Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 161
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[Page 161]
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In the adjoining two-acre horse paddock I built a neat little pigstye to Father's plan, in which we reared, every Winter, two newly-weaned piglets on the kitchen scraps, supplemented with pollard mash. They reached almost full growth in the Spring, when a local butcher took them to the slaughter in return to our getting back half the sides of bacon and half of the hams, a mutually satisfactory arrangement. In short, it was all hardworking, healthy and well-fed living on the best and freshest of food, unprocessed and unpreservatised.
Our vehicles were a large sulky, a small rubber-tyred sulky drawn by one of the ponies (for Mother) and a big two-wheeled spring cart. Trained by my Father, I became the expert with the single-furrow one-horse plough, the orchard scarifier, and the big scythe. On the two acres on the western side of the house, we grew crops of wheat and peas, mixed. This was harvested in the ancient way with scythe and rake, into sheaves bound with "goosenecks", and formed into a small thatched stack in the orchard. It only partly fed our horses, but they loved the peas and grew fat on the mixture.
Within a few weeks of leaving school, I joined Dad's small office staff. He had become known far afield, and was often a week away, attending Land Board sittings at towns as distant as Dubbo, Nyngan, Condobolin, Wyalong and Molong. "Rosedernate" was one and a half miles away from the office, and usually we walked there and back twice in the working day; once for lunch. And frequently we walked to the town and back in the evenings to attend meetings, church, social functions, or merely to go to the "pictures" (cinema). We became really good walkers.
All the young compulsory military trainees at Parkes were formed into a detachment of the 41st Infantry Battalion (Headquarters at Bathurst) merged with the old volunteer 3rd Australian Rifles. We did our night and Saturday afternoon drill in the street, outside the small cabin of an Area Office next door to the Post Office, under the raucous commands of Sergeant-Major Cook of the permanent A.I.C. Staff, and shot the prescribed musketry practices on the local range with Lee-Enfield .303 rifles that we kept at home.