Donald Gilchrist
Ship name / Flight number: SS Fairsea
Arrival date: 21/7/1966
I was born in Ayr, Scotland, on 6 December 1949 but grew up in a much warmer part of the British Empire. When I was about six months old, I was adopted and taken by my step-parents to live on a farm in Southern Rhodesia. I went to boarding school in Salisbury (the capital) until I was about 14 and a half years old.
I had a step-sister back in England and my step-father was a Scotsman, so after school I decided to go to England and get a job. I worked on a dairy farm in Derbyshire but after living in southern Africa, I battled with the cold weather. I started to look at some other options, such as immigrating to Australia or Canada. I didn’t want to move to another cold climate and Australia’s wide-open spaces were appealing. My mother encouraged me to apply to the BBM. By 1965, the pressure for independence in Southern Rhodesia was mounting, and my mother knew that I wouldn’t have a good future back there.
I sailed with 15 other ‘Little Brothers’ on the SS Fairsea. The seaman’s strike was on and the only reason we were able to come out was that we had an Italian crew. I relished the adventure of coming out to Australia by boat. It’s a pity that we didn’t have some social media back then, as it would have been easier to keep in touch with each other. I’d really like to make contact with a few of the Little Brothers who came out with me.
When I arrived in Sydney in July 1966, I went to the BBM boarding house in Burwood and was sent to work in a factory at Strathfield. By August I was working at a sheep station called ‘Nimby’ in Harden. I lived at the homestead and got on well with the owners’ two sons.
Somehow, I got a job as a jackeroo at Wave Hill Station, which at 5,200 square miles is one of the largest cattle stations in Australia. It is 600km south of Darwin and very remote. There were three base camps, and I was one of only three white fellas at camp no.3 – the rest were Aboriginal workers. We had half a dozen donkeys and a cart that we used to move our gear as we went droving. We set up temporary camps near bores. It was a big learning curve for me. Good fun. Good food. We worked hard mustering cattle. There was no alcohol and no women involved so things were a lot better then. I think I stayed there about 12 months.
My next job came about via an accident. I was getting a lift with a mate in a truck and we broke down just outside of Mt Isa. I rolled my swag out under the trailer and slept there for a couple of days while they fixed the truck. The mechanic said he could get me a job at a mine 60km south of Mt Isa at Duchess. When I heard how much money I could earn, I decided to take it. I worked for Norm Shaw at an open-cut limestone mine with just four of us in the remote camp. We were drilling and blasting and would slake our thirst at a pub about 4.5 miles away. I had my 21st birthday there. I think I celebrated my birthday by going out with some mates to shoot kangaroos and brumbies at night.
Part of my job entailed delivering the limestone from the mine to the railhead at Duchess, which is how I got my experience driving a truck. This led to my next job with Angus Campbell from Mt Isa driving cattle trucks in far western Qld and the Northern Territory. I did that for a year or so. Then I got a job with Wrights as a road-train driver from their base in Helen Springs, back in the Northern Territory. We’d drive west to the Ord River in Western Australia, before they flooded it, and cart buffalo to the meatworks in Darwin. Sometimes I’d drive as far south as the Meekatharra rail head to drop off cattle.
After so much driving and moving around, I was pleased when I landed a job in the urban fire brigade in Mt Isa. I bought a house and stayed in the same job for 8 and a half years. I would have stayed longer except I injured my knee and even after the surgery, I couldn’t pass the medical fitness test. I was pensioned off but too young to retire, so I went back driving trucks.
I started doing the overnight run from Mt Isa to Townsville with a freight company and then with Greyhound. I’d drive passenger buses west to the Threeways (where the Barkley Highway meets the Stuart Highway) and east to Townsville. After a while I moved to Townsville and started driving buses to three points of the compass: south to Rockhampton, north to Cairns, or west to Mt Isa.
I got a job with IPEC Road Express, a courier and delivery company, as a supervisor in their yard at Townsville and then for the opposition – Comet – loading and unloading the trucks at the depot. This gave me the confidence to buy a small delivery business in Mt Isa. I started with one truck and one ute and built it up as a transport business taking supplies to and from the mines and working as an agent for transport companies. I called it “Gilchrist Carrying”.
By now I was in my early 40s and decided it was time to get married. I met Carol when I worked in Townsville and we married in Mt Isa. We were happy together but, sadly, Carol got crook with cancer and died.
I wanted to try something different so we bought a mango farm at Alligator Creek, 26 km south of Townsville. I started doing freshwater crayfish farming and was part of a co-op but we couldn’t get good prices and it wasn’t worth the effort.
After this, I did a season hauling sugarcane out of Giru (35km south of Townsville) to the railhead. I liked driving the Kenworth trucks, so when I was offered a job with Brown and Hurley, the distributors for Kenworth in Queensland, I jumped at it. I used to fly to Melbourne and pick up the big new Kenworth trucks and drive them back up to Townsville. It was a lot of driving, but I don’t mind spending time by myself on the road.
My home base was Townsville, and my friend Sue moved there with her two sons from Brisbane. I worked with her first husband in the fire brigade in Mt Isa. We were married in 2005.
I’m semi-retired now. I have about 20 head of cattle and 190 mango trees on our 78 acres at Alligator Creek. We don’t need for much. My wife had to have a shoulder operation after a fall, and then another operation on a broken collar bone, so I’ve been looking after her. We were really pleased to be able to drive to Brisbane for the BBM reunion in June 2025. The Bruce Highway is so much better than when I first started driving on it 25 years earlier. While the roads and bridges are better, there are a lot more idiots using them.
I’ve been back to England a couple of times to visit my step-mother – she moved back there after my step-father died. I also tried to track down my birth mother. When I found out who she was, I also found out that she had died five years earlier. I have been able to meet some of my biological cousins though.
I was very lucky to have the opportunity to come out to Australia. I immigrated when I was 16 years old and never regretted the decision to leave the cold. If it wasn’t for the BBM, I’d probably be living in some grotty place in England. Not many people get the opportunities that I’ve had. It’s a beautiful, free country – a land of opportunity. Australia has been very good to me.