I think I must have been about eight years old when our family left Junee.  We then spent two years in Campbelltown and a further two years in Lake Cargelligo before settling down permanently in Campbelltown again.

I’m surprised how little I remember of these places even though it took up four years of my life.  Nor can I find any photos from this period.  I believe the fact that Lake Cargelligo had no high school for me to attend must have prompted the final move from there to Campbelltown.

So what follows here mostly comes from my brother Brian who has a much better recollection of this time, particularly of Lake Cargelligo.  So, let’s just skip those first two years in Campbelltown for the time being (unless and until someone can fill the gap in this story).

For Lake Cargelligo it must have been a very easy job for Dad.  The town was at one end of a single train track which ran in a south-easterly direction to Cootamundra, a distance of some 240 kilometres.   Dad was required to drive the steam train over the return trip twice a week, staying overnight at Cootamundra before returning home to Lake Cargelligo.  There were, according to Wikipedia, some 27 small towns to stop at along this route each way so it must have been a very leisurely trip for him.

Brian recalls riding a rail hand car along the track near the Lake Cargelligo terminal.  Not much danger of meeting a train here!

Brian has reminded me that we had a small farm outside the town for our first year there.  We had a milking cow, just as we had in Junee, and a dog.  We also had an old car.  Mum drove us into the town for school each day.  Not sure whether she had her licence, but things were pretty relaxed on that score in country towns in those days!

In our second year there we left the farm and moved into the town.  I don’t know why we made the change  –  maybe Mum found the driving too stressful!  I only made one friend that I recall, a girl named Esmee.  She wasn’t very bright.  She came with us on a holiday by the sea, but didn’t like it.

I also remember the Aboriginal girls from the “mission” coming into town once a week (on Tuesdays?).  The shopkeepers would change the dresses that they had on display for these girls, again I don’t know why.  They could only have the front seats at the local cinema.

For some reason it wasn’t considered safe to swim in the lake, though Brian says there were swimming enclosures around the lake shore.  Because of the heat we were given an extra week’s holiday from school in the summer.

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In 1972 Chris and I stayed for a week or so in Condobolin which was about 70 km from Lake Cargelligo.  Chris’s sister Gill was admitted to the local hospital for the birth of her second child, Jenny.  We were there to look after her first child, John.  They were in Condobolin because Gill’s husband, Mark, a forestry officer, had been posted there.

I vividly recall a terrible event at that time, which we saw live on TV while we were there.  It was the time of the Munich Olympics and the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes.  It was horrifying to see these events unfold, with eleven Israelis being killed.

With Gill safely home with her new baby we took the opportunity to drive out to Lake Cargelligo.  The dirt road had recently been graded so it was a relatively easy trip.  We had a quick look around when we got there but there wasn’t much to see and even less that I remembered from my childhood there twenty years earlier.  It was clearly a poor town with a numerous Aboriginal population.  The lake was starting to become an attraction for recreational sports, but there didn’t seem to be much benefit in this for the town.. We didn’t stay for long.

Next page:  Campbelltown