Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 401
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[Page 401]
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ion of a Mr. Webb who came especially from the United States to supervise the design, installation and initial operations of it.
At the commencement of Third Year I became a boarder at the "Astoria", a big five-storey block of apartments and rooms of all sizes, on the north edge of the harbour waterfront, almost directly opposite Circular Quary: the waters of the harbour washed its basement. It kept a very good table in a large dining room on the ground floor, and the inmates ranged from penurious students in small rooms to a director of the Commonwealth Bank in one of the big flats on top. It was there that I first met a lifelong friend, H.M. (Shad) Saxby, then a fellow-student in medicine and President of the Undergraduates Association; also Ted Scorfield, just arrived from South Shields in the north of England to become principal cartoonist for the "Sydney Bulletin", and the Local Secretary for Dorman Long Ltd, recently awarded the contract for the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Already the old terrace buildings in the foreshore streets of Milsons Point had been demolished and engineering surveyors were busy amongst the rubble, accurately fixing the positions of the piers of the approach spans, and of the workshops for the fabrication of this great undertaking.
Although we younger fry didn't have much money to spare, and the students had to spend hours in study during the nights, we managed to have a certain amount of gaiety at the dining table and in the one-table old billiard room.
It was about this time that the newly-formed Yellow Cab Coy put a hundred cabs, specially designed for taxi work, on the city streets: it was Sydney's first big fleet.
During Easter Week of this year, plus a few extra days, I went off in uniform to attend the annual camp of the Corps of Australian Engineers at Liverpool on the east bank of the George's River, not far from where the School of Military Engineering was established during World War II. A few officers of the Veterinary Corps were attached to us for quarters and rations, one of them being a young third-year undergraduate, Clunies Ross,