David Cox

Portrait of David Cox: I used to like riding horses. I been learnt by the experts, old Delaport and old Mick Condon. The whitefella reckons that’s the smartest horseman they’ve seen. They were experienced men, champion horse breakers. We did have plenty of fun. I was king of the gymkhana, so were all the Cox brothers. I used to win the hurdle. I went to the rodeo in Marble Bar, riding a big black horse. My head spun right round, I was dizzy, but he had a job to get me off, he never chuck me. My brother used to race and win the cup, riding Pine Prince, and Old Bluebird. I had a couple of rides in the races, but I wasn’t good as him. On the station I was riding a horse, doing the windmill, going down the well, that’s a terrible job, you look up to see all the heads of the snake sticking out. One man got to stop on top, and when you down the well, nobody’s allowed to have a spanner because if that drop on your head, you’re a dead man. At the station you go right up until night time, ten o’clock. You might get caught with a mob of sheep and lambs, it could be very slow. In the cattle camp you got to handle all the bulls. Bulls are not to play around with, I used to pull ‘em down all the time, the bull was nothing to me when I was young. But, now I look at the bull and think, “oh, you can stop there!” We used to go to town sometimes. We’d tell the boss that we’re going into town, in two weeks, the policeman would check that you’ve gone. If you got no job, the policeman is going to tell you you’re going to jail. That happens to Aboriginals everywhere. I used to chop posts, two hundred every day. It was all Aboriginal people you were working with. By the way, you get a whitefella, you gotta pay them. All the squatters got rich from the Aborigines. They make millions of dollars from us.