Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 85
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[Page 85]
42
obtained medical and hospital benefits at very reduced rates. Otherwise the two doctors charged patients according to their ability to pay, and the Hospital Board did likewise.
A very strong and charitable Masonic Lodge, "Star of the West", had been started by goldminers in the "fifties", and there were well-established lodges in smaller neighbouring towns, such as Peak Hill (where dad had been a Master) and Trundle.
The oldest family in the district were the Toms of Bartleys Creek Station, the original leases of which had stretched from the Bumberry Hills nearly to Tichbourne. Their forebears were the two Tom brothers who had been associated with Hargreaves and Lister in the first discovery of payable gold at Ophir, near Bathurst, in 1851. It was with his share of the gold won, that one of the brothers, Thomas Tom, financed the founding of the Bartleys Creek grazing venture. My youngest sister, Jane, married into this family in 1926, and lived at Bartleys Creek for the greater part of her life.
On the out-back farms and grazing runs, towards the Bogan River, there were some very well-educated and picturesque personalities, such as one old homespun philosopher (Thomas Bridle) who came to town, only on rare occasions, in his big buggy drawn by a pair of well-matched trotting ponies, the fashionable means of transport for the affluent. He used to affirm that he didn't believe in "crafts, creeds and combines", and he coined many other pithy epigrams ; a noteworthy one I remember ran :
"Some men have said there is no God
"But well I hold that there be three
"There names are " £", "s", "d"
Then there was that remarkably well-read and well-informed gentleman who owned Boona Boona Station, many miles north west of Condobolin. He could tell people who had visited foreign countries more about them than they had learned themselves, though he had never been in them.
People living, very isolated, away out in the "back-blocks", really had the leisure in which to indulge a taste for good reading to the fullest extent.