Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 83
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[Page 83]
41
Facing Spicer Park, near the Railway Station, Venables & Sons conducted a general engineering shop, and a single-cupola cast-iron foundry, employing about a dozen men of the appropriate trades. There were two small cordial factories, Cartwright's and Coleman's and a steam-driven sawmill (Mazoudier's) on the north-eastern outskirts of the town. Out on the Condobolin Road, two wood-fired open kilns produced very good sand-stock red bricks and clinkers, hand moulded from the red clayey loam on the site.
Two qualified doctors practised in the town and district; a dour little wizened Scot (Boazman) who dispensed his own prescriptions, and a tall urbane Englishman (Johnson) whose corner house was lighted by a direct-current electricity generator, belt driven by a one-cylinder oil engine which used kerosine for fuel; ignition was by means of a hot tube, and the speed was governed by a "hit and miss" ratchet arrangement. This plant also supplied lighting for his surgery, and for one of the earliest "X-Ray" equipments in the country. In the light of the vast increases in knowledge about medicine and in surgical techniques during the past sixty years, I shudder now, to think how little these practitioners knew.
A fine big brick hospital ward, operating theatre and a detached Nurses' Home, topped the low ridge to the west of the town. The ward had beds for up to about thirty patients, and the hospital was staffed by a Matron and half a dozen nurses.
In 1907, Dr. Johnson had the first motor car in our district, an 8 h.p. De Dion Bouton with a single cylinder, and the next year Dr. Boazman imported a new English four-cylinder "Talbot". By this time one of the local Stock and Station Agencies (Lane & Fuller) had also acquired a De Dion Bouton, with a 6 h.p. engine.
The two medicos also regularly visited a private hospital (Nurse Porter's) in the centre of the town which mostly received maternity cases.
The less affluent citizens were usually members of the local lodges of the old-established friendly societies such as "The Oddfellows" and "The Manchester United", through which they