946, 47 and 49, while living in that tent.
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An early picture of my brothers and me. That's me on the left, the one
with the pout!
This family photo at Boppy Mountain was taken at my older brother's fourth birthday party.
I have several memories of Boppy Mountain, even though it was so long ago and I was so young. Most of them
involve various creatures from the animal world.
My brothers and I were brought up on goat’s milk, provided by feral goats that my parents captured and
domesticated. They included a couple of kids that my older brother and I were given the task of naming. I remember naming
mine “Tizzy Wizzy.” One day I was out somewhere with my father, and when we came home we found my mother sitting
on top of the water tank, while the male goat, old Billy, prowled around the foot of the tank. It seems old Billy had escaped
from his tether and chased Mum until she was forced to climb up onto the tank to evade his horns. There she remained until
we returned to rescue her.
My father had a .22 rifle, which he put to good use, providing us with a lot of our meals. I remember rabbits
were an important part of our diet, as were topknot pigeons. My father’s rifle came in handy on the day we saw a commotion
happening over at the Morris’s home. A fox had tried to attack their hens, but their rooster had chased the fox away,
and it headed straight for us. The fox ran between my mother and me, and into our tent, where it hid under the settee. My
mother grabbed a broom, and whacked the fox on the snout every time it tried to escape. She managed to keep the fox trapped
there until my father came home and shot it.
We three boys slept at one end of the tent, where my father had put down floorboards, my parents slept at the
other end. In the middle was an open living area and kitchen. One night a large tiger snake appeared in our bedroom. My father
grabbed his rifle and my mother grabbed the kettle. Mum poured boiling water between the cracks in the floorboards to make
the snake poke its head up. When it did, my father shot it. It was a fine team effort. After that we started sleeping in the
car. I don’t remember how long that lasted, but eventually we went back to the bedroom, and had no further deadly invasions,
although snakes were an ever-present danger.
On another occasion, my father came home from work one day and announced that he had seen a dam a few miles
away, with enough water in it for a swim. He decided to take the family out for a picnic the following weekend. This was going
to be a real treat for us all. The weekend came, and we drove across country and found this makeshift swimming hole. My father
stripped off and jumped in. When he surfaced, his body was covered with leeches! As horrible as this experience must have
been for him, he was hurt more by disappointment that his family outing had been ruined, and that his high hopes for future
recreational visits to this waterhole had been dashed.
My first-ever car accident occurred while we were at Boppy Mountain. I was a passenger in the back seat of
a car driving to Cobar at night when the car hit a kangaroo. Nobody was injured (I can’t speak for the kangaroo), but
I can still remember being tossed around like a rag doll as the car spun off the dirt road. There were no seat belts in those
days of course, and certainly no child seats or baby capsules.
My last animal-related memory from Boppy Mountain concerns our family pets. The first was a little rusty coloured
dog called, with great originality, Rusty. He “ran away” around the time my younger brother was born. It would
be more than 30 years before I would discover that “ran away” was a euphemism, and Rusty was actually shot by
a farmer for chasing sheep. With his colour and size he could easily have been mistaken for a dingo. We replaced Rusty with
a little puppy called Toby. Toby would remain a part of our family for the next 18 years. He died while I was in Vietnam.
When I was four years old we left Boppy Mountain and moved to Dunedoo. Our neighbours, the Morrises, departed at the same time to Dubbo. That reduced the population
of Boppy Mountain to zero! The two Morris boys, Bronco and Ivan, gained fame as a country and western singing duo on the Amateur
Hour, a popular radio talent quest in the 1950s. Ivan died quite young, while Bronco became a radio disc jockey in Shepparton,
Victoria. Their sister became Sister Ali, an evangelist in the area known as The Block, in Redfern, Sydney.
This is my father taking the family to
work with him. This part of his job was called "running the length": checking the line between Cobar and Nyngan by going over
the whole line on this hand-operated vehicle called a trike.
The picture below is a Google Earth view of Boppy Mountain as it looks today. If you follow the dirt track in an upward
direction after it crosses the railway line, and go right, off the track and into the clearing, that is where we lived
in our tent. If anything, I think it was even more desolate when we lived there. There seems to be more vegetation today.
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Extended
Family
My
paternal grandfather was a station master on the New South Wales railways. He was killed in the line of duty, hit by a train.
My maternal grandfather was a farmer. I never knew either of them. My grandmothers, on the other hand, lived long lives, and
I saw a lot of both of them during my childhood.
My
father was one of six siblings, my mother one of seven. All of my uncles served on active duty during the war. With one exception,
all of my uncles and aunts contributed to the post-war baby boom with a minimum of three children. The exception was my Uncle
Bob, who had the right side of his face blown away in the war. His face was restored by plastic surgery, but he lost his eye,
and always wore an eyepatch. Combined with his great sense of humour, the eyepatch made him a particular favourite uncle.
He remained a batchelor until his forties.
In
one curious family twist, One of my father's sisters (Auntie Joy) married one of my mother's brothers (Uncle Jack). They had
5 children, and we often stayed with them during our Christmas holidays.
Most
of my extended family lived on the Manning River, in northern New South Wales. They were particularly plentiful in a tiny
fishing village by the name of Croki, downstream from Taree, and on the neighbouring Mitchell's Island. Croki and Mitchell's
Island were connected by a small car ferry, known locally as the punt. In the fifties, a lot of deliveries along the Manning
River were done by boat. At various times the punt, the mail boat, the butcher's, baker's and milk boats were all
run by my uncles.
Every
Christmas the extended family would descend on the family members who lived in Croki, thereby doubling the local population.
We would spend the whole summer swimming, fishing and playing in the sun. A small sharkproof riverside swimming pool was the
main focus of activity, but there was also the punt (great for fishing) and a number of nearby beaches, as well as Uncle Stan's
dairy farm on Mitchell's Island. Those regular summer holidays ensured that Croki was as much a part of my childhood as the
places I actually lived, Dunedoo, Boppy Mountain and Ingleburn.
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Dunedoo
Around 1951 or ’52, when I was about 4 years old, my family moved to Dunedoo. We were still living in the tent.
At the western end of Dunedoo railway station, the platform slopes down to ground level. Our tent was placed right at the
bottom of that slope, next to the railway line. We used the public toilets at the station, and took our water from the tank
that supplied the steam trains. The water tank had a thick canvas hose that could be unhooked from the tank and pointed down
to the tank on the train so that the force of gravity would make the water flow. We used that same tank for our showers. Unlike
Boppy Mountain though, the station at Dunedoo was a little too public for my parents to have their showers under the water
tank. They had to take baths instead.
The picture below, taken from Google Earth, shows Dunedoo station, but unfortunately not the western end of the platform
where we lived.
A school photo from Dunedoo Central School. I am sixth from the left in
the back row.
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Ingleburn
In 1960 my family moved to Ingleburn, and I started high school. That is
the subject of the next chapter of my story, A Sixties Teenager. To read it, click on the link below.
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