Ship name / Flight number: Oriana

Arrival Date: 09/09/1962

This story contains references to abuse

I was born in Bournemouth on the south coast of England, the eldest of four children. My two sisters, Sue and Jan, come next and my brother is six years younger than me.

We moved around an awful lot and I remember going from school to school. I never felt stable. I was just getting to know the school and the people and we would move again. When I look back on this time now, I think of that song ‘He’s a lonely boy’ by Andrew Gold.

My dad was a professional driver of trucks and buses. I’m not sure if we had to move around so he could get work. I can remember my mum crying because it was so cold as she was hanging the washing on the line. Both of these things might have influenced my parent’s decision to migrate to Perth in 1957, when I was 10 years old.

When we arrived in Australia, in no time at all I made a new friend, Don, and we started doing a thing called surfing. We would go to Cottesloe Beach together and keep an eye on the shark fins behind us as we rode the waves into shore. I loved it and felt like I had died and gone to heaven and I was meant to be here forever.

However, I've held back from sharing my story for a particular reason, because there's a part of my life that's been impossible to confront. The people who've known me over the years, as a bushman, musician, etc. don’t know this about me. I was sexually assaulted by my father when I was 11; it changed my life, and it still affects me deeply.

This awful thing was happening in my private life, while I was enjoying my new school, and surfing and friends. I went to school with Johnny Young, who would go on to host Young Talent Time. Johnny and I were both keen on the same girl at school and she happened to come from a wealthy family – I watched television for the first time at her house.

While I was loving living in Perth, my father wasn’t happy and he decided that we would all return to England. I was devastated. I think I may have had what they call a childhood breakdown. I didn’t want to be wrenched from my new friends, the sunshine and surfing, and return to England with my abusive father. I asked my mum to find a way for me to stay, but she couldn’t. My father was ex-army and was a boxer – he had a lot of control over our family.

I have never forgotten pulling into the Southampton docks in 1960. It was pouring with rain, and it just reminded me of why we had left England.

Dave Burt (left) with another Little Brother in Pompeii, 1962.

Even though my mum couldn’t help me to stay in Perth, I think she realised that I would never re-settle in England and she encouraged me to apply to the BBM so I could return to Australia. My dad let me apply, only because he thought I’d never have the guts to go. He said to me: ‘you’ll never leave your mother’s apron strings’. I left school and got a job as a labourer in a large warehouse that distributed Cadbury’s chocolates, so I could earn some money because my dad said he wasn’t going to give me any to take with me.

Soon after my 15th birthday in 1962, I’d saved enough to return to Australia with the BBM. My family came to Southampton to say goodbye and my mother was crying, and my brothers and sister were crying, but I'll never, ever, ever, forget, that my father, he never even shook my hand or wished me well. It was exceedingly painful, because I deserved to be loved.

I was on my way. The trip was great. Every day on the boat, we'd do exercises on the deck. I will always remember stopping off at Naples. It is the most immoral place! There were women of all ages trying to pull you into their units as we walked past. We went to the ruins of Pompeii and I remember our guide pointed out where the brothels were. I felt like I was entering an adult world of another kind that I didn't even know existed. It was a bit overwhelming as a 15 year old.

When we docked in Fremantle, my dear friend Don came to meet me. I was so happy to see him again and I was back in paradise! We were both 15 years old and talked about running away together so that I didn’t have to get back on the Oriana. I don’t know who talked who out of it, but I did return to the ship and I knew it would be the last time I’d see Don.

Dave (left) with a friend on the BBM training farm, September 1962.

If there’s one moment in my life that will always be with me, it is the memory of sailing into Sydney Harbour on a beautiful spring morning. It took my breath away. The bridge, the ferries, the sparkling water: it was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. And I remember thinking that everything I'd ever gone through was worth it for this. And the Big Brother Movement, they've actually brought me to heaven. I felt like I’d found my home, my safe harbour.

Our group was taken to Calmsley Hill farm, and I fell in love with milking the cows. That was a mistake! I didn't know how much work was required on a dairy farm. After two weeks, I was offered a job on a dairy farm at Jemalong, in between Forbes and Condobolin. The manager of Calmsley Hill was selling his Winchester .22 rifle to buy a more powerful one and I agreed to buy it off him. He showed me how to unscrew the stock from the barrel and I boarded the train at Central station with my port full of clothes and a rifle.

It was an overnight train and I remember it was a freakishly cold night. I happened to sit next to a policeman who noticed my port and my rifle and asked me what my story was. I told him that I had migrated with the BBM and he was so kind to me. That would never happen today – you’d never be allowed to board a train with a rifle!

On the last leg of the train journey, I saw a fox running out of the undergrowth and I had this feeling that I was getting closer to my true home in the outback. Later in my life, I would become a semi-professional shooter because there was a lot of money in fox pelts and killing wild pigs and boars.

The farmer, Mr Arthur Wright, picked me up at the station in his 1962 Falcon ute. We bounced 18 miles along these rocky roads to ‘Nithesdale Farm’ in Jemalong. When we arrived, there was tea and cakes and I was shown to my room. It was small – just a single bed and a chest of draws. I was in heaven again.

In 1972, John Denver released his song, ‘Rocky Mountain High’ and the first verse has the words:

Nithesdale farm gate, 2025. Photo by Dave Burt.

Comin’ home to a place he’d never been before
Left yesterday behind him, you might say he was born again

I told John Denver when I met him years later that I’d written those words in my heart in 1962. Arriving in ‘Nithesdale’ felt like a home-coming. It’s named after the place where Arthur had his first battle in Malaysia during World War I.

Once I’d unpacked, My Wright came and had a serious talk with me. He said: ‘Son, I gotta tell you something. We have a problem here with snakes, which you'd be unfamiliar with. They're very dangerous snakes. We lose calves all the time. The place is riddled with tiger snakes and brown snakes. Don't rile them up. If they start striking, they'll get you and you'll die. We can't save you. He told me where the shotguns were kept and was pleased that I had my own rifle.

The next thing Mr Wright told me was that I would be working a 7 day week. He said I could ease into it and start at 6am (!!) in my first week, instead of 4am. My first task every morning was to round up the cattle for milking on a horse, something I’d done for the first time at Calmsley Hill so I had a bit to learn!

Mr Wright was an ex-POW from Changi but it didn’t brutalise him. Instead, he was kind to me. He asked me if I needed anything, and I said that I missed having a record player to play my Cliff Richard records. The next time he went into town, he picked up a second-hand player for me and now I had music again and I could sing along.

Once a month, I’d have a day off (after I’d rounded up the cows and done the milking and cleaned out the milking shed). I’d hitch-hike into Forbes and go to the local record store to buy more music. The owners got to know me and catered to my tastes. I liked to get dressed up to go into town, and I remember that one day, I was in my trousers and blazer and there wasn’t room in the cab of the ute that stopped to pick me up. The driver said I could jump in the back – with the pigs!

The snakes were a real problem. I used to gallop the mare bare-back (even though I knew I wasn’t meant to do this) to round up the cows in the afternoon. I saw this huge snake one afternoon, which I thought was a python, and the horse reared up. Unbeknown to me, Arthur Wright used to watch me with the binoculars and when he saw me with the snake he drove up in the ute and told me it was a tiger snake, which are deadly. It could have been the end of me.

The day President Kennedy was killed, I remember I was walking across the paddock to go for lunch and I encountered the biggest King Brown snake I had ever seen blocking my path. I didn’t have my rifle with me, and I have no idea how I got around it. The place was flooded from unseasonally heavy rains, which had flushed out the snakes.

After the oats had been harvested, we’d do bag sewing. It was hot, heavy work sewing up 180-pound hessian bags full of oats and stacking them for the truck to collect. By law, I was paid an additional wage for this but you were meant to be over 18 years old to do this work.

I had one visit from a ‘Big Brother’ while I was there. It felt like a box-ticking exercise when I needed to tell him that I was over-worked and missing my family. My brothers and sisters would write to me and say how much they missed me – it made me very sad – I didn’t realise how much I meant to them.

I wasn’t the only young person at the farm – Mr Wright had a 14 year old daughter, Wendy. She employed every one of her female charms on me, which I managed to resist, but it was one of the main reasons that I left. I was sad to leave, because I looked up to Arthur; he was like a father-figure for me.

When I left, I checked into the Albion Hotel in Forbes. I accepted a job picking up hay bales, but I didn’t know how to tell my new employer that I couldn’t drive a truck! I knew that story would be all around town by the end of the week and I felt ashamed.

Dave Burt (centre) with his band, c.1975.

I picked up seasonal work for a while until I met ‘Hooky Williams’ who was the western district heavyweight boxing champion. He asked me if I wanted to work on his chook farm. There was a pet emu on the farm who ruled the roost. Hooky wanted to test how good I was at shooting over a distance. He said he’d give me £10 ‘if I could make the bastard [emu] hop but not hit it’ with a Winchester rifle. I did it and Hooky was impressed, however, the next day, the emu was sitting in the same spot where he’d hopped. The bullet had landed between the emu’s toes, shattered, entered his foot and become infected. The owner sacked me but Hooky helped me to find another job on another chook farm, which was just as well since the previous week, I had signed a hire purchase contract to buy a 1962 Falcon!

One Friday, I was driving my beautiful Falcon back to Forbes with dozens of cracked, unsellable eggs on the passenger seat when I turned off a bitumen road onto a gravel road at 120km/hour. Consequently, I lost control of the car and clipped seven fence posts on a barbed wire fence before I hit the brakes and found myself covered in smashed, sticky eggs. It was a very expensive repair bill. I needed a shoulder to cry on, but my mother was on the other side of the world.

To help cover my costs, I entered a talent quest at the pub – winner takes all. I sang three songs – two by Elvis and another by Cliff Richard – and won! The band who played my backing music offered me a job as their lead singer. They were called “Ivan Steel and the Raiders”. We used to play at the Forbes Golf Club every weekend. One night we were the support act for the famous Rock n Roll band, Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs.

Around this time, I bought a new John Wayne Winchester rifle for £44.05. I met some drovers who heard I was a good shot and asked me to join them shooting wild pigs near Condobolin. We came across a huge wild Asian boar and I knew then, that I wanted to be a semi-professional shooter. I love being in the red outback, especially a place near Coolabah. It makes me feel like the ‘Wild Colonial Boy’.

Wendy was still visiting me and trying to tempt me at my new abode, Old Ma’s boarding house in Forbes. I kept telling her ‘no’, out of respect for her father, but it was hard for an 18 year old boy to resist. Meanwhile, because I had the only room in the boarding house with a lock on the door, the other male boarders would pay me £2 on the weekends to use my room. It was an easy way to make some money.

My mate introduced me to a young woman, Delma, who was interested in me and we became engaged. Looking back, it was a foolish thing to do.

As if the car accident, the talent quest, boar shooting, and my engagement wasn’t enough excitement, one day I went for a swim in the river and became paralysed. I had to be hauled out of the water and spent four days in a coma at the local hospital. The doctors thought I had a strain of encephalitis. They thought I might not walk again, but I did. However, I wasn’t the same person after this near-death experience and my relationship with Delma fell apart.

Around this time, I received a letter saying that my family were migrating to Sydney because my father wanted to get the family back together. They settled in Wiley Park, and my father got a job driving trucks for IPEC (Interstate Parcel Express Company). He came to see me in Forbes and told me that it didn’t matter what I wanted to do, I had to move to Sydney to reunite with my family. I don’t know how he did it, but he dealt with the huge medical bill that the hospital had sent me.

My father made me leave my band and my job at the chook farm to move back to Sydney. While it was good to see my mother and siblings again, I knew that I didn’t want to be around my abusive father. He got me a job as a labourer with IPEC so he knew where I was, day and night. I hated it.

I remember that my dad’s truck broke down in Yass on an overnight trip. He asked me to drive 300km to Yass with the spare part and the owner of the trucking company agreed. I took Colleen with me, because we were going out and I wanted to spend the night with her in the Yass hotel. However, my father had other ideas. He insisted that his 19 year old son share his room and he tried to abuse me again. I was now old enough to defend myself, and I threatened to kill him if he came near me.

I met Colleen at a gig I was singing at and I thought she looked like Marilyn Monroe. I was elated when she agreed to marry me. When I told my dad that I was going to marry Colleen, he told me it was a gross mistake and wanted to stop me. We married in 1967 and Donna was born soon after.

I took Donna to a Cliff Richard concert in 1972 and Abba in 1977. I passed my passion for music onto her. I’ve been in a number of bands as the lead singer and played lots of gigs, but I’ve never had aspirations to be famous. Being a good husband and father doesn’t mix well with being a professional musician. Even though my band (at the time), The Unit, came second to the Little River Band in the battle of the bands, and a lot of people told me that I had a big future in music, I had to make a choice.

I chose my family. In 1970, in an effort to get back to something more in keeping with myself, I took on a job with Vacik Investments at Auburn; they were the number one company in Australia who handled everything 'outback', from kangaroo and fox skins to pet meat of all types.

I was employed there for 2 years as a skin/fur grader, mainly roo hides which would come in from all over Australia. Some of these hides would end up at the tannery in Sydney and go on to be tanned furs, many of which were sold overseas or would be 'pickled' and end up being leather goods, which included becoming soccer balls or many other items that were popular in the day. I remember with pride being asked to select 'prime' roo furs which were going to be made into a coat that was to be a gift from Tennis Australia to Evonne Goolagong Cawley as a present for her winning Wimbledon. Tennis Australia did end up saying a personal thank you to me, and I believe Evonne loved the coat and still wears it with pride on occasions.

In 1972 I moved on and took my wife and two young daughters to return to dairying at a large Exeter dairy, which unfortunately turned out to be a 10-month trial by 'fire', working long hours for not much pay...

It was in early 1973 that I commenced a new career working as a stud groom at a well-known Bundanoon cattle property, Jumping Rock, just before our third child, Rick, was born. At this time, Colleen couldn’t drive, and we had no way of getting our children to school, so we decided to move.

I saw a job advertised in The Land newspaper at Mandalong Park, St Mary’s. I had a three week trial and got the job. The cattle stud was owned by Rick Pisaturo but managed by Frank and Betty Gardner who became firm friends. We moved into a house across the road that was near a school. Many years later when Betty had a tragic car accident that left her in a coma in the East Hills brain damage unit for seven and a half years, I used to go and visit her and play Elvis to her.

Sunrise at Coolabah, photo by Dave Burt.

There was a financial downturn in the mid-1970s and I lost my job on the cattle stud. Colleen said she didn’t want to live in the country again so I had to find work closer to Sydney. I’d developed an interest in European cars and I saw a job advertised for a salesman at a dealership in Penrith. My only experience as a salesman was with stud bulls! I told the owner of the dealership that a bull has four legs and a car has four wheels and I thought I could do it. I sold expensive cars in Penrith for four years and did really well. However, when the owner decided to switch to selling Nissans, I moved to the Brian Foley Alfa Romeo dealership on Parramatta Road. I sold lots of cars for them, but not enough to continue paying our home loan when interest rates sky-rocketed from 11% to 18% by January 1990. I had to find another job.

I went to a wealthy man I’d heard of who owned the 1200 acre Fernhill Estate in Mulgoa. He had just employed Frank and Betty Gardner as the estate managers and I went to work for them again. Fortunately, Mulgoa was just ten minutes from our new home in Kingswood. Furthermore, he paid off my home loan in cash, and just asked me to pay him back the principal, without interest.

In my spare time, I like to take photographs, particularly of the outback. In 2004 I won the Reader’s Digest Inaugural Photo Australia Competition, with my grandson and his puppy as the subject. The prize was a trip for two on The Ghan with a stopover in Alice Springs. Colleen and I went and I took my camera.

I often wonder what my life would have been like if my father hadn’t sexually abused me. It has affected my whole life. My three children know what happened to me and they hate my father. I went to see a wonderful psychologist and she helped me to understand and process the emotional load that I had carried for so many years.

I want to say ‘thank you’ to BBM. Through them, I discovered my love for the outback. I’ve met some wonderful people on my journey of life – Cliff Richard, John Williamson, John Denver. The whole of my life would not be, if not for the BBM.

David Burt (Ronald)

Ship name / Flight number: Oriana

Chris Greaves