It was not long before I fell into the way of living on this place. Arthur was very level headed with a good idea of what he wanted to do and I went down in July when the crop his first crop of 200 acres was just coming through the ground.
I found the mornings very cold. It was a lot colder than Perth, until about 10 o’clock. It didn’t take me long to realize that this was the life for me.
I learned to milk cows. Are used to help off his wife, Eadie, to milk four or five cows. She was a very good milker. We would milk the cows before breakfast from 6 o’clock in the morning. While she got the breakfast I did the separating as it was the cream from those cows that paid for the living. While she and I did the cows, Arthur attended to the horses. He had six draught horses for the teamwork and one hack for riding around the sheep or getting the horses when they were running out. I liked this part as I had very little horse riding with a saddle.
Also I used to ride down to some dalgite warrens down by the river. I had several rabbit traps and used to catch the dalgite for the skins.
After pegging the skins out on a flat surface with nails until they dried. I would sell them to Wilcox Mofflin in Albany. They were very well-known buyers of wool and all types of skins. I used to get two shillings and six pence for each of these dalgite skins if they were properly skinned clean and pegged out according to the rules.
I also used to collect manna gum on the weekend when the gum oozed out from a blemish in the bark at a certain times of the year. This gum was refined and used for “Gum Arabic” for use with paper where a clean joint was required.
We used to get as much as sixpence per pound”.