Mbali Upeo- Interval

Thank-you everyone who have been faithfully reading my Dad’s story so far. Unfortunately this is as far as he and I got on his memoirs before he died earlier this year. While I have bits and pieces from him about other periods it is not in enough detail to be able to be presented as his memoir.

However, I am determined to try and finish this memorial to his life so I will now begin to piece together my, and my siblings, memories to try and present a picture of the second half of my Dad’s eventful life. It includes an idyllic sojourn in Fiji, winning a block of virgin Queensland scrub in a ballot and transforming it into a cotton farm as well as hacking his own marina out of the crocodile infested mangroves in North Queensland.

It might take me a little, and my siblings are rather spread out, so please bear with me if the postings get a little more intermittent from now on.

However, in exciting news, the kind people at Old Africa magazine have offered to help me publish Dad’s story as a book which I’m ecstatic about so I will keep you posted on progress (and possibly some of you now know what you might be getting for Xmas presents if I finish it in time!).

Mbali Upeo- A new start in Australia and a truck full of dead sheep

We flew from Nairobi to Aden, during which time I managed to cover the baby , Robert (who was about nine months old at this time), in gin and pork stew due to a mite of turbulence on the way. However, he’s always been a resilient child and he didn’t seem to mind too much (the same cannot be said for Margaret).

Robert, in contrast to James and Kathy, was very blonde and possessed remarkably blue eyes. This held him in good stead when we boarded the ship as our fellow passengers included a large community of Greek matriarchs who instantly took to him with cries of delight and wonder.

At least once a day on the six-week journey a frantic search for the baby would usually reveal him being joyfully kissed and tickled and fed vast quantities of hummus.  This was a great relief to me as it was I in charge of entertaining the children each day while Margaret washed a mountain of nappies, ironed clothes and prepared meals.

We disembarked at Perth and, after parking Margaret and the children with my sister Jean, I went looking for work. It was much easier to find then I had nervously anticipated. I walked into an Elders shop, who were (and still are) well known stock and land agents all over Australia, and walked out with a job rounding up sheep for the sales.

It wasn’t highly paid work but it was employment and it was a start.

Picture by Tim Phillips Photos

My work colleagues were real Aussies and as soon as they knew I was English (being none too savvy about the geography of the rest of the world) they began taking the piss out of me as a “pommy bastard”.

Deciding that knocking their blocks off in my first week was not a judicious plan I instead adopted my most English accent and herded the sheep with a high pitched and gentle “come along now, you jolly jumbucks”.

Disgusted at such unmanly language and behaviour they decided I was a lost cause (or possibly a bit mad) and they left me well alone. But now, of course, I had to keep up the pretence. I managed it for a few weeks but one particularly irritating sheep smashed my carefully cultivated act as I let fly with a stream of abuse that mixed Swahili with some choice English phrases that I think shocked even my new work-mates. However, so relieved were they that I was then welcomed with open arms and invites to the pub.

It was only a few months later that I was transferred a bit further north-west of Perth to a place called Merredin. This time I was herding both sheep and cattle that were coming down from the North to the saleyards. Some of the cattle were almost wild and had probably only been mustered once or twice in their life, which certainly added a spice of danger to the job each day.

There were three of us in Merredin and we were also expected to negotiate with the local farmers and convince them to sell their sheep through us. The farms out there were mostly wheat but the farmers would usually also keep a few hundred head of sheep, despite having very little idea about what to do with them. As a little side business we would offer to muster, dip, mark and inoculate the herd for them before they were sent to market. The farmer, rather than Elders would pay us but what I did not learn, until a bit later, was that payment was usually in the form of a large, fat sheep.

This was only brought home to me the afternoon after I had helped to inoculate a huge herd of sheep and the farmer, hat drawn low over the face, nodded his thanks and jerked his thumb towards a sheep telling me it was mine.

“I beg your pardon?” I responded. He looked at me for some moments and then repeated the phrase more slowly, as if for a small child or an idiot.

“Er…that’s very kind of you but I don’t have anything to transport it in,” I said motioning to my small, sedan car.

The farmer shrugged. “That’s your payment. Take it or leave it.”

I looked at this fat sheep and she looked at me with a wild eye. But it had been a long day so I was determined to at least make the attempt to take payment. I asked one of the farmhands to help me tackle the sheep and we managed to wrestle it to the ground about 40 minutes later, tying its legs together with some rope. Then we carried it kicking and struggling like the devil herself, to the car where I buckled it into the seat belt on the passenger side.

I had some qualms regarding the interior but to my surprise, once she was strapped in the sheep stopped struggling and sat there incredibly calmly. In fact, as we headed back into the town, I would have sworn she positively enjoying the ride. She made not the smallest movement and looked out the window for most of the journey, serenely taking in the scenery. The same could not be said for all the passers-by who saw her as we drove through the town. I’ve never seen so many dropped jaws and double-takes in my life. In terms of entertainment value that sheep was worth its weight in gold.

Main street of Kalgoorlie in the 1960s

I was soon moved again but this time the posting was to Kalgoorlie, a mining town on the edge of the desert. It consisted of one main street with a couple of big public buildings and the rest were pubs and whore-houses. It was wild and remote and Margaret had just given birth to our fourth child, another son called Donald. She was not keen on making the move and I was not keen for her and the children to be in such a town. So I left them in Merredin while I determined to try and get a transfer as soon as possible.

My job was to meet the sheep and cattle trucks coming from South Australia to Western Australia (WA) on the rail line that crossed the desolate Nullarbor Plain. Each Australian state had their own gauge rail lines and its own quarantine rules so the sheep had to be unloaded at the border, checked and shorn, and then reloaded before they could continue the journey. One of my jobs was to take the dead sheep off the rail-trucks and dispose of them. It was pretty dirty work to say the least. As the result of a former drought in WA, large numbers of sheep were being bought from South Australia and the temptation for farmers to over-crowd the carriages was too great to resist. This meant we usually had about 40 or 50 carcasses on each train. We would load them onto my truck and I would drive them to an old mine shaft on the other side of town where we disposed of the bodies.

On the day of the annual Kalgoorlie race meeting there was always a town parade. In blissful ignorance of this I loaded up my truck with the day’s load of dead sheep and headed into town. The police, in blissful ignorance of my cargo, decided I would be the last vehicle to go through town before they closed the road. By the time I realised what was going on I had to keep going (as I said there was only one real road in Kalgoolie) while behind me the parade started up. The band started playing, people lined the streets laughing and clapping and waving flags at me, evidently under the impression my truck was part of the parade. Then the stench of the dead sheep would hit them. The change in expression was so ludicrous that I could barely drive because I was laughing so much.

I finished covering myself in glory by going to the ball held that night. The general manager of Elders in Western Australia was attending and so was his pretty wife who was at least 30 years younger than he was. I spent the night dancing and flirting with her and a week later she invited me as her “special guest” to a picnic.

I got my long-awaited transfer back to civilisation two days later. But this time I was moving states- to Queensland.

Mbali Upeo- civilian arrest, bush style

John and Lise

The twins thrived and we were fortunate in our close friendship with a Danish couple- John and Lisé Anderson. John was the local vet, whom I had had alot to do with even before the tick fever episode, and we had always got on well. His wife was a vivacious and intelligent blonde whom I enjoyed flirting with immensely. This did not seem to impact on the tight friendship she had with Margaret, particularly after the twins were born. Lisé had two older girls and was a source of infinite wisdom and experience when it came to children. She even came to stay with Margaret to help when the twins were born and often baby-sat for us when we needed a break.

But tragedy was to strike soon after. The younger of their two daughters fell from a horse when she was five. Her foot got caught in the stirrup and she was dragged to her death in front of their horrified eyes. They struggled to cope. Lisé returned to Denmark and John followed about six months later. But despite the tragedy they missed Kenya and after a couple of years returned, much to our delight as we had sorely missed their company.

However, their departure to Denmark led to the sole episode (for any of my children!) of “daddy day-care”, as they call it these days. Ann was also preparing to leave Africa with her husband and Margaret was worried she might not get the chance to say good-bye to her sister, nor did she have any idea of when they would meet again.

I was unable to leave the farm but I told Margaret that she should go and leave the twins because I, and Sam our houseboy, were more than capable of looking after them for a couple of days. It was, I have to say the first time I had ever offered to do such a thing and, after my wife got over her initial dumb-foundedness, she doubtfully agreed to the plan.

I was privately convinced that women made far too much fuss about bringing up children and this seemed a perfect opportunity to prove my point. So after the babies were dressed and fed by Sam, I put them both in the passenger seat of the landrover the next day and prepared to take them out on the farm with me. There were no seatbelts or childseats in those days but they sat happily enough on the bench seat and giggled when we went over the bumps. I headed over to some new yards we were building and left them in the cab as I inspected the work- first making sure the parkbrake was firmly on.

I was pleased with the work. When I returned to the car the twins were harmlessly engaged upon chomping a bit of tree that had made its way into the cab. I removed the twig, put the car in drive and wheeled it round sharply to head back the way we had come. Unfortunately the passenger door had not been shut properly. As the car spun around, the door flung open and the twins rolled out of it at some speed. They hit the ground with a thud and proceeded to bounce about two yards, coming to rest amongst a little thicket of thorns. I admit to a moment of worry as I slammed on the brakes and hurriedly got out to pick them up. But apart from some gusty tears and quite a few prickles and thorns they seemed unharmed. I brushed them off, dried their eyes and headed home. By the time we reached the house they were back to normal and, miraculously, with no tell-tale signs of their misadventure.

But so impressed was I with the bouncing resilience of babies that I  made the mistake of telling Margaret about it when she came home.

She never again left me alone with the children.

1963 saw Kenyan Independence achieved and, for us, the birth of another son- Robert.

By now we were all aware that the Africa we had known and grown up in was gone forever. For example we’d always had a white inspector of police but after independence the job was, naturally enough, awarded to an African. He wasn’t a bad guy and I got on well with him, but he made it clear that he would not be chasing cattle thieves unless there was one fat cow for him in return. If he did actually catch any cattle thieves they were usually shot on the spot as he had little patience with the British courtroom system of justice.

We were also worried about the children’s schooling. We could not afford the two very expensive private schools in the local area and the only other option was to send them to boarding school from five years old. Margaret’s own experience of being abandoned in school at a young age meant she refused to even consider the idea. So we were already thinking about leaving Kenya when an incident happened that made the decision easier.

My boss, Roger Boules, was in the habit of bringing his rich and often aristocratic friends from England to stay on the farm for weeks at a time. On this occasion the Duke of Portland was his guest and Roger  had decided to buy some locally hand-made rugs in honour of his stay. They were beautiful- weaved in very bright colours- red, yellow and ochre orange and made quite an impact when laid out on the grey, stone floors of the house.

Only a few days after the party left, the house was burgled. Quite a few very expensive things had been stolen but also, strangely, so too had the brand new rugs.
At the time we knew there was a gang of Samburu roaming the area, styling themselves on the recent Mau Mau gangs. Their leader had even taken up the name of General China, after the famous Mau Mau leader.

The real General China and Mau Mau activist.

We immediately suspected they might be responsible for the burglary but when we notified the police they told us they were very busy and unlikely to be able to do much about it for a few days.

I had already recruited two Africans I trusted to work as security guards to help me keep an eye out on the property and later that day they were travelling with me in the landrover. We were driving past this little scrubby thornwood patch when we noticed three large red, orange and yellow bundles bobbing gaily just above the thorn bushes.

It didn’t take us long to realise that, in fact, there were people underneath these bundles and that the bundles themselves were the brand new rugs which had been used to wrap up all the valuables from the burglary.

We took off after them. The bundles split up as soon as they heard us. My guards got out of the car and chased two on foot while I took off after the tallest, red bundle in the car.
He was a big man- massively muscled, fit and tall- a real warrior. He started sprinting fast, dodging and weaving through the bush. After about half an hour I lost him.

I was just about to give up when suddenly the red bundle bobbed up again having zig-zagged back behind me. I churned the gears on the car and raced over to the other side of the thicket. I reached it just as he raced out and collided with the car.
He fell heavily and was dazed and winded but otherwise seemed unharmed.

I quickly took advantage. Yelling to my two guards for help I started binding his hands and feet with my belt and rope from the car. They soon joined me and helped me load him into the car. However, by this time he was regaining his senses and began to struggle so fiercely that my African guards had no option but to sit on him to restrain him for the rest of the journey.

It was a pretty bumpy trip and he was dangerously angry by the time we arrived in town and handed him over to the local police. The police however, were very happy to see us. They took one look at our prisoner and revealed he was indeed “the General” and leader of the notorious, criminal gang whom they had been hunting for months.

He was to be transferred to Nairobi the next day but he was left overnight in a cell with only one young police officer guarding him. The “General” asked for a drink of water.
There were no cups so this young officer let him out to drink from the tap. He was killed for his naivety- a single chop to the neck with the hand.

I wasn’t aware that he had escaped until one of my cattle herders was found murdered and another was told to give me a message that “the General knows where you live and he’s coming to get you”.

The next three months were long and filled with some anxiety. I was unable to do my job without spending most of the day away from the house, leaving my wife Margaret and my three small children there all alone.

Eventually the police did recapture “the General” but by that time Margaret and I had already made arrangements to leave Kenya.

It was with a wistful heart that I said good-bye to the land of my birth but I knew it was no longer the country I had grown up in. Both Kenya and I were entering new stages in our lives.

Margaret, I and the children boarded a ship at Aden and sailed to Australia as one of the many “£10 poms” heading to that country looking for a new start.

Mbali Upeo- tick fever and fatherhood

As my hand healed slowly over the next few months, so too the Mau Mau uprising drew to a close.

But I was still suffering nightmares about that night and could not face returning to the cremeries, so I handed in my notice and started looking around for different work. During my time at Thompson’s Falls (Nyahururu) I had become friendly with the owner of  Aberdare Stock Auctions (ASA). It was a successful business and he was looking for someone younger to come in before he himself retired in a few years. I was keen for the independence that working in your own business would bring so I jumped at the chance.

Also during the following two years Kenya began the long, and sometimes torturous, diplomatic road to independence. As a result the British government put everything on hold including the sales of government property and livestock in Kenya. Unfortunately this formed the greater part of ASA’s business and it soon became clear there was not enough income for two people- particularly when only one was doing all the work. I asked the old guy when he was thinking of moving on and he confessed he had not yet saved enough to retire. I said he had better buy me out and he agreed. So two years later I was again looking for work.

By this time Margaret had also changed jobs and was now working as a secretary for a lawyer, Geoffrey White, in Nkuru. He had just inherited a Boran cattle property called Ndurumo near Rumuruti but had no interest in farming or running cattle so was trying to sell it. He had also become aware that his farm manager on the place was not only engaged in fraud, with one big fat beast dying of snakebite regular as clock-work every month, but there were also strong suspicions he was a paedophile, preying on the local black children.

White fired him at exactly the same time he managed to convince Roger Bules, the son of the owner of Pearl Insurance, to buy the place. Boules was a playboy and liked the lifestyle of having land in Kenya but had no interest in running the property so he demanded a farm manager as part and parcel of the terms of sale.  From my time at the auction house I had got myself a reputation as being pretty good with cattle so I was offered the job. It seemed fortuitous as Margaret had just fallen pregnant with the twins and part of the package included a house on the farm.

At work on the farm

I was excited and looking forward to this change in career from dairy to beef. I liked the Boran cattle and in fact my father had been one of the first to introduce the breed into the ranching areas of Kenya from Somalia and Ethiopia.

But the day I arrived so too did an outbreak of tick fever. When tick fever takes hold within a cattle herd it is one of the most difficult diseases to deal with. The animals suffer horribly with weakness and fever similar to that suffered by humans during malaria. On the day I arrived 20 cows had already died. It was pretty dreadful. I had been well and truly thrown in at the deep end.

The only cure was to get rid of the ticks and that meant dipping every single beast every three to five days. There were 2000 cattle on this place and we were dipping from morning until dusk. Boran cattle also have particularly loose skin so even the dipping wasn’t straight forward or swift as we had to make sure the chemical was getting in amongst the folds of the skin and in their ears- that had to be done by hand. With only one cattle dip on the place we also had to muster the cattle in from the outer paddocks and keep them near the dip.  They were held in traditional African pens made from thorn bushes with all of us taking turns to guard them from lions and cattle thieves during the night.

It was exhausting and deeply depressing work. Every day about a hundred cattle would die on us. They were dropping faster than we could chop the firewood to burn the bodies. Eventually I found a disused well that was 80ft deep and we started dumping the carcasses in there. But even using bags and bags of lime there were always some bodies in a state of obvious putrefication. The well was right near our house so poor Margaret, who was already suffering terrible morning sickness with the twins, also had to battle the foul stench of rotting flesh day and night.

After the death of about 500 cattle and a nightmare week we started getting on top of the outbreak and within three weeks there were no more deaths. I began to be able to breathe normally again.

Despite this horrific start I was very happy at Ndurumo. I got on very well with all the workers on the place, the house was comfortable enough and the land was rich so the cattle grew fat and contented.

New parents

By December 1961 Margaret was also enormously fat but not quite as contented and I think we were both relieved when she finally gave birth to the twins on Christmas Day – which by coincidence was also my own birthday. The babies, James and Kathryn, were born healthy and a good weight, despite there being two of them. The doctor in the hospital seemed very relaxed about Margaret’s ability to give birth naturally to twins and saw no reason to cancel going to the hospital Christmas Party leaving the midwife in charge. There I understand he greatly enjoyed his winnings from the hospital sweepstake about whether the twins would be born on Christmas Day. As soon as word reached me that the babies had been born I drove from Ndurumo to Thomson’s Falls to see them in our car which was a Mercedes 300 with 15 inch wheels and a top speed of 190miles per hour when most cars could only do 90 to 100 mph at that time. It was a very nice motorcar.

I should probably also mention that at the time the actor Anthony Steel was also in Africa filming and he was considered the heart-throb of the time. Anyway I stopped to pick up these two soldiers who were hitch-hiking. They got in and I said “Merry Christmas, I’m afraid I’m in a bit of a hurry.” One started off quite chatty and asked me if I was Anthony Steel- apparently I looked just like him and was driving a very flashy car. Looking back I do not remember disabusing them of this notion, only that I repeated I was in a terrible hurry. I put the car into top gear and reached top speed very rapidly. At this point in time both soldiers stopped talking. When we hit a long low curve with a hump in the road the car went airborne for about five feet before landing gracefully back on the dirt road.

I admit it even scared me a little so I slowed down and apologised to them in the rearvision mirror. I was quite taken aback by the terrified and rather green looking faces huddled together that greeted me. I took it a bit easier after that but both men did not say a word until I dropped them off. In fact they exited the car even before the wheels had come to a standstill. Probably to this day they talk about the mad and reckless Anthony Steel in his fancy car.

We brought the babies back to Ndurumo with great pride only to be met with a long line of the farm’s local Kikuyu labourers waiting to pay their commiserations. I soon discovered that if twins were born to a Kikuyu woman living at such high altitudes (and usually having no break from work) then more often than not the mother was unable to produce enough energy or milk to support both and one often died. I think it was a bit disconcerting for Margaret to deal with such heartfelt sympathy on her first day but she managed very well and soon both mother and babies were thriving- despite the odd interaction with a green mamba snake dropping into their baskets by accident.

Mbali Upeo- return to Africa, marriage and the Mau Mau

Mau Mau prisoners

I returned to Kenya in 1954 as the country was racked with the terror and uncertainty of the Mau Mau uprising. It had been brewing for years of course as tensions between the Kikuyu and white farmers increased but the extremists amongst the Kikuyu now launched a terrorist movement to prompt the British Government to swifter action and grant Kenya independence. A lot has been said about the Mau Mau uprising and our role as colonial and imperialists in Kenya. However, all I can say is that most of the Africans I knew and worked with were not part of the Mau Mau uprising and many were viciously attacked for their refusal to take the oath.

My sister Jean and her husband, on their farm in the Aberdare Mountains, were also attacked numerous times and quite a few of their police-trained German Shepherd dogs as well as their farm workers had been killed in the process. Doug was a target because he was fluent in Sawhili and so worked as an occasional interpreter in interrogations of Mau Mau prisoners. Eventually they both took turns at keeping watch during the night and both became such light sleepers that the slightest rustle or noise could wake them up long after they had left Africa.

But Jean was not only tall, and built on Amazonian lines, but also had a reputation as a crack shot. It came as no surprise to me or the rest of the family that she had one day rounded up four suspected Mau Mau terrorists on their farm single-handedly and drove them to the police station without any incident or any attempt on her life.

I felt I needed to do my part, so after obtaining a job as the production manager at Kenya’s Co-op Cremeries in Thompson’s Falls (now Nyahururu) I also became a part-time inspector with Kenya’s Police Reserve. With a small force of Masai, our job was to look after the local townships at night and keep a watch out for any Mau Mau activity.

Every now and then we would be sent to monitor the Northern Frontier which was a three day trek bouncing around in a Landrover through thick bush and on pot-holed and dusty roads. I would dread these trips as I suffered horribly from car-sickness. On one trip I was barely compis mentis as we went up and down endless hills. It was just as well we didn’t find any suspicious activity as I doubt I would have been up to doing anything about it.

For the most part, however, my part-time inspector job was pretty uneventful and perhaps as a result I grew rather blasé about the target it made me.

In the meantime I had begun in earnest my courtship of Margaret Patterson. She had returned from her drama course in London, having been unable to gain a scholarship to continue her studies. That year the Guildhall had decided to award all scholarships to black students in one of the first attempts at positive discrimination. So she had been forced to return to Kenya and was now working as a secretary in the rail department. She was bored out of her brain.

Trip to Mt Kenya

So we embarked on a social whirl of events and expeditions including a trip to the top of Mt Kenya together- my first experience of my future wife’s grim determination. Despite suffering terrible altitude sickness she refused to give up and I was secretly very proud of her, although it would not do to tell her of course.

I had enjoyed my bachelor days and it is fair to say that I was trying to put off married life as long as I could. However, Margaret was having none of it. On a drive home from a dance one night she asked me exactly where our relationship was heading. I ducked and dived the question but finally said that I felt it was a little too soon to get married and perhaps we should wait for a bit- perhaps even a year or two.

“Oh if you want to wait I might as well go back to England and study as a nurse, ” Margaret replied.

This was not the answer I was expecting. I had already made up my mind that Margaret was the girl I would marry and so the thought of her returning to England and perhaps meeting someone else there was not at all to my liking. And yet…and yet….it still seemed too soon to stop flirting with every attractive woman who crossed my path and buckle down to a life of responsibility as a husband and no doubt father.

I squirmed and wriggled but, despite being normally very amenable and deferential to my wishes, Margaret remained immovable. I knew she was quite capable of booking her plane tickets the following day and so by the time I dropped her off at her parents house in Karen, I had agreed we should get married.

Wedding Day

We got married on a beautiful September day and  left the party early in order to travel to my mother’s house in Mombasa where we were to spend our honeymoon. I had decided I would introduce Margaret to all the joys of watersports during our holiday. So on the first day of I borrowed an aqua lung from a mate along with a gas bottle, hose and gauge that told the pressure. It was still in the early days of scuba equipment so it wasn’t terribly sophisticated. I sensibly decided to test it out in the loungeroom of the house before heading down to the water. It had obviously gotten rusty and the damn thing exploded in my face. Margaret spent the first day of her honeymoon extracting bits of steel wire out of me and cleaning up the room. She often comments that she should have known what was coming based on that first day of married life.

I have no idea what she means.

I also introduced her to Pimms. Margaret had never been a great drinker which was something I felt needed to be rectified so I made up a rather strong batch. She took a couple of sips and screwed up her face slightly.

“Don’t you like it?” I asked.

I knew she was in love with me when she shook her head bravely and said

“Oh no, it’s lovely.”

To which my evil genius replied that she should definitely drink a bit more then. An hour later I had to carry her to the bedroom and roll her into bed.

When we returned from honeymoon I moved from the strictly bachelor only accommodation of Thompson’s Falls up to Nakuru which had houses for married men and was also more of a hot-spot for Mau Mau activity.

I was put in charge of installing the new tetrapac milk packaging machinery and it was proving problematic. I had fought with it for three days and nights. On this evening, as on the others before, I stayed behind after the rest of the workers had headed home and prepared to do battle with the machine once more. The hours ticked by and I grew more and more frustrated. I had just extended my left hand inside the machine and was bashing furiously with a spanner when I heard a noise. It was a noise that dried my throat and sucked my stomach dry. It was the sound of a switch being turned on. It was followed by the tell-tale whirring of the tetrapak machine grinding into action, capturing my hand in the process.

Even before I had turned around to see a shadowy figure disappearing from the shed I knew what must have happened. One of the workers with previously unsuspected links with the Mau Mau had slipped back surreptitiously, plugged in the machine and turned it on just at the moment when he knew it would cause the most damage.

I pulled and pushed and panicked but my hand was caught inexorably in the machinery. There was nothing I could do but to follow it through the same process as a quart of milk. I yelled and screamed for help but no help came by the time my hand approached the “sealing jaws” of the machine.

I tried to resign myself to the inevitable, excruciating pain and the possibility I was going to lose my hand. I felt sick and faint.

I’m not sure how I did not manage to black out as the blades crunched through my wrist. Eventually they pulled apart and I was finally able to free myself. My hand, miraculously was still attached to my arm but only by the merest scrap of skin.

By this time some of the other African workers who lived on-site had heard me and rushed to help. Unfortunately medical help was another problem. At that time of night the nearest doctor was in fact a retired gynecologist who had succumbed to the pleasures of alcohol and was still quite drunk when they found him. One of the other managers, who had also been called, solved the problem by repeatedly dunking him in a cow trough until he was sober. Soon I was sitting at the doctor’s kitchen table alongside several bottles of brandy which were consumed in copious quantities by the both of us.

For three hours he stitched back together all my tendons and arteries before splinting up and bandaging the whole.

And even drunk the man was the best bloody surgeon I’ve ever come across. Once the wrist had healed I had full movement back and the scar was hardly noticeable.

The African responsible made the mistake of returning to his rooms in the barracks on-site. When the other workers found out they hacked him to pieces. By the time the police arrived the next day they found blood from floor to ceiling.

Mbali Upeo- a drinking competition and a friendly slap

At work

My second work placement on my dairy technology course was in a condensed milk factory in Victoria which had the lasting impact of a life-long addiction to condensed milk.

I consumed vast quantities of the stuff over that three winter months I was there. I swear I needed the calories to help me survive what was the coldest place in the world. I had thought I had grown hardened to surviving cold winters in climate-inappropriate accommodation but I was wrong. Only here did I feel real despair as I watched snow falling and knew I had to last a long night amongst uninsulated walls and not enough blankets.

It was in the small town where I was based that I met the son of a family we had known in Kenya- the Allens. They were an Australian family but had emigrated to Kenya and had had three sons- the eldest was the Kenyan commissioner of police and the second son was the commissioner of prisons. However, the third son had returned to Australia and was now working as a rigger on high power lines. My mother had sent me his address and it was hard to conceal my shock when he opened the door. His brothers were slim, athletic, well-dressed and cultivated men. This brother was a big, rough, bull of a man with an intermittent relationship with a razor and, even in the middle of winter, was wearing flip-flops (or thongs as they are known in Australia).

He looked me up and down and the first thing he said by way of introduction was:

“I suppose you’re one of these poofs then are you? Like those brothers of mine?”

I wasn’t quite sure how to respond, particularly since I had always got on well with his brothers, but I laughed it off and made some sarcastic comment.

He made no comment but proceeded to lock up his house and walk past me. I remained where I was uncertain of what to do until he looked back impatiently and said:

“Well come on then. Are you coming for a drink or not?”

I soon discovered he had a reputation as a fighter and a drinker. I was a pretty solid drinker myself at that age but when we entered the pub at 10am even I was a bit worried. We drank all day. At 5pm all his mates, who had been working, entered the pub. At 7.30pm my companion fell off his stool unconscious. I helped drag him out to the front steps and into one of his mate’s utes to get him home. When I walked back into the bar I was hailed as the new drinking champion of the bar and offered another drink. I said I needed a small nap first. I went upstairs to my bedroom, above the bar, and there puked up my guts before collapsing next to the toilet for about three hours. When I came too I felt much better and made my way back downstairs to accept that drink just before closing time- thus cementing my newly acquired reputation while minimising the risk of throwing up again in front of everyone!

At the factory I was charged with making two batches of condensed milk a day. I had to test the milk in the morning and then fill these big cylindrical vats- half milk and half sugar. Something like 22 huge bags of sugar, went into each vat. This was then vacuumed and boiled under a low temperature so it bubbled away all day like a witch’s cauldron. The trick is to not caramelise the sugar or burn the milk and is quite a delicate process….it also required frequent taste tests just to be sure!

My last practical was based in Brisbane, Queensland. I had been told that of all the states in Australia it was the most like Kenya so I was keen to see it. I rode my motor-bike from Adelaide to Brisbane, a distance of more than 1200 miles taking two full days.  My trusty steed did the journey in style without breaking down once.

Unfortunately I arrived on Good Friday and in those days not a single shop was open, either that day or for the rest of the Easter weekend. I had just $5 in my pocket and I knew it would not be enough to cover food and accommodation for four days. After asking around I made my way to a place called the People’s Palace on Edward Street, run by the Salvation Army. I asked if I could pay them when I got my first salary and they agreed. Then I went and bought a big bag of prawns and a loaf of bread with my $5 and lived on that for the four days I was there. The prawns were turning slightly by Easter Monday but I survived without too much more than a slightly dicky tummy.

I worked as an ice-cream grader at the Pauls factory there. It was a big, dirty old place that stuanchly remained so right up until the 1990s, well after the Southbank became rejuvenated and trendy place to go (the building is now a theatre). I was in charge of sterilising the equipment and during my first week there I soon discovered that the milk cans were not being washed and steamed properly. I prepared to tackle the old man in charge of operating the steam drum. He may not have been that old actually…but all his teeth had rotted out and his breath had achieved extreme levels of putridness. I was forced to have a lot of serious chats with him to resolve the problem but I couldn’t bear to stand too close to him. It takes quite a lot of concentration to speak and yet not breathe without appearing to do so. Luckily he was a good humoured chap and the issue was resolved amicably and, more importantly for my lungs, relatively quickly.

After a while I also went on the butter line in the morning. It consisted of a long line of workers taking off the butter and packing it into the crates. We all wore white overalls with a pocket on one side and pulled in tight at the waist. However, on the women, this uniform left a very alluring gap around the midriff. There were a couple of pretty girls on the butter line and I could not resist putting my hands in the gap of their overalls as if it was a pocket. It would usually earn me a good-humoured slap and a saucy comment. I suppose I should be grateful that it was the 50s and not nowadays where I would no doubt be up on a workplace harrassment suit. But it was a good place to work and there was always a lot of hilarity amongst the workers. I enjoyed it so much that after my three month placement was up they offered me a permanent job and I accepted it.

But in the end I only stayed six months there as by that time the Mau Mau had broken out in Kenya and had lasted two years already. Both my brother Jim and I felt we should go back and help in any way we could.

Mbali Upeo- Little brother comes to college

Jim (front row, second from the left) as captain of the waterpolo team and myself as goalie (back row, second from the right)

In my third year I was joined by my younger brother Jim who also decided to study agriculture at Roseworthy. I was rather looking forward to seeing him and met him off the bus from the port. It wasn’t an auspicious start. As soon as he got off, he put down his cases and slogged me across the face.

I’m not really sure why and Jim has never spoken about it. I can only assume that having been able to (and I admit I frequently did so)  beat him up all through our teenage years he was itching for a chance to get his own back now he was the same size as me.

We fought and fought hard that first day but I managed to emerge victorious. While it meant our relationship was a tad uneasy in those first few weeks, it did cement our joint reputations throughout the college as “fighters”.

Our relationship changed for the better when Jim joined the water polo team. Although I had been a champion swimmer for two years running at university, Jim was a much stronger swimmer than I. He was rapidly elected captain of the water polo club, despite only being a first year, while I only just managed to hold onto a goalie position.

We both became friends with Mick Lucy, who was the secretary of the water polo team, and together we all decided we had to do something about the swimming pool.

Swimming in the pool

“Swimming pool” was perhaps an ambitious term for it since it consisted of a mud dam with wooden planks knocked in at each end. It still had lanes and was a proper 25 metre length but every time you turned you probably kicked the board back half a metre into the soft mud.  If you dived off the platforms with force they would sink down. It was very good fun but it needed a lot of maintenance and if too many people were using it they made a bit of a mess.  We tried to solidify it with stones initially, then by pouring liquid concrete into holes, but nothing we tried worked terribly well. We decided that at least half the damage was being caused by the townspeople, who often made the trip to the college in order to use the pool in the afternoons and weekends but did not contribute any funds to its upkeep.

So we banned them.

This went down like a lead balloon as you can imagine.

One evening Jim and I went to the pictures in town and decided to have a drink at the local milk bar nearby afterwards. Some of the locals there recognised us as the ones responsible for the ban and decided to confront us.

There was a pack of them, all as broad as they were tall. They looked very capable of bashing us into a pulp. Although both of us were known as fighters they knew, and we knew, we would undoubtedly lose with such odds. But what they didn’t count on was that, having a well-honed instinct for survival, I was not averse to playing dirty if it saved my skin. I broke the bottle of soda in my hand against the steel counter and stepped forward with it.

“All right then- who’s first?”

Jim hadn’t broken his bottle but was poised to do so right beside me.

I had expected a bloody and painful confrontation and was quite surprised and very relieved when they actually backed down and let us get on our bikes and head back to the college.

Our next move in obtaining a proper swimming pool was to raise some funds and we did so doing various things such as running a Coca-cola stall at the college. The drink was still relatively unknown in those days but was rapidly gaining popularity so we made quite a bit of money out of it- more than enough to improve the swimming pool.

My aerial red hunter 350

I also ran some side businesses myself in order to save up money- such as offering a cut-price barber service for the students. I became pretty proficient at hair cutting…after the first few attempts.

I eventually saved up enough money to buy an Aerial Red Hunter 350 motorbike which was the ticket to freedom for me…and to impressing quite a lot of ladies.

At the end of my year long dairy technology course- which involved learning the art of butter and cream making- I had to complete three practical placements of about three months each and so my Red Hunter came into its own.

I travelled on it firstly to a butter factory in a little town that I’d never heard, and now cannot remember the name of,  in the central drylands of South Australia.

I stayed with an old lady who ran a boarding house and the first night I was there she brought up a very tasty smelling stew with white meat all through it. I sniffed it hungrily and thought “ah good, I love chicken stew”. It was as tasty as it smelt and I was very satisfied. I was probably there for about 10 days before I realised that it was not chicken stew but in fact rabbit stew which she sourced from some obliging fields nearby. The discovery didn’t make me like it any less but it increased my respect at her ability to turn a profit.

At the factory I was put in charge of the two 40 gallon churns which were big circular tubs with beaters at the top and bottom. I had to monitor the butter making and clean out these tubs at the end of each day. It was a small factory, with only 12 workers. Two of them were rough girls who had never been to school and who were all over me as soon as I arrived. I obviously wasn’t as diplomatic in my rejection as I had hoped because one day, as I was in the middle of one of the tubs cleaning it, they turned on the beaters.

There I was trying to straddle one, still keeping my manhood intact, while ducking the other which was coming about an inch away from my head. I was there for about five or ten minutes and could hear the both of them laughing their heads off before they eventually turned it off. When I got out I gave them a bloody good spanking… which I suspect they  enjoyed immensely.

But the thing I really learnt to dread was when the refrigeration plant packed it in- which it did quite often in that searing Australian heat. The plant consisted of cold water and gas ammonia pumps which would release a whole heap of ammonia all over the place in response to any fault within the machinery.  Those of you who have never smelt ammonia up close and personal cannot imagine the reeking vengeance it takes. It would damn near kill you just to find the leak and turn it off. We had masks but they didn’t prevent much. After 10 minutes you would come out retching and spitting, with the smell indelibly clinging to your nostrils and tonsils no matter what you did to try and get rid of it over the next few days.

I admit I was not terribly sorry to leave at the end of three months. I jumped on my bike and headed to my second work placement in Western Victoria.

Mbali Upeo- a new uniform and the death of my brother

Rounding up the pigs

We first-years boarded in the main building of the college that had been built when the college was first established. It housed a maximum of 30 students and it only had one toilet. More often then not you would be forced to go out the back door to a row of outdoor toilets which had no roof and an open drain taking the stuff God only knows where. It was a test of how badly you needed to go, particularly in winter or when it was raining. And since the fumes caused severe retching and gagging- you certainly didn’t linger.

As second years we used the same toilets but our digs were a block of 31 individual units with ceilings no more than 7ft high, concrete floors, a single bed and an open verandah that circulated the building.

And as third years we moved again to some ex-army huts which had three to four rooms to each. They weren’t lined or sealed and there was nothing much in the way of insulation. But they did have their own set of toilets and wash units,  although, again, outside. The showers consisted of a concrete floor with a sheet of corrugated iron circling it. Whoever built it obviously decided it wasn’t worth the expense of another sheet of tin and so there was a large gap at the bottom and the top which meant it was draughty whichever way the wind blew.

In winter these were the coldest bloody huts I’d ever been in. The students would all put copper pennies across the 15-amp fuses to stop them blowing when too many heaters were connected. We would do this until all the wires between the huts were literally glowing. The college provided one heater per room but most of the students already had (or rapidly aquired) a heater of their own. Unfortunately, even with the penny trick, it couldn’t usually take more than two or three heaters so we had to take turns as to who missed out on having the heater in their room that day.

We also had a tiny little cooker which we had to light and feed with firewood. It had a hot-top but you would actually have to sit on top of it to get any warmth from it. It’s main purpose was to heat the water for the showers. We had one bloke in our group who would get up at 5am every day without fuss and light the cookbox. He’d get us up an hour earlier than the others and keep the fire going so we all had a hot shower and then he would let it go out. Because even if the water was absolutely boiling, the draft in those showers was such that you would still be cold but at least your teeth wouldn’t actually be chattering nor your skin a curious shade of blue.

A sergeant in the tank regiment (sitting, in the middle)

As first years we were encouraged to join the Citizen Military Forces or what is now known as the Army Reserve in Australia. If you wanted to go into the military following college then your time with the CMF counted. I had no interest in a military career but I knew firsthand the powerful appeal of a military uniform on the ladies so I signed up in my first week. I took two further courses – one in radio communication and one on tank gunnery. I was soon promoted to corporal and in the uniform I looked pretty bloody smart I can tell you. I took every opportunity to wear the uniform and its success with the ladies was as I predicted. I soon earned my nickname “Buck” Sands.

Unfortunately, I think this started years of chronic deafness.  I was usually in the turret of the armoured car, directing the gunner underneath. We didn’t have any ear-muffs and so my ears took a drubbing as the huge gun blasted just 3-4 foot away. I also became captain of the rifle club at University and even then we were using big bore rifles that packed an audio punch. At inter-college shooting competitions there were eight .303’s exploding every 20 seconds. I was often pretty deaf at the end of gunnery courses or rifle competitions but it usually came back within a couple of days.

By the time I finished my second year course I was promoted to Sergeant in the tank regiment. We had to go on troop manouvres around the countryside in small units. It was pretty hilly countryside, just behind the Barossa Valley. On the second day we hit a muddy valley. I was in the rear tank of Number One Squadron and the leader had the front tank. The leader got his tank through but in doing so had churned up the ground so much that the second tank sank like a stone, right up to its belly. The leader directed that a 20 yard wire rope be used to pull out the stranded tank but it didn’t shift an inch. So he shifted his tank to a fresh spot to try a different angle and managed to get his own tank firmly bogged as well.

I had been watching all this with mounting frustration and finally got out of my tank and took charge. We had another three tanks not bogged so I got two of them on a split rope pulley and anchored the stranded tank to another tank sideways so essentially we had the pulling capacity of four tanks to a fixed point. It worked like a dream and we got both tanks out without hassle. That was probably my biggest military moment of triumph. The possession of a little mechanical engineering knowledge got me mentioned in dispatches, so I was well pleased.

Jack

It was also during my second year at college that I received the news that my brother Jack had died. While at the University of Oxford on his Rhode Scholarship he had joined an aerobatic flying display team and while practicing a complicated manouvre he had dived through a cloud and collided with a small civilian aircraft on the other side. Both pilots were killed.

Although we had never been terribly close Jack was probably the brother I liked the best. He was probably the brother everyone liked the best- he was gifted with both looks, athletic ability and an open-hearted sociability that never failed to draw people to him. It seemed such a terrible tragedy that he should have been struck down so early in a life full of such promise. But so it seems whenever someone young dies I suppose.

His death came as a horrible shock and for the first time I really felt the distance between Australia and Africa. I was grateful then when Margaret Patterson wrote me a touching and heart-felt letter of condolence.

The photo of Margaret I had on my wall at college

Her sister Ann was ostensibly still my girlfriend at this time (at least it was her photo I had on my wall in Roseworthy) but she probably only wrote me two letters in the four years I was in Australia. But Jack’s death prompted a regular exchange of letters with Margaret who was a talented and entertaining writer. Margaret was actually in London during this period. After inheriting money following the death of her grandmother she had decided to follow her dream of writing and acting on the stage and was attending the Guildhall School of Drama and Music.

I was regaled on stories of luvvies and drama-folk which made me chuckle and it wasn’t long before Ann’s picture had been replaced by Margaret’s in my room at college.

Mbali Upeo- First year of college and a victory over “fagging”

Roseworthy Agricultural College

I enjoyed my years at Roseworthy Agricultural College. I was much older than most of the other first year students except for the only other “colonial” boy there, Peter Whitlock, who had been born and brought up in India and had also worked before coming to college. He and I got on ok but I suspect he thought I was a bit arrogant. This might possibly have been true as I did feel that my stint in the Northern Territory had given me an experience few of the others could equal. This did not however, I maintain, merit his revenge. I still wore my big impressive, curly brimmed 10-gallon hat around university. In my first year, as we were castrating and ear-marking some young cattle, I bent over to pull the testicles out of this young bull calf and as I did so Peter leaned over and ear-marked my hat. Those curly brimmed hats only stay upright because of the circle so of course the whole hat sank around my eyes. I could have killed him- if it had been an older hat or an ordinary Akubra it wouldn’t have mattered but now it was ruined. I tried sewing a piece of leather in the gap to restore the brim but it didn’t work and I was forced to buy another, much less impressive hat out of my slender resources.

Generally, my choice of clothes were a point for teasing at college. Not only did I wear beige, suede desert boots- which were almost unheard of in rural Australia- but I also donned brown corduroy trousers. This was my greatest sin in Australian eyes- such foppish workwear was the province of “poofters”. However, by dint of rearranging a few arms and faces, I soon brought about a change of opinion and I had very little trouble when I wore my cords after that.

I had also had already gained some credence with my fellow first year students for getting rid of the time-old tradition of first year “fagging“. Roseworthy had been founded in 1883 and no doubt the founders had been good Victorian gentlemen who had gone to English public schools where such things were considered the norm. Thus it had become part of the fabric of the college that first year students were to be at the beck and call of third year students and do their whim without murmur. Such servitude was to start with a painful and humiliating initiation ritual to be administered in their first few weeks of college.

Since I had arrived early I had heard of what was awaiting me and I was not keen on the idea.  Because my mother had such influential connections I was one day invited for tea with the vice-chancellor of the university and I decided this was an excellent opportunity to tackle him on the issue.

“Isn’t it about time you got rid of such out-dated and Victorian traditions?” I asked. I pointed out that “fagging” had been outlawed in most English public schools and it seemed a bit ridiculous that Australian universities should be lagging behind.

He looked a bit taken aback.

“Well yes of course I agree with you dear boy, but I’m not sure how we are going to stop it. Such activities have never been backed by the college…it just happens.” He smiled serenely at me and changed the subject. I realised I would get no real help from him and if I didn’t want to be initiated I was going to have to take matters into my own hands.

After doing some research I realised my greatest ally was superiority of numbers. By chance our year was one of the largest intakes on record and there were about 31 of us. In contrast the third-years were one of the smallest and had been reduced to just 19.

In the first week, I marched into the student union and called a meeting of first years. I told them I didn’t think we should accept “fagging” or “initiation” and we had the numbers that meant we didn’t have to. Of course this point of view received fervent agreement as most of the 18 year olds were quite frankly terrified of the coming ordeal. I called in the third year representative on the student union and laid down our terms.

“We’re not going to accept it and if any of your boys make the attempt there will be a riot and we outnumber you by almost two to one.”

He too seemed a bit taken aback but defended his position robustly- they had all had to undergo it themselves and otherwise where was the fun in being a third year?

I proposed that we would instead hold a concert for the third years, during which they would be allowed to do whatever they wished in the way of heckling and throwing things like rotten fruit etc but then that was to be an end of it. That was our final offer.

He finally agreed. So that’s what we did and it was a great success. All of the third years abided by the agreement except for one South African bloke who was a particularly loathsome bully. He decided he wasn’t accepting it and he woke one first year up with a pitchfork and tried to drag him outside to do an initiation rite. He was a big fellow but not big enough to hold his own against the three or four of us who instantly attacked him. He soon saw sense and we never had any problems after that.

This incident gave me instant kudos with my fellow first years so I got on pretty well with everyone after that.

Mum and my brother Ted, dressed up for the races.

My mother also came out to visit me for a few months in my first year. She still had a lot of connections in South Australia as her uncle had been an influential figure in politics and society. As a result she was cordially invited to spend her stay with the headmaster of the college. However, she also got on very well with my washerwoman, Mrs Daley. And so after two or three weeks she packed up her luggage and walked from the large house with the extensive gardens, crossed the road to a row of workers cottages opposite “the big house” and moved in with Mrs Daley. She lived there quite happily for another three weeks or so.

It helped confuse the local populace. Nobody could ever really make up their minds as to whether we were “class” or not and consequently never knew where to place us in the social circles.

Mbali Upeo- The Northern Territory and an altercation with a mulga tree

The Northern Territory

“The Alice” in those days was an outpost of wooden houses and corrugated iron surrounded by the distinctive ochre hills of the red centre of Australia. It had no more than 5-600 people living there but there will still signs of when it had housed more than 200,000 people during the war including military camps and the refugees who fled the bombing of Darwin.

It hadn’t occurred to me to check the bus timetable to go further north and I soon learned the error of my ways as I had to wait for a week for the next bus. I was stuck in my hotel which was rough but would have been ok if one of the local drunks hadn’t fallen down a lift shaft that hadn’t been finished. He landed right next to my room which adjoined the stairway. It wasn’t particularly pretty and gave me an aversion to my room. But unless I intended to drink myself from 11am to midnight there were few opportunities for recreational pursuits.

Luckily I ended up meeting my father’s ex-boss while I was there, Don Newland of Newland & Tarlton. He had retired to the Northern Territory. I’m assuming it was where he was from originally as I can’t imagine any other reason that would draw someone to retire there. We spend a night yarning in the pub during the course of which he recommended that I kick my heels for the rest of the week at a place called “Bond Springs” which wasn’t too far from Alice Springs and was owned by a mate of his. I camped there two nights and during that time we had to get a “killer” (a beast to be killed for the station’s meat supplies). It was a good introduction to the sheer size of Australia’s outback. We had to travel 12 miles before we even saw a beast!

I got back to Alice Springs in time to board my bus to Aileron, which was no more than a pub on the side of the road somewhere in the empty landscape between Alice Springs and Darwin. I stayed the night in the pub (I was becoming familiar with rough Australian pubs) and the next morning was welcomed with the plume of dust that heralded the arrival of the truck from Napperby Station. It was driven by the only white man on the station, Monty Scobie. His father, Alec Scobie, had been a champion whip maker (even now one of his plaited leather stock whips can sell for about $8000) and Monty had inherited a lot of his father’s skills. He made me a normal horsehair whip for my stay which I treasured for many years. Monty was a good bloke- slow of speech but with a quick sense of humour.

A couple of hours later we arrived at the station. Napperby was a big wild place. Even the aborigines were wild. They couldn’t speak English. They had a few words of pigeon but mostly it was sign language. There was a tribe of about 200 of them whose camp was right next to the station homestead. They were supplied with tobacco, tea, sugar, jam, maize meal and rice but mostly they still lived on what they got from the bush.

The place was about 4000 square miles and Monty was the care-taker. There were also two half-caste aboriginals who had been born on the place, the results of liasions between a previous owner the aboriginal women. They were the bosses of the mustering teams and each team consisted of about 20 young male riders from the tribe.

The station homestead was a traditional, four-roomed wooden house with a verandah. I use the word verandah in its most liberal sense since this one was peppered with charred holes- evidence that the aboriginals had a blase attitude towards fire risk and insisted on building their campfires there when they chose to camp away from the main settlement.

A couple of the aboriginal women were supposed to look after the house and no doubt they did so according to their own standards. They failed to be bothered by needless concerns with dust and dirt and stale food that have been drilled into Europeans over the years and so the rooms had a pungent odour that clung to the walls and floors and which my nostrils could not cope with.

After one gasping, suffocating night in one of the rooms Monty suggested with a wry smile that I might be more comfortable on the verandah and that is where I lived for the next three months, being careful not to roll too much in my swag in case I fell through the floorboards.

When I arrived it was soon clear that my expectation of being shown around the place and offering to help with a few jobs was not going to be the case. In fact I was considered very fortuitous, free labour. They were just about to start a muster and on the day I arrived they were dishing out the gear- red or blue shirts, according to which mustering team you were in, light coloured trousers, boots and a 10-gallon akubra hat for each man.

In my outback gear

They had had to muster because the owner, a playboy by all accounts, was on a trip around Europe and had wired to say he had run out of money. Could we please gather and rail 600 head of cattle and sell them in Adelaide and send him the money so he could continue his tour of the capital cities.

The first thing we had to do was get the horses ready, most of whom were brumbies. Before I had got there they had had an attack of Birdsville Disease which had wiped out about 200 of their 300 horses. So they’d bought horses, at some expense, from their neighbours who had gathered up all the brumbies on the place and herded them into the Napperby yards. Now we had a week to select our horses and break them in.

Monty was pretty good to me, he selected my horses and made sure I had a good night horse with a few years experience. But I also had three brumbies. I’d never broken a horse in my life and I soon learned that the aborigines did it the old-fashioned way. Gentle the horse just enough to put a bridle and saddle on, jump on and hang on for dear life.

I was really quite surprised that most of the horses did come to hand after this. It taught me that to break-in horses the most important thing is to have the right frame of mind and to be able to communicate with the horse. All the aborigines seemed to be able to do this and I tried to emulate them. I don’t think I did too badly, certainly I was never thrown, at least not in that initial week.

Two of mine settled down after a week but one we had to bush because he wouldn’t calm down. His mistake. They chucked two 10-gallon water bags on him and let him buck himself to exhaustion. Then he was put on a leading rein and became a packhorse. Everything had to be carried on horse-back- there wasn’t even a wagon on the place.

We held the horses in a mob as we went out to our first camp where they were hobbled and let go every night then brought in by a ranger in the morning. Once we started collecting cattle we had to take shifts on riding round the cattle through the night. In total we were out on muster for about six weeks. I have to admit I found it pretty hard. Even thought I’d ridden every day while at FOB Wilson’s it was nothing compared to being in the saddle for hour after hour surrounded by swirling red dust and shimmering heat.

We started off with two tins of jam, golden syrup and tea and sugar. We had flour so we could make damper every day and I had also smuggled from the homestead pantry three tins of peaches, one tin of apricots and two tins of plum jam. All of which I consumed in the first week.

Then I was forced onto the beef and damper. We had fresh beef for the first few days and when it started turning bad we put salt on it and kept eating until it was finished. Then we killed the next beast.

By the time I’d been out there three or four weeks I started hallucinating about tinned and fresh fruit. I’d never eaten beef before I got to the Territory and now I was living on the damn stuff. At home I only ever ate chicken or fish. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the taste of red meat but I didn’t like the endless chewing it required- I assume my teeth have always been a bit weak due to my infant lactose intolerance and subsequent lack of calcium.

Now, not only was I eating beef morning, noon and night but I was also having to drink pretty dirty water. I’d drunk a bit of dirty water in Kenya- if you were out hunting and found a pond or something- but this stuff was on a different scale. We had to dig it out of a dry river bed where 500 cattle had been camping. I’m pretty sure that the fluid we dug up was probably about 90% cow piss. We’d try and convince ourselves that the salty taste was simply the salt in the ground but I was never convinced. I started trying to limit how much water I drank and ended up getting quite dehydrated.

But I must have been healthy. After we’d been out for three or four weeks my horse unexpectedly reared up and backed into a dead mulga tree causing one of the branches to slam right through my shoulder. The horse fell away from underneath me and I was left hanging about three foot off the ground, helplessy pinned by the now bloodied stake of wood.

The aboriginals thought it was the biggest bloody joke since Christmas. They were rolling about on the ground laughing, deaf to my swearing and cursing. Eventually they came and tried to lift me off the tree but I was really stuck. They looked for another way and tried to break the branch off from the tree by half of them hanging onto me and the other half onto the branch. That yielded little result either, other than my yells reaching a pitch that any good soprano would be proud to achieve.

Eventually they got the axe, which we used to cut kindling up and which was as blunt as hell, and started chopping. My god, I swore blue murder. After they got it down they then wedged me against a couple of them and pulled. It came out eventually but there were still quite a few splinters and debris left in the wound not to mention a great deal of shredded nerves all throughout my body. There was no clean water so I peed in the jerry can and bathed it in urine. I managed to get most of the sticky bits out that I could find and then I wrapped it up with my spare shirt because it was the only thing I could find that was reasonably clean.

I left it for three days before I peeled it off to take a look at it and do you know, it was damn near healed and not a sign of infection- despite the fact Mulga timber has a bad reputation for infection. After seven or eight days it was scarred. Funnily enough I’d often noticed that Africans could heal almost overnight from massive wounds without any medicine so maybe there’s something about the diet or being outdoors- I don’t know. Either way I was very relieved although it remained painful and weak for quite some time after that.

At the end of three weeks we had about 6-700 cattle and we needed to start castrating and ear-marking. One rider would ride into the herd on the bronco horse- a big heavy draft horse with a special saddle- lasso the beast and drag it back out of the herd by the neck. We had a rough makeshift area with two lines of stakes in the ground and two panels about 12ft apart to make a bit of a corral. We would put ropes on the front or back legs and pull until the beast fell down. They tend to go down fairly hard doing it this way, and then we’d all get in there- one to dehorn, one to castrate, one to ear-mark, another to administer jabs. It was really hard work and every beast had to be handled this way. By the time we had finished both we, the whole herd and the bronco horse would literally be covered in blood. I thought it was pretty cruel and I reckon we probably lost anything up to 30% of the beasts we marked simply through heat, flies and dust doing their work on the wounds.

Still we managed to finish the muster and send the required number of beasts off to market.

A month or so after we got back off muster Monty took me to the annual meeting of the Barrow Creek Race Club which was always held at Aileron. There must have been about 3-400 people there- ringers, aboriginals, station owners- anyone who was anyone in the local district. I remember almost nothing of the racing itself as we were all hopelessly drunk for the entire three days it was on.

An outback race meeting today

In our drunken halo some bright spark suggested we all play water polo in a billabong about a mile away from the meet. Everyone agreed this was an excellent idea and we all drove, walked, rode out there and proceeded to strip off. Everyone played, men in their underpants or riding britches, women in their bras and pants or even fully clothed. It was very funny and I was enjoying it immensely until they decided to start throwing around this big watermelon as a ball instead. My shoulders were in pretty bad shape- one having been dislocated recently and the other still healing from the mulga accident. This bloody melon slammed into the shoulder that had been dislocated and promptly popped it back out.

This was not the kind of company to deal with a medical incident, in fact any kind of medical incident. One ringer, still pretty drunk, said: “Oh I’ve dealt with this in cattle, you need to pull hell out of it and slam it back in.” Which he proceeded to demonstrate with gusto.

“No, no, no,” said another “You’re doing it all wrong, let me have a go.” He knelt on my chest and gave it a few tugs. He seemed mystified at his lack of success.

Another four, all highly inebriated, shoved him out of the way and kindly insisted they would have me “right as rain” in no time. As a group they embarked on various pushing, pulling, thumping and stomping techniques. By this time all I could do was to give the faintest cry of pain as I devoutly hoped the ground would soon open up and swallow me whole.

Finally a young bloke appeared. I’d not seen him the previous days but he must have been a trainee doctor or something because he manipulated it in the proper way and the shoulder went back in quite easily but by that time I had almost passed out with the pain.

When I got back to Adelaide they told me some of the shoulder cup had actually torn away and so I had an operation to repair it and was in hospital for about 10 days.

But there’s something to be said for the healing powers of the young. Within three days of the race meeting I was able to use my shoulder enough that I could drive a cattle truck from Aileron down to Alice Springs (about 300km).

This was my first experience of night driving in the Australian outback and it scared the hell out of me. This wide stretch of red dirt with white posts every 50 yards that just stretched on and on and on- no bends, no hills, nothing to break the monotony. I started falling asleep at the wheel and as I tried to keep my eyes open the white posts started turning into non-existent cattle jumping into the road with me swerving wildly to avoid them. After it happened three times I started seeing the advantages of having a nap before I continued with the drive.

Finally my three months were up. I caught the bus back to Adelaide to start college.