“Hello, what are we going to talk about?”

It’s after tea and Stan and Suzanne are winding down for the evening. The caravan, borrowed from Stan’s sister Barbara, would appear near new but for the gradient of red dirt streaking across the white shell exterior. Photographs line the interior walls, displaying faded faces of the family.

Tonight’s address? Top of Australia, somewhere east of Mt Isa. 

Up here, precise locations are as useful as a thermometer. It’s hot, and there’s nothing but dry grassy plains as far as the eye can see, and even further still. Just the way they like it.

Earlier in the day I approach the pair with an idea—I’d like to have a chat.

My childhood was full of my grandfather’s tales—so too are my interactions with him two decades later. At any family dinner, gathering or holiday, he’d never miss an opportunity to share a story from his life—or rather, lives.

While our parents had heard the tales many times before (when he saw an opportunity for a segue into a story, he took it), he had us grandchildren in awe. To the wide-eyed child, the sheer scope and variety of experiences, pranks and lessons learned were beyond belief. Here we were dressing up and going on make-believe adventures, and here was this wizened man—our Papa—who had lived these adventures for real.

On the evening of 17 August 2018, in the middle of their latest adventure across Australia, I called to take note of those tales. To connect the pieces I’d heard over the years, and to better understand the man I know as Papa.

Stan’s phone rings. Suzanne answers.

“Are we live?” I ask.

“Yes, you’re live,” she responds. “Papa?” she prompts Stan for a response.

“I’m sorry, what was that?” he says.

“You’re live,” she repeats. “We’re doing a talk.”

“Hello,” Stan offers playfully, before Suzanne threatens to stop the recording before it’s even gotten started. Oh Stan, take this seriously, she thinks.

Stan’s cheekiness—or as he later puts it, his inquisitiveness—becomes a recurring theme throughout our talks. Yet given his formal education and distinguished career, cheekiness seems a curious trait. 

However, as I begin to discover, his inquisitiveness and playful curiosity are precisely what inspired his adventures. They’re as much as part of the man sitting in the caravan as are his snow-white beard and gentle face. Yet unlike those physical characteristics, these traits have been core to Stan Richards’ being from the very beginning.

Early Years

On a cow paddock neighbouring Sydney’s Mascot airport loomed a Moreton Bay Fig. From their house on Niblick St Arncliffe, Stan and his older brother, Terry, would cross the paddock—between parked planes—towards the fig. They would shimmy their way up to its outstretched limbs, for across from the fig stood an even taller pine tree. 

After exhausting the height limits on the fig, the brothers would shuffle out on the tallest branch before jumping across, latching onto the pine. Climbing to the peak, the pine was the tallest tree in the area. To better appreciate their surroundings, the boys felt at liberty to do some pruning. “I think to this day,” Stan recalls with a chuckle, “that pine tree still has a gap on one side.” 

“Things were very meagre when I was a child,” Stan says when asked about his childhood and what the children would do for fun. So they made their own.

The children would make kites and fly them from the open paddocks nearby. Yet they were open for a reason—they were in the direct line of approach for planes landing at Mascot airport. One day a burly policeman in full uniform came running across the paddocks towards the children. With the kites soaring high, several aircraft had been circling above in long lazy loops. The policeman told the children to bring their kites down—all incoming planes had been unable to land for the past 20 minutes.

With John, their father, working on the railway, Stan’s mother May and the children received a pass for free travel for two weeks. May bundled the kids up, prepared sandwiches in a brown paper bag, and went to Central station. From there they would hop on a steam train down the south coast to Kiama, turn around and come back up again, just for a day trip. No frills.

An Australian summer wouldn’t be complete without a swarm of cicadas making their presence known. It gave Stan an idea. 

He thought it’d be fun to go out looking for cicadas and collect them in a shoebox. The next day he took the early train to school to arrive before his peers and teachers. With the classroom empty, he reached up behind the store cupboard, and placed the shoebox, sans lid. He slid it back against the wall and went about his day.

Then class started. 

Stan recalls, “As the day warmed up, the cicadas had actually left the shoebox and were climbing all over the ceiling and hanging upside down. Until one of them decided to croak… Then they all decided to croak. The noise was abominable!”

In a foolish attempt to rein them in, the teacher shouted, “get them down, get them down!” Well, the class had a field day with that. “Ink bottles, pens, pencils, rulers were thrown at the ceiling,” he recalls with glee. With the classroom doors and windows open for the cicadas to take their leave, Stan and his classmates enjoyed the summer’s day out in the playground.

After the success of the cicada prank, he turned his attention to the eight-legged kind. Stan recalled how he found a huge huntsman at home, packed it away in a tobacco tin, and brought it to school. In the morning break, two larger kids took the tin and began throwing it back and forth. It was dropped and landed near a group of girls.

“Don’t open it, don’t open it!” Stan urged them, how sincerely, I didn’t ask.

They opened it. Out crawled the huntsmen, sending the girls jumping back and shrieking. Stan was called into the headmaster’s office, where he fessed up to the crime and got off scot-free. Who could blame innocent little Stan Richards?

When probed on these streaks of playfulness, “I was a mischief-maker,” he says. “School was boring. I tried to put some life into it.”

I asked him why he found school boring? “It didn’t go fast enough.”

Stan went on to achieve Dux of Connells Point Primary School.

Head Down Tail Up

Stan’s father John died when he was 10. Having served in The Great War (Australian Camel Battalion), each child was given a chance to be supported at university through the Soldier’s Children Education Scheme. When the time came to leave school, Stan seized the opportunity. “That was the big break.”

Bill Howe, an office clerk for the scheme, “was more than a father to me, he was a mentor,” Stan says. As Stan was 17, Bill was to guide Stan through university, but had three strict rules. There were to be no girlfriends, no extracurricular activities (such as rugby or the debating team), and it was head down, tail up for the next four years.

Stan was there for one thing, and that was to learn. At the end of every term, Stan was to report back to Bill with his results. “It was not a joke, and I was not allowed to fail.” 

Yet before he started university, the kite-flying, cicada collecting side of Stan wasn’t ready to be swept aside in service to dignified academic glory. Not completely.

As the 1948 summer holidays drew to a close, he took to his brother’s 1927 Chev and began tinkering with it. Examining how it all fitted together, slowly dismantling it piece by piece—until it was nothing but pieces. “Everything that could come apart was apart.”

When Terry offered to take their mother to the shops, he discovered what was formerly his car rightfully kicked up a fuss. Stan spent the final holiday weekend putting it all back together again. 

Yet the inquisitive streak didn’t come without consequences.

After his retelling this story, Suzanne speaks up, “He had an accident when he was fixing the car … nearly cut his testicles off,” she added, chuckling away in the background.

Returning it to its original state, Stan was on the car, leaning over to solder the door back together when he needed another tool. “All I had on was a pair of shorts in the summertime.”

He reached down, but began to fall. He had the presence of mind to push back as he fell. The raw edge of the metal found flesh just two inches past the groin, sliced through his belly, up to the navel. Pulling his knee up the chest to best stem the bleeding, Terry drove him to the doctors. 

Stan hobbled to the back of the doctor’s house where the surgery was. On examining the wound, the doctor offered “I think this needs some whisky.” He poured one for Stan and one for himself before getting to work. Stan held the torn flesh together as the doctor began to stitch him up like a ripped child’s toy. 

Stan was informed he’d have to stay off that leg for some time. “No way,” he said, “I start university tomorrow.” Bandaged so stiffly that he lost all movement from the hip, so began Stan’s tenure at The University of Sydney. 

After the car incident, he seemed to turn a corner and thoroughly apply himself in his studies. Semesters were full of five day weeks, with classes from 8am to 5pm, returning again on Saturday from 8am to 1pm. Assignments were to be handed in by Friday. Between semesters there were exams—thirteen three hour exams within two weeks.

How did he find the time?

Returning home after a full day of class, Stan would go under the house to his own personal study space. Here the height was so narrow that he had to dismantle the table before reassembling it under the house. Stan wired up his own electrics and studied into the night. How did he find the time? He made the time.

When I asked did he have any free time, he simply chuckled. The only time he had free was Sunday. In the summer months he’d go out to Cronulla to the surf. Otherwise, he enjoyed the simple pleasure of a Sunday sleep in.

Stan was frugal in his youth—he still is. After catching the train from Blakehurst to Central station, he would forgo the tram to walk the 3km (with a suitcase loaded full of books and notes for the day) to The University of Sydney. All that to save a penny each way on the tram. “It sounds silly. One cent,” he reflects.

When Stan turned 21, his mother May told him, “You’ve turned 21 now, you’d better get a key for the front door.” Stan replied, “Don’t worry Mum, I’ve had one for five years.” 

In an inquisitive streak, he dismantled the lock on the front door when the house was empty. He discovered that if he removed three out of the five tumblers in the lock, his mother’s key would still work—and so too would a second key he had found. So he repaired the lock with just the two tumblers intact.

Stan had a desire to understand how things worked. “I still do,” he says with pride.

Hello, World

With no clubs, no girls and an extra two thousand pennies under his belt, Stan received his Bachelor of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering in 1952. With few ties to home and an eager mind, he was ready for the world. But was the world ready for him?

Through his strong academic record, he secured an apprenticeship with British Thomson-Houston, an engineering company founded in the late nineteenth century. Set to work for his passage as an electrician on the ship to England, his mother saw him off out of Sydney Harbour.

With the ship set to depart, May offered one piece of advice before saying goodbye. “Son, I know you’re going off to enjoy yourself in the world. Enjoy yourself, have a lovely time,” Stan recalls. Then she added, “There are lots of things we should have talked about, but never got around to it… Just remember one thing … would you still be doing whatever you are doing, if you knew I was standing behind you?”

And that was that. They said their goodbyes and off she went down the gangplank. “That still rings in my ears today. Whatever you’re doing, are you proud of what you’re doing?”

In England, May would write to Stan and send copies of Reader’s Digest from back in Australia. One issue included the hymn A Father’s Prayer by General Douglas MacArthur—but above the word Father’s was Mother’s written in May’s handwriting. When MacArthur was stationed in Australia during WWII, he penned this prayer for his only son, Arthur:

Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid; one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory.

Build me a son whose wishes will not take the place of deeds; a son who will know Thee—and that to know himself is the foundation stone of knowledge.

Lead him, I pray, not in the path of ease and comfort, but under the stress and spur of difficulties and challenge. Here let him learn to stand up in the storm; here let him learn compassion for those who fail.

Build me a son whose heart will be clear, whose goal will be high; a son who will master himself before he seeks to master other men; one who will reach into the future, yet never forget the past.

And after all these things are his, add, I pray, enough of a sense of humor, so that he may always be serious, yet never take himself too seriously. Give him humility, so that he may always remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, and the weakness of true strength.

Then I, his father will dare to whisper, “I have not lived in vain.”

“That’s the best bit of general advice you could ever give … What a wonderful standard,” Stan says. He took the advice to heart and cut out the prayer from Reader’s Digest, folded it into a square and placed it in his wallet—where it remains, more than sixty years later.

In the final year of his apprenticeship, aged 24, Stan received a call for his next assignment. He was to make his way to the Harland Shipyard, Belfast. An electrical issue needed solving on the latest oil tanker under construction—the company’s largest to date. This was, after all, the very same shipyard where the RMS Titanic was built some four decades earlier.

Upon arriving on-site, Stan was introduced to the shipyard’s Chief Engineer. This engineer took one look at this plucky Australian and said, “If they’ve sent you, heaven help them.”

In the tanker’s engine room, Stan examined the two electric turbines that powered the ship. They were identical and designed to be load-sharing, working in tandem together. If one rose to 70% load, so too should the other. This wasn’t happening. They were out of sync.

The Chief Engineer told Stan to adjust the voltage regulators—but Stan knew that wouldn’t fix the issue. Not wanting to show up the top brass—not yet anyway—he did as the Chief Engineer instructed. No luck. The turbines remained out of sync. The Chief Engineer left and came back with eight senior engineers. The group suggested other fixes, Stan tried them, and the issue still hadn’t been resolved.

Disgruntled, the engineers told Stan to fix the issue by morning and left the young Australian to his devices.

Stan worked through the night until he had dismantled half the mechanism—injury-free this time, having learnt valuable lessons on his brother’s 1927 Chev. Thankfully, Stan had a pair of aces up his sleeve: Knowledge and Experience. The two keys to his smug confidence.

Having learnt the principles of engineering in his studies, in his third year of university Stan embarked on three months of industry experience in Tarraleah, Tasmania, at the local hydro-electric plant—becoming second in command during his placement. Under the guidance of the plant’s Chief Engineer, Stan applied theory to the real world. Here was an opportunity to directly observe the impact of his theoretical learnings. “All the theory came to light and meant something,” Stan says of his practical placement.

In particular, the hydro-electric plant gave Stan valuable experience working with AC electric current. Harland ships had all run on DC, and this oil tanker was the first wired with AC—a fundamental fact the experienced engineers had all overlooked.

The next morning, the engineers returned to the engine room and tested the turbines. The metres on the two machines were in perfect sync—as if a string connected the two dials, Stan recalls. When asked by the engineers what he did to the turbines, Stan, in trademark smugness, replied, “Well, I fixed the problem.”

Canada (And Nature) Calls

Stan’s inquisitive mind has driven him to venture out into the world and experience new lands. To set out, contemplate and make sense of his surroundings. It’s a thread that runs through his life. “In my childhood days, even getting on a steam train was an excitement.” He became fascinated with trains and steam engines, wanting to know how they worked, and why was the space between platforms so wide?

Growing up, Stan’s uncle owned a motorcar—a novelty at the time—and took the family camping down the coast near Huskisson. Living out of a canvas tent, Stan would swim and fish on the rocks during the week-long holidays. “I really enjoyed the freedom,” he recalls.

Years later, he modified Terry’s Chev to allow the front seat to hinge back down, transforming the seats into a makeshift mattress. Stocked with everything they needed—including a kitchen sink in the form of an old kerosene tank Stan had cut in half—the Richards family, “looking like hillbillies”, would set off and make camp by the Warragamba River.

Stan’s wonder of—and confidence within—nature was to be tested across the Atlantic.

After his apprenticeship in the United Kingdom, Stan’s gap year(s) abroad continued in Canada, working for Orenda Engines in Toronto. Having done his share of hard work throughout University, and then some, Stan began to make the most of his free time. He’d drift off after work on Friday, and drive off into the Canadian wilderness. Exploring his surroundings, Stan recalls that “the map of Ontario had more blue than green. There were lakes everywhere, of all sizes and shapes.”

With his station wagon loaded with a mattress, pillows, boxes of clothing and tins of food, he was ready to explore the wild. Often he’d pull up beside a lake, make camp, light a fire and sleep in the wagon. On the colder nights, he’d roll a large river stone into the fire. On bedtime, he’d roll the stone out, wrap it in layers of newspaper, and place it at the end of the mattress to keep his feet warm. “Being in the wilderness, you never know what to expect… There have been some beautiful times.”

Looking over the local map, Stan noticed a wide patch of wilderness to the far north, bordered by distant highways and railway lines. With his backpack loaded, he informed the local township of his intentions and set off into the backcountry. When evening approached, he found a fir tree leaning over to the ground, unrolled his sleeping bag and made camp within its limbs.

In the grey of the following morning, Stan woke to a sudden “Thump!” Stan was met by the largest stag he’d ever seen, stamping the ground to coax him out from under the fir. The stag reared up on its hind legs and let out a mighty bellow before running off. For the entire day Stan didn’t hear another animal stir. “I still remember that stag silhouette against the morning light. It was a sight to remember.”

Not content to simply explore Canada by foot, Stan sought to train for his pilot’s licence. Once home, he had the idea to fly himself to engineering contracts throughout remote New South Wales. In hindsight, there was enough work for him in the city, but he did make the most of his time in Canadian airspace.

After building up his hours in the air under the wing of his instructor, the time came for Stan not only to fly solo—but complete a spin maneuver, solo.

Picture this. You’re cruising at 4,000 feet when you ease back on the throttle until you’re just gliding through the sky. It’s just you. Looking out the window, you see the lay of the Canadian wilderness below—the dense forests, the winding streams. Then the plane stalls. It begins to lose altitude. It drops, nose down. It keeps dropping, whirling around like a barber’s pole. That tranquil wilderness starts to look less serene with every passing foot. What do you do?

I know what Stan would do.

He’d first go through his checklist—three times—before pulling the throttle. He’d stay calm, composed. As the aircraft began to twirl down, he’d ease on the opposite rudder pedal to counterbalance the spin. Then he’d ease on the throttle, bringing the plane back to horizontal before returning to cruising altitude.

That’s what he did. He pulled it off without a hitch. “My ego was blossoming,” he recalls, “I’ve done it!” For good measure, he completed the manoeuvre three more times.

Still not content with airborne and terrestrial adventures, Stan rounded out his trio of Canadian near-death-experiences in the depths of Canada’s Great Lakes. Assisting a friend, Stan went scuba-diving to determine where the cold water met the warm—that depth was where the fish were.

Suited up with a tank full of air, Stan dropped into the lake. He swam down. Down further still, until even light feared to tread. He paused, “I was in total blackness. I could not see a thing.” It wasn’t just dark, it was an absolute blackout. Stan lost all sense of up from down, of forward from back. There was no buddy line linking him to the surface, no visual markers to re-orientate himself. He was floating still, lost in a sea of shadow.

Channelling the same composure from the spin maneuver, he didn’t panic. He knew he still had 45 minutes of air left in the tank. He took stock of the situation. He had made a weighted lead belt to help with the descent down. He could unite and drop it, and swim in the opposite direction. But that cost good money—he wasn’t going to risk his life for that. Back to the drawing board.

An idea surfaced. He eased off his facemask, water rushing in to chill his face. Breathing out through his nose, he expelled enough water to leave an air pocket in the mask. Slowly, he rotated himself around until he could feel where the air was on his face—he had created a makeshift spirit level. Following the air pocket, he propelled himself ‘up’ until his surroundings began to brighten. “It was very, very unnerving,” he says of the experience. 

“If things are going wrong, don’t panic. Take a few deep breaths and think again. Think again.”

When Stan Met Suzanne

After seven years overseas, Stan The Wanderer, returned to the family home in Blakehurst. Working to earn his passage, a boy had left, and a man—a pilot, no less—had returned. He had explored the world, honed his skills and was set to begin the next chapter. He wrote a three-year plan for himself. One of the items read, ‘Get married.’

A problem-solver by nature, Stan wasted no time and joined a Sydney singles club that corresponded through the post—the 50’s equivalent of Tinder. And like Tinder, the shallowness of the dating circuit was often a theme then too. The girls who wrote to him were less interested in knowing Stan and more interested in knowing whether he owned a car, and how much he earned. “This didn’t appeal to me at all,” Stan says.

“I didn’t care about any of that stuff,” Suzanne says, her voice piping up over the call.

From the other side of the Tasman, a seventeen-year-old girl had come over to care for her aunt Jane’s newly born third child. Jane happened to live in Blakehurst. On Mooney Ave, opposite the Richards family home.

Before the summer of 1959/60, she was June ‘Suzanne’ Muriel Schofield, a beautiful, yet timid young Kiwi. After that summer, well, her life was never to be the same again.

Towards the end of 1959, Stan—the dutiful son he was—was cutting down a fir tree from the family’s yard. He crossed the street to ask his neighbour Jane if she’d like it as a Christmas tree. But an unfamiliar face answered Jane’s door—a young kiwi by the name of Suzanne. When Stan came back to the front door again to deliver the tree, Suzanne was so enamoured with this Australian man that she reintroduced herself all over again in a fluster.

The two neighbours soon got to know one another. Suzanne recalls, “I would go to my bedroom window and look out the window and see him come home from work… Oh my heart would go!” At this stage of the call, I can hear her thumping her chest with joy. “They call it puppy love,” Stan chimes in.

While Stan was just as taken with Suzanne as she was with him, as the more mature one, he had the tension of playing the role of a friend, without showing too much interest. He was 28 and she was 17. For Stan, it was an emotional struggle as to how he should behave as she was so young. So they took it slow, spending time and going to the movies together.

Suzanne was positively smitten. “He was such a nice guy that I didn’t even think about age. I didn’t think about money. I didn’t think about whether he could provide for me. It was just that I fell in love.”

Over the summer, Stan invited Suzanne to join the Richards family on a BBQ picnic. It was a blue-sky summer day and Suzanne mentioned to May how beautiful the sun was. May quipped, “Which one?” in reference to Stan and his brother Terry. “I was so embarrassed,” Suzanne says, “I didn’t know which way to look.”

February was approaching and so too was Suzanne’s birthday.

Out in South Hurstville with Barbara, Suzanne noted how she was fond of a certain brooch in the shop window—two small budgerigars, ‘lovebirds’, together on a branch. Barbara took note and passed on the information to Stan. When on 10 February 1960 Stan presented Suzanne with the brooch, she “knew something was serious about it.”

Stan remained cautious not to express too overtly how much he was fond of her. That is, until one evening when the pair were looking after Jane’s children together. “We went into the kitchen,” Suzanne recalls, “and I didn’t turn the light on. Say no more. I got a kiss!” From there the romance only continued to blossom.

Yet with her role as Au Pair set to run its course, Suzanne’s return to New Zealand drew nearer.

Before she was to leave, Stan asked Suzanne out to dine at The Hay Stack, Sutherland. “A very posh restaurant. I had never been to anything like it before,” she says, having cut a ballgown down to street length for the occasion. “Stan had to tell me what all the forks and knives were for. It was just magic.”

After dinner, Stan drove the pair into the city where they caught the evening ferry across Sydney Harbour to Manly. Together they watched the moon rise over the Tasman Sea. “That night, he told me how much he loved me … and it hasn’t changed since.”

In March 1960 with Suzanne departing, Stan said, “Go home, think about it, and see how you feel.” While he could afford it, he didn’t want to contribute a penny to her return as he didn’t want her to feel obligated to return and marry him.

Suzanne returned to her family in Christchurch—where she had two boys waiting on her. “One from bloomingwell Invercargill. He hadn’t contacted me for months!”

But Suzanne knew in her heart that Stan was the one. She began to save for her return. Earning eight pounds a week, she’d give three to her mother, Barbara, keep one for herself and put aside four for her return fare—Barbara didn’t want her stranded in Australia should things not work out.

Working hard, sticking to her savings, five months later she flew back into Sydney. A dozen red roses awaited her on her bed. This Stan was something special.

Engaged in February 1961, Suzanne designed her own ring—an S on each side for their names. Stan’s cousin, a jeweller, forged the custom ring. A year later they were married in New Zealand. As a sign of their commitment to family for years to come, the newlyweds invited both of their mothers on the second half of the honeymoon. The quartet set out in a cosy Morris Minor, heading north from Christchurch.

This is but the first chapter of a couple in love who, sometimes with their family—but always with their Lord—would go on to have many adventures together. Living in India. Missionary expeditions through Africa. And setting off into the Outback for months on end.

But those are stories for another time.

Stan the Man

As a child, I looked up to Stan with awe. As a man, my awe for him is joined by admiration and respect.

I’ve long been intrigued to know what made him tick. Why did he view the world the way he did? What gave him the confidence to live such a rich life?

As a youth—and still to this day—his inquisitive mind fueled him to question the nature of things. To explore his world, whether that be a local field or pristine wilderness. To satisfy his desire to uncover why it operates the way it does. Engaging in a feedback loop of observe, play/test, observe, play/test to better know his surroundings. 

Yet a natural aptitude for curiosity could only take him so far. As a young adult, he matched it with an equal measure of hard work. His curiosity drove him to learn, but it was his dedication to honest work that enabled the application of those learnings. Through hard work and experience, Stan grew confident in his abilities. To know when to back himself and set out on endeavours most of us would baulk at.

Now, nearly nine decades later, those same two traits see the pair in the middle of nowhere, somewhere east of Mt Isa. Taking wonder in the playground of Outback Australia, and having the confidence to back themselves. To see what splendours they have yet to discover. 

During our call, after months on the road, I ask them about their intentions to return home. “Do you have a planned route in mind? Or will you slowly wind your way back?”

Stan pauses before responding. The previous day they were at a site once visited by the Australian poet Banjo Paterson. It reminded him of Banjo’s poem Clancy of the Overflow. 

Working as a lawyer in nineteenth-century Australia, Banjo wrote to one Thomas Clancy, requesting an unreceived payment, sending the letter to ‘The Overflow’, a sheep station near Nyngan in country New South Wales. The reply read, “Clancy’s gone to Queensland droving, and we don’t know where he are,” providing inspiration for the poem.

In a “dingy little office”, Banjo wants to escape the city life of 1889 Sydney:

And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me

As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,

With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,

For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.

The reply sparks in Banjo dreams of going bush:

In my wild erratic fancy, visions came to me of Clancy

Gone a-droving ‘down the Cooper’ where the western drovers go

As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,

For the drover’s life has pleasures that the townfolk never know.

And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him

In the murmur of the breezes and river on its bars,

And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,

And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars.

After Stan quotes lines from the poem, he answers my question with his trademark cheeky delivery. “We’ve gone a droving, and we don’t know where we are.”