Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 67
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[Page 67]
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for years, declared his intention, "when his ship came home", of making a trip back "home" to Northern Ireland. In the prosperous years of the Century's first decade several of the more affluent expatriates in our district revisited their native land, but Dad never realized his dream, and when he learnt that his father had died, nearly five years after our arrival at Parkes, and his mother a year afterwards, he talked less and less about making a pilgrimage to the land of his birth.
Despite the differences in religion and British race, Parkes was a happy harmonious town, where the residents knew, and greeted, each other daily. They were generally very united in supporting any worthy cause or beneficial social service. Civic pride was fostered to a great extent by a healthy rivalry between Parkes and its sister town, Forbes, only twenty miles away.
Old age pensions under Governmental auspices were still a few years away, but a hardworking Benevolent Society cared for the poor, sick and indigent: there was practically no unemployment. Most of the poorer families had their own fruit trees, vegetable garden, and a cow or goat on the Common, also a few fowls in the back yard: really sustenance farming on a small scale. Many lived in small houses built on a Mining Tenement, a title under the Mining Act, whereby an individual could take up a quarter-acre of land on a proclaimed goldfield and reside on it as long as he continued to hold a current Miner's Right, a little document, renewable annually at a cost of five shillings. A freehold title under the Real Property Act could be obtained by submitting the property to a public auction conducted by the Local Crown Lands Agent; beginning with a gazetted upset price. If the holder was outbid he, or she, had to be paid the value of the house and improvements by the successful bidder; but this hardly ever happened.
The nuns at the Roman Catholic convent were almost the only teachers of music, typewriting, shorthand and bookkeeping: they accepted Protestants (including my own sisters) as well as pupils of their own faith.