Ken Gamble

I still remember.

And where would you do it physically?

They would send up the books from Mount Isa and we'd have to get on the radio for one hour per day and talk to the teacher in Mount Isa.

She'd be beaming from the headquarters.

Did that give you a lot of time outside of your schoolwork then?

Was there a lot of freedom when you were living there?

Yes, it sure did.

And that was the great thing about it was that with correspondence, with the School of the Air, I could get ahead.

I could actually work ahead.

I figured it out really quickly that if I get two or three weeks...

ahead of my work, I can take time off and go out mustering cattle on cattle properties because the local ringers, you know, young men that were coming into the pub were always saying, oh, you know, come on, boy, we'll teach you to be a jackaroo.

You know, a jackaroo is a young ringer, a young cowboy.

And so I started going to the properties and learning how to break in horses and how to brand and, you know, ear tag cattle and castrate them and all these horrific things that I

I was 12.

12 years old.

And did you enjoy being out there with those kind of grown men?

Absolutely.

It was freedom for me.

It was just amazing.

It was away from mum and dad and, you know, I was becoming a teenager so it was kind of my way of getting out of the house and doing adventurous stuff.