R. M. Williams Quotes
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Trust is the easiest thing in the world to lose, and the hardest thing in the world to get back.
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Dad had a passion for prancing, matched pairs of light horses – buying them, matching them, training them and then selling them to people who could afford them. The stock he drove was nearly always in the process of being trained. That was his business…
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In those days if you came by landau with four horses and a coachman you were royalty. Two horses pulling a carriage of sorts proclaimed you gentry. By buggy and pair you were landed folk. By single harness and sulky no bells announced you but at least you were not walking. The long-shafter brake my father drove was the mark of a horseman but not easily classified…
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One piece of leather moulded to make a boot, instead of a lot of pieces…
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I would think that we've got enough faith in the background that our ancestors left us that will make us win in the future.
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Life, as I came to know it, revolved round feeding the horses, preparing them for work and making the implements they were to haul. Horses pulled wagons; they hauled the wool and the wheat and the merchandise. They had to be shod, and the harness and other equipment kept in repair.
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It seemed important to us that an old drover who walked his cattle a thousand miles or more should be remembered for that achievement.
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[On the products he makes] It's got to last a long time.
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Cowboys that's American, it means boys who milk the cow - call them 'Stockmen'.
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We had a song for the alphabet, a song for the months of the year, still another for the arithmetic tables…
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There was still resentment in me that my mother had persuaded my father to leave the life with the anvil and the reins to take up what I considered to be a useless retirement.
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Was a giant who changed the history of the world. I was in China during the old regime, when it was full of moneylenders and slavery. He changed all that.
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And the life demanded strength. Hay had to be carried from the fields, heavy horses broken to harness, heavy wheels had to be mended and tyred with steel. Any wagon wheel weighed enough to need four men to lift it. Any four-bushel bag of wheat weighed more than two hundredweight (100 kg). Men of his breed worshipped strength.
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Towards the end of those drought years the Department of Primary Industry had discovered that cattle given licks of a mixture of molasses and urea and phosphoric acid maintained health and condition even though the available grazing was extremely poor, and they would ingest materials they would normally ignore, such as wattle and whitewood leaves, and prickly pear.
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I learned the formula of adding and subtracting, learned about the dictionary, and knew that the information to solve any problem was to be found somewhere. But I was bottom of the class all the way – not because I did not like Miss McNeil, but because I could not handle the required standards. The dear lady would keep me sitting by the hour to establish the way a world like ‘altogether’ was sounded and spelt.
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I was six when the war started, ten when the Armistice ended the slaughter. The best of our horses had gone to pull guns, and the pony that I loved so much had been taken to pull a wagon of war. Thus early I learned of man’s inhumanity to man.
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My girl was an outback type who could cope. She was content to sleep on the ground, cook on the open fire, nurse her children in the shade of a bough shelter, eat rabbits, carry water and wash her clothes in a four-gallon tin.
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Big, obedient, patient Clydesdales. I loved them.
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I couldn't handle prosperity... I went back to where I belonged.
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He was essentially a quiet man, a man who never wrote letters…
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The Australian has a characteristic which is primarily optimistic, I would think.
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[On returning to the country] I went back to where I belonged.
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When everyone faces the harsh facts of life and comes to understand that privilege is not a right but a reward, we shall return to full employment because there is more than enough work to keep the whole world busy.
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I'd like to be remembered as somebody who set out to raise a family and pay my debts and stay within all the limits of acceptable society and still make some success.