Red Dust Tapes
OVER 55 YEARS AGO multi-award-winning journalist John Francis interviewed ageing Australian Outback characters, before their voices were lost in the red dust.
THIS IS UNIQUE Aussie history.
NEARLY ALL lived largely solitary lives, in the harsh and lonely inland, on the edge of deserts, in a world of searing droughts, and occasional fierce floods.
THEY WERE prospectors, sheep and cattle men, boundary riders, drovers, railway workers, truck drivers, Aboriginal groups, and isolated but hardy women.
AUSTRALIA'S AVIATION HISTORY also started in the red dust. You'll hear interviews with some of Australia's most famous pioneer airmen (many of whom started flying in the First World War), who used aircraft to make the Outback a little less lonely.
JOHN ALSO interviews the descendants of other unique characters, reads fascinating tales from Australia's Outback past, and spins tales of his own red dust adventures.
WEBSITE: www.reddusttapes.au
Red Dust Tapes
Chasing opals since the 1920s, while paddling his own dusty canoe
SEASON 1, EPISODE 3
Opal miner Franko Albertoni was born in 1883. He was 88 when John Francis interviewed him in 1971, but still jumping around in the crushing heat like a little pixie.
In 1920 Franko and his brother were among the very early miners at the Coober Pedy Opal Fields in South Australia. Then in 1930 they were among the first 12 to dig for opal in Andamooka.
Franko was still living in the same mud and stone hut they had built there. A hut so tiny he just had room for one chair, and so dark, he cooked over his open fire by feel. His prized possessions were his button accordion and tin whistle.
Franko was scathing of his ‘lazy’ older brother George, a womaniser who lived in the city and made a lot of money gambling. Citing the poem, ‘Paddle Your Own Canoe’, he preferred the simple joys of digging for potatoes in earth so dry and hard he had to use a use a pick, and drawing a little muddy water from the well he dug when he was 70.
Also in this episode, goat carts and drought years in the Flinders Ranges. And before we meet Franko, we go underground in search of opal.