Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 323
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[Page 323]
159
I had arrived back home in the middle of a crisis, and my homecoming was not a very happy one. Instead of enjoying my three months leave, gadding around the Commonwealth with free railway travel, I found myself, still in uniform - I had no other clothes - pumping water into troughs and feeding out hay to sheep; hot, dusty and dirty work. It certainly gave me immediate occupation but still left me wondering what I should do when I was right back to civilian life at the end of my demobilisation leave. I could have gone back to my old job in the Public Works Department, with accumulated promotion and seniority on account of my war service, but I really did not have any good civil engineering qualifications, and I felt that a return to this P.W.D. service did not promise me a very bright or remunerative career. In any case Dad, who soon recovered his health, was glad enough to have my clerical assistance in his office, where my eldest sister, Rose, was already installed as his very efficient secretary.
Life at "Rosedernate" at this time was very pleasant. My second sister, Flora McDonald, had returned from Northern Ireland shortly after I came back, and with the exception of my youngest sister, Jane, who was having her last year at the Presbyterian Ladies College at Pymble, we were all home again and very successfully mixing work with play. Our usual social diversions were balls and dances, house and tennis parties, riding and visiting country friends.
With the termination of the war, the ending of the drought and the repatriation of the returned sailors and soldiers the country gradually got back to normal peacetime conditions, which however were never the same again as those that obtained before the war. Electricity, the telephone, the motor car, the printing press, fashion and last, but not least, government, were all beginning to play a much greater and wider part in the lives of the people, and the pace of living was speeded up considerably.
My Father's speculations and investments in broad acres were, on the whole, profitable and he was earning big fees in his office.