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Bill Smith slid unobtrusively into Cairns, North Queensland sometime in the early 1940’s. He arrived with several packhorses, a pony that he rode and very little else. Bill fitted the category of the post-depression drifter perfectly. Nobody knew or cared where he came from. He gradually insinuated his small presence into the Cairns horse racing fraternity and began to earn a bit of money from riding trackwork and shoeing horses, but still nobody thought it necessary to get to know him well. He would turn up before dawn, ride the horses to the instruction given to him, give a brief account to the trainer about the horse’s work and condition, collect his trackwork riding fee and then disappear from the course. Eventually Bill graduated from trackwork to riding in races and he competed in meetings in many of the small country tracks around North Queensland, but he went to the racetrack already dressed in his riding silks and refused to change them afterwards in the jockey’s room with the other jockeys, preferring to go straight to wherever he was staying to change and bathe in private There was much speculation amongst the trainers and jockeys about Bill’s eccentricities and some believed that he was a woman in disguise at a time when women were not allowed to ride in races against the men.
Bill eventually retired to the small community of Innot Hot Springs on the Atherton Tablelands in the 1960’s with a couple of old racehorses for company and in early 1975 he was befriended by a community nurse, Mary Jane McConnell to whom he began to unravel the story of his life. Bill died at the Herberton Hospital on 24th June 1975 and was buried in an unmarked grave at Herberton Cemetery, his origins and family history a mystery to everyone, including the hospital administration.
Unfortunately, Bill had died before he was able to complete the telling of his story to his last trusted friend in the world, Mary McConnell, but he’d left documents for Mary to read that finally gave her the information she and the hospital administration were missing. Since Bill had already been buried by then and his case forgotten, Mary decided to let Bill rest in peace. After many years of nursing, marrying and bringing up a family, however, Mary decided to sit down and write about Bill’s life in the way that she knew he’d wanted to be remembered. She started with his teenage years, as Bill had told it to her, when he’d left Melbourne and set out to pursue a life in the far west of New South Wales and southern Queensland and the story followed his gradual coming of age as he learned all about life on the huge stations in those parts of Australia that many city dwellers don’t even know exists.
In 1929, around the time of the Wall Street collapse and the beginning of the Great Depression, Bill arranged an interview with a solicitor, Sholto Kemp, at his office in Parramatta in Sydney’s west to instigate proceedings in the Small Debts Court against his employer for non-payment of wages. Kemp, an astute and experienced observer of human behaviour, could tell immediately that his client was no ordinary man and Bill was compelled to tell the story of his early life to the solicitor before he would represent him in court. The subsequent case was reported in the newspapers at the time and this formed the basis of the documents that Bill had left for Mary McConnell to read.
This is the story of Bill’s early life prior to the Great Depression of the 1930’s when he roamed through western New South Wales and southern Queensland finding work wherever he could get it, while at the same time holding on to a secret that, if revealed, could have had disastrous consequences for his dream of leading a happy and productive life in Australia’s outback.
