Tanya Heaslip

Well, they weren't always there because in the 60s and the 70s, the stock camp went out for often for months on end.

And so mum would be having to prepare food and take it out.

Then dad got very smart and put in a lot of fences and more yards and more waters.

So it meant that the stock camp wasn't out for as long.

But our friends as kids, we had the stockmen who were all older blokes.

And then the horses, little joeys, little calves, potty calves, they were our friends for my sister and my two brothers and me.

Yeah.

And so life was horses and cattle and mustering when we weren't in the schoolroom doing correspondence school.

All sorts of people fetch up in that part of the world who find themselves unable to live in what I suppose we'd call suburbia or normal life.

Yeah.

These were characters, they were almost all loner men.

They were silent men.

They lived with horses and cattle.

They rarely spoke, but they were good to kids.

They were so good to us.

They'd have an old rollie and, you know, let us have a puff when Dad wasn't looking.

They'd look after us when we fell off our horses.

They were devoted to their horses and to cattle.

They were the kind of men that, you know, you imagine of the old Henry Lawson, Banjo Patterson, Slim Dusty stories of sitting around a campfire at night on a swag, playing their guitars, singing all those old country songs and

Were some of them traumatised, like veterans or something, and then trying to recover in the outback?