Bob "Minmi Magster" Skelton and his "womb mate" Dave [also known as his twin] like the outdoors life.
For decades, they'd spent much spare time at a corrugated iron hut that they built at the confluence of the Karuah and Branch rivers [not far from Karuah] in the late 1950s when they were aged 19.
"The hut stood for over 50 years - they were the best years of all I reckon," Bob said.
They'd catch fish and crabs, shoot roos and cut timber, often with mates.
"It was a great life," said Bob, a bush poet.
Look closely at the photo and you'll see a rickety wharf, showing how close the hut was to the river.
Asked what he most liked about staying at the hut, he said "freedom".
Bob and Dave owned the land [650 acres], which they bought for about "1500 quid". They eventually sold the land, but retained permission to stay at the hut for years.
When they built the hut in 1958, they camped there one night under sheets of corrugated iron to "keep the mozzies off us".
The hut is gone now, but it lives on in Bob's memory - and this poem he penned.
For nigh on fifty years, this old hut stood
On the banks of the Karuah stream
Although it's now gone, it somehow lives on, for I go there at night when I dream.
I see the big open fireplace
Its frogmouth chimney, we built from tin
The corrugated iron window flaps
That we'd open, to let the breeze in.
I recall long days on the river
The flathead and crabs that we caught
Oft' cooked in the coals for supper
And washed down with a drop of rough port. I taste the tang of black billy tea boiled on a blazing log fire, and the flavour of damper cooked in the coals that we'd toast on a fork made from fencin' wire.
I recall wild rides through the bushland
Among the rough boulders and logs
And that time the old grey horse went and dumped me when he was spooked by a pack of wild dogs.
I hear the echo of distant gunshots
Further out there in the scrub
And the exciting sound, of a baying hound
Such sweet music we certainly did love.
I hear the call of ibis and plover
And the kookaburras' joyful laughter
I smell the sooty possum that camped
On the old plank high up on the rafter.
I smell the sweet scent of bloodwoods in bloom, hear the buzzing of small native bees
I see the misty blue of wood smoke
Drifting up through the tops of the trees.
I hear the splashes and blows of the dolphins, as they circle the big oyster rack
To wake me at night in my sleeping
When the sky was an inky jet black
I hear the murmur of the breeze in the oaks, as a nor'easter blows up the river
Yes in my dreams to me it seems
The old hut will live on forever.
Big Spiders
We wrote on Tuesday about a rare insect called a mountain katydid that Glenn Albrecht spotted on his Duns Creek property, near Paterson.
Bob Skelton said this brought to mind "the huge spiders that were in the mangrove trees on the Hunter River, just below Ironbark Creek, back in the '50s".
"The '55 flood wiped them out. It would be interesting to know if they returned. The local blokes called them leopard spiders - they had yellow stripes across them."
Pivoting to another yarn from another time, the Magster told us that he once saw a small dead bird caught in a big spider's web near Stockrington.
Yikes!
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