Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 333
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[Page 333]
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down to some mouldy stale bread, a little jam in the bottom of a tin and some old potatoes and onions, which supplemented with a rabbit, if we were lucky enough to trap one, made an appetising enough stew: because of the drought rabbits were scarce. After a few weeks of this rough rigorous life, I usually drove the forty miles home, in pony and sulky, to "Rosedernate" to recuperate over a long week-end, and wearying drive, and after a few such trips I bought a second-hand, big, Harley Davidson motor-cycle and side car (for £80) which enabled me to travel to and fro very much faster.
Ours was a very poetical family, Mother being devoted to Shakespeare, and in her lifetime wore out three large books of the complete works; she also favoured Omar Khayyam and was remarkably quick at making apt quotations in the course of ordinary conversation, as was Father. His astonishing ability, was to recite "The Task", by Cowper, verse after verse perfectly, right through, with appropriate intonation and gesture. He could do the same with Burns's "Tam o'Shanter" and Shakespeare's Lucretia, and yet I had never seen him deliberately memorising any poetry from a book. Visitors to our home were often treated to a relevant recitation in the course of a discussion on current affairs. So it was only natural that I became very fond of reading, and grew up to be a somewhat "bookish" person. While still in short pants I had read almost all the books in the small, public, lending library at Parkes; most of them fiction. Later, on the eve of my leaving The Scots College, I was introduced to more serious books by one of the resident masters who took a particular interest in me. He lent me the works of Chesterton, Bernard Shaw, Materlinck [Maeterlinck] and Belloc, and I was to prefer serious books on a variety of subjects, rather than fiction for the rest of my life.
In October of 1920, I received letters from the Commonwealth Defence Department informing me that the United Kingdom War Office had agreed to pay my long-standing claim for the differ-