Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 63
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[Page 63]
31
a quick brain, a good memory, and an unusual gift of eloquence, made him an able and successful advocate. As regards land legislation, he was generally acknowledged to be as good as any qualified barrister, and, in fact, it was a great pity that he had not had the opportunity of becoming one.
It was a time when all the big forty and sixty-year leases granted to the big squatters and station owners, were expiring and reverting to the Crown to be cut up into smaller areas, and made available for selection, by ballot, as Conditional Purchase and Conditional Lease under the "Robertson Act". In terms of their leases the former holders had been required to fence the boundaries suitably, to make water supplies for livestock, and to do a certain amount of green-timber treatment to improve the grazing capacity: they could claim the cost of these improvements from the incoming tenants but not their current value.
Most of these expired leases were of really good red clayey loam, almost ready for the plough and very suitable for growing wheat. The leases of the big Burrawong Station near Forbes, alone provided about a hundred wheat farms of four to five hundred acres each; and several other big "runs" were losing their leases during this period of time.
The family followed Dad to Parkes in the Summer of 1904, and we were reunited in a big rambling brick house, "Ulster", standing in two acres of orchard and garden in Bushman St: rent was ten shillings a week. My elder sister Rose and I were enrolled in the Primary Public School at the other end of our street; it comprised one very long schoolroom in which three classes were held, and two smaller classrooms. The headmaster, a fine old scholar, lived in a house alongside.
The fruit trees of the small orchard at "Ulster" bore good crops, in season, of apples, plums, peaches, apricots, oranges and mandarins: the grape vines draped along the side verandahs had many bunches of luscious grapes in the late Summer. It was a heavenly experience for us youngsters to be allowed to pick