Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 337
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[Page 337]
166
vegetable garden and melon patch. He spent at least an hour every morning, helping his wife with the children and her household chores, before going to his own work.
Healy was not only an excellent fencer; in addition he was expert in all bushcraft. The house paddock, of eight hundred acres, had a great variety of flowering gum trees, and along Sandy Creek, which traversed it, there were many "hives" of wild bees in standing, hollow, dead trees. A bush fire swept through this area, and one of the big hollow trees near the house, in which there was a very big old hive, was burnt down and continued smouldering where it lay. Healy came along one Sunday morning to rob it. I expected him to put on a veil, or "smoke" the hive, but he just calmly chopped notches at intervals and opened up the "pipe", which was about nine inches bore and crammed with honeycomb for twelve feet of its length. Some bees were buzzing menacingly around, but he took absolutely no notice of them and they didn't attempt to sting him. When a couple of bees came whirling around my head, where I was standing at a distance watching operations, I instinctively hit out at them. Thereupon, Healy called out, "Don't hit at them, it only frightens them, and they'll sting you". Anyhow, nobody was stung and we each had nearly a four-gallon tin of delicious, glucose-rich, honey after separating it from the wax by the rather crude method of putting the honey-comb into a clean hessian chaff-bag, suspended over a large washing tub and crushing it. Much of the honey still remained in the comb, which we spread on the ground behind the house: it was not wasted, for the bees came and took it all away within a week.
Unfortunately for my plans to voyage to the U.S.A., Britain had just got off the gold standard, and now only about three and a half U.S. Dollars could be got for a Pound instead of the 4.88 that had been the rule for so many years. Dismayed at the prospect of losing nearly one and a half dollars on every pound, I conceived the idea of buying native platinum being mined in the alluvium near the village of Fifield, not very far