Tell me about growing up.
I was born by the [Wimmera] river in a mud hut, in 1919. [Today you can still see the remains of this hut.] See, well, my Uncle [Walter], he used to get me and teach me things about culture. There was one time when I was four years old … my uncle and the other elders took me out into the Little Desert. They told me ‘wait here and we’ll be back to pick you up’… I waited for a while and then started to cry … then all of a sudden I thought, ‘they’re trying to tell me something.’ So up I got and followed their tracks out … and here they are all waiting for me. They patted me on the head and said, ‘good boy’.
At school I had to speak English … I got a bloody good hiding if I spoke in [Wergaia] language … but a lot of it’s lost now …
Well, then, my father, he got rheumatic fever shearing wet sheep and his heart went on him. So I left school [at the age of 13] and worked. I worked on a farm at Woorak near Nhill. Two and six a week I started work for, until it got to ten shillings—that’s where it stopped. I was driving horses and I loved horses. When crops grew, I drove teams to strip the wheat off … I didn’t like shearing. They just told me, they said, ‘you’re not fast enough to shear a sheep’. Well, the quicker you can get down and shear your sheep and straighten up again, well it wouldn’t affect your back … but I was too slow shearing.
What about the war? Tell me about those years.
See … then the Second World War started—that started in 1939. Well, England and Germany was where the war broke out. Well you see, us Australians, we were naturally straight into it. In 1939 I couldn’t join the army, because of my father. You see I wasn’t 21 and my father wouldn’t sign the papers for me to join. He didn’t want me to go … he reckons it had nothing to do with us. Well no sooner I turned 21—that was in 1940 on the 23rd of March—as soon as I turned 21 I joined up.
It was all right then—as soon as I turned 21 I was my own boss, I could