'STRALIAN ARMY
Text of a 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 ya 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'!! Ya haz gotta shave
though, but its 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 steaks
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 piss!! 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.
