Bega Pioneers' Museum has countless files on people and places. This one was written by Len Spindler about his life in the Valley. This extract is set in the Depression years.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
PEOPLE have said to me, “Why, you got butter for two shillings per pound and a pair of boots for five shillings”.
Sure we did but most of the time we didn’t even have that money.
But when Old Man Brady rebuilt the Commercial Hotel and at the opening he turned on free beer for two hours, from 5pm, we rushed it and drank all we could, then filled our old black billys with beer and took it away to drink.
I even carried a billy full on the bike from Bega to the shack to give Eva a beer (warm and flat).
The building on the Bega sewerage started. It was relief work, two weeks on and two weeks off, so seven pounds 15 had to last a month. It was real slave labour.
They sacked a man for rolling a cigarette on the job. I had an old pushbike to ride to work and I’d leave for work at 6.30 with a torch to see by as it was winter and we started work at 7.30, and remember not a bite to eat till 12.
They would dig two trenches, sometimes 20 feet apart in the deep parts, as deep as 28 feet and not more than 20 inches wide.
Then a man was put in each trench to dig a tunnel with a short handle pick (on your knees), all day till you met the other man.
A piece of candle was stuck in the bank with a piece of wire, called a spider, to see by.
To get the dirt out you would first drag it out into the trench with your shovel, then throw it back over your head on a platform some feet down from the top. From there it was thrown out by a bloke called a “boodler”.
In really deep trenches they used a bucket and a windlass over 15 feet.
Twice a day the foreman would throw you down a tape to measure how far you had gone. Oh, they were slave drivers. I saw as many as 10 men sacked in one day.
I have seen men go to the toilet just to get a little rest and the ganger would see and say, “If you’re sick, go home, you’re no bloody good here”.
If caught rolling a smoke you got the sack.
In the big wells at the treatment works, working two big electric mixers, we would put through up to 200 bags of cement a day and all wheeled away by men.