R. M. Williams Quotes
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When you're living in the bush as a child, there's no television or no telephone…
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Don’t make your story too big. I don’t want you big-noting me.
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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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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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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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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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I’ve got to go and check my stock.
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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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If I didn't do this I'd sit back and die. I was a prisoner in my own castle.
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It was the horse and buggy days... horses were our life.
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Superior craftsmen in any trade will never be short of work.
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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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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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My father’s people were Welsh, and the oppression of the burdened miners also shaped my genes.
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We finished up making a pair of boots and they were quite unique…
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[In Adelaide] I was born here on 24 May 1908, in the coldest part of the State, at the start of a particularly cold winter that registered ten heavy snowfalls between June and September.
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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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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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A man must look to the muddy pit wherefrom was taken the clay that moulds him.
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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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Make sure you use Scobie whips…
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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.
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[On Mao Tse-tung] Mao, he had the right idea but just got bushwhacked.
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If you make something good, people will make a track to your door. We made simple things that people wanted and kept them simple.