Looking forward Looking back

Gordon, their last born, had come to them, she affirmed, as the God-given replacement for their eldest child, Georgie, who had died of meningitis aged nine. The family had waited too long to get Georgie to Sydney for special treatment - 13 kilometres by sulky to Bellbrook, 64 kilometres by mail car to Kempsey and finally, 640 kilometres to Sydney by dog-box rail.
By the late 1920s, the north coast of NSW had shuffled unhurriedly into its post-pioneer period. Axemen still talked of cedars with trunks so huge two pit saws had to be riveted together to fell them; bullock teams laboured nobly hauling logs out of the hills. The grinding drudgery Gordon/Slim was determined to escape was milking cows by hand twice a day, seven days a week. Gordon Kirkpatrick was stuck with cows for the rest of his life; Slim Dusty was his passport to another dimension, the wonderland of show time.
Gordon's father, David Kirkpatrick, was 11 months old when his parents Hugh and Mary Kirkpatrick came to Australia from Belfast. Having dumped her husband in Armidale because of his chronic gambling, Mary crossed the Great Dividing Range with her two children and replanted the family in the North Coast town of Kempsey. She set about establishing the first hospitals for women in the Macleay district.
Now a midwife, Nurse Kirk, as she was called, became something of a heroic figure, trudging bush tracks with her black dog, a big stick and a lantern to light the way to yet another delivery. The kitchen oven sometimes served as an incubator for frail babies. Her hospitals were profitable enough for her to put up the money for her two sons to take up selection of two scrub-covered blocks at Nulla Nulla Creek.
Gordon/Slim, born in Kempsey on June 13, 1927, was not yet in his teens when he laid out his whole life like a road map. In time he would have his own band, the Slim Dusty Travelling Country Band, a name that embodied the two life forces - travel and country - that drove him on: another kilometre, another song.

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• Seniorsite

[aplusmedia]

hehe , pretty clever and funny as well as tasteful and not demeaning , great work bud

[seniorsite]

Thanks alot ..Dee

[1467unschool]

haha

[seniorsite]

thanks 1467unschool

[gladiatorproduction]

oh ok here you go 5

[seniorsite]

You trickster

now you can have a cyber hug...Dee

[seniorsite]

Me sad.....

[mrrad1]

Good, how about you?

[gladiatorproduction]

this is great done dee ....no stars but

[me4gaaras]

your wlcome :)