Slavery as a Teen

Slave as a teenager: Man speaks out after 50 years

I left school at 15 in May 1973. I was never very good at my school work. I didn’t find the motivation to work hard at it because I was never sold on the benefits of doing well at school. To compound problems I was often sick.

I left school after my fifteenth birthday.

There was always something to do on the farm at home and this being the start of winter, we were checking our opossum traps and feeding the cows. Several of the paddocks in the bush were fenced off and our job was to cut down trees which the cattle would feed off the leaves.

When I left school I thought that bullying was to be a thing of the past but that was just like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

I was then subjected to verbal abuse and emotional abuse and often called “Stupid.” or “The Stupid Boy” by family members with Dad, Mum, and Jimmy being the worst offenders. Being humiliated in front of family members was a regular occurrence.

One of the most common jobs I did was cutting gorse. I would go over the back of the railway lines and be working hard slashing gorse and putting them in heaps ready to burn in a few weeks. Mum used to say, “Don’t they ever get a holiday?”

Dad’s response was always, “Every day is a holiday for them.”

That was always disheartening. Nothing I ever did was good enough; a perfect example of this was when we went down to the other farm to do some work. I was assigned a job which was grubbing out gorse. I started working and after a few minutes Dad rebuked me saying I was doing it wrong and that this is the correct way to do it. I had used the grubber a fair bit at the other farm but that was on my own with no one about.

Not long after Tom and Sandra Rooney who sometimes kept a horse on the property came along and everyone stopped working but I kept going because I would have been yelled at if I stopped. Mrs Rooney took the grubber off me and said, “I’ll give you a spell,” and then started grubbing. I felt guilty about letting her take the grubber off me.

I was never allowed to leave the farm for any reason. Once I was working up the bush clearing gorse from an old road when I lost track of time. I came home late for afternoon tea and it was a major talking point. When I came home, One of my brothers said, “We were going to look for you.”

On another occasion when I was trying to chase the cows back home after being up the bush, Dad went berserk because I never came home for dinner.

I was excluded from family outings. One day, the family were getting prepared to go down to the farm and as they were hopping into the van, Dad said to me, “There is no need for you to go.”

As it turned out, they were going swimming and I was the only one who didn’t know that. I thought that we were going down there to do the work which was usually the case. I was left at the house on my own.

Everything was done on the farm with hard graft. There were no tractors and any other mechanical device apart from a chain saw which I was not allowed to use. One day we were at a neighbour’s property helping him to spread superphosphate and Dad said, We have three fertilizer spreaders in the back of the van. " He replied, “Lets see them.” Dad then opened the van door to reveal three shovels.

Now and again, a lad who I used to hang out with would drop in, his name was Paul. I suspect that it was to see how I was getting on because I must have just seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth to those who I knew at school. My family would always say, “Bobby did this and that,” it was always said in a way which was to have a dig at me.

One day when Paul dropped in he asked, “What have I been doing with myself?” I replied, “Cut gorse.” he said, “Is that all?”

I was allowed to go to a couple of horse racing meetings by the time I was 20 or so. Mum would say sarcastically, “Bobby is out on parole.”

It felt that way. I was not allowed to come and go as I pleased.

Slavery may have been abolished decades earlier but it still existed in its own way during the 1970s and 80s and it was legal.