INTERVIEW WITH LEO FARRELL born 1942 AT BOMBALA - Died September 6th, 2003
INTERVIEW DATE: September, 1999

Leo Farrell

Leo is one character that seems to have slipped in to the present from the past. His description of his childhood and the way of life around him is lively and detailed. The hardship of his parents' lives and his own is brought alive in a matter-of-fact way. As Leo says, 'That's just the way it was.

KATE. WHAT WAS IT LIKE WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD GROWING UP IN THE AREA AND WHAT CAN YOU REMEMBER OF WHAT YOUR PARENTS DID IN THEIR EVERYDAY LIVES.
LEO. What we were talking about a minute ago, about bark stripping, this was one of the main industries here when I was young. Everybody who was a worker mainly did it in the summer time. Even if they were farmers they might have done, but mainly all the work force, like there were plenty of workers generally. There was no dole.
KATE. I HEARD IT WAS SOMETHING THAT WAS DONE BETWEEN FISHING SEASONS.
LEO. No. Rabbit trapping was done in the winter time. You trapped rabbits in the winter time when they had the best skins. The wattle bark stuck in the winter. The sap stuck. Then in the spring and summer you stripped wattle bark. There was a bark mill at Eden and another one at Bega. Actually there was two buyers at Eden, I think.
KATE. AND THAT WAS FOR TANNING?
LEO. Yeah. And even in those times there was a tannery at Bega too.
KATE. WAS THERE ANYTHING LIKE THAT AROUND HERE?
LEO. Not that I know of. There were people individually that did tanning. There was an old bloke at Burragate, Jack Sawers, he actually died when I was about ten year old or twelve year old and he used to tan. Actually I've still got a rug here that he tanned when I was six year old.
KATE. WHAT WAS IT, CATTLE?
LEO. No, no. Wallaby skin. They were mainly wallabies and 'roos and rabbits.
KATE. ANY KOALAS?
LEO. No. The only koala I saw down here was.... an old uncle of my mothers' had him in a cage. A big koala. But I know from talking to other people that the year before actually, these people, this bloke's wife, my Aunty Charlotte, or she was Mum's aunt, they were young and they were one of the share-farmers on dairies up on Binnies, where George Hayes is. ('Dunblane') There were seven dairies on that place. 'Liddesdale' was part of George's place, where Masons are ('By Jingo') that was part of Binnies' and there were seven dairy farms, different dairies, different families.
KATE. WERE THEY ALL DIFFERENT PROPERTY OWNERS?
LEO. No, Binnies owned the whole lot.
KATE. WAS IT LIKE 'KAMERUKA'?
LEO. Yeah. These people just share-farmed the dairies. And she was saying that koalas used to be up the wattle trees. They used to go and hit them on the head and feed the dogs with them. There was koalas everywhere. But not in my day. The only one I saw was up on the north coast. In '76, I was up there. Then of course, there was 'roo shooting. People shot 'roos and wallabies and sold the skins.
KATE. DID PEOPLE EAT THEM?
LEO. Oh, yeah, of course. Wouldn't have been too many who didn't. Then there was sleeper cutting. The people who had land, farmed. Like this whole... this Towamba river, all the flats down this river would've had corn growing on it. Like here would've been more accessible, they'd pull the corn and sell it, it went away on the boats. But the people down the Snake Track where the access wasn't very good because there was no road in there for lots of years, they grew corn and pigs. When the corn was ripe they'd just turn in hundreds of pigs, they knocked it off the stalks and ate it and when all the corn was finished they drove the pigs, to Merimbula.
KATE. DROVE THEM ALL THE WAY TO MERIMBULA? ALONG THE ROAD?
LEO. Yeah. Well, tracks, or whatever and put them on the boat to go to Sydney. There was no wharf in Eden originally but there was one at Merimbula. They drove everything, like, blokes used to drive turkeys from the Monaro down.
KATE. IS IT TRUE THAT THEY USED TO DRIVE THEM THROUGH TAR PITS TO GIVE A COATING TO THEIR FEET?
LEO. I don't know. I've heard about that one but I don't know. It's like that bloke who drove 4000 goannas through the Simpson desert he got 16,000 sardine tins and put them on their feet for shoes. (laughter) But I know they did drive turkeys. They used to come down the old road, before the Big Jack, (road was opened) down the road through Cow Bail (creek)
KATE. HOW DID THEY DRIVE ALL THOSE PIGS. DID THEY USE SHEEP DOGS?
LEO. I don't know but I imagine they'd had a horse and cart and feed for them too because they wouldn't drive them in one day. They'd have to take a few days to get there and they'd be feeding as they were going. But everybody could make money in them days. Like when we were kids.....I was saying to Lily, (Leo's daughter) she's eight, and I said to her, on the weekend when she wanted to strip this bark and I said I was your age when I started stripping bark, I was eight years old. And we didn't get much off but we got paid for it. We made money. It was like trapping rabbits, you'd trap for skins. Well everybody trapped for skins. But when they used to buy the carcass, a bloke used to come around, and you'd get more money and we'd be gone five o'clock in the morning when we'd supposed to go to school, we'd be up at five o'clock and gone half way to Rocky Hall or Wyndham or somewhere trapping rabbits and get back in time for school.
KATE. WHAT DID YOU DO WHEN YOU GOT THE RABBITS OUT OF THE TRAP? DID YOU SKIN THEM ON THE SPOT?
LEO. Well you went until you finished your traps and then you'd gut them there.
KATE. WHAT DID YOU DO WITH THE RABBIT? DID YOU EAT IT MOST OF THE TIME?
LEO. Well mainly we were trapping them to sell them but we ate them too. We lived on rabbits. That's why I only weighed 6 stone 7 pounds when I left school. There wasn't a lot of nourishment in rabbits. I was reading lately that if you only ate rabbits you'd die of starvation as kids. (laughter) Like when they were growing corn, and all that sort of thing, it would have to be chipped and pulled and put into a heap. There was work all the time. But of course, today, if you wanted someone to strip wattle bark today, the young people wouldn't do it.
KATE. DO THEY STILL USE WATTLE BARK FOR TANNING?
LEO. Yeah. The bark tan is the best tan. Because all that chemical shit they tan with, you couldn't make a saddle out of skins tanned with chemicals because they take in the moisture. All your big hides other than floor mats, all your leather is tanned with wattle bark, all your good leather. One of the things when Australia started giving things away, they gave wattle seeds to Africa back last century and they planted the trees. Now we buy it back. But apparently blokes down in Victoria and Tasmania are still stripping. Because I remember a bloke at Ballarat, I asked him, he had an add in the 'Weekly Times' I rang him up and asked him and he said he was still buying it at $400 per tonn. So that's why I said to the kids, there's heaps down here, we've got to get it off the place. It's really good wattle so I said do you want to give it a go and I'll help you. You see, a lot of sleeper cutters were bark strippers and rabbit trappers too and that's why you didn't get sick of doing one thing. Sleeper cutting, rabbit trapping and bark stripping was hard work but at least it'd be a change. I know Dad, he always cut sleepers but when the good rabbits were on and the price was right, he'd go trapping.
KATE. WHAT TREES DID YOU USE FOR SLEEPERS? DID YOU SELECT THEM?
LEO. No, the forestry bloke would go through but they wouldn't give you the best ones. They always kept the mill logs. They'd go through and mark the trees.
KATE. SO THEY HAD CONTROL OVER WHICH ONES WERE CUT.
LEO. Oh, yes. You'd have to have a licence.
KATE. SO YOU AS A FARMER COULDN'T JUST GO INTO THE BUSH AND CUT SOME SLEEPERS. WAS IT ALL UNDER CONTRACT?
LEO. You'd have to have a licence for a start. You could cut them on private property but you had to have a licence.
KATE. SO WHAT SPECIES WOULD THEY BE?
LEO. Stringy bark, Box . They used to take gum and make all sorts of things and then when the saw mills started to get you to cut sleepers they started to squeeze the little bloke, as usual in the bush, and then they all had to be only Stringy bark or Box and Ash, like around here. Other places they'd be Iron Bark or something like that, and eventually they squeezed the axe-cut blokes right out then and they all cut with a saw.
KATE. HOW DID THEY PULL THEM OUT OF THE BUSH?
LEO. Well, if you could get the truck to them, otherwise you'd pull them out with horses or bullocks. Ours were all pulled out with bullocks.
KATE. SNIGGED OUT?
LEO. Yeah, or on a slide. And then if it was a steep downhill you'd put a chain around a few of them and drag them behind to make a brake on it. Nobody made any fortunes out of it, of course.
KATE. WOULD YOU MAKE A LIVING?
LEO. Yeah. And of course, people didn't need so much. They lived off the land and everybody had their own garden in them times and trapped rabbits and ate them. Birds..... not much I'd never eat. Currawongs were the worst.
KATE. CURRAWONGS! WERE THEY TOUGH?
LEO. Oh, tough as crows feet that. Oh.... thick, black.....ugh!
KATE. WHAT ELSE DID YOU EAT? I MEAN BIRDS.
LEO. Well, parrots were always good eating. King parrots or any sort of parrot. You'd trap him or shoot him, and pigeons. Wonga pigeons or bronze wing pigeons.
KATE. YES, THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO HAVE A LOT OF BREAST MEAT ON THEM.
LEO. Yeah, they were good. I used to catch them....... like things had gone back. When I was a kid things were going backwards then, like from Burragate, up the river, there was netting fences, where people had corn paddocks, and netting fences through the ti-tree, and of course the place had grown over with scrub and there was wattle, and all your pigs would eat a lot of wattle seed and there was holes under the fence where the rabbits or wombats or wallabies went through and the old pigeon, he'd be feeding on them too and he would go through under there too, so you'd set your trap and get your pigeon as he went under the fence. That was before we had guns.
KATE. DID MANY PEOPLE HAVE GUNS AROUND THEN?
LEO. Everyone had guns just about. Every household would have a gun. You wouldn't have heaps of guns like you've got today, you know, they're not some bloody status symbol. You had an old single barrel shotgun or a twenty-two and people were good shots then because they was shooting to eat.
KATE. HOW DID EVERYONE GET ALONG THEN?
LEO. Well, I've said it before. The people might change but the attitudes are still the same. They used to barny a lot down here among themselves around Towamba. 'Course now they don't. There seems to be the have's and the have-not's and they don't argue much. But up around Burragate everybody seemed to get along pretty well. A few people thought differently. No. It was a good place.
KATE. CAN YOU TELL ME AGAIN ABOUT THE TIME YOU BROKE YOUR LEG WHEN YOU WERE A KID. WHAT HAPPENED THEN?
LEO. I was stripping wattle bark then, that was up Deep Creek. Breaking in horses, that was another thing. My uncle, he was a horse-breaker all his life and I learnt a lot from him. In the school holidays they'd always have something to stick me on. Now, like, everyone's writing books about horses, trainers and breakers and all that sort of thing, and one thing I notice is everybody's way is the right way and some are so totally different that one feller says 'don't do this' and the other feller says ' do do that' and that day that I broke my leg up there, I was fifteen or sixteen but that was the day that I realised that horses understood you. And I talked to that horse and he came to me and he knew I was hurt bad and that was when I realised that horses really understand you. And they do. And because they don't take notice of a lot of people, they probably weren't worth taking notice of anyway. See, never, ever, anybody 'cooeed' out in the bush or singing out or anything in the bush or 'yahooing' or anything because if you sung out and somebody heard you sing out they knew there was a problem. And I'd come about three mile, I suppose, and I was only going really slow because my leg was pretty badly broken and the horse, he wouldn't go any quicker anyway, he was just poking along with me. When I got about half a mile from the Towamba river, I was coming down deep creek up past 'Sheep Skin' and I could hear the bells of the cattle in the river so I give one 'cooee' cause I knew my grandfather was there with the cattle and it wasn't long before he came jogging up on his old horse and he said, 'What the bloody hell are you singing out about?' and I said, 'I broke my leg.' and he said, 'Just as bloody well,' he said, 'or I'd give you a cut over the ass with the bloody whip.' I said to him if he'd go and get Dad who was working with Jos Williams who was the only bloke with a ute, to take me to hospital. And he said, ' I can't go bloody anywhere, I've got my cattle in the river and I've got to take them back.' I said, 'Why can't I take them, I can't go any quicker than I am.' I said, 'I'll take the cattle and you go and get Dad.' 'Oh, all right,' he said and away he went. The ute came out, and up in the back of the ute, and carted me off to Bega hospital. And that's where I spent the next three months. But it was all just part of it. And pain killers! I'd never even heard of one, didn't know about them. They put me to bed, set my leg and that's where I stayed. Just something you wore. It was a pretty clean break, a few splits in it but the break was clean.
KATE. AT HOME, WHAT WOULD YOUR MUM HAVE BEEN DOING? DID SHE HAVE TO MAKE HER OWN BREAD?
LEO. Yeah, a lot of the time she made bread. But after we moved into Burragate we used to buy some bread that used to come on the mail bus. There was a baker shop at Wyndham in those times also a butcher shop too. So occasionally we'd get a bit of meat....we'd get bread from there but prior to that, we were out in the sleeper's camp, well, Mum made bread all the time. Bread or damper and always made our jam and later when something must have happened and we got a few extra bob, got preserving jars and used to do our own preserves. We always had a big garden and Mum always worked in the garden. Massive big garden there at Burragate and we lived out of the garden. I can't ever remember buying vegetables or fruit off anybody, ever. When you didn't have it, you went without. In the winter time you ate turnips, which I bloody hate! I was talking to Mum the other night, we were talking about people not wanting to do things. I can't ever remember refusing to do anything or arguing about doing anything. And I said that was eating them bloody, stinking turnips, I even ate them and I hated the bloody things but you ate them. You didn't say 'I don't like them,' you'd get a clout over the ear.
KATE. DID YOU HAVE A HUNDRED AND ONE WAYS TO COOK TURNIPS?
LEO. (laughter) Dad liked them boiled. I hated them but he still likes them and I still don't like them. But I'd still eat the bloody things too, if they were still there.
KATE. WHEN YOU WERE OUT THERE, WOULD YOU BUY A SACK OF FLOUR OR SUGAR...ALL IN BULK?
LEO. Yes. Sugar used to come in seventy pound bags. They were good bags, sugar bags, used them for everything. Tucker bags, pillow cases and all sorts of things. Actually my grandmother used them for towels for the men. She didn't have any flash towels.
KATE. IT WOULD BE RECYCLING. YOU'D USE EVERYTHING.
LEO. Flour bags were all turned into pillow cases and things like that. Tea towels.
KATE. AND WOULD MUM HAVE TO BOIL THE COPPER?
LEO. Yeah. We had a couple of round tubs and a copper and the old washing board. Oh, yeah, the woman worked. My mother reckoned that one of the things that would have killed a lot of women was lifting the bloody great kettle that was made out of cast iron.
KATE. YOU WOULD THINK......THE WOMEN ARE AT HOME AND THE MEN ARE OUT IN THE PADDOCK CUTTING TREES AND WATTLE BARK, AND THAT WAS HARD WORK BUT THE WOMEN......
LEO. Oh, the woman's lot wasn't easy. Not like they've got today.
KATE. AND IF ANYTHING WENT WRONG IN THE HOME, THE WOMAN IS THERE ON HER OWN.
LEO. Yeah, if you were sleeper cutting you could have been five or six mile away in the bush. You left before daylight and got home after dark. Dad used to always have Sundays off. He said he'd never work on Sunday. He didn't believe in working on Sundays. So he'd cut all the bloody firewood and everything on Sunday and the only time he'd have a spell would be on Sunday afternoon. After he'd got a big heap of wood cut he'd sit down and smoke his pipe.
KATE. WOULD THAT BE THE SAME FOR EVERYONE?
LEO. Well, virtually everybody done it.... because it was the way it was. And that was how it was and it was good too. I have no regrets the way we were. I've got a few regrets that I worked so bloody hard in later years to give it all away to women but that was my own stupid fault too, I suppose.
KATE. DO YOU REMEMBER THAT DAY WE WENT RIDING UP TO CAMPBELL'S SWAMP AND PASSED THAT OLD HUT, OR WHERE THE HUT HAD BEEN AND UP TO CAMPBELL'S PEAK WHERE THAT STONE CROSS WAS ON TOP, DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THAT?
LEO. Yeah, well, Campbell's Swamp was on the road through from Rocky Hall to Wog and then to Rockton, Victoria, Bombala, wherever... there was a road through there and Campbell's Swamp, the road went through it, and these two brothers, they were Campbell's, two Scotsmen, they obviously selected it. It was obviously a selection because it was fenced. I don't know about a boundary fence but they had a stockyard there. I found the remains of a really well built stockyard with split rails and mortised posts and the hut, I found it too. They obviously lived there for quite a few years and I assumed they dairied there and took the cream down.....yeah they dairied all through there because there was the butter factory at 'Wog Station.' But see the road was pretty good where they went, like they came up on the contour. I used to ride it all the time looking for cattle. And there was other people between Campbell's Swamp going north towards Basin Creek. There was people who run cattle in the bush, cows, and milked them and moved around with the cows. They didn't own any land or nothing they just owned the cows and they camped in whatever.... I don't know whether they had a wagon or what they did but Dad was telling me about them. There was dairies everywhere. Like when I was a kid going to school, every bloody farm had a dairy on it. And some of them had stopped by then, some of them only had cattle or sheep and sometimes people got older but almost every one of them had dairies on them. The cream truck used to come through every day in the summer time, up to Rocky Hall, up the Big Jack to Cathcart or Mount Darragh, they'd come back down to Mount Darragh, there were dairies there, and back down through Wyndham and Lochiel.
KATE. THERE WOULD HAVE TO BE PRETTY GOOD GRASS UP THERE. I MEAN WHERE WE RODE THROUGH THE BUSH THAT DAY THERE WAS NOTHING THERE.
LEO. Yeah, well the bush had good grass in it, because that was before there were any rabbits. There were no rabbits here then, when they worked. And that's one of the main reasons why all those properties went back to the crown because I could show people all through the mountains out here where places were fenced in and ....but they probably never really owned them they'd be to the Bank, on some of the old maps you'll see, 'Bank of Australia', but round about the first world war too, a lot of the young blokes went away and they never ever came back and the ones that didn't get killed probably thought there was something better somewhere else. Between that and the rabbits ....that drove them out.
KATE. WHEN DID THE RABBITS GET HERE?
LEO. I think they got bad here around about the turn of the century.
KATE. WHERE DID THEY COME FROM...THE COAST, INLAND?
LEO. They come from Victoria.....from memory it took sixteen years to get from somewhere in the west part of Victoria to the Indian Ocean.
KATE. THEY MAY HAVE ALREADY BEEN OVER THERE.
LEO. No. No. They let them go in Victoria. This one bloke and there were twenty odd rabbits he let go and in sixteen years they'd gone forth and multiplied and it was marvelous how they adapted because they'd come from Europe, it was cold and they went out here across the Nullabor, the heat and everything, and they just adapted and away they went. No water. They had to live on blue bush, salt bush, that sort of thing. Amazing animals. Caused more devastation in this country than anything else.... almost as bad as the humans.
KATE. CAMPBELL'S SWAMP WOULD HAVE BEEN A SMALL HOLDING?
LEO. Yeah, like they'd probably just have forty acres, like you could select forty acres. That's how some of those big stations on the Monaro got going.
KATE. WHERE DID YOUR MUM AND DAD START OFF FROM?
LEO. Well, Dad started at Burragate. He was reared at Burragate and Mum was out at 'Nungatta Station' in the bush out there. She never went to school and never had a pair of shoes until she was twelve, I think she told me, they were made out of Wallaby or something, before then.
KATE. SO WHERE DID YOU GO TO SCHOOL?
LEO. I went to school at Burragate for four years and about eighteen months at Bega high school. All the high school taught me was a lot about people. Because where we came from, Burragate was a pretty close little community and everybody knew everybody and was friendly but nobody put shit on you. But take you out of Burragate and put you in a bloody hostel in Bega and then go to high school and have all these teachers putting you down because you had different clothes and we had a homegrown haircut and so forth. They gave me a hard time and I was only little too, and thank Christ I was!
KATE. WHAT KEPT BURRAGATE GOING? DID THEY HAVE A CHURCH THERE?
LEO. No. They had church in the hall. Everybody used the hall. The hall was the biggest hall around in Burragate, actually. But of course those knowledgeable people who moved in up there pulled it down. So now they have nothing. But we had a lot of good times in that hall. When I was a kid there was a dance at least once a month at Rocky Hall, Burragate, Towamba or Wyndham. My great aunt who came from Towamba, here, Jean Beasley, she was Jean Dickie, she used to play the piano, that's all there was, piano and then later on Wally Smith down at the Six Mile Creek, he joined up with her and he had a squeeze box and then he got a set of drums and oh, Jeez, it was full on. There'd be blokes come from Wyndham, they'd be pissed and yelling and carrying on there all bloody night.
KATE. DO YOU REMEMBER A PUB IN TOWAMBA?
LEO. What, the plonk shop?
KATE. THERE WERE TWO PUBS HERE.
LEO. Never in my day. My first recollection of a pub in Towamba was Darcy Parker's bloody plonk shop. Oh, Jeez, I got crook there a few times too. But it was a good thing. People didn't go and drink there all the time. Saturday afternoon you'd go over there and during the week if you wanted a couple of plonks, the door was open, you'd let yourself in, serve yourself and leave the money on the counter. But that got buggered up because when the bloke bought the shop over here, Keller, (Towamba Store) and people got friendly with him and then they wanted him to get a bottle licence there and nobody knew anything about him and when he went to court he never got the licence and Darcy handed his licence in and he said if they weren't happy with him.... he never made anything out of it, it was just a public convenience The plonk shop was still going in 1970 or '71 because I bought a load of timber out, in the old truck of Wally Smiths', a load of slabs from down the old Six Mile Creek homestead out at 'Fulligans' and we pulled up and had a few plonks at the plonk shop.
KATE. DO YOU REMEMBER WHERE THEY USED TO CROSS THE RIVER BEFORE THE BRIDGE WAS BUILT. WAS IT UP NEAR THE OLD POLICE STATION?
LEO. Yeah. They came across where the old house was on the other side, that was where the old road went.
KATE. WAS THAT JUST A BARE CROSSING?
LEO. Yeah. But it wouldn't have had all that sand in it then, what its got today. I can remember the river silting up, in 1956.
KATE. THERE WERE BUSH FIRES IN 1953, WEREN'T THERE?
LEO. 1953, big fires went through the Bega valley and those two girls got burnt over there, Otten girls. That was '53 I think it was.
KATE. WAS THE RIVER DEEP ONE MINUTE AND FULL OF SAND THE NEXT, OR WAS IT A SLOW PROCESS?
LEO. It was pretty quick. There used to be massive water holes. There were water holes you couldn't bottom in. All down from just above Burragate where Ryan's property was where that German bloke is now ( Lucy Lennon's property) just behind his house there was a water hole there a couple of hundred meters long and it was black, you couldn't even see the bottom. You used to get eels there.... you had a job to pull them out! We used to go eeling of a night time with a lantern. And then further down there was all these big water holes and then in 1956 we got these massive big floods and after a drought, of course, and the lot of it (sand) come down then, and then in the 1971 flood, that was a big one, that filled all the water holes up virtually. There's not a decent water hole in the river now.
KATE. WAS IT THE RUN-OFF FROM FARMING?
LEO. No! Rabbits mainly. It wouldn't be much to do with farming in that time. Mainly the rabbits. And then, of course, its been made worse now by logging. What they did up in 'Wog Station', ploughing and all that up there, it was unreal. The erosion that came after that, but most of the river was buggered by then anyway. Like the Wog river, when we first went to
'Fulligans', there was no sand in the Wog river then, there were all rocks in it. But after 1971 it was all filled up with sand.
KATE. SO, WAS THERE A DROUGHT BEFORE THEN?
LEO. Yeah, from 1966 right through. When we first bought 'Fulligans' it was in drought then and we lost nearly all the cattle. Half of them died, the other half was sold for nothing - or next to nothing. We didn't even own the bloody things, they were on a bill from the auctioneer. But people were different in them times. We were straight with him. We just said we can't pay you. So he said, 'Well buy some more,' we said we can't , we can't pay you so we can't buy some more, and he said, 'Buy them on the bill too,' so we stocked the whole place and sold everything back for five years before we got any money back at all. They all went to the auctioneer. We just worked at other jobs, saw mills and what ever and kept the place going. I spent three years in hospital in the middle of that.
KATE. WERE THERE ANY SAW MILLS AROUND HERE THEN?
LEO. No.
KATE. THERE USED TO BE ONE AT STONEY CREEK.
LEO. Yeah, Rayner's had one there. Rayner and Hite, they both came from the Monaro. They both had saw mills, there was one at Myrtle Creek and one here at Stoney Creek and then Hites had one at Rockton, I remember being there when I was a kid. Big steam engine running it and belts going everywhere. And then there were a few spot mills around and then the sleeper cutters, they got the swing saws and that, there were a few blokes that cut with a broad axe, they then got stuck into the swing saws and that worked for a while but it fizzled out.
KATE. WHAT DO YOU MEAN, SWING SAW?
LEO. There were wheels on it and a circular saw out the front and they just pushed the saw into the wood. They still use them today. McCammish's and Ally Harris cut for years out at Indigo here (Pericoe.) Ally was out there for fourteen years, him and Stringy Bean, cutting sleepers. They could cut hundreds. They were on quotas usually. But it died out, or was forced out or whatever.
KATE. SO IN TOWAMBA, YOU WOULD HAVE YOUR DAIRY, DID YOU HAVE A BUTTER FACTORY HERE?
LEO. There was originally. It was over there just along from the shop, on the Eden Road. There was a butter factory there, there was one at 'Pericoe Station'.
KATE. WAS THERE ONE AT BURRAGATE?
LEO. Yeah, there was one at Burragate out at 'Lyndhurst' where Beatie's live.
KATE. WHO WAS THE BUTTER MADE FOR?
LEO. It was made for export. They used to put it in kegs, wooden kegs.
KATE. SO THEY DIDN'T WRAP IT HERE?
LEO. No. It was salted and put in kegs and taken to Merimbula. There was a butter factory at 'Wog Station' but it all used to go through to Merimbula. There was a factory at Rocky Hall and one at Wyndham. There was factories everywhere.
KATE. SO IT WAS ONLY THE FIRST STAGE THAT THEY HANDLED HERE AND THEN IT WOULD GO OFF TO BE PROCESSED FURTHER.
LEO. Yeah, it would go off in kegs. Then the people had their land. They had cattle as well and bullock teams. Most of them worked their bullock teams and people, like, my grandfather would be buying steers and growing them up and you'd sell the whole team and start again.
KATE. SELL THEM AS A WHOLE TEAM?
LEO. Yeah. Sell them as a working team. If you had a good pair of leaders, you'd get good money for them.
KATE. AND HOW MANY YEARS WOULD THEY BE GOOD FOR? WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO THEM THEN? WOULD THEY BE EATEN? DID THEY HAVE A SHORT WORKING LIFE?
LEO. No! Fairly long working life. They'd probably go until they were fifteen years or more. I know the last team that was around here - my grandfather owned most of them and he sold them to these blokes called Tom and Jim Parker who used to be up at Rocky Hall and Reedy Creek and then they took them to Bombala. They were up there for a good while. I don't know where they run the bullocks but then they moved to Cooma and they had these bullocks at the time the centenary was going on or whatever and these bullocks, they was all over twenty years old. Massive great bullocks with big horns on them but they wouldn't've worked then. You couldn't have taken them in the bush snigging logs but they were still working. And they were all over twenty year old.
KATE. SO A BULLOCK IS A STEER. HOW DID THEY GET SO BIG?
LEO. They kept them. Not like the ones you sell off young. They'd grow big if you kept them. Its just the same as up in the north, the drovers, they wouldn't even start them until they were five or six year old. They bought store or fat bullocks and kept them till they were five or six year old. Today, people are too weak to eat that sort of meat, they've got to have veal or something soft.
KATE. SO THEY WERE A PARTICULAR BREED? HEREFORDS?
LEO. Well, mainly when I was younger, it was Shorthorns. Some people had Herefords. Binnies up here had Herefords and my grandfather had Suthocks? They had a lot of Shorthorn influence in them at that time. Big red bullocks.
KATE. DID THEY SHOE THEM?
LEO. Yeah. Two halves. I've actually seen bullocks shod. Dad and his Uncle Pat they were snigging bridge girders out of Jingera, up here, and they shod all their bullocks themselves. But when they were on the roads in the teams, they were shod all the time. They just brought them in when they were ready to start the year, they brought them in and shod them all and away you went.
KATE. WERE THEY SMART ANIMALS? AS SMART AS A HORSE?
LEO. They were docile and they done their job without much trouble.
KATE. SO YOU HAD YOUR TWO GOOD LEADERS AND THE REST WOULD FOLLOW? WOULD YOU LOOK FOR GOOD LEADERS?
LEO. Yeah, the smarter ones would be leaders and you always had two really big ones. Two in the pole, the rod at the back, and then you'd have two bigger ones in front of them because they'd pull some of the weight up off the poles at the back. But if you had twenty-two in a team, which most of them had twenty or twenty-two, the leaders would steer them all right, all the rest of the bullocks but the ones that steered the wagon were the four back there at the back. The two in front of the pole, they'd call them tug bullocks and they were the ones that pulled the wagon.
KATE. WOULD THEY HAVE TO BE BIG?
LEO. Yeah, big. All they had to do was understand a couple of commands, 'Gee' or 'Whoa', that was it. Come or go. And if they didn't, they got a cut of the whip which really made them pull. It was no easy job, bullock driving. I know one of Dad's uncles, Christie Farrell, his father was a teamster, and he carted wool from Currawong and Delegate Station down the Big Jack to Merimbula, because the Mount Darragh (road) was there in them times, and when his son Chris left school at fourteen, he bought him a small wagon and give him a team of bullocks and he went out on the road, fourteen year old, and he wasn't very big, they were only little men, he was only about five foot high, Christie, and he had to go out before daylight in the morning and go and find these bloody bullocks. They all had bells on when they were turned out in the bush, well they had to go to feed somewhere, they'd have to find them, bring them in and yoke the bloody things up. And I'd imagine he'd be the same as when I was doing a bit of bullock driving with Dad, carting bark out of the bush, I was that small and the bullocks were that big, I couldn't stand beside one of them and put the bows on the one on the offside, I'd have to get up between the two of them, put the yoke on the neck then get up between the two of them to put the bow on the opposite side. And then walk all day till your bloody tea and handle them! You imagine some fourteen year old kid today with twenty-two bullocks and a bloody wagon with about five ton of wool on it come down the Big Jack Mountain! I don't think people can even visualize it.
KATE. I REMEMBER TALKING TO JACK BEASLEY TRYING TO GET HIM TO OPEN UP AND TALK ABOUT WHEN HE WAS A KID AND AFTER A WHILE WHEN HE REALISED I WAS GENUINELY INTERESTED, HE TOLD ME HE SAW A TEAM OF A HUNDRED HORSES LINED UP....
LEO. It wouldn't be one team, it would be several.
KATE YES.... WAITING AT THE BLACKSMITH'S SHOP NEAR THE SHOP HERE IN TOWAMBA, WITH THEIR NOSE BAGS ON WAITING TO BE SHOD BEFORE THEY MADE THE DECENT TO THE COAST. HE SAID HE HAD MENTIONED THAT BEFORE TO SOME PEOPLE BUT THEY DIDN'T BELIEVE HIM SO THAT MADE HIM HESITATE BEFORE MENTIONING THINGS LIKE THAT BECAUSE HE WOULD GET LAUGHED AT.
LEO. The young people couldn't visualise life without motor vehicles. They never saw the bullock teams.
KATE. IT WAS A HARD LIFE.
LEO. That's what got this country going was people like that. And they were hard people that came here from overseas because, it was pretty much the same, we've got the haves and the have-nots and there were a bloody lot of have-nots in them times, few people had money and there was the serfs, the serfs and the landlords. All came from the Old Country or Ireland and they were all battlers but they were pretty tough people. My brother and I had to leave here because things got really bad and the best you could make was five quid a week.
KATE. WHEN WAS THIS?
LEO. Oh, around the late '50's when I was fifteen, sixteen. I took a fencing contract, it would have been a mile of fence put up for Stan Umback up at 'Lyndhurst' along the river, with me and my brother, he was only fourteen, and old Gilbert Ryan was with us, he was an old age pensioner. We put up this fence, all rocks, (rocky ground) all around that river, netting fence, trenched the netting in, everything was done by hand, dug the post holes with a crow bar and bored them with a broken bit (holes in the posts for the wire to go through) all for a quid a day! So anyway we pissed off and went to Port Kembla. I'd never been past Cobargo. I played football with the school at Cobargo and never been any further. We had to leave, there was no bloody money, we were slaving, there was no bloody dough. So we went to Port Kembla. Actually I'd just turned seventeen and my brother was sixteen and we went up there. We'd hardly even shaved! Put our ages up to twenty-one. I was a young looking twenty-one, got a job on the bloody railway construction and all the overtime we could handle. We were clearing twenty-eight pound a week. Dad was home working his ass off for eleven!
KATE. YOU MUST HAVE THOUGHT YOU WERE RICH.
LEO. Oh, yeah. We were into the grog, women, oh, jeez! (laughter) My brother was good, he could save money. I always reckoned money was there for having a bloody good time. Spent a lot in pubs on grog but I had fun though. But, I've had quite a bit of money a few times but it always caused me a lot of grief. I've had more fun without it too.
KATE. WELL YOU'VE GOT TO WORRY ABOUT LOOKING AFTER IT....
LEO. Oh well, some other bastard wants it. But you can have a lot of fun without it. Then some of the best times was out west 'roo shooting and rabbit shooting and we had hardly any money all the time. We worked all the time. We made a living but shit, it was good. Never had a roof over our heads for two years. Camping and swagging in the sand hills and didn't give a shit. If it rained you sat by the fire, you had a big hat, with a book under your hat and read until it stopped. Yeah, it was a good experience.
KATE. I WAS TALKING TO A LADY ...SHE COULD REMEMBER GOING TO BEGA IN THE CAR AND THE ONE THING SHE COULD REMEMBER ON THE OLD HIGHWAY, IT WAS UNSEALED, WAS AT EVERY CORNER THEY WOULD HAVE TO BLOW THE HORN BECAUSE THERE MIGHT BE SOMETHING COMING THE OTHER WAY. THE CORNERS WERE BLIND AND THE ROAD WAS NARROW. THE TRIP TO BEGA WAS A WHOLE DAY'S OUTING AND CONTINUAL HORN BLOWING ALL THE WAY.
LEO. Yeah, I remember that when I was a kid in these old rag-top cars, if somebody had one. We didn't have a car. The old mail car, old Teddy Butcher went from here to Towamba through in the old rag-top bloody car. I remember being crook and spewing every time. It was bloody terrible. Then you'd go to Bega and sit for two hours in the dentist chair, get in the car and come back. No wonder I hated town. Only went twice a year and spent all my time in the bloody dentist's chair because I had crook teeth from shit that happened when I was two years old. They gave me some medicine that stuffed my teeth up. I've never liked town since.
KATE. WHEN I STRIPPED ALL THE WALL PAPER OFF MY LOUNGE-ROOM WALL, WHICH WAS PART OF THE OLD SHOP....
LEO. Yeah, Hartneady's...
KATE. YES. NEAR THE FRONT DOOR THERE WAS GRAFFITI WRITTEN ON THE WALL. IT SAID, "FONE INSTALLED IN OCTOBER 1926" AND YOU CAN STILL SEE THE INSULATORS ON THE TREES ALONG THE ROAD, SO DID THEY HAVE THE TELEPHONE BEFORE THE ELECTRICITY?
LEO. Oh, yeah. There were telephones that went all through the bush.
KATE. WAS IT IN THE EARLY FIFTIES?
LEO. Yeah. Around about '54 or '56 we got the power on. It was amazing. You could see! These lights, after using kerosene lamps and you thought it was a pretty good light, but with the electricity, we couldn't believe it, how you could see. The other thing we had with the lights was a radio. My mother bought a radio and she had it for over thirty years. That one radio. We never had any electric fridge or anything like that. No washing machine. We had no money to buy the things.
KATE. SO DID YOU SALT YOUR FOOD?
LEO. Yeah, salted the meat.
KATE. WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST FRIDGE? KERO?
LEO. Yeah. People had kero fridges. We never ever had one. We salted the meat or it was fresh. Rabbit meat or wallaby or birds or whatever, so you didn't need one. And we had a meat safe, I've still got it, I think its about fifty years old, and I've taken it from 'Fulligans' to Lochiel.
KATE. WOULD YOU HANG IT UNDER A TREE?
LEO. No. Its a wooden one. One for indoors with the gauze at the top. There was always a cask down at the back behind the house in the shade with the two tanks, there was a meat cask there with salt meat. My grandfather used to get a bullock in the winter time and we'd get a quarter, and salted the meat. It wasn't too bad. You just salted it and it made its own brine.
KATE. AND HOW LONG DID THAT KEEP?
LEO. Months and months.
KATE. WAS IT ALL RIGHT?
LEO. Yeah, it was all right.
KATE. SO WHAT YOU SALTED YOU WOULD HAVE TO BOIL ?
LEO. Yeah. Boil it.
KATE. SO YOU WOULD ADD YOUR POTATOES, GREENS AND TURNIPS?
LEO. Yeah, turnips. I'll never forget my turnips. I remember talking to Johnny Love's mother years ago, they used to come down every few winters, they'd kill a cow for us, and she was talking about how hard things were, and I said they're not as hard as they used to be. She said 'Why is that?' I said because I don't have to eat turnips now. (laughter)
KATE. I CAN'T GET ANY HISTORY OF MY HOUSE WHEN IT WAS A SHOP IN TOWAMBA BUT ROLLO SOUTH CAN REMEMBER BUYING LOLLIES THERE.
LEO. Your place came from Yambulla. Mum could probably tell you something about your place because it was Hartneady's shop and I remember her talking about them.
KATE. IF YOU COULDN'T GET ACROSS THE RIVER, IN A FLOOD, YOU WOULD STILL HAVE YOUR SUPPLIES.
LEO. But see, in them times it wouldn't matter if there was a flood and they couldn't get across for bloody months because people would've had their supplies, flour and so forth. Today people only live from day to day. The last few years I've talking to Dad about these things and he was talking about the flour mill at Burragate. Its all news now about growing wheat on the Monaro, they grew wheat on the Monaro bloody years ago. I worked on a station up there back in the 60's that grew heaps of wheat but now its a new thing, and we were talking about it and Dad said that old Jack Sawers, that was the bloke I was talking about who used to tan skins, earlier, he was our neighbour, he and another bloke ring-barked Badley's, that place this side (Towamba side) of 'Fulligans', when he was fourteen years old, well he was telling Dad that they grew wheat at 'Lyndhurst' where Stan Umback used to live, and him and somebody else got out with the bullock team and wagon and loaded the wheat on and brought them into the flour mill at Burragate, got it ground and took it back. And as far as he can work out, it was where Henshaws now live, somewhere on that block there. But I don't know where. But see, when I was a kid, down where Henshaws built, well just this side of the gully, there was a house there, and Uncle Ned and Aunty Charlotte Umback lived there. There was a house beside it where his son and wife and kids lived there. You come up the road towards the sports ground, there was a house straight opposite the sports ground gate. Old ? live there, and next door there was another house, Sis Keevers lived there. You went along through that gate where all the mail boxes are and there to a little house where we used to live, well half way across there, there was another house, they've just built a new house there now, roughly in the same place, where Jack Sawers used to live. There was bloody houses around there everywhere. And then they all went.
KATE. WERE THEY BURNT IN BUSH FIRES?
LEO. No. No. Pulled down and taken away. Old people died... or went away.
KATE. THEY USED TO MOVE HOUSES A LOT THEN, DIDN'T THEY? I
WAS TOLD THAT IN BURRAGATE THEY MOVED ONE HOUSE UP A HILL.
LEO. Yeah, that was Ester Umback's house. They brought it up from down the bottom. Where we lived at Burragate, where Donna Eddy lives there's a little house across the creek, well that was where we lived, well that house, the main part of it, was a shed, very well built weather-board shed which was about four hundred meters away over in another paddock, and my father bought it off Jack Sawers, he put two big logs underneath, jacked it up with screw jacks, put these two big logs underneath it and snigged it with a bullock team over to there, I was a kid, I can remember it, I was about five or six, and they had the stumps, the foundations in, and he snigged that bloody house onto the stumps.
KATE. THERE MUST HAVE BEEN A LOT OF ENGINEERING THAT WENT INTO THAT.
LEO. Yeah, old Ned Umback who was an old builder, Umbacks, they were pretty smart, they could do anything. Like, most people could do anything, but the Umbacks were builders, tanners, they could do anything. Ned Umback, he put the stumps in, and I can still see it today, and somewhere Mum and Dad must have a photo, I remember seeing a photo, and the bullock team coming, well it was the main part of the house and then he built two more rooms on to it, a kitchen and a bedroom for us. It was only four rooms in it, but they put it up onto the blocks.
KATE. WOULD IT BE LIKE A SLED AND THEY'D DRAG IT?
LEO. Yeah, big poles. I don't know how they did it. They pulled it right onto the stumps at the bottom end, it was four foot off the ground and it was snigged onto them with the bullocks. Pretty good feat. But they did it! Things had to be done. Today they can't do it. It was always drummed into me as a kid. I can't ever remember saying, I can't do something. The Old Man always said to us, there's no such word as can't. You do it!
KATE. I SUPPOSE IF THERE WAS A 'CAN'T ' IN IT THEN IT NEVER GOT DONE.
LEO. No. You imagine the way those blokes worked. If they said 'can't' then nothing would happen.
KATE. IT WAS DO IT, OR DON'T SURVIVE.
LEO. Yeah. But they had to do that, get a house there so we could come out of the bush so I could get my formal education. Mum educated me. She'd never been to school a day in her life. I could read and write before I got to school. She taught herself.
KATE. WHAT WAS HER MAIDEN NAME?
LEO. Hobbs.
KATE. WHERE DID SHE COME FROM?
LEO. Well, her grandfather was a ship's captain and he owned his own ship and he used to ply between Plymouth and Sydney in 1842 he sold the ship in Sydney and settled in Boyd Town. He had Jack Hobbs and Billy Hobbs, I don't know whether there were any more but he had two sons and Mum's father was Jack Hobbs ...
KATE. IS THAT ALL RECORDED?
LEO. Oh, yeah, it's all documented, Someone did the genealogy, I've got a copy somewhere. And I've got a photo somewhere of Uncle Billy Hobbs. He (Jack Hobbs) married, I think his first wife was a Bede and they had some twenty kids. And she died. I know why! But then he married my mother's mother, he was sixty-eight years old, and she was only sixteen! But she had a hair lip and she was one of these Umbacks, that I said the old bloke had sixteen kids, well, they were all boys except three, I think there was only three girls. Betsy, (or Bessie) my grandmother, she had a hair lip. Well, do you get rid of a daughter with a hair lip? But I think the old bloke was really good from what I've heard Mum talk, like old Hobbs was a good old feller and then she married this other feller and he died when he was eighty and Mum was twelve, then she ended up marrying this Duke Geffs, I think that was pretty volatile from there on in. He was a boozer and hard worker, trapper, shooter, what have you, but a hard, hard man. I knew him. He was hard. He was dingo trapping, years he dingo trapped for money. A horse fell on him, it might have been down at 'Nungatta Station', in a big bloody gully and broke his leg and he dragged himself back to 'Nungatta Station' with a smashed leg and then, well he was sixty. Tough bastard!
KATE. YOU WOULD NEVER HAVE HAD THESE PLACES SETTLED WITHOUT PEOPLE LIKE THAT.
LEO. Hughie's brother was rabbiting at 'Nungatta Station' and in them times you had to work for weeks scrubbing the station, digging out seedlings or what have you or ring barking, to trap for a week, so you could have the rabbits. So him and his brother, one bloke used to do the work and the other feller used to trap, and there's a photo of them standing in front of this hut and they've got fox skins, fox skins just hanging all over everywhere. And they used to shoot 'roos too and that's how they lived, but that's how the Station got going too, because everybody, if they wanted a rabbit paddock or bark paddock or whatever, you had to work. They cut wattle bark. We used to strip bark. We had to do it for old Jack (Sawers) strip bark for these Toffies, like Ryans and so forth and wattle grew in spite of them, they didn't grow them, and they took half the bark. When you stripped it, they got half!
KATE. THAT WAS A BIT ROUGH!
LEO. Of course it was rough. Everything was rough. But that was they way it was. Then the last big bark expedition we done, we stripped enough to buy 'Fulligans' and we were working in the mills in Bombala and we done it weekends. I never give anybody anything, we just started down the bloody Big Jack Mountain....I used to come down Friday, lunch time, we knocked off half day Friday (from the mill) and we'd start at the side of the road, Council's bark, I suppose, and strip by the ute-load. At that time the Cockys couldn't force you because nobody was stripping bark then. It was sort of fading out and the bloody trees were covering their places up, but that's how it was. It was the same old thing, it was the landlords and the serfs. They screwed you but you still made a living... subsistence.
KATE. 'NUNGATTA STATION', WAS IT LIKE 'KAMARUKA'?
LEO. No. It belonged to one bloke. It was always one mob running it. There was no share farming or nothing on 'Nungatta'. Its got a pretty black history, 'Nungatta'. I know a bit of it but there's a couple of books written about it.
KATE. IS THE ORIGINAL FARM HOUSE STILL THERE?
LEO. I don't know about the original one, there's a really old one there. The Station homestead's there. Nobody lives in it, except when the bloke that owns it comes down occasionally and stays in it. There was some pretty bad things happened there, they shot all the blacks the first bloke who had it, he had to disappear the first few years, who shot the blacks out. They were thought of like 'roos and vermin. Yeah, a lot of hard work went into it. Dad worked there, when I was born he was working there at 'Nungatta Station'. Tom Napier was the bloke who had it then. There was a Dunbar....Walker, Brown, Napier....... Napier had partners anyway, and he bought the others out and there was only Napier, Tom Napier. I remember him, seen him once, a real tall, thin bloke with a moustache. Oh, Dad used to talk about how he was a hard man to work with, but all the trappers there, fences to be fixed, a lot of people worked there. Dad was a rabbiter and bullock driver.
KATE. WERE THERE A LOT OF ABORIGINES THERE?
LEO. Yeah. Originally there was. Well, my mother knows where one of their camps was, it was on the Neenah, where the Neenah creek runs into Nungatta creek and I know where that is. And she said she found stone axes and things there when she was a kid. I remember having the stone axe. Somewhere over the last thirty years it got lost. She had the stone axe from one of their camps.
KATE. DID YOU SEE ANY ABORIGINES AROUND HERE WHEN YOU WERE A KID?
LEO. No. First black that I knew and got friendly with was an old bloke when I was in hospital in Bega. Weekends we used to go down to the river. There was an old feller living under a sheet of tin there at the junction at Bega. I was only thirteen. I liked this old bloke, got friendly with him and he made me a nulla-nulla. I gave him ten bob for it. My mother still has it.

AND THAT'S THE WAY IT WAS.

Leo's grandfather on his mother's side is buried at Nungatta. (Hobbs)