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First published in Australia in 2017 by Primordial Press
This electronic edition is published by ETT Imprint, Exile Bay 2017.
ISBN 978-0-6480963-5-1
Copyright Alan Pride, Marilyn Pride & Lewis P Morley
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Original material by Alan Pride, Pat Varney, Bob Treglown and Ian Brock
Transcription and editing by Marilyn Pride
Word processing and editing by Edwina Harvey
Design, layout and image processing by Lewis P Morley
Cover painting adapted from an original by H Crane, 1953
Thanks to Peter and Steve Doyle for the photo in Chapter 27
Many Thanks to to Jenny Pride for rescuing ALL the letters from a throw-out!
Contact [email protected]
CONTENTS
1 – Born in the 1930s
2 – Make your Own Fun
3 – To the Warkaroo Hills
4 – I Fall in Love with Steam Trains
5 – Working-class Life in the Depression
6 – Running a Home in the 30s
7 – Stone-breaking after School
8 – My Working Life Begins
9 – Quinyambie Station
10 – Freedom on Wheels
11 – License Antics
12 – The Joys of Bikes and Girls
13 – Car Adventures in the Desert
14 – My Broken Hill Gang
15 – I Fly the Coop
16 – Off to see the World
17 – Two Desert Boys see Snow
18 – Family in Cornwall
19 – Steam Trains and Motorbike Adventures
20 – My First Voyage to Africa
21 – My Second Voyage to Africa
22 – My Third Voyage to Africa
23 – Onto the Oronsay
24 – Crimes and Misdemeanours
25 – Back to Australia
26 – Our Bush Cottage
27 – Another Lucky Escape
28 – The Joys of the VW ‘Bug’
29 – Fun with Cars and Bikes
30 – Around Australia by Motorcycle Outfit
31 – ‘Nobody tells ME what to do’
32 – A Series of Unusual Events
Appendix
—‘Motor Vehicles I have Owned’
—‘My Motorcycles from 1945 to 1995’.
Chapter 1
Born in the 1930s
I came into the world in the front room of my parents’ house, on the 29th August, 1930—the same month as the arch of the Sydney Harbour Bridge was first closed.
In those days most people were born at home, with a nurse at hand if their parents could afford one. Mine was called Sister Carwithen.
We lived at 307 Oxide Street, in the western NSW town of Broken Hill. An isolated desert settlement, it was based on the mining of silver, lead and zinc, and most people worked in the mines or in businesses servicing them; even the streets were named after minerals. The population in the 1930s was about 30,000 people, living in houses of stone, brick or corrugated iron (uninsulated!) Many streets further away from the town centre were just dirt, dust blew everywhere, goats and rabbits roamed freely, and water was always scarce.
My father, Reg Pride, was a mining engineer. My mother, Ethel, had been a dental nurse before marriage. Both of them enjoyed a better standard of living than their parents' – Dad came from a crowded house in the working-class Sydney district of Balmain; Mum’s mother, Sophia, had arrived in Broken Hill in a bullock-wagon.
Her family had left Cornwall in 1865, sailing on the Lincoln to Adelaide in South Australia, and from there working their way through the desert, ending up in Broken Hill 500 kilometres to the north-east.. Their first Broken Hill home on arrival in 1885 had been a tent on the corner of Chloride and Beryl streets, and their lives were hard, working in the mines and dying of diseases curable today. (Her elder sister Elizabeth had died at sea on the voyage out, of meningitis, and another four of her ten siblings died young; of whooping cough, kidney failure, 'atrophy', and more meningitis. She lost her own husband, son and mother over a seven-year period— her husband, James Barnes, dying at 43 from 'pulmonary phthisis', aka 'dust on the lungs' after a working life spent down mines.) My mother, like myself, was born at home, in a miner's cottage in Mica Street.
Our home was a big brick and stone place with a cellar underneath, lawn and flowerbeds out the front, a red-dirt backyard with a chook pen and clothesline, and an outside dunny.
Soon after my birth, Dad went to New Guinea to supervise the installation of mining machinery. Mum and I joined him when I was four, while my older sisters, Gloria and Audrey, were looked after back home by Sophia (whom we kids called “Narna”) when not at boarding school in Adelaide.
Our servants were three New Guinea men: Mickey, the cook; Sarpi, the houseboy, and Boko. They called me Liklik (little) Master, and taught me to swim by throwing me into a nearby river with a rope tied around my waist! I soon learned Pidgin English and chattered away to them, while they carried me on their shoulders.
