Any day on the river is a perfect day.
No particular special day, like I say, I been here 60 years, I know the river like the back
of my hand.
But I still love getting on the river and I love taking someone who hasn't been on the
river and showing them what I've seen over a lifetime.
I still get the same pleasure today as I did when I first got on the first boat and went
in the river, I absolutely just love it.
Love the water, love the boat, love the river.
It's part of me.
Louis, look hey, Hey, look what Dad’s got, a smako!
What?
I can remember back when I was four years old, when I fell in the channel at Dareton.
I nearly drowned and my aunty saved me.
I’ve still got the toy truck sitting at home on the TV cabinet, what I dropped.
I dropped it in there and went in after it and she whooped me out.
I just love boats, like I say I lived on the river and I absolutely love boats.
The first boat I got was just and old wooden boat that no one wanted, so I patched it.
Between that and bailing it out to stop it from sinking I actually enjoyed myself.
We’re just coming up towards where Tarzan used to live, just up here where these bamboos
are.
Over on the left here the Edwards family lived here.
They come here with a circus coming through here back in the early stage and they stayed
here.
Two of them became fishermen, but Norm, Norm Edwards, they called him Tarzan.
He used to have shows up here and in these trees, he used to have swings and everything.
He used to bend big roofer nails in his mouth, bend iron bars around his neck, contortionist,
he could sit down with his feet folded up behind the back of his head.
He was amazing.
He was a good friend of ours when I was only young growing up.
Yeah Norm was great, he was just a real gentleman.
And they just used to love going to Menindee.
Norm used to buy double ice cream, a stick of fritz and half a dozen tins of cat tucker,
and that's all he used to live on.
He fell in love with my auntie, and he was probably 40 or 50 years older than her anyway.
But he wanted to marry right or wrong, but she didn't.
And he said to her, ‘look, you'll never be lonely’, he said, ‘I'll get you a white
cocky, so you'll have someone to talk to’.
She said, ‘I don’t want no bloody white cocky’.
Anyway, it didn't eventuate of course, but he still stayed friends with us for years
and years.
Til me aunty moved on and we didn't see him after that, it must have been because there
wasn’t no interest in coming home.
But yeah we saw him years after that.
He was just a real gentleman.
Never heard him say a bad thing about anyone.
Without the river there's nothing.
That’s our livelihood.
In Menindee we just do our own entertainment, if we’ve got water we usually go skiing
or something like that, or fishing, it’s always to do with water.
Everyone gets depressed when there's no water.
The perfect summer here is when you can knock off work or on a weekend, get a heap of your
friends, just grab the boat and you make a day of it.
Everyone brings a bit of a plate or something, or a BBQ.
We just go all out there and make our own entertainment, skiing all day, it's great.
But once that goes, we got nothing, and then we’ve just got the town, no one wants to
come there, it’s so quiet and depressing.
So the perfect summer is with water.
Tt’s just a different livelihood on the river.
I couldn't live anywhere else but on the river.
I got no intention of moving either.
I was born here, I’ll die here.