Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 369
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[Page 369]
182
I stayed a few days in Sydney looking up several of my friends, and then took the night train back to Parkes, where I received a very affectionate welcome home again at "Rosedernate. After a week of easy life there, I drove out to the "Frenchmans" in a sulky drawn by one of the "Rosedernate" ponies; my motor cycle had been sold during my absence abroad for a bit more than I had paid for it, and the proceeds invested in a truck of young cattle from the Orange Sales.
I was soon busy putting the finishing touches on the house and completing the front verandah. For a wage of £3-10-0d a week and use of the house, I engaged the services of a one-time share farmer, Flood, who was down on his luck and out of work, with a wife and three children. He was an excellent bushworker and very skilled in the use of crosscut saw, steel wedges and maul, and adze. We sawed down suitable Stringybark trees, split them into wide thick slabs with end-driven wedges, and then dressed them with adzes to make solid tops for elevated tank stands. Flood also built a big cattle and sheep mustering and drafting yards in the home-paddock, and a high netting fence around the house, and future gardens and fruit trees. In between working on these improvements he attended to the livestock, fumigated rabbit burrows and maintained the fencing.
For my part I returned to live most of my time at "Rosedernate" and assist in my Father's office, with regular visits to the "Frenchmans", which was now being worked by a loose partnership between Dad and me.
There was now quite a building boom in Parkes, many nice brick cottages being built by money largely provided by the new Advances for Homes Department of the State Government Savings Bank. Prospective home-builders owning a suitable building lot, were financed up to eighty per cent of the cost of the building, the loan being repayable by a forty-years table mortgage - a small instalment of the capital and a low rate of interest.
Telephones were now common enough in homes and offices, though in the year 1908 my Father was one of twenty eight citizens