Richard Middleton (Sticks) - Transcript of Interview
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Australians at War Film Archive Richard Middleton (Sticks) - Transcript of interview Date of interview: 4th September 2003 http://australiansatwarfilmarchive.unsw.edu.au/archive/803 Tape 1 00:38 Well, good morning. My name’s Richard Middleton and I was born in 1932 in Brisbane, Queensland. I started off life a very confused little fellow and I’m at the age of 71 now and I’m still confused, but that’s not the point. I had a lot of happy memories as a child, but then again, when I got to the age 01:00 of about nine, my mother died and I was left in a situation where I believed I had a father and a sister and brother, which only turned out to be a father but a stepsister and stepbrother who…and I was then in the situation where I wasn’t needed around the place - I was surplus to requirements and my father, who was a very brutal man and drinking man, I had some…no one to fall back on to so 01:30 I had a lot of problems and I decided at a very early age that any other place was far better for my health than where I was so I persisted with it until I was old enough to get out of it and I did. I went to school. I liked school but my brother was much smarter than I because my father sort of doted on him. My sister wasn’t allowed to help much because she was only a female and in those days females had to keep their 02:00 place and know their place in life. Lorna to me was more like a sister and a mother after my mother died. So school and I sort of didn’t agree much. So I must admit history and geography were my favourite subjects. drawing, acting the fool was the best, but being in school wasn’t very funny. After my mother died I was sent to Toowoomba to my Aunt Alice’s place, 02:30 who was a sister of my father, and I sort of got out of the fire into the frying pan because she was a very religious lady and she tried to impound her knowledge on the hereafter on me and I sort of rejected this in large lumps so I gave her merry hell in my own inevitable way as a nine year old possibly can, and a Scorpio I might add, so I was shipped back to my father who in the meantime had married 03:00 again and this lady came into my life. Even though I didn’t know her, she was my godmother, I sort of vowed and declared that I wouldn’t let anyone take my mother’s place but over the years as things went by I learnt to love this woman very deeply. She was a very genuine and honest person and even to this day I miss her very much, but transgressing there a bit. 03:30 I got to the age of 14 and I was at Ashgrove State School then and there was a Mr Wink there who was I think he was an offshoot from some Gestapo organisation because he did not like me and I did not like him, and I read or heard somewhere that the day you were 14 you could walk out of school, and in the middle of a mathematics examination, of which I was not doing terribly good at, I put my hand up and asked is that true you can leave school the day you’re 04:00 14 and he said that is correct. I said, “You can just walk out?” He said, “That’s correct.” I started packing my gear up and he said, “Where are you going?” I said, “I’m leaving school. I’m 14. I’m out of here.” So I walked out the door and I went home. I never thought of the consequences, because even at 14, I was a big lump of a lad. My father was still big and he could hit hard and I went home and when I told my stepmother about this, she freaked out. “What in God’s name are you going to tell your father?” Well, I hadn’t even got that far, 04:30 but I told him at dinner that night and he said, “Well you’re not going to bludge on me, boy. You’d better get yourself a job. So what do you want to do?” Well getting away from home was the best thing I could do getting away from him so I said, “Well, I’d like to I’d like to go and work in cattle stations and do things like that.” Why I don’t know because I’d never been away from home before apart from Aunt Alice’s place and going onto a cattle station was beyond my wildest 05:00 imagination because I didn’t know what the heck it was all about. So I went out to a place out at Chinchilla fellow by the name of Green, and Mr Green was one of the old tough old schools, because if anyone knows what an old tin milking shed is, like, it’s about 12-by-12 and there was an army cot in there - an iron wire cot, a dirty old mattress that I think the WAS DOUBLE QUOTE CHOOK s used to lay eggs on, but 05:30 it was cleaned down and one pillow and two blankets. No floorboards, no curtains, no nothing, and a kerosene lamp, and that’s where I stayed, and Mr Green told me that I would be working from sunup until sundown and he wasn’t joking, and he also told me at night when he whistled I was to come over to the house and get my meals, but he didn’t tell me that when he whistled that the dog turned up at the same time and that dog beat me twice to meals at night 06:00 and ate both meals and I didn’t get any, and course when I saw Mr Green about it, he said, “Well, you’ve got to smarten your footwork boy.” Shut the door in my face and I had to wait till breakfast. Things were tough. I worked for the pricey sum of, today’s money, $1.25 for a six-day week, swinging a nine-pound short shaft Kelly axe, ringbarking. Now I had never done that in my life before, and within a couple of days I 06:30 had blisters all over my hands and a couple of days after that I had blisters on those blisters, and when I said to him, “What can I do?” and I…he said, “Peel them, boy. That’ll make them strong and hard.” And that’s the only medication he gave me and I still had to swing that axe and there was no messing’ around with Mr Green. Mr Green and I parted company after three weeks because one of his cows…we 07:00 had to had to run them one day in a bit of a storm, and they were Amber and Angus, they were Black Polls and one of them puffed up and died because we ran them too fast and they’re not used to that sort of thing, and it lay there for a day before he went out and butchered it and I wouldn’t eat the meat. I didn’t think it was good because I’d never seen cattle butchered before, and I’d never didn’t think it was a good idea so I didn’t have terribly much to eat for a couple of days so I said to myself, 07:30 “Mrs Middleton’s little boy Richard should be in another place,” and I, I got the hell out of it. Now, the show was on at the time Chinchilla show and he said he wasn’t going to take me into town on a special trip so I had to wait till they went to the show, which was Saturday and he paid me by cheque right for my three odd weeks, which I couldn’t get cashed, and here I was, 14 years old at Chinchilla. Could have been the other side of the moon 08:00 for all I knew, and I did not have a clue how the hell to get to Brisbane or which direction it was in. With my little trusty port [bag] and my little hat on my head, I thought, “Well, what the hell am I going to do?” and I ran into this bloke who wanted to know a lot about me and he looked like he was a soldier was in khaki with his hat turned up on the left hand side, but he turned out to be a copper. And I’d never seen a country copper before, and he wanted to know what I was doing, and by that time I was pretty close to tears because I was not impressed 08:30 with the country people in general, and Mr Green in particular, so I told him the story and he said, “That mongrel.” “Alright son,” he said, “what’s the cheque for?” So he pulled the money out of his pocket and he said, “I’ll fix Green up,” and he rode me down to town down to the railway station in his - what was it? Was a motorbike with a sidecar, which I thought was a good idea because I’d never ridden on a motorbike before, nor a sidecar, and I had to wait about five hours for the train to come, so a 14-year- old boy 09:00 from the city sitting on a railway station with a thousand flies waiting for a train to come was more than I could cop and thinking all the time, “What the hell’s my father going to do when I front up?” Anyhow, I got to Brisbane safely and I went down there and I got home and he was not impressed, and I ended up getting another job out at Winton.