Great Australian Outback School Stories by Bill Marsh

Author:Bill Marsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC Books
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Just Like a Sentence

I grew up in the Gulf country of Queensland where we lived on a cattle station four mile out of Normanton. When I say ‘cattle station’ it was really mainly more of a depot for my father and my uncle to run their horses because, at that time, they were big drovers all through that country. So it was only a small place, only about twenty-six square mile. Yeah so, even though we did run a few head of cattle, the property was more set up as a droving operation than as a cattle station. Besides having the brood mares for breeding they also had hundreds of other horses. See back in them days they didn’t have motor vehicles, they only used horses when they went droving, and they used to have about two different droving plants a year. A ‘plant’ is what you call the whole works; like all the horses, all the cooking gear, the saddles, swags and all that sort of stuff — the whole box and dice — and only one plant would do just the one trip, then you’d get together a fresh plant for the next trip. That’s why they had so many horses.

But that’s all besides the point because Normanton was also where I did my primary schooling, and someone was saying the other day that if I was going to tell a story about my school days, then I had to tell you about the time I was about ten and Mum was taking us into school in our old bloody Ford and I fell clean out of the back of the car and got hooked up on the back bumper, and all the other kids were yelling out for Mum to put the brakes on pretty quick but she didn’t and it was only when she saw me trailing along behind in the dust that she decided to stop the car. So that’s the story, and from memory I was none the worse for wear from it. Mum just threw me back into the car and off I went to school and I don’t even remember having any days off school because of it. But it wouldn’t have been the best of starts to a school day, ay? Anyhow, that’s the story.

At the Normanton school, back in the late 1940s and into the early ’50s, there would’ve only been about thirty of us kids. There were no Aborigines but we had one family of Chinese and one family of, I think they was Kanakas or something. You know, Kanakas was those Islanders that they brung over here to work on cane farms and that. Anyhow I think that’s what they were but they were definitely a different race other than the Aboriginal.

Even so, for a small place like Normanton, there was a fair swag of us kids and when I was in my last year at primary school there was four of us in Grade 8. The school only went to Grade 8.

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