Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 81
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[Page 81]
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one of them being a young Londoner, Charles Chaplin. They were of course silent films, but rather clever gestures and grimaces compensated for the lack of speech.
A couple of years later the first open-air cinema opened in Court St. The patrons sat on thick planks supported on low stumps, and there were no supports for the backs. Prices were sixpence for front seats, a shilling for the rear ones.
Apart from a horse-drawn four-wheeler, which could be hired by pre-arrangement, there was no public transport. Most people walked to work, or around the town, and a minority rode in a sulky or on a horse. A few possessed the new bicycles, first made by the Rover Company in England, which were known as safety bicycles, to distinguish them from the high "penny-farthing" solid tyre contraptions of previous years. The first safety bicycles were much improved by being fitted, first, with a sprocket and chain drive, and later with the pneumatic tyres invented by the North-Irish Doctor Dunlop.
Foot Brothers had a shop in the main street, in rear of which they hand-built, assembled or repaired some of these cycles. Also they were agents for the new Edison Phonograph and its cylindrical records, and had one, with a three-feet long horn, blaring its music and songs out into the street on Saturday nights for the delectation of the townspeople strolling up and down the dusty roadway, in pairs or groups, during the milder evenings: this was popular conviviality for young and old. Only a few horsed vehicles were impeded by this practice and motor traffic was undreamed of.
Down where the Molong Road crossed the Billabong Creek on a long wooden bridge, McGee's patent roller flour mills kept the town and district well supplied with excellent flour. The first mill on the site had been the old style, with huge flat circular grindstones, which were still lying around in the grass nearby.
In the south end of the town, Westcott Brothers employed blacksmiths, carpenters, wheelwrights, painters and upholsterers, about forty or fifty men all told, in making all types of horse-drawn vehicles, from the great four-wheeled waggons to pony sulkies.