Haveachat with Les Shipp

by Les Shipp

flighty actress and a man who really loved her. She wasn’t prepared to settle down with this one man who in her mind was going to hang about and be there for her when she was ready. She left it a bit too late, for when she decided to settle down with him he had fallen in love with someone else and rejected her.

  She never imagined this would happen to her as she was very beautiful and a great actress. In her misery she wailed, “Send in the clowns”, knowing all along that she was the clown who had got her just deserts.

  Leaving this sad story behind, it is great to have clowns who can step in and brighten our day even if we ourselves are the clowns. Life taken too seriously really needs a clown or two to brighten our day. Our son Roy was a typical clown when he was growing up, which was a big advantage to us when we were conducting horse riding lessons to timid children. We would say, “Roy look after Johnny,” and he would go into his clown act pretending that he needed Johnny’s help to stop him falling off and Johnny would be so taken up with Roy’s antics he would forget about his fear and the pair would ride off and have great fun.

  To laugh at one’s self in adversity is often a great help as we are able to recover much quicker or accept what life presence. I was given a role in a musical, something funny happened on the way to the forum. I was pleased until I read the script. My part was that of a befuddled old man called Erroneous who had lost his daughter in Rome and the only way to find her was to travel seven times around the Seven Hills of Rome. It was said that the part really suited me so I played it to the full and the seven times I staggered across the stage on my way over the hills, it was greeted with loud cheers from the audience. I was so successful at being befuddled I was asked to play the same role in the Armidale production. It pays to send in the clowns.

  A LIFE WELL LIVED AND MUCH MORE TO COME-TIMELESS.

  Having grown up on an isolated farm in the Blue Mountains I always had a curiosity about the big wide world. At sixteen years of age I started work on a sheep station in Western New South Wales where I worked for the next seven years. It was a lonely life but I made the best of it playing sport at the weekend and going to dances when I could get a lift. No young man at this time had his own transport. I was an avid reader of the magazine, the National Geographic which fuelled my curiosity about the big world out there. After the seven years on the station I decided that dreaming about the big world wasn’t going to get me anywhere so by the age of twenty-three and having saved the princely sum of eleven hundred pounds I booked a return ticket to England. What an experience that was for a farm boy on the six weeks trip from Sydney to Southampton and then the twelve months traveling around Europe. In the twelve months I visited twenty-two countries, staying at youth hostels. In Salzburg Austria I met an Irish girl in June and by October we were engaged. For the last two months of my stay I worked at Harrods department store in London and in early January my Irish girl and I were married and on a ship heading for Australia.

  Back in Australia I quickly started work at Coles until I secured a position on a cattle stud in central New South Wales. On that property I don’t know how my new wife from Ireland managed with the temperature at 110f and not a tree in sight and a new baby to contend with. My employment improved over time until I became the manager of an eleven-thousand acre property and my wife started up a school bus run. It wasn’t all plane sailing as we lost an infant son and a house fire took everything we owned and then a mighty flood came and I had had enough of rural work. It was a new direction for me as the whole world seemed to be covered with water. The railway line had been washed away and they were calling for paid volunteer fettlers to repair the line. I was to be a railway fettler for the next four years and in the meantime being transferred to Tamworth.

  In Tamworth we bought a three-hundred acre property where we started up an equestrian centre which we operated very successfully for the next thirty-seven years. We had a great life during this time with my wife winning championships with her horses all over New South Wales. Our four children blossomed here also getting on with their respective lives and I secured a job with Telecom which I held for twenty-one years.

  With my wife busy with her competitions, I entered the world of musicals and over the years I performed in seventeen musicals as well as plays and concerts. We both joined an art course at Tafe and have been painting ever since. I volunteered for eight hours a week for seventeen years as a telephone councillor and fifteen of those years as a councillor trainer as well. This prompted me to learn more so I enrolled in a graduate diploma course in management and human relations externally and in 1980 I received my diploma.

  When I retired from Telecom aged sixty-two I joined my wife in competing in dressage events in which I competed in for the next ten years. Eventually we decided it was time to really retire so we sold the equestrian centre and ended up in a delightful village called Pomona where we bought a house in town. We became very involved in an art group where we continued to paint and to my delight I found a writer’s group in the community centre which I attend each week. It is a very inspiring group and through their encouragement I have had my autobiography published in March 2014.

  I am happy that our life has been well lived and now in our autumn years with the wonderful people around us I am sure there will be many more exciting times to come.

  HEAVY DUTY.

  I started my life in Japan, one of several thousand to come into the world that year. It was impossible to be an individual but as time passed I knew I was destined to live in a heavy duty world and much was expected of me. I hoped that I would be able to live up to others expectations.

  As I matured I was sent off to do a very important job in the outback of Australia. It was sad leaving Japan but exciting at the same time. I didn’t know what to expect when I arrived but what I saw was daunting. The countryside looked very challenging with rocky outcrops of ironstone ridges everywhere and the heat was intense. My job was to be on an isolated cattle station in the middle of nowhere and I was transported there in a four wheeled drive over sharp mountain ranges and deep rocky fords through fast flowing rivers.

  Arriving at the vast cattle property it was an oasis around the homestead, which was built on the banks of a billabong with lots of trees to shield it from the harsh countryside. It was a hive of activity with stockmen going here and there in a very purposeful way. There were many vehicles in the large shed and even a helicopter. There were many horses grazing in a paddock close by and an occasional stockman would ride past on his way to check on some stock. My boss seemed to be a very efficient man and I could see by the way the property was being run he had everything under control.

  My job would take me over much of the property and I really enjoyed it. My fellow workers and I always did our best to be efficient and our boss often praised us for a job well done and we never let him down. During the mustering season we were kept busy helping with the muster and keeping the camps well stocked with provisions. After the mustering was completed we went with our boss to Darwin to see the livestock sent off overseas in a boat. Our boss liked to have a bit of a break then with a holiday by the sea and we had a wonderful time frolicking up and down the beach with him. Then there was the arduous journey back to the station where we had to complete our jobs before the wet season set in. Once the wet season had set in it was a miserable place to be with water everywhere and continuously getting bogged. The humidity during this time caused all sorts of problems and the isolation had a big effect on some of the workers. The station cook, to escape his miseries took to the grog and was off his head for several days, and the gardener went walkabout and wasn’t seen again until the next dry season, even the boss who was usually cheery became grumpy.

  I worked on this station for many years and my boss often said what a sterling job I did and he wouldn’t have been able to manage without me. Looking back I was proud of the job I had done and I am sure the country of my birth would also have been proud of me. Everything comes to an end eventually and my end came
when I hit a sharp rock while chasing cattle and I was completely wrecked. I thought I would be dumped as no longer being useful, but no the boss said to one of his men,” Take that heavy duty Japanese tyre to the garden and we will have it as a surround for that rose bush I bought in Darwin.”

  THEY JUST DON’T MAKE MEN OF THAT CALIBRE ANYMORE.

  It is a changing world and it has been changing over a long period of time. The equality of the sexes have played a great part in these changes along with our world where there is less time to follow the old rules of man that used to apply. Back in time boys were taught right from the start what the rules were. The men grew big and strong and protected and respected the women as they were regarded as the weaker sex and needed to be looked after. They weren’t expected to go out to work, just be sweet and gentle and take care of the man’s castle while he did all the important things like running the country and being the bread winner.

  In those wonderful days men doffed their hats when meeting a women and made sure they had a seat to sit on and generally looked after them. They always opened the door of the car or the building