Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 103
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[Page 103]
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and grandfathers let their heads go. It was the same careless abandon all over the State, and inevitably the celebration got so rough that people were seriously injured and valuable property was damaged: pushing over the narrow weatherboard privies ("dubs") that housed the sanitary pans all along the back lanes, was a favourite amusement of lusty youth on New Year's Eve. All this resulted, finally, in the Riot Act being suitably amended to prevent behaviour that could be dangerous or damaging, on New Year's Eve, or any other festive occasion.
In Parkes this new Riot Act was zealously enforced by one particular policeman (Kiernan) who was not above severely punching or kicking any youth he caught offending.
There was no coal-gas or electricity supply in the town. All domestic lighting was by kerosene lamps, or candles in the bedrooms. The bigger stores had acetelyne-gas installations, fed by locally manufactured, galvanised iron, generators and gas holders, in rear of the premises. These used calcium carbide, which was also used in bicycle lamps. It sometimes happened that a schoolboy got a "sixer" (with a cane on the palms of his hands) for dropping a pea-sized piece of it into one of the inkwells recessed into the school desks; the ink would boil out spectacularly.
The Bushmans Mine had been lighted, above ground and down below, by one of the earliest, direct current, electricity generating plants imported into the country. A "Manchester" type dynamo with two large cuboidal field coils, was belt driven by a small, high speed, vertical steam engine.
In addition to daytime crushing, the battery worked a long night shift, and the roar of its stamps could be heard all over the town. The residents became accustomed to sleeping through this noise, but if for some reason the battery stopped during the dead of night, many sleepers immediately awakened.
By about 1909 most of the deep-reef mining, in and around Parkes, had ceased, and the town had become an important and prosperous wheat-growing and railway centre.
Father was now harvesting a sizeable income in his new