Patsy Kemp was at Glen Innes on Tuesday and Armidale on Wednesday, September 18 to launch her first book The Drover's Daughter. She said her book was the first to be written about a family of drovers living out of the back of a truck and eventually a caravan, and working together for 15 years.
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"It had to be told because that story has never been told before," she said.
"So, this is a little bit of Australian history. I was droving on the stock routes in NSW and Queensland with mum and dad and five other siblings from three-months-old until I was 15-and-a-half.
"It was certainly a different life. Very hard, actually. You never had a day off. you had to keep working all day to keep the stock moving. That was part of the deal with the stock inspectors, you had to move so many miles a day."
Patsy said it was a life that involved numerous horses and dogs.
"We're talking about the early-1950s until the mid-1960s. We never had a permanent home to go home to, we just always lived out of the back of the truck and the caravan," she said.
"If we finished a job somewhere, say in Inverell, we would stay there until we got another job.
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"We would park somewhere on a riverbank so the horses and dogs and we could get water for showers and all the rest of it."
Until the family finished droving in 1967, Patsy said they had no idea what it was like to live out of a house, and when the family did move into one the kids thought it was great.
"We didn't have to pack up and move every day, and you could put the dishes in the cupboard and just get them out of the cupboard without having to jump in and out of the caravan or the truck," Patsy said.
It took her two years to complete the book and she is now halfway through her second book which is about her later life as a shearer's cook, jackaroo's cook, farmhand and cookhouse keeper.