Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 167
Primary tabs
Transcription
[Page 167]
83
them, and writing out a docket and pay envelope for every employee, was a task that had to be started four days previously. The necessary cash was drawn from the Commercial Bank in Parkes on the previous Thursday afternoon, put into the pay envelopes and locked in a safe in the office overnight. One of the Staff had to sleep in the office that night with a loaded revolver under his pillow. An amusing incident occured when Mahoney, after a visit from the Veterinary Surgeon, was looking around for a very small container in which to measure out the few drams of a dose of powder prescribed for some of the horses. I suggested using an empty cartridge shell from the revolver. Mahoney promptly took it outside and pulled the trigger; there was just a dull click, and he had to try three times before the weapon fired. Mahoney, though, was not at all amused and sternly ordered that a box of new cartridges be requisitioned forthwith.
The Paymaster, James, had been a bank clerk in England. He was very facetious, and dearly loved teasing Wilson the Storekeeper, a very pious person, who was also a recent arrival from England: James unmercifully "pulled his leg" at every apt opportunity. James was also a great practical joker. He once showed us a fearsomely coloured and very lifelike model he had made of a huge spider, which he was packing up to send to his relatives in England to show them what terrifying insects one encountered in the Australia bush.
An average of two hundred men and a hundred horses were working on the section, in several specialised gangs under tough competent gangers, and under the immediate supervision of a riding ganger, or foreman, Watson, a big lean bronzed character, who on occasion would knock a rebellious navvy down with his bare fist, and had been known to boast that he really was a bastard, and then reel off the names of a number of great figures in history who were bastards too.
The navvies lived in tents in one big camp at the main depot, and in a few smaller ones at convenient places along the 30-mile