HIS STORY: Six of the Best HIS POETRY HOME
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In the early months of 1947 I was living with my mother in South Brisbane opposite Musgrave Park. It was a large house which had been converted into rooms with a communal kitchen and bathroom. I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor in conditions which were very ordinary and the constant bickering between residents was unbelievable. I pestered my mother into applying to have me finish school on financial grounds to alleviate the situation. My mother answered an advertisement in the Courier Mail for a lad to work on a dairy farm. Suddenly I was transformed from a schoolboy into a wage earner for her application was successful. So, just before my thirteenth birthday, I started work for Mr. Cedric Zischke at Mt. Tarampa as a farmhand. And so began 18 months as a "Tit puller". To this day Cedric Zischke and I still keep in touch and it was his efforts that instilled in me the work ethic that was to serve me so well. It never did any harm to Put the Boy on a Farm. I learned so many skills on the farm like herding and milking cows, some of which became like pets and I sometimes wondered how they felt. I hope they would be pleased if they could read How Now any Old Cow. Delivering calves, handling multiple draught horses, feeding pumpkin to pigs and planting pumpkins all became normal daily tasks at which I became proficient. Each day there were problems to solve and improvisations to make and there were times when I was afraid of obstacles or tasks that I thought were beyond me. Life on the farm was filled with encounters with all sorts of creepy, crawlies and things that go bump in the night. But, the beastie I feared the most was the snake. My first encounter and its effects are fully explained in The Addled Adder. |