STATE LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA

J. D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION

OH 721/4

Full transcript of an interview with

KEITH LASLETT

on 24 April 2005

By Robert Thompson

Recording available on CD

Access for research: Unrestricted

Right to photocopy: Copies may be made for research and study

Right to quote or publish: Publication only with written permission from the State Library

2

OH 721/4 KEITH LASLETT

NOTES TO THE TRANSCRIPT

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3

J.D. SOMERVILLE ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION, STATE

LIBRARY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA: INTERVIEW NO. OH 721/4

Interview with Mr Keith Laslett recorded by Robert Thompson at Mount

Gambier on 24th

April and 1st May 2005 for the The State Library of South

Australia’s Mount Gambier Region Oral History Project.

TAPE 1 SIDE A

We’re talking to Keith Laslett today. It’s the 24th

April 2005. Could you tell us,

Uncle Keith, when you were born?

LS: Robert, I was born on the 23rd

January in 1927 at Mrs Robertson’s Nursing

Home in Sturt Street, Mount Gambier. It’s perhaps ironical that I spent so much of

life in Sturt Street, as that’s where I had my joinery factory and building

headquarters. I was the sixth child, the fourth son, of William Manger and Lillian

Rose Laslett. My brothers and sisters were John Lacey, Reginald Thomas, Rosa

Grace, William Langford, Emily Lillian, and Una May. My father was a farmer and

we lived on Kingsley Road, Allendale East. The home we lived in is still occupied;

it was the home of my grandparents.

My father purchased his first motor car in the year I was born from my Uncle

Charlie Earle. It was a 1914 T–Model Ford. It was customary in those days, on fine

days, to let the hood down to reduce the wind resistance. My father was also a very

keen cricketer and, particularly on a fine day, took the family, including the new

baby, in the new car, with the hood down, to play cricket at Kongorong. I have been

told that this outing probably contributed to my contracting bronchial pneumonia,

and apparently I was quite ill and fears were held for my survival.

Right. Well, you’ve obviously survived that incident, Uncle Keith, and I’d just

like to ask you about what do you remember about the Laslett history, the origins

of the Lasletts in England? Do you have any stories about those people?

LS: Well, the story is, Robert, that we originally came from Normandy to England –

With William the Conquerer? Is that the time?

LS: – yes, that’s the time. And I don’t know, I have been privileged to visit a

number of the properties which the Lasletts owned or controlled in England,

particularly in Kent, and I don’t know. I wonder whether they might have got a bit

of a kickback for services rendered! (laughter)

4

Well, they may have done! This is near Canterbury, isn’t it?

LS: Yes, yes. My grandfather’s old home was ‘Vale’ or sometimes called ‘Hole’

Farm in Sturry, which is in Kent, and near Canterbury and that part – – –.

How many miles from Canterbury would it be? Ten, or fifteen?

LS: I would say fifteen to twenty, something like that.

Yes, it’s not far, is it?

LS: I’ve been privileged to visit the old home, which is still there, but the property

where my grandfather lived as a boy had been sold some probably thirty years ago to

the English Water Board to become what would be called the Great Oak Dam. It

hadn’t happened until a few years ago, because the people protested that it was

wrong to flood this good quality farmland, and there was a school of thought that

thought that really it wasn’t a dam that they wanted but a playground for the rich and

famous. However, with some recent very dry years, I think probably its eventual

fate will be to be a dam. The old house that was there, and I’ve visited a couple of

times, was the same as the one that was in the picture above our mantelshelf at our

old home on Kingsley Road at Allendale.

Now, I’ve also spent a day or two looking around some cemeteries, particularly in

that area of Kent. There are a lot of Lasletts there – they’re all laying a bit still now

– but at the door to the church, the church door at the Ash Church, there are a

number of tombstones and they are all of Lasletts, and they date back I think to 1500

and something, the eldest ones of them.

Where is Ash in comparison to Vale Farm? Is it close vicinity?

LS: Yes, wouldn’t be far away, no. It’s all the little villages, one sort of seems to go

into the other and you’re sort of in one before you’re out of another. But there were

a number of properties there that history tells us were controlled by the Lasletts, who

were yeoman farmers.

They were for centuries, weren’t they?

LS: Oh yes, yes, it was a long time. And there’s still some live ones there, Robert.

Oh, that’s good!

5

LS: And they have, for I think centuries, been agriculturalists, fruit and veg people.

The present generation, some of them grow the produce, others transport it and still

others sell it. But it’s very, very rich soil and they can probably grow up to three

crops of vegetables in a year so it’s very good.

We have come to know one family in particular, Bill and Linda –

Lasletts?

LS: – yes, Bill and Linda Laslett – and they live at Little Weddington Farm in Kent,

and they are farmers and they have sons who have produce stores where they sell it

and generally they are marketers, growers and marketers, of their own produce.

Now, I’ve also said I looked round and there was a lot of them laying very still,

including my great-grandfather, and it was not hard for me to imagine, to stand by

that grave of George Laslett, to imagine my grandfather – a lad of probably

seventeen years of age – standing there beside the grave with his mother and

brothers and sisters at my great-grandfather’s funeral. And that grave is still there in

the Surrey churchyard.

I don’t know that they would have known at that time that my grandfather and his

family would not have been able to inherit the lands that they farmed. Under

English law in those times the descendent or the heir had to be twenty-one years of

age, and of course my grandfather was not that old. Which seems a pity, but I

wonder if perhaps he may have been a bit of a disgruntled young man and, with his

younger brother, they decided to head out for Australia. When we think about it,

they were, when they arrived in Australia, eighteen and sixteen years of age.

Incredible. Only young boys, really.

LS: Well, we wouldn’t have been too rapt if our kids had decided to take off never

to return, and that really was the possibility. You know, there was no probability of

them being able to return to their home country.

There is some letters in that document that Uncle Reg wrote how he was

determined he was going to come to Australia –

LS: Yes.

– so he must have built up this rosy picture of what Australia was like before he

came out here. So somebody must have been telling him what Australia was like

before he left.

6

LS: Oh, yes. I think he was under no illusions about that it was a land of

opportunity, as indeed it’s proved to be. I don’t know that they could have quite

expected the harshness of Australia –

Well, it would be totally different, wouldn’t it? This ‘green and pleasant land’ of

England and come out to Australia – – –.

LS: – (murmurs agreement) the lush quality. And of course England is green, it is a

green country; it’s not the grey-green of Australia.

No, it’s totally different.

LS: And you just need to be there to see that there is a difference from this

‘England’s green and pleasant land’, as it were.

So perhaps he didn’t fully understand what Australia was going to be like.

LS: Well, I don’t think they did.

They couldn’t possibly.

LS: And of course I don’t think they had any ideas of perhaps what they would do,

you know, evidenced in that when they first came I believe that Uncle Manger, or

‘John’ as he was known, I think he went to the gold diggings in Ballarat.

Oh, right. So they arrived in Melbourne – what was that? – the 30th

December

1855.

LS: Eighteen fifty-four.

’Four, yes, that’s right. And you reckon he went straight to the goldfields then,

Manger?

LS: Well, I can’t be sure about that but it would seem that that. But anyway,

Grandfather must have almost immediately have come around to South Australia,

probably on a packet steamer, and he would have been, I guess, a fairly lonely young

man. But among the opportunities that he had one was as a guard at Yatala Labour

Prison, which probably then was quite new.

Did he have a job originally on a farm at Gumeracha?

LS: I believe so, I think that is true.

But probably that didn’t last very long.

7

LS: Well, I think they wandered around a bit. They were probably looking for

somewhere to put down their roots. And of course there wouldn’t have been a lot of

knowledge to say what you could do or what you couldn’t do.

South Australia would have only been a really – it’s in the early stages of its

history, isn’t it? It’s not even twenty years old.

LS: Yes. Well, you know, the colony was founded in 1836, so by 1854 it wasn’t all

that old. And it would have been fairly sparsely-populated outside of the capital

city.

Yes – there might have only been about twenty thousand people in the whole state.

LS: Oh, that’s right. And I think they came to Mount Gambier, which of course

was really settled from Victoria for the Henty brothers who came overland to Mount

Gambier from Portland. So I suppose this was another opportunity. And he was a

man with a young wife and a young family looking for somewhere to put down their

roots.

Yes. You mentioned his wife there, Uncle Keith, so could you tell us who George

Laslett married?

LS: Yes, he married Eliza Anne Langford. Now, the Langfords came from a very

similar area to what Grandfather did in Kent. In fact, you see the tombstones in the

churchyards where there are Lasletts, there are also Langfords. And I think there’d

been some connection in the families before that time. One of the – the Langfords’

is in some ways a more colourful history, in that my great-grandfather migrated, as

he had hoped, to Australia also with his wife and young family. One of the kids was

my granny. They were shipwrecked off Nelson Province in New Zealand. Now,

that’s a province in the northern side of the South Island of New Zealand, the ‘top

end’, I suppose you’d say, of the South Island of New Zealand, a very pretty and

prosperous area today. I don’t know how serious the shipwreck was because there

didn’t appear to be any loss of life, but they were away off-beam.

Were they actually heading for Australia?

LS: They were heading for Sydney.

Oh, right!

LS: They weren’t going to New Zealand.

8

I thought they actually went to New Zealand –

LS: No, no, no, no, no.

– and then they – – –. Oh, right. They were heading for Australia.

LS: Anyway, they dried themselves off, picked themselves up. I’ve heard say that

Great-Grandfather was one of the first landholders in Nelson Province in New

Zealand, I don’t have proof of this but one day perhaps I might go and research that.

So after the shipwreck they decided they’d stay there.

LS: Well, I think it was the best alternative at the moment.

Yes! Probably wasn’t a lot of boats going through at the time.

LS: Well, you couldn’t sort of pick up on another one that was necessarily going to

Sydney. Shipping wasn’t that great. Eventually, Grandfather Langford decided that

he would come on to Sydney, as was his original intent – – –.

What did he do?

LS: He was a joiner–cabinetmaker, made fine furniture. He decided that he would

come on to Australia, because that was his idea. It’s a trait that my wife calls

‘pigheadedness’ that she –

Been passed down, has it?

LS: – believes has come down to the present generation. (laughter) However, he

came to Sydney, established himself in business and was manufacturing fine cedar

furniture. Incidentally, we still have some of that in the family, some of the furniture

that he made, a chest-of-drawers and a bed, which were wedding presents for

Granny, very fine craftsmanship.

There wasn’t any nails in it.

LS: No, no nails, no. And beautiful cedar furniture, the like of which – well, I guess

you can’t find the trees today. And so he then, when he had sort of gathered the

wherewithal, he sent for his wife and family to come and join him, and one of the

family was Eliza Anne Laslett, my granny. I’m very glad they did. (laughter) But

that ship also got way off-beam. Obviously the Omega satellite wasn’t working.

And that ship went down around the icebergs, hopelessly lost.

9

Well, they’d have been heading in the wrong direction.

LS: Yes. Well, you know, the ocean was a hell of a big place in them days and

there were no navigation aids as there are today. So that ship was lost. At one stage

the passengers apparently rebelled and they were all shut down below decks.

Because of the crew, or because they thought they were going in the wrong

direction/

LS: Well, I think they thought of the incompetence of the captain and the crew. So

much so that, when they got down round the icebergs, the captain said, ‘Well, let

them out. Every man for himself.’ I don’t think there was a great expectation of the

ship or any of the people surviving. Lloyd’s1 gave the ship up for lost, but it

eventually arrived in Sydney three months overdue. Now, can you imagine the

privations? You couldn’t really stand up between decks. And what about the food?

Well, you’d have thought the food would have run out – food and water.

LS: Oh! There’d be weevils in the flour – – –. No refrigeration, no air-conditioning

of course.

So they were really lucky to survive.

LS: Well, I believe they were. But three months overdue, that – – –.

You don’t know the name of the ship, Uncle?

LS: No. I think probably there are some Langford connections who would know

that, and that’s one of my quests to perhaps find that out. Anyway, somehow they –

the family, the Langford family – came to Adelaide, and it was whilst they were

there that obviously my Grandfather Laslett met with my Granny [Langford]. Great-

grandfather Langford was at one time the licensee of the Walker’s Arms Hotel2. It is

said that he at one time owned twenty-six acres of land where the ABC3

Collinswood studios are now. And I’ve heard that he drank it. Now, Grandfather

was at that stage employed at the Labour –

1 Lloyd’s – maritime insurer based in London.

2 The Walker’s Arms Hotel is situated on the Main North East Road at Collinswood in metropolitan

Adelaide.

3 ABC – Australian Broadcasting Commission.

10

At Yatala.

LS: – Labour Prison, yes. So I think that from there – and they were married; and

they were married in Holy Trinity Church, I do know that, on North Terrace4.

That’d be Church of England?

LS: Yes, yes. Well, the Lasletts were –

They were Church of England.

LS: – Church of England, yes. And their earliest child died in infancy and she is

buried in North Road Cemetery. So I think they had one, maybe two, other children

when they decided to come to Mount Gambier.

Was Manger, or John as he was known, was he already in the Mount Gambier

area?

LS: I’m not sure of that. But he certainly came to this area and – – –.

I was just thinking that, if he was here, that’d be a reason why George might

bring his family down to Mount Gambier.

LS: Could well have been, Robert, it could have been why he came. I don’t know

about that. But he certainly did reside here at one stage. In fact, he’s buried in the

same grave as my grandparents are at Port MacDonnell Cemetery. But they came

with them and they brought with them the furniture that my great-grandfather had

made for Granny as a wedding present.

I think what used to happen in those days is there’d be a group of bullock drays

and teams who would follow each other, go in tandem as it were, I suppose

probably –

Bit of protection?

LS: – probably as much for protection as anything else.

About what year would this be?

LS: I’d say it’s the very early 1860s. But they came to Mount Gambier. Now, first

up, I think they settled on some land at Wye. This didn’t work out very well and

was, I think, rather a disappointment to them.

11

What, the land was poor or – – –?

LS: I think the land was poor; and in one of his letters that he had written back to

England he complained about the kangaroos eating their crops.

Oh, right.

LS: And the soil certainly, whatever we might think of it as Australian soil, didn’t in

any way compare with the lush land that they were used to in Kent. And so they

came there. They, I believe, lived for a time in a house near the cave at Allendale

East before moving to the house in Kingsley Road where they lived out the rest of

their lives.

And they did have land where the old Kingsley School is at one stage. I don’t

know whether they owned it or – – –. But they did reside there at one stage.

LS: There were some strange sort of land deals in those days, you know? People

had rights over this piece of land or that piece of land. I can’t tell you about the

ownership. I think the rate books probably said they paid rates on it.

Well, the old Port Mac books, they said that he did have that house near the cave

in 1869 –

LS: Yes?

– and then a year or two later he had the land where the old Kingsley School is,

but then they only go up to 1872 and then there’s no more assessment books up

until the 1900s.

LS: Oh, right.

So we don’t actually know when he moved into the house on Section 382. But I

assume that had been some time in 1870s.

LS: Yes. The house was, I believe, built originally, or the original part of the old

home, was built and owned by somebody by the name of Bollwell or Ballwell or – –

–.

Oh, right. So the Lasletts didn’t actually build that house?

LS: No. Well, the house in itself was of two main rooms which had a gable roof

and so that was the main house. It was a gable roof and it was a shingle roof thing:

4 In the City of Adelaide.

12

the shingles were blackwood, because the area round there – and my mother tells me

that – the area around Kingsley was a forest of blackwoods and sheoaks. Even the

post-and-rail fences at the front of the property, the rails were blackwood. Just think

of that today.

Well, it’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? There’s hardly any vegetation in Allendale

now, it’s only sort of on the roadsides you get much vegetation.

LS: Yes. Well, the land was, as you know, it became all cleared.

So they would have been local blackwoods that were split for shingles.

LS: Oh, yes. Yes, they were native to the area.

Because some shingles, they were imported from Tasmania.

LS: No, these would have been local. And an interesting thing is that we had a

pigpen – when I say a ‘pen’ it was probably a chain and a half each way in length,

whatever that is in metres –

Yes! About twenty metres by twenty metres, I suppose –

LS: Yes, something like that.

– or a bit more.

LS: And it was made of wire-laced palings, split palings. Now, I believe I could

take you to the tree where those palings were split, and they were blackwood. That

was a dead blackwood tree, and I remember it standing for a number of years before

it was cut down and palings – and there was enough palings to go all around that

[pigpen].

And this was a blackwood near the old house, was it?

LS: No, no; this was over in a property we later acquired, called ‘Elmsley’.

Oh right, yes?

LS: And that’s where that blackwood came from. But according to my mother,

when she was a girl going to school, she walked through a forest of blackwoods or

sheoaks. So they were sort of the native trees of that area. They were not the big

trees like the stringybarks and some of the big gum trees that grew on the better land

13

in, say, O.B. Flat or Yahl or that area: where the soil was heavier they grew bigger

trees.

And probably a bit further from the coast they’d – – –.

LS: Well, further from the coast it’s – in the settlement of things, the area [of] say,

O.B. Flat, Square Mile, Yahl: those districts had big trees.

That would have equated to good land, I suppose.

LS: Well, they were settled by German people mainly, and the German people

settled there because they knew if it grew big trees it would also be good soil, and

the Germans were not afraid of a bit of hard work. The English tended to settle – the

English and the Irish tended to settle where the land was easier to use. (laughter) So

no, they were – – –. But you know, in those areas, that’s where they were. And of

course time has proved how right they were about the quality of the soil.

Yes. I remember Jessie Peters saying I think it was her mother told her that you

couldn’t actually see the people in Allendale in the early days; you could hear the

ringing of the axes striking the trees. So it must have been heavily forested in the

really early days.

LS: Yes, I think it was, but it would have been in that sort of acacia, stringybark-

type trees that really didn’t grow to be great big trees. And so that – – –. (break in

recording) So the people that settled in Allendale, a lot of them were Irish descent,

English or Irish descent. The Scottish people settled in places called Millel and

Glencoe, and those sort of areas were nearly all Scottish-settled. Allendale and that

was Irish–English. So (laughs) they did sort of gather a bit in groups.

Well, I suppose it’s understandable, isn’t it, that they’d hang together and they’d

feel more comfortable with their own countrymen.

LS: Oh yes, I’m sure that that was the case. We lived in that old house that

Grandfather lived in all the rest of his life, Grandfather and Granny. My mother and

father first lived across the paddock in a small house there but they later moved over,

my father took over the land that was his father’s and the other land that he acquired

around it. And so we moved into it, and that is the house that I think practically all

of our family were born in, except when it came to me and I got the special treatment

of going to Mrs Robinson’s Nursing Home. I’m not sure about my younger sister:

probably she did too.

14

What about the older ones? Were they –

LS: All born at home.

– oh, right.

LS: Yes. Jack and Reg were born in the little house across the paddock.

Where Edges used to have later on?

LS: Yes, that’s right.

What about your grandfather – he came out here, he would have had to do some

sort of work – what did he do?

LS: He worked as a sort of a supervisor, I think, in the road constructions, and

remember there wouldn’t have been too many roads in those days.

No.

LS: He was also a well-educated man – in fact, all the Lasletts in England went to

public school. I have a letter that he wrote to his parents in 1847 from school, telling

them when he was going to break up for holidays.

Oh, right. So this boarding school would have been close to where he lived,

or – – –?

LS: Yes. I don’t think in England anything was very far away (laughter) from

anywhere else, in these days’ standard. In fact, the English people don’t sort of

travel –

No, they still don’t.

LS: – to the extent that we do.

Like a hundred miles is a really long way.

LS: Oh, it’s a big day, yes. Yes, well, it’s there; but you know we think nothing of

perhaps travelling two or three hundred kilometres sort of before lunch or whatever,

but no way. If they have to travel a hundred miles that’s a hell of a long way.

So if he was twenty or thirty miles away he would have been a long way from

home.

15

LS: Oh yes, would have been a long way. And so everything’s relative, I guess.

But the fact that – well, it’s a fairly steady trip for us to go from here in Mount

Gambier to Adelaide in five hours in today’s motor car.

From here to Adelaide?

LS: Yes, from here to Adelaide. Whereas it took five weeks [for my grandparents].

Yes, that’s right. It’s all relative.

LS: So times have changed. I’m very proud of our family history. I think we

should all try and record something of what we do. I used to have a lot of interesting

conversations with my late brother, Reg – a great pity we never recorded some of

those conversations. I attempted – and, you know, you only do a bit every now and

again – to write some of my own history, and I’ve encouraged my brother to do the

same, which he’s done, just some interesting things from your past, and let the

modern generation know what life was like in our day.

Yes. It’s totally different to today, isn’t it.

LS: Well, it was. That’s how it was. And my early life, I can remember some

instances before I went to school, and that would have been before I was six years

old. And I remember our house and it, as I said, was originally two rooms, gable-

roofed house. It had a lean-to built on the back of it of three rooms. One of those

rooms, which I understand was Grandfather’s room and later became the boys’ room

sort of stuck out to the side because the one was two rooms wide, this one was three

rooms wide and so it stuck out a bit like a pig with one ear, you see. And then there

was the kitchen. Now, the kitchen was about a metre separated from the stone part

of the house. They tell me they had to do this because kitchens had a fair habit of

sort of burning down – the fat gets in the fire or something and – – –. That was a

very interesting room, the kitchen.

And that wasn’t made out of stone?

LS: No. That was – well, I don’t know whether you’d even call it ‘weatherboard’

but it was that type of board. It didn’t have any ceiling and it had a – you know, the

boards to stop the draught were pasted over with pictures, they’d come out of the

Chronicle or the Weekly Times or some other magazine, and they were pasted over

and the main purpose of that was not for decoration but to –

16

Stop the draught?

LS: – keep out the draught. I remember my favourite picture, I think, was of Amy

Johnson, and she was a very early aviatrix. Our farm had a few pigs, and they were

duly slaughtered for their meat. The pigs were killed at home and the carcases taken

to old Charlie Carlin’s to be smoke-cured. Some pork was eaten fresh, and I

remember that whenever a pig was killed there was a particular delicacy was a

rissole called a ‘faggot’. The sides were cured and the bacon was hung from the

rafters, which prompted my father to say that they were the best pictures to have

hanging up.

Saturday night, whether we needed it or not, was bath night and kerosene buckets

were heated on the top of the wood stove, and I probably should say what a kerosene

bucket was. A kerosene bucket was kerosene used to come in four-gallon tins: cut

the top out and put a handle in it and it became a most useful bucket, and they were

universally used for milk or whatever and certainly for heating water for a bath. But

the big washtubs were brought in and set on the kitchen floor and water there topped

up with a bit of hot water. But I don’t know, I probably was a bit loath to get in the

bath, but I seemed to be somewhere near the last. (laughter)

Right! So it probably went from the oldest to the youngest.

LS: However, that’s what happened. And the soap used for bathing was Mum’s

home-made soap, and despite Mum’s best efforts to improve the quality of this I can

only refer to it as horrible. (laughter)

What was it made out of, Uncle?

LS: Well, mainly mutton fat, caustic soda, borax – oh, and there was some other,

some resiny sort of stuff.

No perfume in it to make it smell a bit – – –?

LS: Yes, they used to do that a bit.

Oh, right.

LS: But Mum made all our soap and these great big bars of stuff, and oh, it didn’t

give much lather, I tell you.

Water would have been a problem, wouldn’t it?

17

LS: Water?

Water, yes – you wouldn’t have had a lot of rainwater, would you?

LS: Oh, we had tanks for rainwater.

You never ran out?

LS: No, no, not really. And if we did there was always the water in the well.

Oh, right? And that was pretty good water?

LS: Yes, that was good water. It was a bit hard, but it was – that didn’t help the

soap, either. But generally there was enough.

In the kitchen there was contained a very large zinc-lined chest, and this was used

for keeping the foodstuffs away from the mice and the ants and any other nasties. It

had a large, hinged, wooden lid and – – –.

Would this have been the normal practice for people to have one of these?

LS: Yes, something like that, so you could keep things out of the weather, out of all

the things –

Keep the vermin out.

LS: – because your flour and that was pretty valuable stuff. This wooden lid was

quite heavy when it was hinged, and the whole bin rejoiced in the name of ‘the flour

bin’, because in them days flour was bought in a hundred-and-fifty-pound bags, it

was like a wheat bag.

Right, so that’d be roughly fifty kilos, forty or fifty kilos?

LS: Yes, it’d be something like that. And sugar, the bag of sugar was always in

there, too: that was seventy pounds in a bag of sugar.

It must have been a fair-sized container to get it all in.

LS: Well, because of its large size the bin was used to store other things, like cake

and biscuit tins. These were very tempting items to a young fellow of three or four

years.

How did you go lifting the lid, though?

18

LS: I was just able to lift the lid, but then had to balance myself over the end of the

bin to reach the forbidden things. Sometimes the lid would fall down on me and it

was while so trapped and suspended with my feet kicking in the air that I was caught

by my sister, Rosa, and I will always remember the whack she inflicted to my

bottom. (laughter)

It was a good try!

LS: Being a large family we needed a large table, and in the end of this table was a

drawer that rejoiced in the name of ‘the knife drawer’. It was more than big enough

to hold all our cutlery as well as a treasure trove of items which would gladden the

heart of any young boy.

My mother used to do the washing in the aforementioned washtubs –

This was outside?

LS: – yes, on a bench in the backyard. The water was heated over an open fire, in

fact I think it was an old stovetop that these things sat on, in kerosene buckets and a

wringer was mounted between the washtubs which sat on this bench. And not only

were the clothes scrubbed on the washing board, but they also passed through a blue

rinse and a cold water rinse. So that’s how – – –.

It was a fair sort of an exercise.

LS: Oh, very thorough. Washing day was Monday. You didn’t wash on any other

day: Monday was it.

Even if it was pouring rain Monday you still – – –.

LS: And it was a source of some pride, and I think a bit of envy, for a women to

have her washing on the line before her neighbours.

Oh, it was a bit of a competition, was it?

LS: You could see all the neighbours’ clotheslines. So that was where it was. And

of course Monday night then had to be ironing night – no drip-dry stuff them days.

I’ll tell you a story about that. My two elder brothers went for a holiday to stay with

some cousins in Geelong, they had a family of six girls, and my brothers went there.

And in them days trousers were sort of flannelette with no permanent press or

19

anything like that. And the girls, not being used to catering for boys, ironed their

trousers flat, so the seams were at the side, not at the front and back.

Oh, right – wrong way round.

LS: They were a bit nonplussed as to what to do, you know, ‘Should we complain

about this?’ (laughter)

How the ironing was done, Mum had about half a dozen solid cast-iron irons with

a smooth base, and they were heated on the top of the stove.

So while you were using one you’d have the others heating on the stove.

LS: Yes, you had the others heating up. And they used to test them by licking their

finger and quickly touching it on the iron.

If it burnt your finger off it’d be hot.

LS: No, if it sizzled it was hot.

You were right.

LS: Yes. So it was there. And another thing I remember, and it must have been my

sister – she was of course a good deal older than me –

Is this Rosa?

LS: – but I discovered this in mention I made of making a slide out of a wide board.

Now, elevating one end of it so that I could slide down it. And I did this not

realising that there was a rusty nail sticking up out of it. Now, not only was I

chastised for tearing my strides but the rusty nail caused a bit of damage to my rear

end. (laughter) But the damage to that was nothing compared to the indignity that I

had to suffer in baring my bottom to my elder sister to apply some kerosene.

Kerosene, that was the cure-all?

LS: That was the universal cure-all. Used it for everything – we didn’t drink it, but

just about everything else.

Our farm had cows, a bull, sheep, horses, dogs and cats, as well as the pigs. My

father’s ambition was always to increase the acreage of his property, and when I was

born the farm would have consisted of the home paddocks of seven acres on the

southern side of Kingsley Road, fifty-four acres on the north side of Kingsley Road,

20

a further eighty acres which we named as ‘Elmsley’ about three or four k’s, I

suppose, south-west, forty more acres down the Bay Road halfway to Port

MacDonell which was called ‘the hospital block’ –

They all had names.

LS: – oh yes, yes – and another piece of land out Sewarts Road out in the sort of

Garden Flat area, I suppose. And that made up the farm until Dad later on purchased

property of over a hundred acres at O.B. Flat.

So all the land was fairly well spread out.

LS: Oh, it required a lot of droving, and when I was a young fellow I spent many

days on horseback shifting stock from one place to another and it was not unusual to

take some stock to O.B. Flat and to ride home on the pony in the moonlight. In latter

years of his life Dad was not at all well and he and I would sometimes drive to O.B.

Flat, camp the night in the hut and we would follow the sheep home. I would walk

behind the sheep and Dad would drive along in the car, and that happened a few

times: I walked those fourteen miles on many, many occasions. How are we going,

all right? Do you want to stop? (break in recording)

Originally none of these properties had windmills. Some had more or less

permanent water in waterholes. But stock and garden water had to be pumped with a

Douglas pump. A fairly constant chore, particularly in hot weather.

Yes, especially seeing as all your properties are spread out so far.

LS: Pumping water, like turning the handle on the cream separator, were skills one

acquired at a very early age.

The arm muscles would have been pretty good!

LS: (laughs) Yes. I don’t remember when I was too young to get the cows in for

milking. The putting back in the paddock afterwards was probably my first job.

So this is pre-school.

LS: Yes. In latter years I was expected to do my share of the milking – in fact, we

each had to milk our own share of the cows –

And this is by hand?

21

LS: – each morning, before and after school.

You’d have to milk them by hand?

LS: Oh yes, yes. The milking machine brand was ‘MDK’, they used to say, in those

days: ‘Mum, Dad and the Kids’. (laughter)

My earliest attendance at Kingsley School, if you’re interested in my schooldays,

Robert –

Which was just down the road from the Lasletts’.

LS: – yes, it was – oh, it would be half –

Mile?

LS: – yes, kilometre, I suppose, up the road. And my earliest attendance must have

been on a half-holiday, possibly Empire Day or something like that, when I went to

school with my big brother, Willy.

So you started school when you were six?

LS: Yes.

So this is about 1933 now.

LS: That’d be about ’32, ’33, yes. Willy must have been allowed to take his little

brother with him, who at that stage must have – he must have almost been finished

his schooldays by then.

Yes, because he’s – what? – six or seven years older than you?

LS: Yes, eight.

Eight years older, yes.

LS: Our family had one or more children at this school from 1917 until 1941 –

That’s a fair sort of spread.

LS: – there was a Laslett at the Kingsley School, and for most of us that was our

only formal education.

Which went to Grade 7.

LS: Grade 7, yes.

Did any of you go to high school?

22

LS: No, no, we never. My sister Emmy was some four grades ahead of me and no

doubt had the dubious honour of taking me to school on the first day at school.

Others starting school on that day were Frank Howard, Jean Kemp; and the class

reached its highest number in about Grade 4 with the addition of Joy Butler, Heather

Whitehead, Betty and Shirley McLeay, and on occasions Dick Perryman.

Didn’t he always rock up?

LS: When he came to stay with his grandmother, old Mrs Kekewick.

Oh, I see.

LS: The school was basically a one-teacher school with grades 1 to 7 in one

classroom. When the numbers were sufficient – I think it was over thirty-three or

some figure like that – a junior teacher was engaged, and this was a person who was

awaiting their acceptance to teachers’ college, as was the case with my eldest

brother, Jack. I am of the strong opinion, and was then particularly, that my brother

went to some pains to ensure that no favouritism was afforded to his young brother.

Was it the opposite, maybe?

LS: (laughter) I’m sure – – –. Ah, dear! The teacher for our first four years of my

schooling was Harold Jones. In fact, until that time he had been the teacher of all my

preceding family members. They say that when he first arrived he was an excellent

teacher, but over the ensuing twenty years or so he lost some of his drive. I

remember him as a kindly man who probably taught us as much about manners and

ethics as he did about the three R’s. The lack of scholastic ability was reflected

when the inspector’s exam revealed a lot deficiencies.

So was he getting to be an old man by then?

LS: Yes, he was. I recall that I did not get one sum correct. Something that did not

at all please my father (laughter) who – I believe that he thought that his child was

not all that dull. Nevertheless, there was never any criticism of the teacher

expressed in front of us by our father: his contention to us that the teacher was right

no matter what his own thoughts on the matter might have been; and that the teacher

was always to be respected, and so it was that when I was caned for some

misdemeanour at school, my conduct being reported at home, often meant further

punishment.

23

Got a double dose!

LS: It was my sisters who told Dad! Be all this as it may, I still have some sort of

pride in the fact that I once received the cane three times within half an hour. To this

day, I do not know of anyone who can claim this distinction. (laughter)

Very proud record!

LS: On another occasion I was kept in after school, the reason for which I can’t

remember, and as was Mr Jones’s custom, when the kids all went home from school

except for those that were kept in, he would lock the door of the classroom and go

and have a cup of tea. Now, on one occasion I remember that Dad had told me that

if I got home in good time and did my chores quickly I could go to the Mount to

meet the train where my favourite uncle and aunt were arriving from Adelaide. This

was a pretty big deal, and there am I locked up in the classroom on my own. There

was no real way out except to climb up the window, out over the fanlight and down

the outside of the window, which I did accomplish, and looking at the windows

today I wonder how I did that, but I was obviously quite a lot smaller. However, I

was very prepared to face the music on Monday morning, but nothing was said, not a

word. I wonder if he’d had something stronger than tea, or whether he completely –

His memory might have been going a bit by then!

LS: – completely forgot about me! I might have been there all the weekend!

Good job you did climb out.

LS: Nothing was said.

Oh, that’s good. Did you mention it to your parents when you got home, though?

LS: No, I don’t think I did. Don’t think I said. Well, I would have been a bit later

because the other kids had all gone. (laughter) Ah, dear!

After Mr Jones departed on my first day in the fifth grade came Clarence Pierre

Murphy. When we lined up for school on that first morning we were left in no doubt

that things were going to change considerably. This was a fiery little Irishman, he

had quite a temper, but on reflection I guess it was just what we needed, and

although I suspect that our learning was largely motivated by fear (laughter) I now

believe that I owe a great deal to Peter Murphy.

24

So did you have him for the last three years?

LS: For the last years of my school. And on my last day at school, having just

received the results of my QC, which was Qualifying Certificate – this permitted a

primary school student to go on to high school, if they gained their Qualifying

Certificate – I received – in fact, I topped the area with the marks 589 out of 700.

END OF DISK 1: DISK 2

You were just mentioning there, Uncle Keith, how in your Qualifying Certificate

you received 589 marks, which was the highest in the area?

LS: Yes. And that was out of 700, and it was particularly significant because it was

20 more than the scholar of our family, who is a school teacher, brother Jack. He

only got 569.

Oh, right – you should have been a school teacher.

LS: And I got 200 out of 200 for Maths, out of a possible 200.

Well, you made big improvements after Mr Murphy got there, because you

weren’t getting any sums right there when Mr Jones was there.

LS: Well, he asked if I was satisfied with my marks and I said, ‘Oh, yeah.’

(laughter) And he told me I shouldn’t be, because I hadn’t achieved the possible.

And I can still remember those words to this day.

So even though you’d done really well, he thought you could have done better.

LS: Yes. He said, ‘No, well, you shouldn’t be; you didn’t get the full marks.’

A hard task master.

LS: Well, he was; but it was good for us. I think Mum and Dad had hoped that by

the time I had finished primary school they would at last be able to afford to send –

Someone to high school.

LS: – someone to high school. But I was allowed to leave school, and I think I

wanted to leave school, but that didn’t happen about going to high school anyway

because of two things that happened, and one was that my father had died and the

Second World War had started.

Your dad died in – was it 1938?

25

LS: Yes, Dad died 1938 and the War started in 1939. So I left school in ’39. And

so I was allowed to leave school, not quite aged thirteen.

My early years were those of the Great Depression. They were sort of coming out

of that period when I was around. It was not hard to realise that our family, like

most of those around us in those days, were by today’s standards financially very

poor.

Did you have an awareness at the time that you were poor?

LS: We always thought there were some poorer than us. But we also knew that we

didn’t have any money. Living on a farm had many advantages: we could grow our

own potatoes and we milked our own cows and killed our own sheep, and Mum

made our own bread, and we caught our own fish occasionally – Dad would say,

‘We’ll go and catch a fish after milking.’

And fish were plentiful at that stage?

LS: Well, we could go down to a couple of places at the Lighthouse Beach just after

dusk and we could come home with enough crayfish to last us for a day or two,

without getting our feet wet.

Really? So how did you do that?

LS: Dad had a couple of places up on the rocks, we’d lower the drop net down and

probably ten or twelve feet above the water, a couple of special spots, and we could

come home with – it was no good over-catching the fish because –

You couldn’t use it.

LS: – there was no refrigeration. If you couldn’t eat it, it was no good having it.

But clothes, I can remember – it must have been a pretty stressful time for our

parents because there was no money, as such.

But as a child did you realise that they had a hard time?

LS: I think I realised that they had it, but I didn’t have it so it didn’t make a lot of

difference to me. A new pair of boots was something really special. And as for

clothes, well, we didn’t buy too many clothes. It was mostly hand-me-downs.

And did your mum make clothes?

26

LS: Only when we were really little, but we always had someone older to sort of

hand down and that was our – – –.

You being one of the younger ones, you’d have got a lot of them.

LS: Yes, and there was another family in the Mount who were quite well-off and

they were friends of my father’s, and they had two boys and they used to hand their

clothes, which were quite good, down to us. So that was good.

Outside of the work – this is I’m talking about the poverty – like we had our farm

there, but there was no cash, and there wasn’t any work, really. Only work was

probably for the District Council and that would be breaking stone on the side of the

road or something like that. But this work was scarce, in that anybody who wanted a

job had to put their name down and eventually you might get a week or two weeks’

work, if you were lucky.

This is during the Depression or just after?

LS: Just after, in my early days.

Just as you’ve left school.

LS: No, before I left school.

Before you’d left school, right.

LS: When I was still at school. My elder brothers. I can remember Reg going off

with a cooked leg of mutton, enough bread to last for a week, home-made bread, and

probably some sausages, and you’d go off to work out at the Punt Road and camp

there.

Was this on the road work?

LS: Yes. Like pitched a tent, two or three of them, because travel backwards and

forwards to Punt Road, well, you didn’t do that. So that’s what we did. And then

another thing, source of income, my Uncle Bert Wallace, who had moved away to

Geelong, had a block of land that he retained here. It was called Stony Flat and it

had a lot of wattlebark on it, wattle trees, and we used to strip the bark and that was

used for tanning hides – I don’t know whether they use bottle bark, I don’t suppose

they do today; but that’s what it was used for – and we would strip these wattle trees

and bundle them up and dry it, and that would be used then for tanning.

27

Must have been a huge amount of wattle trees in the district, because a lot of

people have mentioned to us about stripping wattle and it would have been your

old grandfather, Earl, he kept an old journal and in that he kept a record of the

drayloads of bark that he took down to – would have been Wilkie’s mill, probably.

LS: Yes, to the bay. There was a bark mill at the bay.

Yes. It was hundreds of loads of bark that he carted, so there must have been a

huge industry that a lot of people took part in in those days. And the wattles

would have died after they’d been [stripped].

LS: Oh, yes. What we used to do – because some of these wattle trees were quite

big – we would cut them down while they were green, after we stripped them, and

then we’d come back and that was our year’s supply of firewood.

It’s really good wood, isn’t it, wattle.

LS: Oh, yes, very good wood.

So you got two – you got income from the bark and you got the wood as well.

LS: Wood for the fire. Mum was a very resourceful provider, too. Apart from

making her own bread she made all the jams and chutneys and everything else we

ate. Usually a lot of it was fruit or that that was given to us. Some of the apples

were windfalls or codling moth ones, but you cut all that out and the apple pies were

as good as the best.

Did you have an orchard of your own?

LS: No, no. We had I think there was one apricot tree, that didn’t do very well.

Most people would have had an orchard, wouldn’t they?

LS: A lot of people did. Old Sammy Keiselbach, who lived down the road, he had a

good orchard with practically all sorts of fruits, and he was the source of providing

us with a lot of fruit that he gave us because he was an old bachelor fellow and so he

would bring us up fruits and windfall apples and all of that thing.

And he was sort of related through the Earls, wasn’t he?

LS: Well, yes, I guess he was. He would have been probably Aunt Laurie Earl’s

uncle.

Uncle, yes.

28

LS: Old Sam. As kids we used to raid his orchard and climb his mulberry tree.

He must have hated you kids.

LS: Well, I don’t think he liked us very much. And old Corny Griffin, he had the

block of land right next to the school and he had some almond trees in there – not

that I ever remember too many almonds off it; but I can remember one time John

Pudney was always an unfortunate sort of bloke. Anything happened to somebody it

was Pudney. And I remember he got his foot caught in a tree, one of Corny Griffin’s

trees, and I can still see old Corny standing there with a stick alongside sort of

slapping his leg with the stick. There’s Pudney up the tree –

Couldn’t move.

LS: – couldn’t get down, and us standing on the gate giving cheek. (laughter) And

so eventually old Corny had to climb up and pull him out.

After he’d belted him a bit.

LS: But one of the things I remember, Mum used to make her bread I think twice a

week, and Saturdays she’d make bread, German cake and buns, and Wednesdays

she’d make bread rolls. I can’t imagine anything nicer than a fresh-out-of-the-oven,

crusty bread roll, spread with melon and orange jam and topped with scalded cream.

Wouldn’t call the King your uncle.

That German cake, that was terrific, too.

LS: Oh, she was really good. Mum was a good cook and I’ve never seen her hardly

ever use a recipe book.

No, it was all in her head.

LS: She used a bit of this and a bit of that, and so it is. But, you know, in them

times, although they were so poor, there was a lot of pride in people and I suppose –

– –. I can remember one day, I was with Dad in the old spring cart down at the

hospital block – and so I must have been, well, I wouldn’t have been more than nine

– and I’m sitting in the bottle of our cart, and our neighbour there, old Alan Cutting,

who lived next door to our block on the Bay Road, was over talking to Dad. And I

remember Dad saying to him, ‘Alan, you and Maggie have done a great job in these

hard times bringing up a large family.’ And old Alan said, ‘Yeah – and not a bit of

29

dole meat in any of them, Billy.’ Meant that they hadn’t had any dole or dole

payment, ‘not a bit of dole meat in any of them, Billy.’ (laughs) I remember that

story; it’s funny how you remember them things.

So some people in the Depression period would have got food handouts?

LS: Oh, yes. You could get rations, as they called them, and I think it was

administered through the Council, I’m not sure, because there were not near as many

do-good organisations as there are today. But you got coupons or something that

you could get food, like you might be able to get so many pounds of sugar or

something, and maybe even meat from a butcher’s. It was a subsistence sort of a

thing that kept you alive and not much else.

Whereas nowadays people are paid cash if they can’t get a job, in those days you

were given a coupon to buy food.

LS: That’s right. Well, there wasn’t – cash was a very scarce commodity. Dad was

keen to encourage us to save and we had a penny bank thing at school, you had to

make a deposit of a penny. And I reckon two pages of my bank book was the same

thing: one penny, one penny, one penny. The school bank day was probably

Thursday or something and you took your penny along and it was written in your

little Savings Bank passbook.

Yes. I remember Mum saying about that too, that she was upset one day she

didn’t have a penny to take to school and she wouldn’t tell her dad what the

problem was, and he fished in his pocket and he gave her a couple of pennies and

he said, ‘Is this the problem?’ And she was happy, she had a couple of pennies to

take to school.

LS: But that’s how poor people were. They must have had to really budget for

things.

So there was a really co-operative spirit within the Allendale district, was there,

people helped each other?

LS: Oh, yes, I think there was. I don’t think there was any great sympathy for

people who weren’t prepared to help themselves a bit. But most people were. I

guess it was pretty typical of Allendale that people did help each other.

Most people would have had small farms, wouldn’t they? They wouldn’t have

had big acreages?

30

LS: Oh, yes, small [farms]. Well, Allendale was subdivided to small; Dad used to

say it was ‘..... ..... settlement’, which was a term they used, ‘..... ..... settlement gone

mad’.

Yes, it was too close.

LS: It was divided, you know – like our home block was seven acres.

Seven acres, yes.

LS: I think the next-door neighbours probably had ten and the one before them had

ten.

How could have people made a living off that?

LS: Well, they couldn’t. They could milk a cow or something like that. That’s why

Dad was always rather different to his neighbours. Instead of being content with that

seven acres he –

Tried to get a bit extra land.

LS: – bit more and a bit more and a bit more, and I think he was proud of what he

was able to achieve in his lifetime, really.

Your dad was William Manger Laslett, and he married Lilian Rose Earl, and that

was about 1910 they married?

LS: Yes, something like that.

And what about the Earl side of the family, do you know much about their

history, Uncle Keith?

LS: Well, only my uncles and Grandfather Earl. Grandmother Earl had long since

died –

Yes, she died – what, only forty-something, wasn’t she?

LS: – yes, she died quite early. In fact, my mother and her elder sister had a fair bit

to do with the bringing up of the family. I think there was about ten of them.

Yes, I think there was ten children.

LS: And so that was – – –. Grandfather Earl had a property down – that joined on

across the road from the bottom of our paddocks.

Down Stony Flat?

31

LS: No, no, no, no; this was in the land across Kingsley Road. His place was not far

away from the Allendale Store when that was Tibbles’s Store, and he had that there.

He had a housekeeper that lived with him. But we probably didn’t have a lot to do –

we had a bit to do with Uncle Tom Earl: he lived further out Kingsley Road, or

further than we were from the school but west whereas we were east. And we had a

bit to do with him. In fact, we would have seen them every Sunday because we

always went to church and Sunday School.

This is at the Methodist Church?

LS: Yes. And Uncle Tom used to sit up the front of the church and one of the

ministers referred to him as ‘the choir’. He didn’t sit with his wife or family, he

always sat on his own right up the front of the church.

Bit strange.

LS: There were some strange people, I’ll tell you.

So he led the singing, did he?

LS: Well, I think he reckoned he did.

The other uncles were away from here. Some of them went to Serviceton to farm

– I don’t know whether farm land was made available or cheaper or something up

there in them days.

Cheaper, probably. That was Bert Earl, he went up there?

LS: Bert and Frank. They went up there. I think Ernie too, probably. So we only

had sort of to do with them.

But there were all the other neighbours around. Across the paddock were

originally the Hollands and then later the Wallaces, and there was always a lot of the

Hollands about.

And they’re relatives as well, aren’t they, the Hollands and the Wallaces?

LS: Yes, Aunt Lottie. I never saw my Uncle Bill Holland, nor did I ever see my

granny or my grandfather. My grandfather died in the December and I was born in

the January, so we went pretty close but we –

Yes, just missed each other.

32

LS: – never made contact. So I have no personal memory of either of them.

No. From what I’ve heard, everybody seemed to like Granny Laslett, they

thought she was a lovely lady.

LS: Yes. I believe that she was, they always said she was a very gentle, kind

person.

And in that bit that Reg wrote, in his article, it says that everybody loved Granny

Laslett.

LS: Yes. Well, I didn’t know her, of course.

No; she died in 1917, I think, so ten years before you were born.

LS: Yes, well before me. But from all accounts she was. See, Grandfather lived

with my mother and father and three or four of their kids in the house in Kingsley

Road. Grandfather was told, I think, when he was about sixty that he had a bit of a

heart turn and they said, ‘You’ll never work again.’

Yes – ‘take it a bit easier’.

LS: And I don’t think he ever did. And my old Aunt Em, maiden aunt, really

dedicated her life, I think, to looking after Father. And I think he was quite prepared

to have somebody look after him.

That was a big thing on her behalf, though, wasn’t it?

LS: Oh, I’d say she sacrificed her life.

Her own life, yes.

LS: She was a pretty handy sort of auntie to have, because whenever any of her

brothers or sisters needed someone to help, Em was there. And I know Aunt Lil

Glynn, she lived down on what’s now the ..... outstation. In fact, Uncle Paddy Glynn

was the head stockman there for 1898 to about 1912 or something. The ruins are

still there and it’s a very remote place today. What it must have been like in those

days – – –. But Aunt Em would go down to Lil, to her sister Lil, whenever she was

having another baby and that happened about ten times, too.

Yes, there was a fair few kids, wasn’t there.

LS: But it was a very remote place and still is today. What it must have been like in

those days – – –.

33

So Em would go down and stay with Lil.

LS: She’d go down and stay there while Lil had the baby and sort of look after the

other kids.

So would Lil have a midwife come round when the child was being born?

LS: No, I think it was – well, there might have been, but I think mainly it was Aunt

Em. But of course after ten they just about knew.

Yes, but imagine if there was complications. They’re miles from anywhere.

LS: Well, of course there were complications in a lot of cases and that’s why –

A lot of women died.

LS: – a lot of women died in childbirth. But, you know, it was probably a remote

place in that it would have taken her half a days’ ride to get there.

Would she take a horse and cart to go down there?

LS: Yes. I guess somebody came for her and took her down.

But no, I think Allendale people generally were very, very co-operative and

probably never more illustrated than during the war years. You see, during the War

there was nobody between about the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, they just

weren’t there, and they’d all gone off to the War; and so the rest of them, kids and

all, had to do the best they could. Now, I think that my mum, who was by then a

widow for some time, we had my older and younger sister and I and Mum at home,

and I think Mum thought we were a bit over-staffed at times because I was

invariably volunscripted to go and help out somebody else. And this is what we did.

People did this. If somebody was ill or something like that, well, ‘Keith can go and

help milk the cows at your place and we’ll do his at home’. And at harvest time

there was always somebody came to help, you weren’t left there doing it on your

own. Planting of crops and things like that. Always somebody would be there to

help.

That was really good community spirit, then.

LS: Well, it was. I don’t remember ever getting paid for any of these jobs and I

don’t remember that we ever paid anyone. But that was just taken for granted that

that’s what you would do.

34

I remember Mrs Butler, and they lived up near the school, she had a poison finger

and so she couldn’t help with the milking and Mum said, ‘Keith can go’, so we did.

And Mr Butler had taken Mrs Butler to the doctor’s, no doubt to see about her

finger, and their son Brian and I got the cows in and we thought we might have a bit

of a rodeo. So we bail up a cow, hop on its back, pull the pin out and let her go.

(laughter) And there was a little Jersey that was particularly good. Anyway, when

Mr Butler came home and came down to milk, and we hadn’t gone very far and we

didn’t have much milk in the can, he said, ‘These cows have been stirred up’, he

said, they won’t give their milk down.’

I wonder why!

LS: Well, we didn’t confess, but I think he might have had a bit of an idea. (laughs)

But, you know, that was the case. I can still in my mind’s eye see Les Kerr, they had

a farm sort of the north of Allendale, but they had hired or borrowed from Milstead’s

at the bay a trolley. Well, Milstead’s were blacksmiths, so they made things and

made everything very solid and very strong; and they’d made this trolley – well, I

think it was more of a wagon, but it was a rubber-tyred thing. And we were carting

in the sheafed hay; and an example of the age [of] people that was about, there was

me, who was probably about sixteen, and Uncle Charlie, who was probably nearing

seventy. And we were throwing up these things and Les would built this great big

load. Oh, ridiculous. Uncle Charlie kept moaning and saying, ‘Oh, it’s ridiculous!

Throwing the hay all that way up there.’ He said, ‘Halfway and we could come back

and get another load.’ Anyway, that’s what we did and I can still see: the trolley

came over a bit of a ridge, sideways, it tipped over and I can still see Les Kerr

coming down off the top of that load with a pitchfork held out at arm’s length.

He didn’t want to spear himself.

LS: Like Old Father Time. (laughter) It took us two loads to get that back into the

stack.

After that did he make smaller loads or did he keep with the big, high loads?

LS: Kept insisting on these big, high loads. Anyhow, it took us two loads to get that

back on the trolley.

You’d have been right behind.

35

LS: Yes. But all of those sort of things happened but nobody ever – like shearing

time, ‘Yep, go and do that’ and lamb marking or whatever –

Everybody just helped each other.

LS: – somebody would give you a hand. (break in recording)

– – – yes, I remember the grubs got in the oats and they would eat all the oats,

clear them off overnight just about. So the hay, when it was cut with the binder,

instead of having a large top where the heads of the grain was in the [top and stalks

in the] bottom of the sheaf, they were almost wedge-shaped because the oats had

gone, and when the stalks were dry it was very, very slippery. And so I remember

carting hay in the cart and you’d get it sort of nicely on, the horse would move off a

bit quick and down she’d go. Stan Butler was building the stack at home, and Brian

was throwing the stuff up and I was ‘pointing’, as they used to call it: one person

pitched the stuff and somebody pointed it or put the sheaf right near the builder’s

fork. Well, that was all going very well until the end fell out of the stack due to this

slippery hay, and Mr Butler was buried in the hay! We could hear him in there but

we couldn’t quite make out what he was saying until we’d cleared a bit of the hay

away and then we could distinguish that what he was saying was, ‘Don’t use the

fork.’

He didn’t want to be jabbed! (laughter)

LS: But I think generally we had a good life, but life on the farm was no picnic.

There was no sport.

None?

LS: None. Like, you know, Sunday, the only day you had off – any time off – and

that was between milkings because you really weren’t supposed to do too much on

Sundays –

No! Terrible thing to do.

LS: – that was about the only time we had off. The rest of it – in the wintertime

you’re well and truly in the dark, finishing the chores.

So did you have some sort of light in the dairy, or how did you do it?

LS: No, no, it was pretty [well feel and memory].

36

So you had to have them milked before it got dark.

LS: Well, we milked them in dark sometimes.

Milked them in the dark?

LS: Yes. And we were in the moonlight. And in the morning the milk truck used to

come at seven-thirty –

So they had to be finished before then.

LS: – so we had to finish the milking before then. We milked our cows into a

bucket, like stripped them into a bucket, then we poured it through a strainer into a

ten-gallon can. And those cans then had to be barrowed out to the milk stage, which

was about the height of the milk truck –

So you had to lift them up onto the stage.

LS: – so it had to be down there by half-past seven because that’s when the milk

truck came. So it was pretty early. After milking you’d put out the hay, which was

usually sheafed hay, and you’d spread that out to feed the cows, made sure they had

a drink.

Did you have a windmill at this stage?

LS: No.

No, still didn’t have a windmill.

LS: No, not at that earlier stage. We did a bit later on in there. Then you’d go and

have breakfast and get cleaned up a bit. By that time the cows had ate their hay so

you’d take them across the road down to one of the day paddocks, then you’d go to

school.

This was all before school.

LS: So you’d all been there since about daylight and you’d done three or four hours,

sort of thing –

Before you went to school.

LS: – and you went to school at half-past nine, had to be there for half-past nine.

Now, if I went to go around the sheep or was required to go round the sheep over at

37

their other property, which was two or three miles away, I could ride the pony to

school, but other than that you walked. With all the other kids.

I suppose everybody was the same – – –.

LS: Well, we were all the same. The social activities, well, they usually revolved

around the church.

Both your parents were heavily involved with the Methodist Church, weren’t

they?

LS: Oh yes, yes. Mum used to clean the church and she always put the flowers in

the church, and that was always done. Dad was more of the business side of their

affairs. But we all went to church and it was sort of mandatory that you went to

Sunday School, then you went to church. And that’s what many families did and it

didn’t matter whether they were Protestant or Catholics, you know.

Yes, everybody in those days went to church.

LS: I think all the Catholics always went to church. They were better attendants

than some of the Protestants.

They might have been more afraid!

LS: But some of the highlights was the Sunday School anniversary, then there was a

concert after that, Sunday School concert, at which we’d all perform. Mrs Wallace

would train us up to put on items. And then there was the church anniversary, that

was another thing. There was a school picnic every year.

Where would that be held?

LS: Well, quite often – it sort of varied between the Springs or Clark’s Park, as it’s

now called, the Woolwash, where the caravan park is now, and the Racecourse Bay.

And we would be taken to – that would be either school or the Sunday School

picnics. We used to go, in the earlier days, in Mr Don Kerr’s wagon, and they’d put

the trestle tabletops along the side of the wagon so we had a bit of a backrest and

Sunday School pews in there to sit on, and away we’d go.

Be a bit bumpy, wouldn’t it?

38

LS: No, it wasn’t too bad. There was a good road down to the Bay. And then, a bit

later on, Ron Kerr, that’s Mr Don Kerr’s son, he was the chap that was killed a

prisoner of war, never returned.

Oh, Ron Kerr?

LS: Ronnie Kerr, yes. He bought a tip truck for use on the road and we used to go

in that. And then Harry Holland, he got a Maple Leaf truck and that’s how we were

transferred to there – I think that was after Ronnie went to the War, the war from

which he never returned. And so Harry Holland always had a truck. And all the

kids would load up. There’d be a working bee at our place the night before to cut the

sandwiches. Now, in them days the only bread you bought was Hi-Top bread, it was

what we call Hi-Top today but in those days it wasn’t called Hi-Top, it was a loaf of

bread, that’s what you bought when you bought a loaf of bread. Now, for the

Sunday School picnics or concerts or that Mr Tibbles would be required to order so

many sandwich loaves from Carr’s Bakery, sliced. And Mum would cook the

corned beef and they’d mix up this thing with corned beef minced up with mustard

and they’d have a working bee to cut sandwiches for the picnics. And of course

there was always the other cakes and things that the other ladies provided and

everything else, but they always had this working bee to cut the sandwiches.

So it was a good day.

LS: Oh, it was a good – that was a night, that was a night-time job. But that was cut

for the next morning, ready to go to the Sunday School or school picnic or whatever.

No, that really sums up fairly much my early life.

What about your dad, did he have TB5?

LS: Yes, he did.

And he was ill for quite a few years before he died.

LS: Yes. I think my father probably – he had pleurisy and pneumonia, and I

remember when he had those, and that was fairly early in my memory of things, but

I remember him being very ill and being in hospital. I don’t think he ever really got

5 TB – tuberculosis.

39

over that, and my own thoughts is that he went back to provide for his family

probably before he should have done, before he was fully-recovered. TB was fairly

common in those days, a lot of people died of TB, and it was before they ever had an

X-ray program or anything for early detection of it and people just died of TB. But

so many people who died of illnesses that really I don’t think were ever properly

diagnosed. I believe that whilst we say there’s a lot of cancer now I don’t know that

there is proportionately any more than there was them days, only it gets the blame

that probably should have been apportioned to it years before. But better detection,

better medicine and – – –.

Well, better transportation, like from Allendale to come to the Mount would have

been a half-a-day journey, would it?

LS: Oh, no, no – well, not in my time, because Dad had a car, you see.

Before the car, though, it would have taken many hours to get to the Mount.

LS: Well, yes, I guess it would have been by ‘drag’, I think they used to call them,

which was a sort of a – wasn’t a carriage, it wasn’t a trolley, but it was something in

between. But I only remember when Dad was there, and certainly he was called

upon many times – and I suppose he volunteered, most times – to bring people to the

doctor or the hospital.

Because he had a car at that stage.

LS: Because he had a car and there wasn’t a lot of people who did. And so he

would bring people up to the doctor or to the hospital. So it didn’t take all that long,

in my memory. He had this old blue Ford ‘T’ – I think I mentioned it earlier – 1914

model. I don’t think it had any side curtains. It had a hood. And it didn’t have a

battery as such, it was a magneto thing. But I remember Dad being a bit offended, or

insulted I suppose you’d say: he was going to a funeral and it rained, and he’d given

a woman called Annie Burns a ride to this funeral, and she had the audacity to put

her umbrella up inside his car.

She was getting a bit wet.

LS: Not greatly impressed, no. (laughter) But my father always had a good sense

of humour, a very quick wit, you know, and – – –.

He was great mates with Tony Hyde, wasn’t he?

40

LS: Yes. Tony Hyde was a neighbour – not in my memory, but he was a neighbour.

They used to get up to a few skylarks together.

LS: Oh, yes. They always had – they liked a practical joke, and one of the classics I

think was they both worked at Coola Station – this is sort of before my time – and in

them days the shearing was five and a half days a week. They knocked off at

lunchtime on Saturday and you were back there on Sunday night to start work early

Monday morning. Well, because it was blade shearers there was a lot of them, and

the big woolsheds, some of them had up to forty shearers, you know? And then

there would have been as many station hands and rouseabouts and what have you.

But Dad and Tony were what was defined in them days – and I don’t think there was

any union to say what they were called – but they were ‘shed hand pressers’, they

used to press the wool, which was quite a bit in them days and of course it was big,

old, heavy presses, they’d to –

It would have been really hard work.

LS: – lift them up. But anyway, they were driving home one Saturday afternoon in

the buggy and found some rubbish beside the road, and one of them had a chemist’s

bottle on it which was fairly fresh, and Glover’s were one of the Mount chemists in

those days. And so they cooked up this idea of making up a cow drench, and they

reckoned they could get the fellows to drink it, see? So they made this drench up –

and I don’t know what all the ingredients were – but there was coffee and treacle,

Epsom salts and, well, there must have been some sort of fluid, and this is what they

used to drench the cows with to sort of get them going: if they got blocked up, well,

they’d give them a dose.

Sort of a home remedy.

LS: Yes, yes. So anyway, they took this down and on Monday night after tea Tony

Hyde came out shaking this bottle and said, ‘You know,’ with this bottle, he said,

‘Ah, bit of a wog,’ he said. ‘I got some stuff from Glover.’ And he said, ‘I don’t

know whether it will do any good.’ But several of them opted to have a dose, and

my Uncle Dick, who was a bit of a hypochondriac, he sort of got first serve and as

such he got most of the Epsom salts. I reckon he ran around the bunkhouse all night.

Others said it definitely cured them, it was good stuff.

41

Fred Thompson was one of those, wasn’t he?

LS: Well, he could have been, yes.

I reckon I remember you telling me this story –

LS: Oh, yes?

– and I reckon he thought it was pretty good stuff.

LS: Well, it probably wouldn’t have done anybody any harm, no. But it’s what they

used to give the cows if you had a crook cow. And that was there, and then there

were one or two people who were sort of amateur vets, you know: if you had a cow

sick you’d send for Uncle Charlie or somebody to come up and he’d probably

diagnose what was wrong with her or something. His wife, my Auntie Grace,

Mum’s sister, she was a bit the same on the medical side. Auntie Grace had a

thermometer and she had a doctor’s book. (laughter)

So that qualified her to be the District Nurse.

LS: So that was there. And it was during the War, I felt really ill. I didn’t know

what was wrong with me but I did feel very, very sick and I had been putting up

some fences around the haystacks, middle of summer and it was very hot, and I

thought I must have got a bit of a touch of the sun. Anyway, it wasn’t good and

Mum tried different things and she gave me a dose of castor oil. That didn’t make

me any better, and Auntie Grace came up and got out the doctor’s book and her

thermometer and took my temperature, and that was way, way up. And the doctor’s

book, and I said, ‘It might be appendicitis,’ not really knowing what appendicitis

was. So she reads out this doctor’s book and it said all of the things, the symptoms,

and I was nodding, ‘Yeah, that’s right, got that, got that,’ and the pain’s eased if their

legs are elevated a bit and all this, and about the final thing it said was, ‘On no

account give castor oil, as this invariably proves fatal.’

You should have been done for!

LS: Poor old Mum, she went about green, you know.

She thought she’d killed you!

LS: Anyway, after the milking was done, which was priority –

42

You couldn’t die before then.

LS: – no, no, couldn’t – they decided that, well, they’d better bring me to the doctor.

That was about last resort.

Yes, you had to be nearly dead.

LS: Emmy was the only qualified driver we had, my sister.

Oh, that’s right: Gran didn’t drive.

LS: No, no, she never did. Anyway, she decided we’d come up to see the doctor.

And Uncle Charlie I think came with us. Probably because I might have dropped off

the perch at any time. Anyway, we came up to old Charlie King and he examined

me, and this was quite – it would have been eight or nine o’clock at night, I suppose

– and he examined me and decided that I had appendicitis, put me in hospital, and

the next day they operated on me for appendicitis. Now, at that stage I was

seventeen years of age and I was the only one of our seven kids who had ever been

in hospital. I had been there as an infant and then – – –. So the dosing that Mum

gave us on Saturday mornings, whether we needed it or not, like Epsom salts or

liquorice powder or whatever – – –.

No doubt you’re all lined up dutifully and never tried to run away or anything

like that.

LS: Yes, that’s right – oh, not much! But we never escaped. But anyway, must

have done some good, because we’ve never been. And I don’t think it was till your

mother had her first child, Rosemary, that she would have ever been to hospital.

Yes, that’s probably right.

LS: So we’re a pretty healthy lot.

Yes.

LS: The other thing that I did during the War, and I say it was – like manpower was

very, very scarce and there was an old chap, Billy Childs his name was, and every

year he would put in on a share basis with the Schank Station a square mile of oats.

And old Billy was never noted for his generosity: in fact, if he could use less binder

trying to make really big sheaves, well, he would. So he would plant this crop every

year. I came into the joke when it was harvest time, and they had two tractors, an

43

old Fordson and another Farm All tractor, which were pretty rare things in those

days, and they pulled two binders and they harvested this square mile of oats. [?We

stooked them so that the stooks were close together; when stooks were far apart –

and saved dropping them, stooks were fairly close together.? (sense unclear)] Old

Billy would pick a place where the stooks were close and there he’d build a stack, a

threshing stack. They’d pull the thresher up alongside these stacks, and part of his

deal was that he had half the oats and the Schank had so much hay left for chaff for

their horses and all these things. But the main thing was the threshing. And it was

my job to stand on top of the threshing drum, facing Billy Childs who was feeding

the drum, and pick up the sheaves of hay which were forked up to me, pick them up

on a knife that was fashioned out of an old file with a bit of tape or something

wrapped around it and cloth, and you could pick up the sheaf, head facing down into

the drum, and you’d throw the sheaf: one to the left, the next one to the right. And

as you threw it the weight of the sheaf cut the band. And old Billy would feed it into

the thresher. The straw that went out the back of the threshing drum went into an

elevator which was then – sometimes went straight into a hay baler, and Keith

Childs, old Billy’s son, was in charge of that, of the straw, and every now and again

if Keith thought we deserved a bit of a rest he’d run the belt off the elevator. Well,

then there was a panic to get that all back, and old Billy’s singing out, ‘Come on,

lads, come on, come on, come on!’

Wasting time.

LS: We were wasting time. But it was big money, I got half a crown an hour for

that, a pound a day.

Pound a day.

LS: Yes. That was pretty big money.

Well, it would have been.

LS: So that’s what we did. Now, this was all in wartime, and I would never have

been allowed to enlist because I was required to stay home. There was what they

called ‘protected industries’, and whether I liked it or not I was there.

And Jack was in the Air Force and Bill was in the Army.

44

LS: And Bill was in the Army. So I was there, but I decided that I would join the

Air Training Corps. And we held classes, I think it was every Tuesday and Thursday

night, at the Mount Gambier High School, and we studied Maths, Algebra and

Science, Aircraft Identification and all this sort of thing.

What year would this be?

LS: Well, the War ended in ’45: I suppose it was probably about ’42 or ’3,

something like that. Anyway, some of the high school teachers were involved in

teaching this class, one particularly was a chap called Magor, Cliff Magor, and we

used to come up, and I think it was two hours, session every Tuesday and every

Thursday night. On Sunday we would come to town, to the high school, where we

were picked up by an Air Force truck and taken out to the airport for the day, where

we received marching training and rifle training and all of the things, we were fed

out there in the mess hut and brought back to the Mount, and then I could ride my

bike home. So I actually rode my bike to the Mount about three times every week.

You’d have been fit.

LS: Oh, I probably was, yes. Now, when we were threshing – this was on Tuesdays

and Thursday nights – I didn’t want to ride my bike all the way home to Allendale

and then come back, so I’d take some tidier clothes with me and I’d have a bit of a

sponge off in the stock trough and then I’d get on my bike and ride into town, I’d

have a pie and a milkshake for my tea and then go to these lectures, then hop on the

bike and ride home. Now, Eric Smith did some of that with me – Eric Smith from

the Bay – but that was our sort of formal training in the War. But had I reached the

age and been able to, I still wouldn’t have been allowed to.

You’d only have been about eighteen when the War finished.

LS: Yes, only eighteen when the War finished, I was just old enough. And of

course then, when the War finished, well, there was things to do. Bill came home

and – well, Bill always was a farmer, he never wanted to be anything else, and I

think that was a very happy solution. He was, I think, a good farmer. But we knew,

both of us, that the little property wasn’t going to keep both of us for the rest of our

lives and so it was decided that one of us should go and find a job if we could, and

45

Bill insisted that it be my choice. Well, I was very happy to leave the farm: it was

not a barrel of laughs, the farm life, in the wartime, as I said.

So he left it up to you to make the decision which one of you – – –?

LS: He insisted that I make the decision, and one of us would go and get a job.

Well, I said if it was all the same to him I’d be quite happy to leave the farm, thank

you very much.

You’d had enough of the farm.

LS: Well, I had.

END OF DISK 2 PART 2

DISK 3 PART 2 [0:32:00 minutes]

It’s the 1st May 2005 and we’re having another talk with Keith Laslett. Where we

finished last time, Uncle Keith, you were just about to start your building career.

Could you enlighten us about how that came about?

LS: Yes. Well, I think I’d said that I had found employment with a chap named

Bert Kuhl. They were practically stonemasons, that was the biggest part of their

trade, but they used to do other sides of the building trade as well. Leaving home,

for me, meant I had to find somewhere else to live and I found a place to board with

Mrs Gregory at Gowrie[?] in Gray Street in Mount Gambier. Mrs Gregory accepted

me as a boarder on the strict condition that I was a non-drinker. I was allocated the

middle bed in a three-bedded room, and my bed was directly under the window.

This window was used for the chaps to throw in the banned beer, and, after nearly

being brained with the beer bottles being thrown in – they were big bottles in them

days – I thought that a shift of bed would be appropriate. So I changed places. I got

on well with the other chaps in the boarding house, and it was there that I probably

acquired the name of ‘Laz’. There were four of us who shared the name ‘Keith’.

So you had to have some way of distinguishing who was who.

LS: Yes, that was so. And in typical boarding house tradition Keith Mackintosh for

some reason became ‘Dinah’, Keith Hazel ‘Haze’, I became ‘Laz’ and, not

inappropriately, Keith Sleep acquired the name of ‘Arfa’. (laughter)

’Alf asleep!

46

LS: Mrs Gregory was not an unkindly woman who possessed a ready wit and a

sharp tongue.

So you had to be on your best behaviour.

LS: My first job was as a builder’s labourer in a new home, Oldham, in Ferris

Street, for Miss Lenore Kentish and her parents. The gang consisted of my boss,

Bert Kuhl, his brother and later my brother-in-law Ken, Ross Sage, Ted Birrell and

maybe Keith Eland. Others to join the gang later were Ivan Shelton, Spencer

Jeffs[?], Bob Chapman. Bert was a surviving member of Kuhl Brothers

Stonemasons, his two elder brothers having taken up farming.

House building started with the delivery on the site of large building blocks of

Mount Gambier’s famous coralline limestone. These cubes measured 1.4 metres by

1.4 metres by .9 metres or, in other words, 4 feet by 4 feet by 3 feet.

What would they weigh, Uncle, roughly?

LS: Over two tons.

Up to a ton.

LS: Upwards of two tons.

Two tons, oh right.

LS: And it would require forty-five or fifty of these blocks to build a twelve square

house. The stone was cut using a 6-foot, or 1.8 metre long cross-cut saw.

Did one person use the saw, or would you have one each end?

LS: Just one. Because the stone was quite easy to cut. And so first we would halve

the block, which then gave us pieces about 2 foot plus by 3 feet by the height.

These, one half we would then turn around with the aid of a Trewhella jack so we’d

turn it 90 degrees to the other half.

Because it’s still a ton weight, I suppose, you can’t shift it by hand.

LS: Oh yes, still a ton weight. So we would lever it round with this block, and then

we would cut it in three: that’s three slabs, 300mm, or one foot thick. So we’d

finish with this piece of stone, three ‘slabs’ as we called them, about 1.4 by about

700 by 300mm. Those slabs we would tip sideways over onto our knee and we

47

would – very quickly (laughs) – sort of tip them onto their edge, because if you

weren’t quick you’d squash your knee.

So there was an art in doing it.

LS: It was quite a knack in doing it, but it was something we acquired very quickly.

(laughter)

You’d learn it pretty quick, I imagine.

LS: We would then cut those slabs into what we call ‘ashlars’, and they would each

measure about 125mm by – I could think of these things easier in feet and inches.

Say it in feet and inches, that’s all right.

LS: Well, it’s 2 foot 3 inches, 2¼ feet, which is 750, so it’d be 125 by 750 by 300,

and that was what we called an ashler.

That was the standard size, but I suppose you had to vary it.

LS: That was – yes, in those days. For some jobs we would cut the ashlars much

thicker: for a single wall they might be as big as 8 inches, or 200mm. But generally,

for house building, they were about 100 to 125. The outside walls were cavity – that

is, there were two walls – and the inside was just a single wall.

Those 8-inch blocks, they must have weighed – – –.

LS: Yes, they weighed about a hundredweight. And they were very heavy, and we

used to pick them up, put them on our shoulder and then from our shoulder we’d put

them on the scaffold. There’s a stone in the house, over the front porch of the house

that Dr Richard Strickland lives in, that’s 1500, 1600 long, 1.6m, by 200 thick, by

300 high. Now, I picked that up, put it on my shoulder, loaded it onto the scaffold,

then hopped up and helped my brother-in-law place it in the wall, and it’s still in that

(laughs) position in that house in Lake Terrace.

What would be the weight of that?

LS: Oh, it’d be well over two hundredweight.

You wouldn’t be allowed to do that now, you’re only allowed to ..... about 20 kilos.

LS: No, that’s it. Can’t have anything heavier to lift now than a slab of beer!

(laughter)

48

Well, how’s your back now?

LS: I’ve never had any problem with my back, no. A lot of builders did.

I can imagine it’d be hard on your back and your legs, knees, ankles.

LS: Yes, I think it probably was. But we sort of grew with it, as it were, and we

never had any trouble. I remember once we were using 300 thick ashlars in a tank

stand down at the old Tantanoola cheese factory, and my boss was carrying one of

these on his shoulder up the ladder, and he got about four rungs up, I suppose, and

the rung gave way. He took out all the other rungs on the way down. He never took

a day off or anything, but he said to me years later, ‘My back’s never been much

good since I had that – – –.’ (laughs)

All that weight as he hit the ground – ooh, terrible!

LS: That would have been a good hundredweight and a half.

He wouldn’t have had time, I suppose, to flick it off his shoulder, it’d happen that

quick.

LS: (laughs) Not a way, no. Building was quite different in those days. There

wasn’t any steel scaffolding, it was timber which we would rope together, and then

that was there. And of course that was all very heavy to cart around.

What about your uprights, what did you use for uprights? That was timber as

well?

LS: Yes, we put timber posts in the ground.

Oh, you’d actually put a post in the ground, then tied the –

LS: Yes, and tied the –

– horizontals to the post.

LS: – yes, the ‘ledger’, as we called them. And then the putlugs into the wall. They

were a piece of timber with a steel plate on the end so that it sat on the wall and

didn’t make too big a hole when you had to point it up. But we didn’t – see, this was

just after the War and there was not very much, and we never had a mixer. So it was

my job, as the ‘boy’, and we’d go to the site and there’d be a truckload of sand

would be there, we’d have usually a part of a tank and we’d put several bags of

freshly-burnt lime in there, put the water in and it’d boil up and become a paste, and

49

so we mixed this lime and the sand together. But that was the boy’s job, and you’d

have to mix up this truckload of sand into a heap of mortar.

So was this one of the worst jobs so they’d get the young fellow to do it?

LS: Oh, that was one of the boy’s jobs, you know – didn’t need a lot of brains.

You had to start at the bottom, I suppose.

LS: And then we would wet that back when we went to build the place, and the lime

had cured in the mortar, and no cement was added so it wouldn’t set hard, you see.

So you could add cement when you worked it back.

Oh, later on, when you were doing the job.

LS: Yes. But the thing that a lot of people don’t perhaps realise is that – and it’s the

old biblical thing about not putting new cloth onto an old garment, because

otherwise it’ll tear away from the old one – the same with building: you should

never use a bonding material stronger than the material to be bonded. But Mount

Gambier is very fortunate in having limestone, because it is the most inert of

building materials, unlike bricks: clay bricks tend to grow. Minutely, but they do.

And concrete blocks shrink. So that doesn’t happen with limestone. But going from

the job, if it was in the town, well, you hopped on your bike. If it was out of town

we’d go in the boss’s ute6. And only three people could sit in the front and the rest

of us sat out the back, rugged up against the cold and the wet, and we would travel

some days perhaps thirty or forty miles –

To get to the job.

LS: – to get to the job. And we did that every day while we were building that

particular house. But really we sat in the back of the truck, you sat on whatever you

could sit on and rugged up in your Army greatcoat to keep out the weather. But

gradually things have changed. But I’ve always enjoyed building, and Carleen says

I’ll be building till I die and I’m not really unhappy about that prospect.

You’ve worked in an industry that you’ve really liked.

6 Ute – utility vehicle, a small tray-topped truck.

50

LS: Well, Robert, it was always good to be able to see something for your efforts.

You could sit at a desk all day and when you go home at night you can’t really see

what you’ve done.

No. You’ve put a house up, you can see what you’ve been doing.

LS: I was still employed by Bert Kuhl when I built my first house, which was for

my brother Bill down at Allendale East, and I didn’t intend to build it all but Bert

said, ‘Look, you can go home, you can stay with Mum.’

Be ideal.

LS: All right. So I went home and stayed with Mum and Bert said, ‘You can cut up

the foundation stones,’ which I did, and then he said, ‘Well, you might as well cut up

the ashlars,’ which I did.

How long had you been working with him at this stage?

LS: Oh, probably about, I suppose, about three years.

Oh, right, so you’d had a pretty good grounding by that stage.

LS: Yes, I had, I knew what to do. But anyway, I didn’t expect to build it all. But

then, when I’d finished cutting all the stone, he said, ‘Well, you might as well start

building.’ So I started building and I finished up, I said, ‘Well, I’m not doing the

roofing.’ I’d done all the timberwork. So Bert came down and helped me put on the

roof sheeting, but other than that I’d done everything else.

So you’d have been, what, about twenty at this stage?

LS: Yes, twenty-one probably. By this time I’d bought a couple of blocks of land

from Bert, across the road from where he lived, and I bought two blocks of land for

eighty-five pounds.

It be worth a bit more than eighty-five pounds now, wouldn’t they?

LS: And then I built what they called a ‘back-ender’, which was sort of – people

would build a garage or in this case it was a double garage, and I built that to live in,

on this land. And I lived in that – I lived there, batched there, for five years – and

when I got married we lived in that for the first three years of our married life, in that

51

back-ender, before we moved into our house in Victoria Terrace. We moved in

there, ‘ready or not’, when Malcolm was born.

So the original place was just left as what you call a back-ender, was it?

LS: Well, we used it then as the garage. And a shed, you know: it was a double

garage. It was quite comfortable.

Did you build a house on it then?

LS: Built a house on the same block, yes. I built a – oh, it’s quite a nice house: it’s

a two-storey, attic-roofed house. And we lived there for I think eight years or so

before we moved up to Kennedy Avenue and we built a large house there on some

land that I had acquired, and so that was where we lived.

But in the building, I went out on my own. After about five years with Bert I

decided that I was going to have a go building contracting on my own.

So there was plenty of work in the area at this stage?

LS: Oh yes. I had a house to start with, and before that was finished I had other

jobs to go to. I started originally with one employee, Dennis Cox, he was my

labourer and he was a good lad, and so the two of us would go and we built the

whole house, built it from foundation to painting.

Was he an apprentice or was he already a builder?

LS: No, he wasn’t officially indentured. He was a labourer, and a good one.

Dennis unfortunately passed away a number of years ago, but he was a very good

worker. But since then I moved on and I formed a partnership with George

Paxford[?]. He and I had a very successful partnership, I think.

It’s a well-known name, the Laslett-Paxford building company.

LS: Yes, it was a well-known building name. George was a good partner, in that he

had probably a better way with men than I did. He would probably get on with some

blokes that I mightn’t have done. But between us we didn’t argue, we (sound of

electrical interference) had a great belief in each other’s ability, and –

So it was a really good partnership.

52

LS: – it was a good partnership. And after a few years we took over a business that

was from Bert Elkins, and Bert was a carpenter and joiner and he had a little

workshop in Sturt Street, and we bought that from him and took over that side of the

business keeping Bert as our foreman of the joinery shop. So after that he didn’t

really go out on the job very much but he ran the joining shop. We built our building

premises in Sturt Street and that’s still there now, I think J-Pack[?] and two or three

other people in it, because it was quite a large building. We employed five or six

people in the joinery shop all the time, and we used to buy our timber in large

flitches. We made most of our joinery out of a timber called western red cedar,

which is imported timber.

So the pine wasn’t used at that stage.

LS: Wasn’t used for joinery, no. And so we used to buy our timber by the semi7-

load and some of the flitches were quite large. I remember one being 40 feet long by

600 wide by 150 thick.

Six hundred’s two feet, is it?

LS: Yes. That’s a –

That’s a big plank, isn’t it?

LS: – fair bit of timber. But that’s how it used to come to us and we had –

And then you’d cut it up.

LS: – saws that we could break them down and then we made – – –. And – oh, very

proud to say some of the cupboards in the better houses, shall I say, probably the

more expensive ones, probably jobs where we didn’t do the building but we certainly

made the joinery, came from our workshop. Out of pine we made all the furniture

for the Tantanoola Catholic Church and for a number of other places we made some

very nice joinery. We made a lot of joinery for Commodore Motels, who were quite

a big chain in them days, and a motel in Melbourne had our shoeboxes in because

they said they couldn’t get them built anywhere there. And hairdressing salons for

one particular designer who lived in Adelaide, we made all the joinery for his

7 ‘semi-‘ = semi-trailer, articulated truck.

53

hairdressing salons – or his clients’ hairdressing salons – all over Australia and

shipped it out from there. We made most of the joinery in the Apcel Mill at

Tantanoola.

That would have been a large job, wouldn’t it?

LS: Oh yes, yes. Well, of course it was built in several sections, but in one

particular section we didn’t have the building contract for that one but we had the

contract for all the joinery. And that involved a lot of round handrail which we made

out of maple; and I had one joiner who was very adept at doing fine work and a

return rising wreath in a handrail is not an easy thing to make.

Who was this fellow?

LS: He was a Polish chap named – well, I always knew him – his name was

[phonetic spelling] Vadislov Bacca. A most interesting fellow, who –

He’d have come out here after the War?

LS: – yes. He had his own joinery business in Poland and when the Germans

invaded he still ran his business but he was – the Germany Army, they ran the show,

they told him what to do. And he made, he said, a lot of roll-top desks for the

Germany Army officers, and coffins. Oh! His wife said, ‘Coffins, everywhere the

coffins!’ He never sort of learned the language very much.

He must have learned enough to get by.

LS: When he migrated to Australia they thought, ‘Oh, he’s to do with timber, we’ll

send him down to the timber mill,’ and so he was there milling, helping with the

milling.

That would have been a waste, wouldn’t it.

LS: Green pine, you know. And he was most unhappy, and somebody who could

interpret the language came to me and said, ‘Can you find him a place?’ And some

dilemma, because you can’t employ someone that you can’t talk to and pay him the

same money as people you can. So I agreed to take him on. And I got into trouble

with the union because I had agreed to employ him for that, but I wasn’t paying him

the same as the other men. Anyway, they did see the light and saw sense in it, and I

realised – – –.

54

END OF DISK 3 PART 2

DISK 3 PART 1

LS: – – – he’d do that very fine work. He was a craftsman, he wasn’t just a joiner,

and he was – – –. (laughs) One day he cut his finger. Well, he’d put it in the planer.

And I said he didn’t ever really learn to speak English very well –

So he swore in Polish, did he?

LS: – so I said, ‘How did it happen, Bacca?’ and he told me, he said, ‘I plane all the

eight-foot timber,’ then he put his hands back and plane and ..... that through. ‘Plane

eight-foot all the morning,’ he said, ‘I plane the eight-foot.’ (pauses) ‘One three-

foot bugger.’ (laughter)

Oh, followed through with the fingers!

LS: I took him to the doctor, who said, ‘Ah, really needs a skin graft.’

Must have been pretty bad.

LS: And Bacca said, ‘What he say?’ And I said, ‘He said it should have a skin

graft.’ ‘What is that?’ I said, ‘Oh, they might take some skin from, say, off your hip

and put it on there.’ He said, ‘No! No. Here sore; not here sore, too.’ (laughter)

He didn’t want to be sore in two places.

LS: So anyway the doc said, ‘Oh, it might be all right,’ so we let him go. But he

was a wonderful person. How hard it was for him, a grandfather at that stage, to

pack up his traps from the country that he’d lived in all his life, established himself

in business, had his own business, to migrate to Australia at his age with nothing.

How old would he have been?

LS: Oh, he would have been in his probably early fifties when he came, and he

worked for me until he passed on, really – well, till he almost passed on he was

there. But a wonderful story of someone’s ingenuity, how they had suffered so

much. He said that whilst he was happy – well, as happy as could be, working for

the Germans, when the Russians came he said –

He wanted to get out.

LS: – ‘Time to go.’

55

That was a good move, anyway.

LS: Yes. But I had another chap, a Dutchman, who worked for us – well, I had

several Dutchmen worked for me – but this chap had eight kids, and he actually went

bald overnight, that fellow. He said he lost all his hair overnight, you know, through

sheer worry. Then to come to Australia and to set up here – – –. But some of the

other Dutchmen thought about going back home for a visit and he said, ‘Never. No

more.’

He never went back?

LS: Never went back. But his family have all done well and are a great credit to

him, to him and his wife.

What was his name, Uncle?

LS: His name was Denys. But a very fine character, very nice man. And that

happened with a number of people that we employed over the years. But the Dutch

were a strange race, in that we had some Dutchmen from one part of the country and

some from another, and they never spoke at all.

Didn’t they?

LS: No, no, no. No connection. And I believe that Holland is like that: there’s a

part of the country, I think the southern part is Catholic and the other part’s

Protestant or vice versa.

So they can’t talk to each other.

LS: No. Well, you know – and whereas some of them are fair in complexion the

others are quite dark. And we had both types worked together, but some of the

Dutchmen would get on very much better with the Germans or Poles than they ever

did with their fellow countrymen. But anyway, I suppose I should tell you about

some of the jobs that we did.

Yes, that’d be good.

LS: The name ‘Laslett and Paxton[?]’ became quite well-known. Apart from many

houses we constructed, including three at Balranald in New South Wales – – –.

That’s a long way to go.

56

LS: Well, they liked the idea of the coolness of a Mount Gambier stone home –

Oh, right, you used the limestone.

LS: – yes, transported the limestone up. We went up there to build one house for a

friend of my bank manager’s, then his neighbour wanted one, and then the bloke

who carted the stone asked then. They were on rural properties, so we built those.

We built three schools –

Which were they?

LS: – MacDonell Park, East Gambier – East Gambier Infant – and Reidy Park. We

built those three schools, three churches, the initial building for SES8 television

station.

What were the three churches?

LS: They were the Church of Christ on Jubilee Highway, the Baptists in

Macarthur[?] Street and the Presbyterian in Boandick Terrace. We built

Woolworth’s, where Border Watch is now; large sections of the panelboard factory

in White Avenue; large amounts, including the highest part, of Softwood Holdings,

which is their site out Millicent Road; the library; the chapel; and the other units at

Boandick Lodge; all of Mount Gambier Pine Industries; all the Bank of New South

Wales renovations and extensions; motels; sub-divisions on what was – a sub-

division we developed on Crennans Estate; hospital buildings, quite large sections of

that; big sections of the Apcel Paper Mill.

These are all pretty large jobs so you must have had a reasonable workforce at

this stage.

LS: Yes. We did service stations, et cetera. We had about, I think, twenty-eight of

our own employees and we would have employed as many sub-contractors and their

employees, so at any one time we’d have nearly sixty people that were getting a

living out of Laslett and Paxford.

Well, by that stage, then, it must have taken a lot of your time just to manage the

staff, wouldn’t it? Or were you still active in the building part of it?

LS: Well, you see, of course the bigger part of it was that you didn’t get these jobs

without you contracted for them.

57

Well, that’d be a huge job.

LS: And pricing of that was sort of solely my job. Which involved me working

night and day almost because there was only me and the office girl to do that. And

some of the jobs, forty years ago, that cost say six hundred thousand pounds –

Yes. Well, they’d be millions and millions of dollars.

LS: – this was millions today. (laughs) In fact, I see they do some extensions or

something and it’s over a million. And of course you didn’t get every job you

tendered for.

No, but you would have had to have put the work in to tender for them.

LS: Yes. I missed the building of the Mount Gambier High School by less than a

quarter of one per cent.

Ooh! That was close.

LS: (laughs) It was close, and had I had one sub-contractor’s price in time I would

have won it. But less than a quarter of one per cent. And that took a good deal of

work because –

It’s a huge place.

LS: – no computers.

No computers, no.

LS: We did have an adding machine.

That would have helped a little bit.

LS: But, you know, you had to take –

Everything would be drawn.

LS: – take off the quantities of all the materials and huge pad of big plans.

And you couldn’t afford to get it wrong, either.

LS: Oh, no, no, no.

You’d need to keep your finger on the pulse.

LS: If you made a mistake you had to wear it. But I quite enjoyed that challenge. I

did that; George looked after mainly the outside staff, I sort of organised the sub-

58

contractors, Bert Elkins[?] handled the joinery. But we had trucks and things and

delivery things and somebody had to do all of the different jobs – the ordering of

materials and what have you. But it was a – I quite enjoyed the job. And we were

the largest locally-owned construction company in Mount Gambier. There were

some fairly big builders.

I also had always had a, I suppose, aptitude for design, and I guess had

circumstances been different in my earlier years, and I’d gone on to high school and

done the rest and perhaps to university, I think I might have been an architect. But I

can honestly say that I’ve designed some very nice houses and buildings. A lot of

companies, they would tell me of their desires and say, ‘Draw it up and get it done,’

and that’s there. So that was something I always – – –.

So do you think that was your strong point in you could visualise – – –?

LS: Well, I’ve always been able to visualise something completed before it was put

down on paper, you know, I’ve been able to see, ‘Well, this’ll look like that,’ and so

that’s been a way of life and I still dabble in something.

So it’s been a lifelong interest.

LS: Oh yes, that’s been something that I’ve always done. I’ve still got a drafting

machine. And I like to see pride of achievement. Actually, I’ve just thought of

another church I’ve built, and that was the Dartmoor Church – it was a beautiful,

classic little church design. A lot of our work was for architects, and over the years

we formed some good relationships with those people. And some of our suppliers,

over the number of years that we were in the business, we made some very good

relationships in there. We had an agency for tileware and hardware and also our

own insurance thing, an agency with our own insurance.

So you had a fair bit of the building side of things covered.

LS: Oh yes, we had it pretty well covered. And we tried to employ, as nearly as

possible, the same sub-contractors. If they were good. There was usually two of

them and they would compete against each other so we were getting a good price.

But they liked working for us. One of the reasons was I think they liked being paid.

(laughter)

That’s always a big incentive, if you get paid!

59

LS: Yes. Well, you know, they knew that there, and our practice in building was

that we paid all our accounts on the last Friday of every month, and that was a

policy, so we could never get very deeply in debt.

No. That’s probably a good idea.

LS: But that side of business management, we had to do that, too. Unfortunately, a

lot of my good friends in the building industry were good builders but they were

hopeless businessmen, and that’s why so many builders went broke. I remember

saying to one of them once, ‘Stan, you’re building an awful lot of houses.’ He said,

‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Are you making any money out of them?’ He said, ‘Well, to be

honest with you, Keith, I wouldn’t really know.’

Ooh! That’s a recipe for disaster.

LS: By the time he found out, well, of course it was too late. And that was sad,

because that fellow was a good builder and he was a hell of a nice fellow, but he just

didn’t –

Didn’t have the business ability.

LS: – well, he couldn’t be bothered. He had building to do! (laughter)

Well, I suppose. A lot of people aren’t interested in that sort of thing.

LS: It does happen. But to do that, was there. But I, apart from being that I was

very much involved in the Builders’ and Allied Trades’ Association, which was the

forerunner of the Housing Industry Association. Builders’ and Allied Trades’ was

founded in Melbourne and I was the South Australian delegate to that organisation,

which involved me going to Melbourne every three months to meetings.

And would they set standards for the industry, or what was their purpose?

LS: I guess their purpose was one of mutual help, and you certainly needed that in

those days, particularly soon after the War: everything was rationed for a number of

years and you could only get so much cement to build a house, you could only get a

certain amount of roofs, and I don’t know whether the administration I suspect might

have cost more than (laughter) the actual thing. But however, that’s how it was.

And they also set a standard and they started an assurance scheme whereby any

60

member contracted to build everything to a HIA standard, and that was the

forerunner of Quality.

Up until that stage, then, were there any building standards, or anybody could

just go in and whack up one?

LS: No, there’s always been a Building Act and a code. The architects would have

had a fair bit to do with the formation of that, the Institute of Architect, and that

generally was administered to some extent by local councils and their building

inspectors.

Oh, right, they had a building inspector.

LS: Yes. But generally speaking that was it. But, as in everything else, there are

always those who take a shortcut or do something wrong, and you couldn’t be a

member of the Builders’ and Allied Trades’ Association if you were there, or if you

were found out doing that you quickly wasn’t. But it became something of a

guarantee for home owners to have a house built by a Housing Industry Association

member.

So if you were a member then it would attract the ordinary person to get a house

built by you.

LS: Yes, that’s right. And if anybody had a complaint, they went to the

Association, who looked at it and if it was a genuine one then they would ensure that

that builder went back. You had to place a bond, you had to put up a bond, which

was a guarantee of good faith, which I think is a great idea, really. And I was

involved in formulating some of those policies, and that was a sense of some

achievement. We used to meet at the Commercial Travellers’ Association in

Flinders Street, and that’s where I first learnt to eat oysters Kilpatrick. (laughter)

Country boy goes to the city.

LS: And so we would have dinner and then we would have a meeting. I don’t know

what’s transpired since, but some years ago I received an invitation to attend a

gathering of all of the old original HIA members with the idea of writing a book, this

one chap was going to write a book. And so he sent out to all of us, all of the old

originals: I walked into that room and, God, there were some old people there!

(laughter)

61

You weren’t one of them?

LS: We each had to have a bit of a say, you see, and I said, ‘I can’t get over how

you people have aged.’ The reply: ‘Well, have you looked in the mirror lately?’

But on reflection I guess I was one of the younger ones in that original thing.

Regrettably, the bloke who organised it all and took all the things died very suddenly

three weeks afterwards.

So the book never got written?

LS: Well, I don’t think so, no.

That’s a bit of a pity.

LS: Yes, it is. But there were some pretty hard times. If you wanted to get a bath or

something for a house you just about had to bribe somebody, it was that sort of

scarce.

How long after the War did this go on for?

LS: Oh, this went I suppose the best part of ten years.

Really! Gee.

LS: You know, there was restrictions on this or that. And so that was an aspect of

the thing and something there. So there we go.

Well, we’ve covered a fair bit of your building work, Uncle Keith. What about –

how did you meet Auntie Carleen?

LS: Oh!

Because she must have been around by this stage.

LS: Oh yes, yes. She was around, I think – well, she’s been around for about fifty-

four years. I was very involved with the church in those days, and particularly the

PFA, which is the Presbyterian Fellowship Association, and we had attended an

Easter camp at Naracoorte. And it was there that Carleen and I became friendly.

And one thing led to another, and we met on – as I said earlier – we lived the first

almost three years of our married life in a back-ender until we built our house, and

then we moved into our house, unfinished as it was, when Malcolm was born.

Malcolm’s your first son.

62

LS: First son, yes. He was born three years after we were married. And then came

David. Sort of about every two and a half or three years –

Another boy came along.

LS: – another boy, and another boy with Craig. Then last of all Richard. In that

time we had moved from the house in Victoria Terrace after eight years, we then

moved up to a house in Kennedy Avenue – Ray Scott now lives in that house.

Would have got a nice view from up there.

LS: Oh, magnificent, yes. I bought the land before I’d finished the house in

Victoria Terrace, and I always thought, ‘One day I’ll build a house up there.’ And so

we built it, and it was a large house and it had everything, a swimming pool and all

that.

You’d have been popular with all the kids in the district, then.

LS: Oh yes, yes. We had there, all of our kids learnt to swim there and they, most

of them – well, they were all good swimmers. So that was there. And it was whilst

we were there that I had my first heart attack. It was also about that time, or soon

after that, that the Public Buildings Department came to me and said did I know of

anyone who could look after their major construction in the South-East. And I said,

‘Oh, that would have been a good job for me when I retired.’ (laughter)

So the wheels were going round.

LS: But not thinking that I would, you know. And I said, ‘Oh, it sounds a good job

for me when I retire,’ but they said, ‘Well, you wouldn’t leave this.’ I said I’d think

about it. I went home and told Carleen that night and she said, ‘You’ve had a

warning: take the job.’ And I said, ‘I can’t just leave this.’ But it’s amazing what

you can do. Nobody’s indispensable. And so I allowed my name to be put forward

and (laughs) they said, ‘No worries, you’ve got the job if you want it.’

How old were you at this stage? Fifties?

LS: Yes, yes, I would have been in – so it’s about thirty years ago. I’ll have to think

about that.

Close to fifty then, maybe?

63

LS: Had the kids – – –. Just switch it off for a minute. (break in recording)

So we reckon you were only about early forties.

LS: Yes, early forties. So I took the job and it was quite a change to work thirty-

seven and a half hours a week from about the eighty that I’d been doing.

So it would have been a little bit less stressful.

LS: But my job was as a senior building inspector for the extensions to the Mount

Gambier Hospital, doubling the size of the nurses’ home, building the School of

Nursing, the TAFE8 college, the courthouse and Grant High School, were all my

jurisdiction. I worked with a young architect who really, I suppose, was my boss, a

chap named David Chapman, who’s been very –

Well-known name in Mount Gambier.

LS: – successful. But David’s first introduction to Mount Gambier was at the

Public Buildings Department and – – –. (break in recording)

END OF DISK 3 PART 1

DISK 4 PART 1

LS: David, David Chapman, I was old enough to be his father. But he and I got on

very, very well and are still today great friends. We have enormous respect for each

other. And I think the builders quite appreciated the fact that they didn’t have to go

to Adelaide to get an answer to their problems. For my part, whilst it was a job that

was demanding, it wasn’t any trouble for me to interpret plans. (laughs) In fact –

Well, you’d been doing it for a long time.

LS: – the work was fairly largely what I’d been doing, but in this case I didn’t have

to pay the bills or hire the staff, so it was a much easier lifestyle. Easier to the extent

that I could see that it would be wrong of me to expect that my superannuation

would keep me in my old age. I don’t say I became bored because I don’t think

you’d ever become bored, but I did look a bit to the future, to where we were going.

We had always caravanned up until this stage: we had a caravan and we used that

and it was a great way to travel with the kids.

64

Would you use the caravan each year, or – – –?

LS: Oh! We did more than that. If it was a nice weekend we’d –

Hook the caravan up.

LS: – hook the caravan on and head over to the Grampians. Our kids loved the

Grampians, they loved to climb up the mountains and – – –. Or we’d go down to

Portland or somewhere. But at other times we used to go to Mildura every

Christmas and to Robe every Easter, and we went with friends who had a boat and so

we spent a lot of time water-skiing. The kids could all ski, Malcolm particularly

very well. But anyway, on that side I became, I suppose, looking to the future and

thinking that, ‘Well, one day it might be nice to run a caravan park.’ I saw this bit of

dirt for sale and I thought, ‘Now, that’s not a bad location for a caravan park.’

Just on the way into Mount Gambier.

LS: Yes. And the upshot of it was that we bought that and we developed what was

a cow paddock into the state’s highest-rated caravan park.

Did you work as the building inspector while you were still building up the

caravan park?

LS: Yes. Carleen – we sort of built the initial stages of it. I employed a lot of

fellows at weekends because I knew so many in the trade, and we built the

rec[reation] room, I think twelve bathrooms and the main amenities block. The

caravan park I designed on what we had thought would be ideal, in that it would be

an ‘en-suite’ park, in that each caravan could pull into its own bathroom.

Sounds good.

LS: Well, we’d sort of had sending the kids over to the toilet and they’d come back,

there was no paper or they’d leave their jocks9 there if they went for a shower or

something, and so we thought this would be ideal. And I designed the park on that

sort of theme.

What did you name it?

8 TAFE – Technical and Further Education.

9 ‘jocks’ = underpants.

65

LS: Kalganyi.

And how did you get the name?

LS: Well, we were pondering what might be a suitable name and there were all the

usuals that came up, but we were looking in the Reader’s Digest book of Aboriginal

names and one of the kids said, ‘Here’s one, Dad: “Kalganyi”.’ The first three

letters are my initials and so it seemed right, and that was an Aboriginal name for

‘camping ground’, so there you go.

So you had your name.

LS: So we had the name. And people say, ‘That place with the funny name.’ It

wasn’t ‘Sunset Rest’ or something like that. So that’s where the name came from,

out of the Reader’s Digest book of Aboriginal sayings, word meanings. So that’s

how we had that name. But I’d been after about four years with the Department I

elected to take permanent part-time employment, which meant that I’d work three

days a week. Some weeks I might work seven days if the job demanded that and

some weeks I’d only work two, or whatever. That went on for another five years, I

suppose, during which time I was building up Kalganyi. In fact, I don’t know that

we really stopped building up Kalganyi.

Just an ongoing process.

LS: Yes. So we built there, I think we had forty-two sites with their own

bathrooms, and by then we’d found that cabins were the thing and we had forty-two

cabins. Which involved a lot of (interference with microphone obscures speech) and

toilets and –

Big plumbing jobs.

LS: – yes, big plumbing jobs. We did all our own work; the only work we didn’t do

was the electrical work, and our son David did that until he was killed. But the park

has won a number of awards for things. It was, as I said, the highest-rated in the

state. And we were quite proud of that. But none of it would have happened without

Carleen because, whilst I was working for the Public Buildings Department –

She must have been there.

LS: – well, she was the cleaner, you know, the (laughs) –

66

Yes, everything.

LS: – the office girl and the bookkeeper, and she’d wash the curtains and make the

bedspreads and all of those things. So it was truly very much a partnership. And we

stayed there for twenty years. When we first moved there we lived in the games

room, which was an upstairs building. Then we moved to what we called ‘the office

house’, which is the house that has the office and the shop attached. And lastly we

moved to the other house that we’d built on the place. So we had three moves there,

we didn’t change our address or location very much.

And, well, our son David was going to take over the park from the old man, he

was going to do it. He would have been very good, because David had a nature that

would get on with people whether they were eight years old or eighty. A pretty rare

combination, but it’s one that’s fairly necessary in an industry that has that much

public contact. He was going to ride his new motorbike around Australia, him and

his mate; unfortunately that was not to be because, when he was taking his bike

down for its last service, he was killed. And that – well, sad and all as that was, it

certainly really put all of our ideas into reserve, because just suddenly we didn’t have

that – – –. Malcolm at that stage was plumbing and he was working in Darwin, he

was working for O’Connor’s, and he particularly worked on the patrol boat base and

on the lift equipment that lifts the corvette boats, patrol boats, out of the water in the

cyclone season, puts them up on the bank, and the sort of pipework and plumbing

and that involved was what Malcolm was doing. Craig was at uni doing civil

engineering, he was doing a vacation job up on the Stuart Highway. And Richard

was home, about to start uni. So that meant that our workforce – – –. And pretty

largely, you know, from day one them kids helped build Kalganyi, it’s as much a

credit to them. They worked very, very well; I think myself that it was probably

better for them to work with me and learn some skills, which they do have, than me

perhaps trying to make a fool of myself playing sport with them. You’ll never know

the difference with that, but that’s the way it was. I insisted that they be like

workmen, keep their time –

So it was run as a business.

LS: – and I paid them accordingly, so that when they were old enough to buy a

motorbike or whatever they had the money to walk into the shop and buy it, and a

67

ute or whatever they wanted to buy, they had the money to buy it. But they had

earned it, no doubt about it, they had earned that money. And Kalganyi went on

with a very, very good reputation. We sold it twelve years ago and we probably

stayed there longer than we would have done had one of the boys been interested in

taking it over. But they weren’t, and I’m glad that they made their own decision.

Yes, they’ve all made their own way in life.

LS: Well, I’m pleased that they didn’t feel duty-bound to follow the old man’s – – –

. David would have done it and would have been very good at it, but the others

really it wasn’t their cup of tea. And so we’re very pleased as a family-wise that

they chose not to. We think the price we sold it for was reward for our efforts, and

we wouldn’t have sold it for less. We sold it on the condition that the price was

fixed, but how they paid for it wasn’t necessarily so, so we’ve had a mortgage over

the place ever since until a few weeks ago, when it was sold again and the people

didn’t want our money! (laughter) So that’s really the story of Kalganyi.

In our tenure there we naturally became involved, as we seem always to do, in the

tourism associations and the local one and the district one and the state one. I was a

member of the local association, a member of the South-East Regional Tourist

Association and a delegate to SATA, the South Australian Tourist Association. So

we had a big input in there.

Did you enjoy that side of things?

LS: Oh yes, yes, it was something that I could do and it meant mixing with other

people in the industry.

And I suppose you’d pick up ideas from each other.

LS: Well, yes. We were in the Caravan Parks Association, too, that was quite there.

Carleen was mainly our representative on that state body. I have a trophy there

that’s the Harry Darling Award, which was the highest state award that an individual

could receive, and I was the second person to receive that award. Because we were

in the caravan park industry, we became involved with an organisation called Big

Four Tourist Parks. They started with four parks in Ballarat who were getting a bit

of a raw deal from council, so they decided, all the opposition ones, to get together,

which they did. And they called themselves the Big Four. Collectively they could

68

go to the council and get legitimate plans approved, but because the council had a

park as well they really had a lot of trouble getting legitimate building plans

approved. So they had a win there. And they then decided that this bloke down the

road, he wasn’t such a bad sort of a bloke after all, and they believed that something

needed to be done about standards in caravan parks. Like the travelling public

wouldn’t know by just looking at a caravan park guide what the –

What the standards were.

LS: – what the standards were. The toilets could be long-drops, or they could be

tiled and what have you; the cleanliness; the management of the parks. And so they

set about to do something about this. They formed themselves into an organisation.

We were early members because I’d heard of this and I thought, ‘Well, that might be

for us.’

‘Sounds like a good idea.’

LS: And so we were the first park in South Australia to belong to it and probably

about, I think, four in Ballarat, two in Bendigo: I think we were the eighth park to

join. We used to have meetings in Ballarat or Bendigo, delegates’ meetings. I got

myself involved in being on the committee, then I was the – secretary wanted a

change so I think I took over as secretary, I was the vice-president and then the

president. And it was in my term as president that we acquired a greater number of

parks – I think we went up to fifty-six in the first instance – we had an affiliation

with Kampgrounds of America and with Top Ten Tourist Parks in New Zealand.

There was an organisation called Wes Nova Parks [?] in Western Australia, and they

suggested that we ought to form a coalition but we said, ‘No, you can join us if you

want to, if your parks are good enough.’ And we set a very rigid standard, and so

you had to come up to that standard before you could become a member. And we

didn’t compromise that, we had a set of rules and you had to abide by them.

I think I was president for about five years, and when I eventually got rid of that

job we hadn’t renewed our contract with our executive officer and they said to me,

‘You’ve got nothing to do, you can do this.’ So I promised that I would do that for

one year. In fact, it was five. It was a job that I could do and did do. It involved me

going to most capital cities every year.

69

So a lot of travel.

LS: A fair bit of travelling. By then we’d employed people at the park so I was free

–

That released you from – – –.

LS: – yes, it allowed me to do this. I enjoyed the job. You had to be pretty firm in

your decisions. I think I did a good job, and again Carleen backed me up, that’s why

I guess we’ve both got life memberships of that organisation.

So all through your life with Carleen it’s been a partnership always.

LS: Yes, been a team effort. So anyway, I ran that show. Several things happened

in my tenure: mainly that our membership increased to almost a hundred, in every

state in Australia. It was my job to organise the annual conventions and the caravan

and camping shows in each of the capital cities, and all the executive meetings and

the ordinary general meetings – we had four of them a year – and the executive

would invariably meet the day before or something like that. But it became quite a

big business. Not nearly as big as it is now, but it became a big business. And at the

twenty-second convention there were two of us – my predecessor as chairman and I

– who had been involved in the administration of the thing for half its life, for eleven

years, so we certainly had an input into that. And we are, as life members, invited to

all of the annual conventions.

Do you still go to those?

LS: Only very occasionally. Sometimes – I think it was wrong, and I’ve expressed

this to people – they shouldn’t defer to us older people. As I told one bloke, I said,

‘We’re yesterday’s people.’ Times move on, no matter what organisation you’re in.

If it’s a successful one it’s moving forward.

Yes, you need new ideas coming in.

LS: And I said, ‘We’re not to be deferred to’ (laughs) ‘as how things happened in

our day.’ I said, ‘You can think what you like.’ But it’s a new team now, and

they’re doing well. I was asked at a convention in Sydney to present four life

memberships to people, and of course these days the dinner is a black tie job.

Be no good for me!

70

LS: And I said, ‘We’ve come a long way. I remember when we had to get two

prices for green T-shirts to wear at the show stand. And look at this!’

Yeah, black tie job.

LS: However, that’s what –

Progress, I suppose.

LS: – well, I suppose it is, yes. But there were a lot of us there who remembered

our more humble beginnings. And it was humble beginnings, and I often said, ‘I’m

pleased we did have humble beginnings, because we moved a bit slowly but we

didn’t make mistakes, we knew what we were doing.’ I was very much involved in

the franchising of that organisation, which was quite a job – not just a matter of walk

into a lawyer’s office and say, ‘Look, we want to franchise this.’

You’re dealing with a lot of organisations, aren’t you, a lot of businesses.

LS: Yes, you do. And each individual, and of course each one had to – – –.

And everybody would have to be considered.

LS: At one stage I sacked the lawyer, which caused one of my executive members

to say, ‘You’ve done WHAT?’ I said, ‘I’ve sacked the lawyer.’ ‘Oh, my God,’ he

said, ‘He’ll sue us for every bloody penny we’ve got.’ I said, ‘I don’t think so.’

(laughs) He was incompetent and I pointed that out to him and he bloody knew it.

But I had three mayors on my executive at one stage, the mayors of Queenscliff,

Kiama and – oh, what the hell’s the name of the place? – anyhow, it’s in that Bega

area ..... ..... ..... So you had to be a bit sharp on meeting procedure, had to know

what you were doing. So that was all there.

But the great thing about Big Four is that we were a family of people, everybody

was like a family member – and this was in the old days when it was possible, can’t

do that now with over a hundred people. But we made some marvellous friendships,

friendships that we carry on to this day. Anywhere in the world that – – –. And we

did make them in the world, too. People in America and New Zealand, particularly.

I tried to get an involvement in England, but the English – they since have, but they

don’t travel any great distance in England and they couldn’t get over this, you know,

travelling three hundred k’s from one place to another in a day! But anyway, that’s

since been proved differently. (break in recording)

71

You mentioned earlier, Uncle Keith, about your son David’s death, and that must

have been a traumatic experience for all of you. When you were a young boy of

eleven your own father died, and that also must have been a traumatic experience

for somebody so young. Could you just explain the circumstances of that for us?

LS: Robert, I remember my father’s death quite well. He’d been ill for a long time

and I guess, being a youngster, his imminent death was probably kept from me rather

than the older members of the family would have perhaps known that – – –.

He’d been sick for a long time, hadn’t he.

LS: Yes, he had. (break in recording) Some of us had been over to milk the cows

over at Elmsley, and when we came home we saw Dr King’s green Buick at the front

gate. We whipped up Bessie, the horse, to get home, and when we arrived home the

others went into Dad’s bedroom; I put the milk cans on the stage and went and

looked after the horse. When I arrived to the bedroom it was to see Dr King lift up

Dad’s hand to feel for a pulse and nod to Mum to indicate that Dad had died. He

then gently closed his eyes.

I remember crying and feeling very sad. Someone brought a shed door, which

was placed on a trestle, and Auntie Grace was there to lay out the body.

This was the usual arrangement in those days.

LS: Yes, that was. You didn’t send for the undertaker to come and get the body, it

was the usual thing. Phone calls had to be made and not least to my brother Jack,

who was teaching at a primary school called Salt Lake which was near Snowtown.

I next saw my father, who was covered with a sheet, pennies had been placed over

his eyes to keep them closed and a bandage under his chin and around the top of his

head to keep his mouth closed.

This must have been a hard thing for an eleven year-old boy to cope with. But

that was just the way things were done in those days.

LS: It’s the way things were done. Pearce’s the undertakers came the next day and

placed the body in a coffin. I remember my father looking very handsome and

peaceful, with his hands clasped together and wearing a bow-tie.

Right. Was the bow-tie something that he would have worn quite often?

LS: Oh yes, they were pretty smart, I tell you. Una and I were considered to be too

young and therefore not allowed to go to the funeral at the Bay Cemetery. In those

72

days funerals always left from the deceased’s home. Looking back over my life, I

guess I have always been grateful to the memory of my father, even though I was

fortunate in having older brothers and sisters to help Mum in my upbringing.

Nevertheless, as a teenager and a young man, it would have been nice to have been

able to talk to my father and to seek his advice.

Yes. So you missed out on what could have been another twenty or thirty years of

having your father around.

LS: Yes. Well, for some time anyway it would have been.

So it must have been really hard for Grandma Laslett then, at that stage,

because – – –.

LS: Mum had, I think, a very difficult time. Not only were two of her sons away at

the War –

That would have been a little bit later, wouldn’t it? Next year.

LS: – yes, that’s the next year, but it was all in those times. I remember a packet

arriving from Elders Trustees, where all the accounts had to go after my father’s

death because the property was in his name, and all these insurmountable,

seemingly, bills to be paid in those days. Some of my uncles advised Mum that she

should sell the place. And I think some of them would have been ready there to pick

up a bloody bargain themselves.

So she didn’t do that?

LS: No. She was quite determined that Dad had built this property for his family,

and that his family would have it. And so she had a difficult time, to not only try and

make ends meet but I guess some responsibility for bringing up those that were left

home, and certainly there would have in wartime been concerns about my brothers.

And she was not a hundred per cent well woman herself.

Didn’t she lose a kidney, or was that later?

LS: Yes, she should have lost one, as the doctor told her, much sooner because it

had damaged her other kidney. But she lived for thirty years with one kidney. But

she was quite a remarkable woman in many ways. (handling of papers, break in

recording)

73

No account of my boyhood and teenage years could be complete without some

reference to my parents, brothers and sisters. I guess it would be right to describe

my parents as sincere and very practical Christians. Their strong beliefs in their faith

and the practice of Christian tenets in their daily living was an example to their

children and all who knew them. Sunday was always regarded as a special day – and

I think I mentioned this earlier, about having to clean boots and things.

Yes, and not do any work. Wasn’t allowed to do any work on Sunday.

LS: No. No, that’s right. That was taboo. My parents were always, I suppose,

hosts. We seemed to have a lot of visitors, whereas we didn’t visit very much.

So your mum must have been a good cook, in other words.

LS: Well, she was a wonderful provider. I don’t know how she did it, but she did.

And my eldest brother was Jack, and he was educated at the Kingsley School, as in

fact we all were. After gaining his QC, which was the Qualifying Certificate, a

requirement for proceeding to high school, Jack furthered his studies by

correspondence at home, this study being at night and by candlelight. His success in

this regard enabled him to gain acceptance to the Teachers’ College in Adelaide and

so become a primary school teacher. Jack was highly regarded as a teacher in his

several appointments. He enlisted in the RAAF10

during the 1939-45 war. After

gaining his wings as an observer he was posted to Canada for further training in the

Empire Air Scheme. He was posted to Britain and, fortunately or unfortunately, on

the eve of his departure he slipped on the ice breaking both his leg and his ankle.

And so he was left on his own in Canada without anybody that he really knew.

Many of Jack’s flight members were lost in Europe during the Battle of Britain.

After suffering two separate attacks of kidney stones, each requiring surgery, Jack

was invalided home to Australia to resume his teaching career. Jack suffered a heart

attack whilst watching his beloved Sturt football team and died in hospital a few

hours later on the 9th

May 1965, aged fifty-three years.

My next brother, Reg, was born on the 7th October 1913. To a large extent, Reg’s

boyhood years were the same as his older brother Jack, and after gaining his QC he

further studied at night. In fact, I can recall them both seated at the same small table

74

in the boys’ room. While Jack’s interests were in sporting activities – cricket and all

ball sports – Reg’s great loves were fishing and shooting, at both of which he

excelled. I remember an occasion after hearing one gunshot Reg walking up the

paddock with two rabbits. When I suggested that it must have been a good shot he

told me that actually he had shot three, but one had escaped in the bushes –

whereupon his dog laid the third rabbit at his feet.

It’s a good effort.

LS: I’ve been peeved to sit in the same boat, using the same bait and tackle as Reg,

when Reg would receive numerous bites, me not a nibble. He would catch King

George Whiting and me trumpeter. Reg was a very resourceful person: he could

make things with his hands. He valued his tools and later made a collection of old

hand tools. Reg was interested in the Agricultural Bureau, the Presbyterian

Fellowship Association, the Sunday School and church activities. He was a farmer

and farmed at O.B. Flat and Allendale East. At the age of forty Reg accepted a call

and the challenge to full-time ministry in the Methodist Church. His first

appointment was at Goolwa in South Australia. This was truly Reg’s vocation; his

love of people and his enthusiasm for his work could well and appropriately be

summed up with the remark of one of his parishioners: ‘The best parson we ever

had.’

Man of the people.

LS: Yes. Reg retired from the ministry but he never stopped work, his chaplaincy

role at Resthaven being greatly appreciated. Reg died in Adelaide on the 11th

March

1995 in his eighty-second year.

The next child in the family is Rosa Grace.

LS: Yes. She was born on the 26th July 1916 and she, like her two brothers and

other members of the family, attended the Kingsley School. I cannot recall much of

Rosa’s early years, to me she was always my ‘big sister’, and I’m sure by the time I

was born she would have been a great assistance to my parents in helping with the

younger children. The helping of others was to be typical of Rosa’s life.

10 RAAF – Royal Australian Air Force.

75

I remember Auntie Rosa as being she had a really good, nice nature and always

jovial.

LS: Yes, she liked a laugh, she really did. And she married a bit late in life, I

suppose, but she married a widower, Rowley Edge[?], and they built a new home on

their property, but after some time they sold the farm and purchased the Allendale

East General Store.

I think all the kids, when they went to the store, they got good value for their

money when the lollies were doled out by with Auntie Grace.

LS: I’m sure that that would be so. Rosa died quite early in life really, by today’s

standards, in 1976 at age sixty years. And she was sadly missed by the community,

the Methodist Church and her husband Rowley and sons Rowley and Larry.

Brother Bill was next in line – William Langford, he kept on my granny’s maiden

name. In his early years he was always known as ‘Willy’. He was born just two

days before Armistice was declared in World War I. Old Mrs Lithgow, the midwife,

referred to him as the ‘peace baby’. It could be said that Bill was a born farmer, and

I’ve certainly not known a time when he would have wished to do otherwise.

Bill was a bloke of tremendous physical strength. His ability to lift a very large

redgum strainer post, walk it over to the hole when he could hardly put his arms

around it, and drop it down the hole that he had previously dug – – –.

Yes, I think his son, Peter, inherited that ability too, he’s very strong.

LS: I can remember him climbing up the tower of a windmill with the windmill

head over his shoulder, lifting it above his head and dropping it in the slot.

That would take a bit of doing.

LS: Oh, it certainly would. He was a very, very strong man. During the Second

World War Bill joined the Light Horse Regiment. They were camped at the

Glenburnie Racecourse and they were encouraged to supply their own horses. Bill

took our mare, Bessie, and she was involved in a great stampede of horses and was

never again to be completely trusted. Bill then joined the 2nd

/27th

Infantry Battalion.

He saw service both in Australia and overseas, particularly in New Guinea and

Borneo. I have heard others tell of Bill’s bravery and leadership, but it’s a subject

that he does not speak about. I recall that on his return from military duties Bill and

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I had a discussion about our futures. It was obvious to each of us that the farm

would not be able to support both of us. Bill insisted that the choice would be mine

and the other perhaps could find a job. Having spent all the war years at the farm I

was more than happy to try and seek employment, which I did.

Bill was the first recipient of the Citizen of the Year for the Port MacDonnell

Council, he was a director of the Gambier West Cheese Factory, went on an industry

promotion tour to the Middle Eastern countries. Bill was a member of Rotary for

many years and was awarded a Paul Harris Fellowship. His long service as Justice

of the Peace was recognised at a Parliament House ceremony. His service to the

Firefighting Association has also been publicly recognised. Many words would be

needed to describe Bill’s involvement in the church as a member and a lay preacher,

a very dedicated member of numerous committees, commitment in all aspects of

both the spiritual and temporal life of the church. At over eighty years Bill is still

involved with his beloved farm.

Now, the next child in the family is my mum, Emily Lillian.

LS: Yes, she’s my second sister. And I suppose it was she who had the doubtful

privilege or task of taking young Keith to school on his first day. I doubt that it

would have been a very great pleasure to her.

Probably not.

LS: Emmy, as she has always been known, like the rest of us was expected to help

with the chores about the house and properties, and I well remember the arguments

between us about washing the dishes, et cetera. Following my father’s death Emmy

would have been a great comfort and assistance to Mum, especially in those very

dark days of the War. I recall Mum, Emmy, Una and I listening to Churchill’s

famous speech: ‘We will fight on the beaches. We will never surrender.’ To a

recently widowed woman with seemingly impossible difficulties and only her three

youngest children to help, Emmy as the eldest of these would have been relied upon

to be Mum’s right-hand man. Emmy was the only one old enough to legally drive

the Oakland car.

She married your dad, Gordon Thompson, and now as a widow lives on part of the

farm, Kingsley Road, Allendale East. She and Gordon had four children, your two

sisters and brother Bill. Emmy was a staunch Presbyterian and frequently called

77

upon to fill the role of organist at the worship service. Her husband, Gordon, had a

passionate love of cricket and this has been passed on to his sons and grandsons,

their exploits in the field being a source of pride and enjoyment to Emmy.

Now, you’re the next in the line.

LS: Yes, I think you’ve heard enough about me!

And the last child in the family is Una May.

LS: Yes, Una’s a year and eleven months younger than me, so she’s the –

The baby of the family.

LS: – the baby of the family, and she was born on my dad’s birthday. And Una’s

early years would have much been the same as Emmy’s and mine: school, Sunday

School, church being the only diversions from the daily work. Being wartime,

organised sport was practically non-existent.

So you didn’t have any sport during the War?

LS: No, not really, nothing organised. The only sort of social activities were

associated with the church or farewell functions when the boys went off and enlisted,

and the welcome home ones when they came back from the War. But there was a

big event for Una, who was aged nine, and me eleven, was a trip to Adelaide. Reg

and Rosa were to be best man and bridesmaid for brother Jack’s wedding in

Snowtown. And we all travelled in Cousin George’s V8 Ford truck with a canvas

canopy over the back to Adelaide.

Your mum would have been there as well?

LS: No, no, Mum had to stop home to help Grandma with the milking.

Yes. I mean – oh, so Grandma didn’t go either.

LS: No, no.

Grandma and Em stayed home.

LS: Only Una and I. And Reg and Rosa, who were not sort of resident at home,

they went, and Una and I went and we stayed with Uncle Alf and Auntie Mag down

at Glenelg, and then we went out and stayed with Uncle Bert and Auntie Lyley

78

Worth at Payneham. It was while we were there that [we experienced] the highest

recorded temperature in Adelaide, 117.7 degrees.

That’s hot.

LS: Oh, it was hot. Despite being so hot we could go out at night and look up to the

Hills, the Adelaide Hills, and see all the fires that were burning up there. There were

a lot of fires in that year. I don’t think the temperature’s ever got quite that high

since, and it was certainly the record for that time. But we had a great time anyway,

and I think I saw my first movie, went to the first picture, at the age of eleven years

old, went with my cousins down at Ozone Theatre in Glenelg. But after the War life

took on more normal times.

Ken Kuhl came on the scene then, I assume?

LS: Yes, he was about. So we went, and I think there were three weddings in the

Laslett family in very short time: your mum and dad, Uncle Bill and Jean and

Rowley and Rosa – oh, Ken and Una, rather. Your mum and dad had been married

earlier on, yes.

Yes, ’45 I think they got married.

LS: Well, it was then, and then in fairly quick succession was Bill, Rosa and Una.

So there we are, and that’s made up a fair bit of the Laslett history.

What about your uncles and aunties on the Laslett side of the family? Did you

have much to do with them?

LS: Not a lot. We certainly knew them and Uncle Dick lived at Mount Schank, he

also had a quarry down in Pareen Station, a limestone quarry where he quarried the

blocks of stone. He always had a nice team of horses and used to do a lot of I

suppose agricultural work – ploughing and those sorts of things.

So he used his team of horses to go around ploughing.

LS: Ploughing and harvesting and all that, he had a very good team of horses. And

in the wagon he used to do quite a lot of carting. He had a small property adjacent to

the Mount Schank Station, and the name ‘Laslett Road’, that comes off the Bay

Road, really commemorates his name.

You mentioned one of your favourite uncles was Alf: why was that?

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LS: Well, I guess because he was perhaps nearer to Dad’s age in the family. I think

there seemed – the elder ones of the family, I suppose, were what you would call

fairly sober sorts –

Fairly strict?

LS: – yes, straight, you know. Aunt Lottie, Auntie Lil –

You probably didn’t see a lot of Auntie Lil.

LS: – no, I didn’t see much of her. Uncle George – Uncle George was a very

dapper dresser, he always was very smart. And Uncle Dick.

Did Alf come then?

LS: No, no, there was Em was in there too, Auntie Em, she was a maiden aunt, she

never lived there. But she was a bit of a sort of a general help to most people. She

certainly looked after her father, I’d say dedicated her life to old Grandfather. But

she was at one stage, as they called it in those days ‘in service’: that means she was

a housemaid or whatever. She worked for the Reverend Hartley Williams.

Was he in the Mount?

LS: Yes, he was a Church of England parson. And I believe that it was in his time

that there was quite a break-up in the Church of England, they sort of went two

ways. At one stage she worked for the Helpmann family and would have been

around the place when Robert Helpmann was small.

Nursed him?

LS: Yes, yes, that’s right. But mainly she would have been – – –. If somebody was

sick they could send for Em, and she would help anybody sort of anywhere, and

particularly to her family. But mostly she dedicated her life to the care of

Grandfather.

END OF DISK 4

END OF RECORDING.