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    Great Tasmania Stories
    Great Tasmania Stories
    Great Tasmania Stories
    Ebook72 pages1 hour

    Great Tasmania Stories

    By Bill Marsh

    ()

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    About this ebook


    Master storyteller Bill 'Swampy' Marsh travels our wide brown land collecting yarns and memories from the authentic voices of rural Australia. the people you will meet in these stories will touch your heart as Swampy brings to life all the drama and delight of life in the outback. By turns frightening, hilarious, wonderful, tragic and poignant, these tales are sure to get you in, hook, line and sinker.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers Australia
    Release dateJul 1, 2011
    ISBN9780730498681
    Great Tasmania Stories
    Author

    Bill Marsh

    Bill ‘Swampy' Marsh is an award-winning writer/performer of stories, songs and plays. Based in Adelaide, he is best known for his successful Great Australian series of books published with ABC Books: More Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories (2007), Great Australian Railway Stories (2005), Great Australian Droving Stories (2003), Great Australian Shearing Stories (2001), and Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories (1999).

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      Book preview

      Great Tasmania Stories - Bill Marsh

      A Mother’s Love

      Like I said, in the days before the Royal Flying Doctor Service was set up here in Tasmania, back in about 1960, basically the only aircraft that were available for evacuations from the Bass Strait islands and other remote areas were aircraft owned by the state’s two major Aero Clubs. Those clubs were the Tasmanian Aero Club, which was based at Launceston, and the Aero Club of Southern Tasmania, based at Hobart.

      Now I wasn’t ever a commercial pilot and I’ve never flown for the Flying Doctor Service, as such. I was just a private pilot who flew out of our local Launceston club back in those early days. The aircraft we were using at the time was the single-engine Auster J5 Autocar, which was a small four-seater fabric aircraft.

      But the most heart-wrenching trip I ever made was after a couple of children had been severely burnt, out on one of the islands. These kids got inside a car and were playing with matches or whatever. There they were, mucking about when the vehicle exploded in flames, leaving them trapped inside. So we got the call during the night and I think it might’ve been Reg Munro, our Chief Flying Instructor, who flew out and brought the children back to the Launceston Hospital.

      Anyway, the following day I went over to the island to pick up the children’s mother. Now just before I took off I heard that one of the kids had died. The problem was that, when I picked the mother up, it was obvious that she hadn’t yet been informed about the death. Remind you, I was just doing the job as a private pilot through the Aero Club so it wasn’t really up to me to inform her that her son had just passed away.

      But, God, I felt for that poor woman.

      I reckon that there’d be nothing worse than to lose one of your own children, especially one as young at that little fellow was. So there I was flying this woman back to Launceston, knowing that her child had just died, and knowing that she hadn’t yet been told about the death. And there she was sitting in the plane with me, full of a mother’s concern, full of a mother’s hope, full of a mother’s love.

      A Word of Warning

      A word of warning. Look, I know some of these drovers that you’ll be talking to, I know them well, so just be a bit careful because, let’s face it, they’re going to try and lay the bull on. You’ll get inundated with stories about rushing cattle and roping brumbies out of trees and riding them next day, and they’ll be on about just how smart they are, horse-tailing and the like.

      Take for instance, ‘When I got to the Armstrong River it was in flood and the only way I could get the cattle across was to swim them. So there I was battling against the raging current and I was getting a bit tired and that’s when this log came floating by so I grabbed onto it and blow me down if it didn’t turned out to be a 40-foot crocodile!’ That sort of rubbish. Or, ‘One day we had a massive cattle rush. The whole lot of them went. So there I was, riding flat out. Then when I finally got up the front to try and turn them around, blow me down if there wasn’t a wallaby sitting up there on the lead bullock.’

      Now, those bullshit type of stories were okay once because everyone knew that it was bullshit. But nowadays there’s people that think it’s true. And that’s why I say that that sort of stuff should be clearly labelled ‘tall stories’.

      Then there’ll be others saying, ‘I did this and I did that and I did something else.’ Well, to be honest, skites give me a pain in the arse too, I’m sorry to say. And anyway, you’d think that if some of these blokes had been any good in the first place then someone else would’ve been talking or writing about them long before they started blowing their own horns. I mean, all you’ve got to do is to read the books that these blokes write. Some of the things they reckoned they did, well, if you did that sort of stuff with a good boss drover you’d get your arse kicked pretty quick-smart, I can tell you.

      Tell it as it is, I say, because, you can take it from me, you’ll get inundated with crap, all right. Just take them horse whisperers. As a friend of mine says, ‘Nowadays they’re jumping out from under every bush and toilet.’ What a load of rubbish. There’s nothing special there. Because, to be honest, thousands of drovers and stockmen — black, white, bridled and with pink spots — had that sort of insight into animals, and that’s because they liked them. That’s the thing, liking them.

      No one can teach someone to love animals, you know. That’s got to come

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