MURRAY Sweetapple remembers Australia’s vast farming plains, tough and some funny times during the war, and later love and peace.
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On November 25 he will celebrate his 96th birthday at his now residence Jonathan Rogers GC House in Nowra.
Mr Sweetapple said the secret behind a long and happy life was to be content within yourself and enjoy the many beauties the land down under had to offer.
He was born in Perth where as a boy he lived with his mother Violet, father Arthur, and younger sister.
He remembers his father as a stern man, especially when he returned from World War I, a colonel who fought on the sands of Gallipoli.
His favourite childhood memories were racing pigeons “thousands of miles”, which he started with a few mates who lived a few doors down.
“I left home when I was 16 and began work as a stock and station hand at Elders,” he said.
When he was just 19-years-old he signed up as a foot soldier during World War II and served the Australian Army for six years.
“I started as a private and worked up to a captain,” he said.
There was a photo of Mr Sweetapple sitting on his bookshelf. It was of four young men, dressed in uniform, laden in weaponry.
“That photo there was taken in Syria. The four of us scaled the wall of the fort and the others got hit going over and fell backwards, but the four of us made it,” he said.
“I was 21 there.”
Before he was sent to Syria, Mr Sweetapple trained in England for about eight months. He said the extreme temperature changes were “crook”.
“I missed Tobruk, but I was at the next station and then we went back over past Palestine and into Syria. Later we came back to Australia and went up the islands. I finished up on New Britain,” Mr Sweetapple said.
He spent his 21st birthday training in England. He said there were no celebrations but around the same time some of the soldiers were up to a little Aussie mischief.
“We used to go on route marches and we passed a piggery one day, which was near the camp, that night a couple of the fellas went back and pinched a pig,” he said.
“With a bottle of beer they woke the sergeant cook and said come and murder this.
“The next morning, of course, police were looking for it and everything. They didn’t find it, it was all cut up.”
Mr Sweetapple remembered the colonel was accompanying the police on their search.
“When they left the sergeant cook said to the colonel ‘Did you enjoy your pork chop this morning?’ The colonel looked at him and then it dawned on him of course. It was the funniest thing.”
Mr Sweetapple said he found it funny his military number, WX96, resembled his birthday celebrations this year.
After the war Mr Sweetapple moved back to Perth to work for Elders, aged 25. He began to do a lot of travel to major sheep stations across rural Australia from Adelaide, to Broken Hill, Tibbaburra and Wentworth, Alice Springs and even Sydney.
It was during this time he experienced the serenity as a lone traveller on the open road.
“Working stock and station was my life. I always slept under the stars if I didn’t make the homestead,” he said.
The stations were at least 80,000 acres and it was sometimes days before he saw another house, so he would camp by the road with his swag and a billy.
“I always carried enough tucker with me because you never knew where you’d get to,” Mr Sweetapple said.
“It was very peaceful. That’s what’s helped me live as long as I have.”
While he was travelling through Adelaide, Mr Sweetapple met his first wife and later wound up in Sydney where they bought a house in Chatswood.
He was predeceased by two previous wives before marrying Margaret who resides at Clelland Lodge.
They have been married for 25 years.
“We met in a church where my youngest daughter used to go in north Sydney,” Mr Sweetapple said.
“We were introduced and that was that.”
Mr Sweetapple has five children, two boys and three girls and six grandchildren to date. He said they live all over Australia and he loved all his family very much.
Mr Sweetapple hopes to have a small birthday celebration at Jonathan Rogers GC House on Wednesday, November 25.