Many of the surnames in this story have been changed as the people are still living in Boggabri. The tale is essentially true and reflects the author’s impressions of this small, country town in North West New South Wales. Mary was born in Canada and lived in the United States until her mid teens when she returned to Australia with her parents. Shortly afterwards at the beginning of World War ll, both of her parents died and she was forced to leave school at age sixteen before completing her education. Life was no easier then than it is now for an under-educated, single woman with no support from her family.

Several years after leaving Boggabri, Mary returned to the United States where she succeeded in making a success of her life. Now in her late eighties, she lives in a large, comfortable Cape Cod style house in a well-to-do neighborhood on the West Coast. She retired in her early sixties after a career as the Principal Assistant to the President of the largest civil construction firm in the USA.

The story begins in late 1948 when Mary, tired of life in post-war Sydney, decides that perhaps she can find a wealthy farmer and settle down to life in what she imagines is a prosperous country town.

Welcome to the Bush                                                                                    October 1948



A few weeks later, after a brief interview in Sydney with Ray Webb, manager of the Boggabri Farmers Co-operative store, I took the ten-hour train journey to Boggabri from Central Station in one of the old six-passenger “dog-boxes”. They were fitted-out with hard, narrow seats upholstered in dull green vinyl that was worn away in parts to reveal the horsehair padding underneath.  The compartment was decorated with framed, faded black and white pictures of the Blue Mountains, Coffs Harbor, Jenolan Caves and Kiama.  On the wall, a dirty, water-filled, glass carafe with a chrome-topped, cork stopper was provided to slake our thirst during the trip.  The chipped, communal tumbler was in the nearby holder. Before arrived in Newcastle the rusty, metal foot warmer thrown in right before we left Central, had lost its heat.

When the conductor called “Boggabri” for the three-minute stop at 3 a.m., I was cold and bleary-eyed.  As I hurriedly stood up and brushed the soot from my good black coat, the train applied its brakes suddenly and reversed with a jerk. Before I could reach for the suitcase and golf sticks on the overhead rack, a three-iron and a putter spilled onto the lap of a snoring bald-headed farmer who woke up and scowled at me. I didn’t apologize because Baldy had taken up more than his share of the seat since he got on at Muswellbrook. It was not an auspicious beginning.

Emerging from the train, I looked around the bleak, railway platform and was greeted with a limp handshake by a pale young man with a vacant expression. He was wearing a greasy oversized felt hat that hung over his eyes like a corrugated iron roof over a station homestead.  Searching for more signs of life, I saw Mr. Webb hurrying and bouncing along the platform. He took my suitcase, looked at the expressionless greeter and said,

“Don’t mind him. It’s only Clint. The lad’s a bit daft, but quite harmless.  He meets all the trains.”

Clint was one of a prolific local clan who had been marrying their cousins for generations.

Mr. Webb was a short, heavy-set man with small feet who walked in the nimble manner of a French dancing master.   He was also a pompous windbag, but very gracious as he described in detail his grand mission for Boggabri.  Enthusiasm poured out of him.  As we started off for the hotel, his car bouncing and squeaking on the uneven road he said,

“Did you know you look a lot of like Beatrice Lilley?”

“Umm” I thought, “where’s this headed?”

He then assured me I would be comfortable at the “Commercial” - the best hotel in town.   When we entered the hallway, dimly lit by a few bare bulbs, Webb pointed with some pride at a long, moldy water stain about a meter up on the wall where the Namoi River had overflowed its banks several years previously.  Quite an achievement in that arid countryside!  The lower section of the wall was thick with many coats of varnish and the upper wall was tin plate molded in a fleur-de-lis pattern, all painted a muddy yellow.

Room 3 on the second floor over the saloon bar, was narrow with a high ceiling, furnished with a double bed and a marble-topped Victorian dresser and wardrobe.  Tucked under the end of the bed was a white chamber pot delicately embossed with lovers’ knots and grape leaves.  A square of beaded linen covered it daintily.   Overhead, hanging from a cord, was a naked light bulb.  Mrs. Rosen, the publican’s gaunt wife, showed me the makeshift bathroom on the iron-roofed balcony, and pointed down in the yard to what looked like a corrugated iron sentry box – the outdoor toilet.  I soon discovered that on Saturday afternoons this outhouse smelled like a honeybucket at a rock concert.  For the convenience of users who did not bring their own toilet paper, stacked on a spike were four-inch squares of the Sydney Morning Herald, which were just a few degrees softer than sandpaper.  However, I was pleased to see it was the Herald.  Ink on the other papers never dried properly and smudged badly.  Mrs. Rosen failed to warn me about her pet bird, a vicious crow the size of a penguin, which came out at night and went for your ankles on the way to the dunny.
Dodge City

The next morning before breakfast the clean scent of gum trees wafted across the upstairs verandah.  From this vantage point I got a clear look at the business district.  On either side of the dusty main street were two uneven rows of wooden buildings:  on one side an empty corner lot, a Greek restaurant and the Commercial Hotel.  To the right of the hotel entrance was young Kenny Webb’s bicycle and radio repair shop, and to the left, Connolly’s Stock and Station Agency. There were no bicycles in Kenny’s shop where he slept, just rusted parts.  In the time I lived there, I never saw anyone in Connolly’s dusty little office.   He did all his business in the hotel bar. He must have been successful, however, because he sent his daughter to an expensive Catholic boarding school in Sydney.

Across the street was Lay Lim’s Grocery, Tibbets Mercery store, Crethary’s Newsagency and a sad looking bakery where a swarm of flies circled stale buns in the window.  While the Commercial Hotel and Tibbets Emporium both needed paint, they looked reassuringly solid.  A few other buildings were boarded-up, while some were faced with curling, sun-bleached clapboards that had a distinct do-it-yourself look to them.  Two smaller streets crossed the main street, ran for a block or so and then disappeared.  On the corner to the far left, was the beauty parlor, one of the few female refuges in the town. Between cracks in the pavement tufts of brown paspalum grass struggled to survive.  At the north end there was a dusty horizon of emptiness broken only by a clay-colored, flat topped bluff known as Gin’s Leap.  The story was that an aboriginal woman had leaped to her death rather than be caught by three white settlers who were chasing her.  I could easily understand why any woman would take such a leap as a welcome alternative to being caught by one of the drunken farmers I had seen in the pub. On Sundays it looked like a plague had emptied the town.

At the side of the hotel, nibbling away at the weeds stood a patient old workhorse, still saddled.  He was tied to a hollow log that served as a water trough near the sagging barn that had once been a stable but was now the washhouse.  Eb, an old codger, rode to the hotel for his serious drinking because the sober horse always knew the way home.  Weather-beaten Eb sometimes slept all night on the ground behind the pub, awakening with the fresh morning dew on his clothes and smelling like a wet emu, which didn’t matter because he wasn’t currently romancing any local lady.  

I soon noticed that on Saturday mornings this unkempt backyard became a riot of color, as the seed catalogs say, when Miss Sullivan the third grade teacher hung out her freshly laundered home made bloomers, one color for each day of the week: yellow, orange, sky blue, avocado, forest green, red, and shocking pink, (the latest color from Elsa Schiaparelli’s fall collection).  These over-sized bloomers had such a reputation that whenever parents talked to Miss Sullivan about their children’s progress, they couldn’t help but be distracted by wondering which color lurked beneath her skirt.  Unfairly, she was known more for her crayola-colored knickers than for her teaching ability, which was considerable.

Minus a few utility trucks parked near the hotel, this was Dodge City, with the usual decayed verandahs overhanging the footpaths, except that Boggabri lacked the vibrant energy usually found in frontier townships.  The heat was now starting to build and the only apparent shade was provided by telephone poles.  The town of Boggabri was a place that time forgot.  
The Farmers Co-op



The Boggabri Farmers Co-operative was located on Brent Street near the railway tracks, and close to the wheat silo, the most substantial structure in town.  The Co-op was a long, narrow, fragile-looking, one-story weatherboard building with a small porch at the entrance and a galvanized iron roof.  On either side of the porous old front door, colorful enameled signs advertised Oliver Tractors, Bovril, Arnott’s Biscuits, Vegemite and Neptune Oil.  As customers entered, the jingle of a cowbell on the door announced their arrival, and the unpainted floorboards creaked, releasing a fine dust that rose in little spurts after them.  Inside, to the left were two partitioned offices, one containing a new Royal typewriter- this was my office but alas there was no evidence of an adding machine. To the right was a long narrow counter ran the entire length of the acid green wall.  There, young Rex carefully weighed and packed tea, sugar, flour and cereals into brown paper sacks ready for the orders that would be picked up on shopping day when the outlying farmers and cow-cockies came in with their wives in the unhurried, deliberate way that country people have.

Ellen, a solemn, tow-headed fourteen-year-old assisted Rex and me as needed.  For all its shabby appearance, the Co-op was run very efficiently.  Ray Webb held a tight rein on costs and was in constant motion, darting here and there, supervising everything, never missing a detail.  He explained that one of my duties was to prepare the monthly billings and balance the bank statement.   All this without an adding machine!   During my brief interview in Sydney, I had neglected to tell Webb that arithmetic was not my strong point.

On my first morning at the job, Bert Launt, a wheat farmer with craggy features put his head around the corner of my cubicle to see what the new girl looked like.   He looked me over as if he were appraising livestock at the Easter Show and spoke prophetically,  “I reckon you won’t be here long.”

Stacked at the rear of the store in a fenced area topped with barbed wire, were forty-four-gallon drums of oil, petrol and kerosene.  Close by the back door was the employees’ privy, a humble termite-ridden shack with a permanent lean that a decent breeze could flatten.  The noxious atmosphere pestered by flies did not make it a place for leisurely contemplation.  

In addition to farm equipment and groceries, the Co-op sold hail insurance to conservative farmers who didn’t want to gamble on their wheat crop being destroyed just before harvest.   Most small share-farmers couldn’t afford it, and a year’s labor was sometimes wiped out in a single day when a severe hailstorm struck.  Another annual fear was drought, for which there was no insurance.  During a light storm one day, it was from Rex that I first heard that quaint Aussie prayer for rain: “Send her down, Hughie.”

One morning in the midst of packing the orders, Rex raced to the front door.

“It’s the Urquhart funeral!”  

He stood there for some time watching the procession.   Along Brent Street other people, mainly housewives, were out car counting.

“Thirty-two cars.  That’s a proper send-off for poor old Pom.  It beats the McCarthy

Funeral by five cars.   Well, back to work. ”  

In Boggabri, the number of cars in a funeral cortege was a matter for family pride.
A Significant Game of Two-up

Around three o’clock one morning during a night of heavy drinking with five of his mates in the saloon bar, Mr. Rosen, the publican, challenged diminutive Harry Pye, a reputedly wealthy grazier, to show his gambling spirit in a single game of two-up.   Rosen calculated his equity in the hotel, and Pye matched his bet.  Dave Coombs, the local Police Sergeant, was the designated ‘spinner’.  He aligned two pennies on the end of a wooden kip and, in accordance with the rules, expertly sent them three feet above his head.  Rosen called “tails”, and six unshaven chins rose and fell expectantly as the pennies landed tails up.  Harry Pye lost.

Two months later Rosen sold the hotel, and invited forty guests to a farewell dinner in the dining room.   Typical of an over-worked country woman, Mrs. Rosen did all the cooking and served everyone.   She never joined the guests.  A week later, with their newfound wealth, Rosen and his tired wife set off in a shiny new caravan to see Queensland, and their obnoxious pet crow disappeared forever more.

I was glad to see Rosen go.  It wasn’t that I disliked him, but one night, a few weeks before the two-up game, after drinking a lethal quantity of booze, he switched off all the lights, and hid in the shadows at the back of the hotel with a carving knife in his shaky hand, threatening to skewer anyone on the way to the outhouse.  Billy, the taxi driver who lived in the hotel, warned me to bolt my door and stay in the room until breakfast, by which time Rosen would be sleeping it off, dead to the world.  Chamber pots were used that night much to the annoyance of Bessie, the maid-of-all-work, when she began her rounds next morning.
There is a Tavern in the Town

On Saturday the community center of Boggabri was the barroom at the Commercial Hotel.  The new publican, his wife and Betty, the bar maid who came with them from Newcastle, worked the taps with unhurried, effortless ease drawing schooners and middies, and never faltering.   From mid-morning until six o’clock the roar from the bar permeated the building and flowed out into the backyard as far as the barn where I was doing laundry and trying to avoid singeing my eyebrows when I lit the copper.  All was exuberance within the hotel.   The wheat farmers and graziers who came from miles out in the bush regarded their beer day with a single mindedness that nothing could disrupt.  When a station hand from Baan Baa took his pony at a trot through the main entrance, along the central hallway and out the back door, the drinkers never paused. Local SP bookies quietly made their bets on the Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane horse races with local punters and slipped out to the phone to ‘lay off’ bets beyond their financial ability to pay off if they lost. Late collections and winners would be contacted on Sunday morning or early the following week with the prices from the Sydney Morning Herald.

If any of the boys exchanged insults and a bloody punch-up began, a few unspoken rules of behavior were observed.  The crowd allowed several weak blows to be landed, and then their cobbers restrained the belligerents, and honor was satisfied.   Men clamoring for service at the counter were not familiar with the practice of holding in any gas, so by closing time at six o’clock the barroom was a solid wall of flatus, moisture and gusts of alcoholic breath - a scent oppressively male.
The Menu

Mrs. Cox, the cook at the Commercial Hotel, didn’t strive for artistically arranged presentations of food, but it was robust country tucker:  gargantuan servings of over-cooked beef and lamb with baked potatoes for dinner, and endless eggs and bacon or steak for breakfast.  Before the first guests arrived for breakfast, cold, crisp toast was placed on the table.  The local cows grazed by the river on mustard weed, so if you liked Colman’s mustard you loved the milk at the Commercial Hotel.  The guests were serious eaters:  meals were for eating; not talking, and they gulped their food down like sword swallowers.  Each guest was assigned a certain seat in the dining room so that the linen serviettes could be used for twenty-one meals.  This was a real labor saver, but not a pretty sight by the end of the week when they were covered with stains of tomato sauce and gravy.

Food foibles were not tolerated at the Commercial Hotel.  One Sunday evening I beckoned to Bessie, our forlorn waitress, who frequently looked as though she was close to death propped against the dining room wall.  One supper when she ambled over in her leisurely way, I said,  “What are these little white things moving around on the roast beef?”  Inured to all complaints, Bessie said, “What’s all the fuss about?  Anyone would think you hadn’t seen maggots before.”  Soon Mrs. Cox, the irascible Irish cook, the child of pioneer stock, came out of the kitchen and with a voice that would shake Aeroplane Jelly, said,  “What’s going on here?”  Several of the hotel guests then left their tables to come over and look at my dinner, all enjoying a quiet chuckle at the city slicker who didn’t know a maggot when she saw one.   I declined the main course and finished dinner with a cup of tea and two servings of chocolate steamed pudding.
I Learn to Polka

Boggabri’s social activities were lively in winter, and both the town people and the farmers were very friendly and hospitable.   Families from every social level, including the landed gentry, called ‘squatters’, went to dances at church halls in the surrounding countryside. Local three or four piece bands provided the music with piano, violin, drums and a wind instrument – a sax or a trumpet. Many times the musicians ‘doubled’ of several instruments. Dances were held in Baan Baa, Maules Creek and Willala all of which were a long drive from Boggabri. If a full-up band was not available, an iron-fingered Mrs. Driscoll would play the piano from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. She was paid  £2, plus free transportation in the school bus.  Her repertoire consisted of evergreen tunes, barn dances, polkas, the hokey pokey, and the Lambeth Walk.  On occasion a fiddler accompanied her and together they played loud enough to be heard in Sydney.   

Between dances the men stood on one side of the hall and on the other side the women sat on slatted wooden folding chairs.   Grant Wood could have done justice to the rough-hewn faces of men dressed in unaccustomed suits, and older women in their long homemade dresses.  When the music started, the lanky, weather-beaten men crossed over to the other side of the hall and chose a partner by standing in front of a seated woman and nodding toward the dance floor.

The Country Women’s Association gave the best-catered dances whose members used the opportunity show off their considerable baking skills. Around eleven o’clock, the music ceased and trestle tables were set out and spread with plates of potato salad, sausage rolls, curried eggs, cocktail sausages (called “little boys”), scones and Rosella jam, lamingtons and large pots of strong tea.

Liquor was rarely permitted in the church halls, so most men brought their own, going out to their utes several times during the evening to drink with friends. When they returned to the hall their boots were encrusted with a thick layer of mud or dirt.  Women wearing their best high heel shoes rarely went outside.   By ten o’clock there was a waist-high cloud of choking dust that simply hung there, stirred up by the stomping feet of fifty energetic farmers.  People who lived in the outback, starved for company, danced happily, reluctant to go home, until Mrs. Driscoll played Good Night Ladies.  After that the dancers stood respectfully at attention while she played a few bars of God Save the King.  Finally, she blotted her brow with a folded white handkerchief, closed the piano with a thud, and everybody departed.   The dairy farmers would arrive home in time for a cup of strong tea and Vegemite on toast before going out to milk the cows.

The only rich unmarried grazier I met was young Malcolm, a woolly mammoth of a man with long black hairs on his fat wrists. With his widowed mother, he ran 20,000 sheep.  Mal was shorter than I, couldn’t hold his liquor, and had an incurable case of flatulence.  So much for my finding an Australian Gary Cooper!

On closer observation it struck me that a woman living on the land, life had many drawbacks. Even the wives of wealthy squatters who sent their children to private schools in Sydney and owned high-priced cars, worked like indentured servants in hundred degree heat during shearing or harvest time. They prepared three large meals, seven days a week on a fuel stove and often under a corrugated iron roof that trapped the heat much like their oven. These women could split kindling and keep a wood-burning stove going twenty-four hours a day, and yet manage to cook the most mouth-watering meringues called “pavlovas.”  They knitted and crocheted and carried water and built fires under copper tubs to boil laundry.  In addition, they often tutored their children via radio and correspondence courses.  I soon quailed at the idea of becoming a farmer’s wife. It was a harder life than I could survive and I had nothing but admiration for these uncomplaining, capable women with iron constitutions who probably would not change places with any woman in a Sydney suburb.
Down By the Riverside

The tedium of small town life was relieved late one night when Ray Webb and the new blond barmaid from the Railway Hotel drove down to the river for a drop of gin and a bit of recreational smooching.  One can imagine Ray’s nostrils flaring when he clapped eyes on Laverne’s cabbage-like breasts in the moonlight his basic instincts immediately taking over.    Unfortunately, as they were leaving, his car got mired in the spongy black soil and had to be pulled out by the only tow truck in town.  As word of this mishap spread through the town it provided some of the locals with amusement, and no doubt took their minds off the high cost of hail insurance.  But not all citizens were amused.



Next morning the self-appointed town elders gathered in the pub for a serious meeting to discuss the situation.   Ray’s behavior was seen as a humorous escapade, but Laverne’s behavior was seen as a serious transgression, and she must leave town lest she corrupt the morals of respectable women.  There was general disappointment when our only taxi driver, told Bert he had taken Laverne to the station for the 9 am train to Newcastle. These committed citizens doing their civic best had badly wanted to impress on visiting barmaids that this kind of behavior was not acceptable in Boggabri, but the opportunity had apparently slipped through their fingers.  No worries. Surely there would be other barmaids like Laverne passing through the town one day.  What to do?  They called for another round of drinks.   Heavy hangover or not, Laverne was savvy enough to get out of town before the virtuous vigilantes could haul her off to the stockyard and brand her forehead with a large  “A”. Quick-witted Mrs. Webb wisely concluded that Ray had been working too hard and needed a vacation, so they immediately set off on a ten-day drying-out tour of picturesque New South Wales, leaving Rex and I to mind the store.   



My future obviously didn’t lie in Boggabri.  It was a small, inbred town with its own rules and snobberies.  Social acceptance depended on the size of a farmer’s property and his annual income.  Although there were two classes - the graziers and wheat farmers barely making a living - one of the most endearing characteristics of both classes was friendliness.  However, women wishing to retain their reputations did not go to the hotel unless they were staying overnight for a wedding or needed to catch the early morning train.   When I made a dress for Rex’s mother she declined my request that she come to my room for a fitting as it wasn’t proper to be seen where I lived.   Although I barely knew her, it was quite proper for her to ask me to make a second dress, although she never offered to pay for either.



The Handsome Man

(Note: This name has been changed.)



Since celibacy at that age was never one of my strong points, I have a dilemma in telling about my love life in that country town.  How much to say, what not to say?



For some months my weekends and evenings had been taken up by a handsome, happily illiterate man from a well-known local family.  He was not without some assets and skills, however.  He owned a four-door sedan, at that time the only new American car in the shire.  He was a crack shot at the local clay pigeon competitions and he was good with horses and when a traveling rodeo came to town, he showed outstanding adhesion to a bucking brumbie for thirty seconds. The audience yelled with delight with many “Good on ya’s.”      



We had had a sizzling romance for some months until the fire was suddenly quenched one Sunday night when driving back after having dinner with a friend Marjory and her parents in Manilla, about 45 miles away.   On the way home we stopped for a delightful hour or so in the back seat of the car searching the sky for the Southern Cross and other more interesting things.   As dawn broke through, we prepared to get on our way.  Then came the thunderclap as my erstwhile lover released the hand brake,



“I think you should pay me fifteen pounds because that is what it would have cost you for a taxi to visit Marjory.”



I said, “Would you repeat that?”  



He did. “Fifteen pounds!”



Did he think I was an heiress? It would have taken me at least six months to save fifteen pounds.   Later that evening he walked me upstairs to my door, gave me a brotherly peck on the cheek and said goodnight. As he walked down the staircase a shoe with a spike heel that barely missed his right eye swiftly followed him.  End of romance.


Ridin’ the Range

Soon after the explosive break-up with The Handsome Man, a new recreation occupied my weekends.  It began one Sunday morning when Jimmy, a native Australian stockman, rode into the back yard of the hotel leading two chestnut ponies.  Jimmy was slightly built and was dressed in an old, ill-fitting hacking jacket, well-worn jodhpurs and a raffish felt hat, obviously his best clothes.   Where Jimmy or the horses came from, I cannot remember. Perhaps my friend, Betty the barmaid, made the arrangements, although it was unlikely that either of us would have met an aborigine.   Blacks were not permitted in the hotel and I never saw one in the co-op.

Betty, Jimmy and I took leisurely rides occasionally on Sundays along quiet, bumpy lanes that sliced through flat, peaceful landscapes of ripening wheat fields and grazing sheep. Bordered by untidy gum trees and rarely seeing a car or truck, the telephone wires above us zinged in the heat.  It felt like the three of us had the world to ourselves.   It was a peaceful experience and a comfortable ride as the ponies had been trained to lope at a gentle pace and my pony wore a big user-friendly Western saddle instead of the small English one.  Bored with our slow pace, Jimmy often galloped ahead and took his horse through a few tight figure eights, then danced it back in reverse gear to where Betty and I were loping along.

Returning from a 20-mile ride, I was contented, tired and slightly bruised, but Betty never suffered any after-effects.  She sat in the saddle as though it was her favorite armchair because she had learned to ride as a ten-year-old.  During the Depression her father, like thousands of others, could not find work and was unable to support his family.   Accompanied by his wife and ten-year-old daughter, he hitched two horses to a wagon and traveled the New South Wales bush for nearly a year picking up odd jobs on properties wherever he could.   (Dust Bowl farmers and their families on the other side of the world were doing the same thing in tin lizzies, not horse-drawn wagons.)  When young Betty became bored with the monotony of the journey, she rode bareback for hours.  The family camped at night and the meals were prepared pioneer-style on the ground over an open fire. I wondered what happened when it rained.  Perhaps it was one of the drought years.   Surprisingly, Betty looked back on this as a happy period in her life.  I never knew her mother’s opinion.

Betty and I soon developed an overwhelming enthusiasm for horseback riding.  On warm summer evenings we often sat until late on an old kitchen table on the back veranda discussing a hare-brained scheme to purchase a half-share each in a twelve-year old pony, presently grazing on the common, for which the owner was asking twenty-five pounds.  If we could come up with the money we would call our horse Timothy.  Of course, we never had twenty-five pounds between us, but it was a happy thought.

I began to realize that it didn’t say a lot for my former relationship with The Handsome Man when time spent with a horse was becoming more enjoyable than his company ever was.

Several months later, I met and married an itinerant surveyor. It was goodbye to Boggabri and my try at reaching the golden ring of marrying a grazier.



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