The evenings were long that summer. Entertainment was scarce.
When two merino rams took to fighting for the attention of the ewes, the percussion of their head clashes rolling through the twilight, we sat on the porch, watching the show.
Tony Wright working as a farmhand as a 15-year-old.
You don’t want to go anywhere near them when they’re in that mood, said the station manager. Everyone knew stories of some fool who’d tried to stop rams fighting and had ended up in hospital.
I was working as a farmhand on a large isolated sheep station that was a world away from just about everything that beckoned to a 15-year-old boy in the first month of 1967.
My room was a lonely hut smelling faintly of sheep-dip and strongly of mice, birds nests and the leather of old horse harnesses.
A little transistor radio kept me company at night, capturing the signal from Melbourne’s The Greater 3UZ, where Stan “the Man” Rofe broadcast nourishment for the 1960s: rock music.
The Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations was unlike anything anyone had heard before; The Loved Ones’ Ever Lovin’ Man changed time itself; The Spencer Davis Group’s I’m a Man sent a charge direct to the brain of a teenage boy.
Let’s Spend the Night Together marked The Rolling Stones as deliciously bad. The Easybeats easily beat The Monkees for cool. Eric Burdon, The Who, The Kinks and The Troggs told our generation’s tales of yearning.
A fancy party and I was the hired help. Farm handing had become too real
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02.01.2024
The evenings were long that summer. Entertainment was scarce.
When two merino rams took to fighting for the attention of the ewes, the percussion of their head clashes rolling through the twilight, we sat on the porch, watching the show.
Tony Wright working as a farmhand as a 15-year-old.
You don’t want to go anywhere near them when they’re in that........
© The Sydney Morning Herald
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