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bay mare dropped her head and started to buck. I was all arms and legs, but managed to stay in the saddle for a change. I took one look at the ground and it was too damn hard to fall off this time.
    After the shearing we returned to the Womals. All together we had twenty-four horses there, most of them young ones. Although I sure had my fair share of busters, quite often I managed to stay in the saddle when a horse started to buck. But that doesn’t make such a good story! After my uncle and I had done all we could with the horses we returned them to their owners. Then it was time to move on.
    We went back to town and got a job working racehorses. I used to have to get out of bed at five-thirty each morning, which nearly killed a lazy bugger like me, so that we could make an early start on the horses. In winter it was so cold that I used to have tears trickling down the side of my face and couldn’t feel my fingers as I exercised each horse. You had to be crazy to work those racehorses in winter. As the weather warmed up things became easier.
    One morning I was hung over with too much grog from the night before. The last place I wanted to be was out there, exercising those racehorses. However, I got to work, and finally there was only one horse left to ride. I caught that last horse and set off. Coming around the corner of the track, the horse shied at a pigeon sitting there. I wasn’t sure if the horse had seen the fence to the left of me, so I loosened my grip on the reins. At the same moment the horse hit the fence and stopped dead. I wasgently thrown over the fence and landed on the broad of my back.
    All the times I was thrown from horses I was never hurt too bad. I had horses fall over with me, I got thrown hard onto the ground, I even had horses rear over backwards. But I always managed to walk away unhurt.
    I still lacked discipline. One night my mates Roy Cambarngo, Chong, Adrian Finlay and a few others decided to get on the grog. Since some of us were under-age and not able to drink at the pub, we decided to get a carton of stubbies and drive around in Ernie’s taxi. Ernie charged us twenty cents to beep the horn, twenty cents to do a fish-hook, fifty cents to spin the wheels and a dollar to do a handbrake. By the end of the night we had fitted seventeen blokes in the taxi, with another one hanging off the roof rack.
    My uncle and I spent a few months working the racehorses, and then I gave this job away, and we broke our partnership. But I shall never forget how Johnny Dodd taught me such a hell of a lot in such a short time.

4
    There wasn’t much work around Mitchell, so a bloke called Greg Pearce and I decided to head up to the Northern Territory. I felt, too, that I needed to get out of Mitchell for a while. Greg and I already had a job lined up in the Territory, at a station called Auvergne, two hundred kilometres out of Katherine.
    We headed off by coach, waving to our mates as we pulled out of the bus depot. The trip to Mt Isa seemed to pass reasonably quickly, but when we got there we were told that the road was too wet for the bus to continue the journey. Passengers travelling to the Northern Territory would have to stay a few days in Mt Isa. Greg and I were in luck. I don’t think we had a dollar between us, but one of the other passengers on the bus told us we could stay at his place. During the next few days we became accustomed to the scene at Mt Isa, but we were eager to get to our destination.
    On the bus once more, we seemed to travel for hoursbefore the driver at last pulled up for lunch at a little outback pub. As Greg and I stepped off the bus, we were only too well aware of the stares of the local drinkers. To make things worse, there were thousands of grasshoppers. You had to be pretty watchful, especially if you were munching on a steak sandwich. If you felt something that was a bit crunchy and tasted bloody awful, then it paid not to swallow it. While we were there, one