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The Magic Of Horse Droppings

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As a young boy from the age of 2 every day my life was full of activity due to a constant stream of people who were like shops (before supermarkets) coming past to our front door with everything we needed. They came in trucks or carts of all shapes and sizes. Most of them were drawn by horses. They'd stop every few houses with the sound of “Whoa” and then move on to the sound of “Gid’yup” - with or without the driver. They were very well-trained horses, mostly draft horses bred for this kind of work. At some time during the day I’d come with my beach bucket and spade and scoop up the poo left behind on the road by all the horses. Then I’d bring back my buckets full of horse poo and empty it onto my Dad’s vegetable garden. He grew great vegetables. In those days there was so little traffic that it was never a problem. You see, we lived away from the main roads so there was no through traffic, the only traffic was to and from the nearby houses. First off I’d be woken early ...
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The Magic Of Fairy Hills

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My very first memory is of walking to the next street, holding my mother's hand, to go to the Fairy Hills Kindergarten which was held in a big old house. Yes, I was living in a place known as Fairy Hills. I would have been about 2 years old. This was a massive contrast to the denuded flat lifeless area which I have just described, my next home. It's a contrast I don't think I've ever recovered from. Such a big emotional shock. My mother found our new home, where we lived before moving to the government estate when I was a teenager, after travelling by train from our inner suburban duplex home until she reached the end of the line. Then she started walking across the vacant fields until she came to a house for rent. Unknown to my mother at the time, our new home was on a corner near where the Darebin Creek joined the Yarra River (the river which runs through the city of Melbourne and out into the bay). My mother had found a natural Australian fairyland and the...
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Spooky Spooky Teenage Years

Hello, my name is Neil Smith. Welcome to the first post on my spooky spooky blog about how I came to write my real life ghost story, an unexpected spooky spooky book adventure. As a sensitive teenager my family moved to a spooky government housing estate. Row upon row of little boxes they called homes. For acres there was not a tree to be seen, the entire natural landscape had been bulldozed to the ground. We had neighbours into drugs and alcohol and, I suspected, a lot of domestic violence. The houses were mostly disappearing under an uncontrolled growth of weeds and the streets around me were always littered with empty cans and assorted rubbish. I felt sorry for the children and I accumulated a vast collection of children's records (as they were back then) which I would use to entertain them on occasions. Not surprising I've grown up with a passion for taking care of the natural environment, a concern for the care of children, a distaste for drugs and alcohol and a ...
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