Text of an actual letter from a kid from Eromanga to Mum and Dad.
For those of you not in the know, Eromanga is a small town west of
Quilpie in the far south west of Queensland
Dear Mum & Dad,
I am well. Hope youse are too.
Tell me big brothers Doug and Phil that the Army is better than workin’
on the farm - tell them to get in bloody quick smart before the jobs
are all gone! I wuz a bit slow in settling down at first, because ya
don’t hafta get outta bed until 6am. But I like sleeping in now, cuz
all you gotta do before brekky is make ya bed and shine ya boots and
clean ya uniform. No bloody cows to milk, no calves to feed, no feed to
stack - nothin’!! Blokes haz gotta shave though, but it’s not so
bad, coz there’s lotsa hot water and even a light to see what ya doing!
At brekky ya get cereal, fruit and eggs but there’s no kangaroo
steak or possum stew like wot Mum makes. You don’t get fed again
until noon, and by that time all the city boys are buggered because
we’ve been on a ‘route march’ - geez it’s only just like walking to
the windmill in the back paddock!!
This one will kill me brothers Doug and Phil with laughter. I keep
getting medals for shootin’ - dunno why. The bullseye is as big as a
bloody possum’s bum and it don’t move and it’s not firing back at ya
like the Johnson’s did when our big scrubber bull got into their
prize cows before the Ekka last year! All ya gotta do is make
yourself comfortable and hit the target - it’s a piece of pi$s!! You
don’t even load your own cartridges - they comes in little boxes and
ya don’t have to steady yourself against the rollbar of the roo
shooting truck when you reload!
Sometimes ya gotta wrestle with the city boys and I gotta be real
careful coz they break easy - it’s not like fighting with Doug and
Phil and Jack and Boori and Steve and Muzza all at once like we do
at home after the muster. Turns out I’m not a bad boxer either and
it looks like I’m the best the platoon’s got, and I’ve only been
beaten by this one bloke from the Engineers - he’s 6 foot 5 and 15
stone and three pick handles across the shoulders and as ya know I’m
only 5 foot 7 and eight stone wringin’ wet, but I fought him till
the other blokes carried me off to the boozer.
I can’t complain about the Army - tell the boys to get in quick
before word gets around how bloody good it is.
Your loving daughter
Jill xxxx