Item 04: Memoirs of a Colonial Boy by Robert Joseph Stewart, ca. 1971 - Page 87
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[Page 87]
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Another outstanding character, was a tall handsome middle-aged bachelor (Digby Noy Johns) the owner of Wollongough Station out beyond Condobolin. The scion of a wealthy Ulster family, he had graduated in Law from Trinity College, Dublin, and after serving as an Assistant Commissioner in the temporary British Administration, after the end of the Boer War, he came to settle in New South Wales, bringing his mother and another brother with him. He had a phobia about germs, and on overnight visits to Condobolin, he carried a pair of nanny goats as passengers in his big buggy. At the hotel he ordered a loose-box for the goats as well as for his ponies. In the morning he would carefully wash his hands and milk the goats, and a large jug of this milk would be placed on the big breakfast table, and his fellow diners invited to partake of it. They would be treated to a scholarly dissertation on the virtues of goat's milk. "No germs can live in the milk of the goat, you know", was his repeated declaration. He became one of Father's regular clients, and a close friend of our family, often staying overnight at our home. Like my parents, he was a Shakespeare devotee, and during his visits, the conversation was well interspersed with recitals and quotations from the Bard's plays and poems.
At Alagala, a tiny settlement on the Bogan River, two English brothers (the Gillanders) after "coming down" from Oxford University, acquired a grazing run. Like all farmers and graziers who were well out in the West, they were very isolated, their nearest neighbour was perhaps five to ten miles away. Letters and newspapers would be delivered perhaps only once a week by a mails-contractor travelling many miles with just a horse and sulky. Roads were just deeply-rutted tracks winding between the bush trees. There were no telephones and telegraphic communication was not handy. In case of bad accident or of serious illness, the nearest doctors were at Condobolin or Parkes, though a little later a good devoted doctor came to Trundle. Dr. Boazman, during his first years at Parkes, had ridden several times on horseback to Trundle and to "Plevna" to attend to very serious cases.