BOGGABRI - A  THREE PUB TOWN - 1948
This is part of Mary (Critch) Zausmer's story. Mary is Boggabri Bill's sister who is alive and well and living in the U.S.A
Glancing through the Herald one Saturday morning, I noticed a small ad in the 'Positions Vacant - Women section': 
"Wanted: Secretary/bookkeeper for Farmers Co-op store in Boggabri, NSW.  £5 a week."  
I'd been living in Australia about ten years and had never seen the outback, or even a kangaroo, so why not?  I thought it was a chance to live a healthy, outdoor life away from the noisy, crowded city with its high cost of living. Perhaps I would meet a tall, handsome grazier in a broad-brim Akubra hat who owned 40,000 acres and looked like Gary Cooper.  On Monday I mailed off a letter of  application.
My research showed that  Boggabri, a town I  never heard of, was about 350 miles northwest of Sydney, with a population of 6,000.   (The number  turned out to be greatly exaggerated.  It was more like 800.)  Exercising more caution than I had on my Melbourne adventure the year before,I applied for a two-week vacation saying I was going to visit a friend in the country, with the idea of mailing in a resignation  if the new position turned out to my liking.
Welcome to the Bush
A few weeks later, after a brief interview in Sydney with the manager of the Farmers Co-operative store,  I took the eight-hour train journey to Boggabri from Central Station in one of the old six-passenger dog boxes, with hard, narrow seats upholstered in dull green vinyl worn away in parts to reveal horsehair  padding underneath.  The compartment was decorated with faded  black and white pictures of the Blue Mountains, Coffs Harbor, Emu Plains, Kiama.   Chained to the wall  a clouded carafe with tepid water sloshing around alleviated our thirst during the trip.  Attached to it was a  dirty communal  tumbler.   Before we got to Newcastle the metal foot warmer had lost its heat.
When the conductor called the Boggabri station for the three-minute stop at 2 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 with a jerk, and 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,  but it was not an auspicious beginning. 
Emerging from the train, I looked around the bleak little railway platform and was greeted with a limp handshake by a pale young man with a vacant expression wearing a greasy oversized felt hat that hung over his eyes like a thatched roof.  Hurrying along the platform came my prospective boss, Mr. W  who took my suitcase and said,
"It's only Clint." Said Mr W.  "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. W 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,  and he  described  in detail his grand mission for the future of Boggabri.  Enthusiasm just came pouring out of him.   We started off for the hotel, his car bouncing and squeaking on the uneven road, and before we had gone two blocks, he said "Did you know, you look a lot of like Beatrice Lilley?"  Yes, I know, I know.  He then assured me that the "Commercial"  was the best hotel  in town and I would be comfortable there.   When we entered the  hallway dimly lit by a few bare bulbs, W. pointed with some pride at a long, moldy water stain about four  feet 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, a naked light bulb was burning.  Mrs. Emanuel, the  publican's gaunt wife, showed me the makeshift bathroom on the iron-roofed balcony, and  pointed down in the yard to a corrugated iron sentry box.  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,  stacked on a spike were four inch squares of the Sydney Morning Herald, 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. Emanual failed to warn me about a vicious  crow, the size of a penguin, who came out at night and went for your ankles on the way to the outhouse.
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, then the Commercial Hotel.  To the right of the hotel  entrance  was  young Kenny Webb's bicycle and radio repair shop, and 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 Veronica to an expensive Catholic boarding school in Sydney. 
Across the street was  Tebbut's mercery store and a sad looking bakery where a swarm of blow flies circled stale buns in the window.  While the Commercial Hotel and Tebbut's 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.  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 hill 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 was a patient old work-horse, 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 Eather, 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 skirts.  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.   (Recent Australian visitors from Gunnedah report that Boggabri has not changed.)
The  Farmers  Co-op
The Boggabri Farmers Co-operative was located on Brent Street  near the railway tracks, down the street from the wheat silos and grain elevators,  the most substantial structures in town.  The Co-op was a long,  narrow, fragile-looking,  one-story corrugated iron building with a small porch at the entrance.  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 floor boards 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, but no evidence of an adding machine. To the right was a long narrow counter that ran the entire length of the acid green wall.  There young Rex Eather carefully weighed and packed tea,  sugar, flour and cereals into brown paper sacks ready for the orders that would be picked up on market day when the outlying farmers and cow-cockies came in with their wives in the unhurried, deliberate way that country people have.Ellen MacDonald, 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 live stock 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.   In the noxious atmosphere pestered by flies it was not 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 farmers couldn't afford it, and a year's labor was sometimes  wiped out in a single day  when a severe hail storm 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 house wives, 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. Emanuel, the publican,  challenged diminutive Harry Pye, a reputedly wealthy grazier, to show his gambling spirit in a single game of two-up.   Emanuel  calculated  his equity in the hotel, and Pye matched his bet.  Dave Coombs, the local Police Sergeant, was designated the 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.  Emanuel called 'tails', and six unshaven chins rose and fell expectantly as the pennies landed tails up.  Harry Pye lost.  (In two-up,  the coins  must land both heads, the king, or both tails,  the kangaroo, to win.) Two months later  Emanuel sold the hotel, and invited  forty  guests to a farewell dinner in the  dining room. Typical of an over-worked country woman,  Mrs. Emanuel did all the cooking and served everyone.  She never joined the guests.  A week later, with their new-found wealth,  Emanuel and his tired wife set off in a shiny new caravan  (camper) to see Queensland, and their obnoxious pet crow disappeared forever more.  I was glad to see Emanuel 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 Hughes, the taxi driver who lived in the hotel, warned me to bolt my door and stay in the room until breakfast, by which time Emanuel 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 publican, his wife and Betty, the bar maid, worked the taps with effortless ease, unhurried, 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. 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 the belligerents were restrained by their cobbers,  and honor was satisfied.   Men clamoring for service at the counter were not familiar with the art of the gentle, or sneaker, fart, so by  closing time at six o'clock the barroom was a solid block of gas, 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 bush 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.  In that way, linen serviettes (napkins) could be used for  twenty-one meals.  A real labor saver, but not a pretty sight by the end of the week.Food foibles were not tolerated at the Commercial  Hotel.  One Sunday evening I beckoned to Bessie, our forlorn waitress, who might have been dead, propped as she was against the dining room wall.  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 came out of the kitchen, and with a voice that would shake Jell-O, 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, sometimes forty-five miles away at Maule's Creek,  just  a widening in the road between Narrabri and Boggabri.  To play the piano from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m, iron-fingered Mrs. Driscoll 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  she was accompanied by a fiddler 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 unccustomed suits, and women in their long homemade dresses.  When the music started,  the lanky, weatherbeaten 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 best catered dances were given by the Country Women's Association 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 (small cakes dipped in chocolate and coconut), and large pots of strong tea. Liquor was rarely  permitted in the church halls, so most men brought their own, going out to their utility trucks 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.  Women wearing their best high heel shoes rarely went outside.   By ten o'clock there was a waist-high cloud of choking dust which 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 McGhie, 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 Gary Cooper! On closer observation it struck me that, for a woman, living on the land had its 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, often under a corrugated iron roof  that concentrated the sun's rays like a magnifying glass. 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 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 Laverne, the new blond barmaid from the Railway Hotel drove down to the river for a drop of  gin and a bit of  friendly copulation.  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 Billy Hughes, the taxi driver, told Bert Launt 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.  So  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 Eather'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 Mrs. Eather, 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
And now since celibacy was never one of my strong points, there is a dilemma  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 new Chevrolet four-door sedan, at that time the only American car in the shire.  He was a crack shot at the local clay pigeon competitions and he was good with horses, showing  outstanding traction on a bucking bronco for thirty seconds when  a travelling rodeo came to town. The audience yelled with delight.    
We had had a sizzling  romance for some months until the fire was suddenly quenched one Sunday night driving back after having dinner with Marjory and her parents in Manilla, about 75 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  things more interesting.   As dawn broke through, we prepared to get on our way.  Then came the thunder clap 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 he was swiftly followed by a shoe with a spike heel that barely missed his right eye.  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 half-caste 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 jodphurs and a raffish felt hat, obviously his best clothes.   Where Jimmy or the horses came from, I cannot remember.   Perhaps my friend, Betty Kynaston 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 sliced through  flat, peaceful landscapes of  ripening wheat fields and grazing sheep, bordered by untidy gum trees, rarely seeing a car or truck, with the telephone wires above us humming 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 a 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 waggon and travelled  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 waggons.)  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.  

BOGGABRI - A  THREE PUB TOWN - 1948
This is part of Mary (Critch) Zausmer's story. Mary is Boggabri Bill's sister who is alive and well and living in the U.S.A
Glancing through the Herald one Saturday morning, I noticed a small ad in the 'Positions Vacant - Women section': 
"Wanted: Secretary/bookkeeper for Farmers Co-op store in Boggabri, NSW.  £5 a week."  
I'd been living in Australia about ten years and had never seen the outback, or even a kangaroo, so why not?  I thought it was a chance to live a healthy, outdoor life away from the noisy, crowded city with its high cost of living. Perhaps I would meet a tall, handsome grazier in a broad-brim Akubra hat who owned 40,000 acres and looked like Gary Cooper.  On Monday I mailed off a letter of  application.
My research showed that  Boggabri, a town I  never heard of, was about 350 miles northwest of Sydney, with a population of 6,000.   (The number  turned out to be greatly exaggerated.  It was more like 800.)  Exercising more caution than I had on my Melbourne adventure the year before,I applied for a two-week vacation saying I was going to visit a friend in the country, with the idea of mailing in a resignation  if the new position turned out to my liking.
Welcome to the Bush
A few weeks later, after a brief interview in Sydney with the manager of the Farmers Co-operative store,  I took the eight-hour train journey to Boggabri from Central Station in one of the old six-passenger dog boxes, with hard, narrow seats upholstered in dull green vinyl worn away in parts to reveal horsehair  padding underneath.  The compartment was decorated with faded  black and white pictures of the Blue Mountains, Coffs Harbor, Emu Plains, Kiama.   Chained to the wall  a clouded carafe with tepid water sloshing around alleviated our thirst during the trip.  Attached to it was a  dirty communal  tumbler.   Before we got to Newcastle the metal foot warmer had lost its heat.
When the conductor called the Boggabri station for the three-minute stop at 2 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 with a jerk, and 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,  but it was not an auspicious beginning. 
Emerging from the train, I looked around the bleak little railway platform and was greeted with a limp handshake by a pale young man with a vacant expression wearing a greasy oversized felt hat that hung over his eyes like a thatched roof.  Hurrying along the platform came my prospective boss, Mr. W  who took my suitcase and said,
"It's only Clint." Said Mr W.  "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. W 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,  and he  described  in detail his grand mission for the future of Boggabri.  Enthusiasm just came pouring out of him.   We started off for the hotel, his car bouncing and squeaking on the uneven road, and before we had gone two blocks, he said "Did you know, you look a lot of like Beatrice Lilley?"  Yes, I know, I know.  He then assured me that the "Commercial"  was the best hotel  in town and I would be comfortable there.   When we entered the  hallway dimly lit by a few bare bulbs, W. pointed with some pride at a long, moldy water stain about four  feet 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, a naked light bulb was burning.  Mrs. Emanuel, the  publican's gaunt wife, showed me the makeshift bathroom on the iron-roofed balcony, and  pointed down in the yard to a corrugated iron sentry box.  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,  stacked on a spike were four inch squares of the Sydney Morning Herald, 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. Emanual failed to warn me about a vicious  crow, the size of a penguin, who came out at night and went for your ankles on the way to the outhouse.
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, then the Commercial Hotel.  To the right of the hotel  entrance  was  young Kenny Webb's bicycle and radio repair shop, and 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 Veronica to an expensive Catholic boarding school in Sydney. 
Across the street was  Tebbut's mercery store and a sad looking bakery where a swarm of blow flies circled stale buns in the window.  While the Commercial Hotel and Tebbut's 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.  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 hill 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 was a patient old work-horse, 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 Eather, 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 skirts.  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.   (Recent Australian visitors from Gunnedah report that Boggabri has not changed.)
The  Farmers  Co-op
The Boggabri Farmers Co-operative was located on Brent Street  near the railway tracks, down the street from the wheat silos and grain elevators,  the most substantial structures in town.  The Co-op was a long,  narrow, fragile-looking,  one-story corrugated iron building with a small porch at the entrance.  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 floor boards 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, but no evidence of an adding machine. To the right was a long narrow counter that ran the entire length of the acid green wall.  There young Rex Eather carefully weighed and packed tea,  sugar, flour and cereals into brown paper sacks ready for the orders that would be picked up on market day when the outlying farmers and cow-cockies came in with their wives in the unhurried, deliberate way that country people have.Ellen MacDonald, 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 live stock 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.   In the noxious atmosphere pestered by flies it was not 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 farmers couldn't afford it, and a year's labor was sometimes  wiped out in a single day  when a severe hail storm 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 house wives, 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. Emanuel, the publican,  challenged diminutive Harry Pye, a reputedly wealthy grazier, to show his gambling spirit in a single game of two-up.   Emanuel  calculated  his equity in the hotel, and Pye matched his bet.  Dave Coombs, the local Police Sergeant, was designated the 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.  Emanuel called 'tails', and six unshaven chins rose and fell expectantly as the pennies landed tails up.  Harry Pye lost.  (In two-up,  the coins  must land both heads, the king, or both tails,  the kangaroo, to win.) Two months later  Emanuel sold the hotel, and invited  forty  guests to a farewell dinner in the  dining room. Typical of an over-worked country woman,  Mrs. Emanuel did all the cooking and served everyone.  She never joined the guests.  A week later, with their new-found wealth,  Emanuel and his tired wife set off in a shiny new caravan  (camper) to see Queensland, and their obnoxious pet crow disappeared forever more.  I was glad to see Emanuel 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 Hughes, the taxi driver who lived in the hotel, warned me to bolt my door and stay in the room until breakfast, by which time Emanuel 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 publican, his wife and Betty, the bar maid, worked the taps with effortless ease, unhurried, 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. 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 the belligerents were restrained by their cobbers,  and honor was satisfied.   Men clamoring for service at the counter were not familiar with the art of the gentle, or sneaker, fart, so by  closing time at six o'clock the barroom was a solid block of gas, 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 bush 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.  In that way, linen serviettes (napkins) could be used for  twenty-one meals.  A real labor saver, but not a pretty sight by the end of the week.Food foibles were not tolerated at the Commercial  Hotel.  One Sunday evening I beckoned to Bessie, our forlorn waitress, who might have been dead, propped as she was against the dining room wall.  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 came out of the kitchen, and with a voice that would shake Jell-O, 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, sometimes forty-five miles away at Maule's Creek,  just  a widening in the road between Narrabri and Boggabri.  To play the piano from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m, iron-fingered Mrs. Driscoll 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  she was accompanied by a fiddler 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 unccustomed suits, and women in their long homemade dresses.  When the music started,  the lanky, weatherbeaten 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 best catered dances were given by the Country Women's Association 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 (small cakes dipped in chocolate and coconut), and large pots of strong tea. Liquor was rarely  permitted in the church halls, so most men brought their own, going out to their utility trucks 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.  Women wearing their best high heel shoes rarely went outside.   By ten o'clock there was a waist-high cloud of choking dust which 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 McGhie, 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 Gary Cooper! On closer observation it struck me that, for a woman, living on the land had its 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, often under a corrugated iron roof  that concentrated the sun's rays like a magnifying glass. 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 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 Laverne, the new blond barmaid from the Railway Hotel drove down to the river for a drop of  gin and a bit of  friendly copulation.  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 Billy Hughes, the taxi driver, told Bert Launt 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.  So  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 Eather'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 Mrs. Eather, 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
And now since celibacy was never one of my strong points, there is a dilemma  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 new Chevrolet four-door sedan, at that time the only American car in the shire.  He was a crack shot at the local clay pigeon competitions and he was good with horses, showing  outstanding traction on a bucking bronco for thirty seconds when  a travelling rodeo came to town. The audience yelled with delight.    
We had had a sizzling  romance for some months until the fire was suddenly quenched one Sunday night driving back after having dinner with Marjory and her parents in Manilla, about 75 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  things more interesting.   As dawn broke through, we prepared to get on our way.  Then came the thunder clap 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 he was swiftly followed by a shoe with a spike heel that barely missed his right eye.  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 half-caste 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 jodphurs and a raffish felt hat, obviously his best clothes.   Where Jimmy or the horses came from, I cannot remember.   Perhaps my friend, Betty Kynaston 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 sliced through  flat, peaceful landscapes of  ripening wheat fields and grazing sheep, bordered by untidy gum trees, rarely seeing a car or truck, with the telephone wires above us humming 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 a 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 waggon and travelled  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 waggons.)  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.