R. M. Williams Quotes
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[In the 1930s] I got a muscleman to toughen up my body, and especially thicken my neck, so I could withstand the battering I knew I’d get in life.
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When you're living in the bush as a child, there's no television or no telephone, there's no neighbours and there's no talk much between people so you do, I suppose, develop to be more an individualist than probably you would now.
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It was the horse and buggy days... horses were our life.
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I’ve got to go and check my stock.
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Make sure you use Scobie whips…
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My book on leather-plaiting, first prepared more than fifty years ago, has been circulating in increasing numbers and many enthusiasts have come to me personally to have the knots demonstrated when they have found it difficult to learn from diagrams. I feel guilty that very little of the knowledge accumulated through a lifetime is in print, especially some of the more intricate knots which I find hard to illustrate.
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The adventure that might be encountered in any life that keeps as guidelines the rules governing the human spirit.
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Any manual skill gives its practitioner much personal pleasure, particularly when it is one that admits of constant improvement.
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We're slightly more honest, we're a little more honourable, I hope, and we have a national feeling of pride in being Australians…
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My father was a horsemen and had to supply teams to the people who work the agricultural areas, wool and that sort of thing so horses were our life.
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The centre of Australia is a land almost without dew, therefore comfortable, and in spite of it’s dry bulldust, clean to those who know how to keep clean in it.
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It's a long hard struggle from nothing to something if you're starting off with nothing, especially if you're raising a family.
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We finished up making a pair of boots and they were quite unique, but the fact that they were unique, one piece of leather moulded to make a boot, instead of a lot of pieces, took the imagination of the bush people and they became very popular with the bushmen who liked the idea of bush boots being made by a bushman for bushmen. It took on and, you know, from that there's been a million pairs sold or more, eh?
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In this world of opportunity every youngster today could get employment if he or she learned some specialized trade, some skill, some ability.
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The mastery of those Aboriginals over their environment has been the inspiration of my life. I would like to be the master of my environment as they are of theirs. I think I have gone a long way towards that, but not nearly far enough. I have a tremendous respect for them.
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Superior craftsmen in any trade will never be short of work.
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I didn't do a Bondy. We didn't produce anything new, just things that were in the Australian tradition - but better and stronger. Beyond the ideas I can't take any credit for the growth of the business. The kids were responsible. I was too busy with cattle and gold.
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Expediency has marked the road down which I have walked to dubious success, and always the pirate, the rebel, has shouted his advice over my shoulder while the faintest of lights pointed out a dim way.
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What is it that they say about the winter of our discontent? Those were my years of misbehaving. I just had too much money. I was in Paris, London and New York all the time. I had the best of everything, but I was so unhappy.
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We finished up making a pair of boots and they were quite unique…
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It was only ever an experience in making a dollar. The company was only ever a small part of my life. I've done a lot of things that have given me greater pleasure.
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[On his father] He was a man of another age, really, holding a set of values that differed in essence from those that most men hold today. The son of a pioneer settler, he grew up believing along with most of the men of his world that a man’s physical strength was his measure.
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A man must look to the muddy pit wherefrom was taken the clay that moulds him.
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My father had hands like a giant. As a child I had small slender fingers, and it was my ambition to develop hands like my father’s. Artists have lately expressed the wish to paint my hands, so somewhere along the way I must have achieved my wish.