Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 17
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[Page 17]
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Darling in stern-wheel paddle boats - the "Darling Dreadnoughts" - as far as Bourke, then a thriving pastoral centre where, of all places, a very substantial Customs House was built for collection of the duties imposed on the imports from Victoria when boot and clothing factories started up in N.S.W. Darlington Point a short distance downstream from Narrandera, was the eastern-most point of the Murrumbidgee where the river boats came up from South Australia to load wool clips for shipment overseas at Adelaide.
At the time of my first birthday in 1895, the Irish Italian, Marconi, the inventor of wireless telegraphy, successfully transmitted a message over a mile. Only twenty years before, the telephone and the phonograph (gramaphone) had been invented in the U.S.A. by Grahame Bell and W.T. Edison, respectively, and the electricity generating dynamo had been perfected in Germany by Seimens only a few years previously. I was only two years old when Prince George (later King George V) and Princess May (later Queen Mary) went to see the first of the flickering jumpy silent cinematographs at the Alhambra theatre in London. And so I was born into the age of invention, but it was not until the first decade of the 20th century that these inventions were made generally available to the public. The coronation of King Edward VII in 1910 was the first important event to be filmed for a newsreel. The very high "penny farthing" bicycle of this time could not be ridden by a woman, not even in a divided skirt. In 1890 cycles were still clumsy and primitive, with solid tyres and no gears or chains, but began to find riders everywhere.
At the beginning of the new century, and shortly after I had started my kindergarten schooling with the nuns in the convent at Peak Hill, my Father resigned from the Mounted Police, and our family, which now included my sisters Rose and Flora McDonald [indecipherable] moved to Sydney. This move was one of my earliest vivid recollections. In an American type four-wheeled mail coach drawn by two pairs of trotting horses we travelled thirty miles over a dusty red gravel road to Parkes to where the railway had recently been extended from Orange and on to Forbes. All through the night the