Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 327
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[Page 327]
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selection by returned soldiers holding Qualifying Certificates, with preference for myself. He was very nice and very sympathetic, but thought it was too big an acreage for one soldier. However, on my stressing that it would be too small for two, he agreed to let me have it, and in due course my title to the area was officially gazetted. Soon afterwards one quarter of it was converted to a Conditional Purchase and the balance to a Forty-year Conditional Lease; much more negotiable titles than the original Crown Lease. And so I became a grazier, in a small way.
Immediately after the end of the war, the small cross-roads village of Yeoval consisted of a big brick hotel, a small general store, a modern primary school, a corrugated-iron recreation hall and half a dozen small wooden houses, in one of which a branch of one of the commercial banks opened a few months after I came. It was a centre for about fifty small wheat farms scattered over a limited area of rich red arable land, that had been the best part of the old Buckinbah Station. It was a very isolated place, being at least forty miles away from any big town, but the imminent construction of a railway from Molong, through Cumnock and Yeoval, to Dubbo was soon to put an end to its seclusion, and many of the local elders would be making a journey to the big city of Sydney for the first time in their lives.
Except for a few strangers passing through, the pub did very little trade before the bar-closing time at 6 p.m. The farmers and their employees were all hard at work, but, behind closed doors, the bar was crowded nearly every night especially on Saturdays. If the local mounted policeman, who was stationed in a neighbouring village, Obley, happened along, he turned the blind eye, and sometimes joined the thirsty throng, keeping order and telling a few inebriates that they had had enough: the police, though, were very strict regarding Sunday closing.
On my first Sunday afternoon in the district I was mistaken for a relieving mounted policeman: riding a fine horse and wearing near-white breeches and tan leather leggings, I must have looked like one. I could hear loud sounds of revelry in