Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 325
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[Page 325]
160
Prices of many imported commodities, in short supply, had sky-rocketed during the war. The price of petrol got as high as five shillings a gallon, and corrugated roofing-iron was costing nearly a hundred pounds a ton towards the end: yet in two years time these prices had fallen to two shillings and sixpence, and twenty-two pounds, respectively.
A few months after I joined my Father's office staff, I heard of a forfeited Crown Lease of just over three thousand acres in the hills near the village of Yeoval, and about forty miles from Parkes by the Wellington Road. This lease had originally been granted to a Parkes builder who hadn't the capital to stock and further improve it. Dad got an immediate Permissive Occupancy of it, under the Crown Lands Act, in my name, at a low annual rental. On it I put two small lots of cattle of all ages that I had bought, at an average price of two pounds a head, during the drought.
The area comprised two adjoining expired Improvement Leases, one having been held by Yunnundry [possibly Yullundry] Station, owned by the Glassons, and the other by Buckinbah Station, where Banjo Patterson the author of "Waltzing Matilda" was born. Though it was rough light granite country all the trees except useful ones had been killed by ringbarking, the common boundaries were fenced and there were excellent water supplies in three creeks. Having lain unstocked for a long time it carried a thin coat of rough grasses and it also had a good scattering of edible Currajong and She-Oak trees. Yeoval enjoyed an average rainfall of nearly thirty inches a year, and being elevated above the Western Plains it had a very comfortable climate.
I took a fancy to the place, which was known locally as "The Frenchmans", and decided to try and get a secure title to it, rather than take up one of the smaller, expensive, but more productive, blocks of farm land that were available under the Returned Soldiers Settlement Act, administered by a special branch of the Lands Department. With this objective in view, I interviewed Surveyor General Broughton at the Lands Department in Sydney and asked him to have the area reclassified for