Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 79
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[Page 79]
39
Father-in-Law, Francis W. Gibson, of Plevna, Trundle. A few years later the Commonwealth Treasury printed its own banknotes and the old surcharged notes of the Private Banks quickly disappeared. In the private banks on the goldfields, on a table behind the Teller, there was usually a large, highly polished, brass scales, for weighing gold offered for sale by individual miners and by mining companies. The banks were the principal buyers of gold, the fixed price being £3-17-10d a fine ounce.
In its mining days, the only public hall in the town for concerts and performances by small itinerant theatrical companies, was a very small one, facing one side of the stables yard in rear of the Royal Hotel. It had a tiny stage with a drop curtain covered with shop advertisements, but hardly any stage properties or scenery. For two or three nights the visiting troupes would stage "blood and thunder" dramas such as "The man they couldn't hang", "East Lynne", or "The face at the window". A gentleman named Dan Barry was the main actor-producer.
But when the new century was only six or seven years old, an affluent farmer and sawmiller at Bogan Gate (S.L. West) made himself a public benefactor to Parkes by building a really big brick hall, complete with a large stage, proper dressing rooms and a long dining annex. It was well furnished with stage scenery and a fine new piano. It was duly named "West's Hall" and was a great boon for public meetings and the several big balls that were held there every year: it also enticed better and bigger theatrical and other entertainment companies to come to our town.
It was about this time, as a boy twelve years old, that I saw the first jerky flickering moving pictures; comic films being shown in West's Hall, for one night only, to a full house. The price of admission was sixpence. Electricity for the projector was supplied by a small portable generator belt-driven by a single cylinder petrol engine, set up outside the hall. The programme lasted a little over an hour, and the films were American productions in which the humour consisted of the actors throwing or pushing custard in each others' faces,