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
As a kid, he skinned cats and sold the meat. What happened years later at the Dolly Pot Mine?
SEASON 1, EPISODE 11
When I interviewed Ernest Skein in 1970, I was told he had recently been let out of jail.
I didn’t want to close down an interview with a fascinating old-time prospector, so when I got the message that some subjects were not to be touched, I left that one alone. It remained just a giant elephant in the tiny, hot-as-hell tin shack in which I interviewed him in Tennant Creek, in the Northern Territory.
What I’ve found out recently deepens the mystery of Ernest Skein. It involves a shocking incident that occurred at the Dolly Pot Mine in Tennant Creek, way back in 1939.
I relate what little I know of this incident at the end of this edition of Red Dust Tapes. But for the most part, this is the story of a north Queensland butcher who got his start selling cat meat, and ended up as a gold miner in the Northern Territory, with a whole lot of rough and tumble along the way.