Garry Sonny Martin

My name’s Garry Martin, but most people know me as Sonny.

Welcome to my Blog! I will be updating this page with new stories from time to time. 

I write stories about my childhood growing up in western Queensland to show the next generations what it was like growing up as a Blackfulla in the 1950s and 1960s.

I write these stories with the help of my daughter, Angie Faye Martin, to preserve memories of the past for future generations. Above all, I hope my granddaughters – Lailah and Ruby – find joy and meaningful connections in these stories.

I started documenting my childhood when I was in Oakey with my brother, Owen (Poe), and my mother, Zona Martin née Leslie. It was a quiet and nostalgic time for me – I finally felt time and space to really reflect on the past. My daughter was calling frequently from Melbourne during the Covid lockdowns and wanting information about the past for her debut novel, Melaleuca. She was particularly interested in stories from the yumba and how life was back then.

I hope you enjoy these yarns, have a laugh and remember our loved ones. There’ll be more coming soon!

Mrs Free

By

Mrs Free was a single mum with three kids who lived on a farm about five kilometres from Cambooya. Ray and I worked there three days a week after school helping her out.

I believe it was a local identity, probably the shop keeper, who approached Dad knowing that he had a couple of lads who could maybe lend a hand to Mrs Free helping to collect and clean her eggs in preparation for sale to the regional egg board.

The school bus that we caught into Toowoomba for school each day would drop us off in Cambooya around four o’clock of an afternoon and on the days we worked for Mrs Free we would hop on our bikes and peddle off to her farm.

Ray and I enjoyed our time collecting eggs and mucking around with her three kids as it was a good chance to make a bit of pocket money and get away from our own annoying brothers and sisters.

The two dollars a fortnight we earned would go towards buying our 25 cents a packet of Benson and Hedges cigarettes and some other indulgences, like the locally made sarsaparilla and barbecue potato chips that I loved.

I had a rather sneaky suspicion that Ray had a crush on the second daughter and for him ‘working’ there was an additional bonus, but for me it was the afternoon teas of deliciously cooked slice made of condensed milk and cornflakes and freshly made lemonade.

I remember one afternoon riding home after work we got caught in a hailstorm. We had about three kilometres to go before we reached home and that’s when we could see the storm approaching from the west. The wind was blowing directly into our face at hundreds of kilometres per hour and as we peddled frantically towards home the sun started to disappear beyond the darkened grey sky and our fears began to heighten and that’s when the rain started to pelt down upon us.

Suddenly with a huge crack of thunder, and lightning strikes so dangerously threatening, the sky burst open and the hail came tumbling down delivering the most painful blows to our unprotected bodies.

There was nowhere to shelter from the constant bombardment of rain and hail, not a tree in sight and still a long way from home, so all we could do was to keep our head down and peddle as hard as we possibly could and hope for the best.

I have never to this day experienced anything quite like that afternoon, the relentless punishment from the hail beating down on us that seemed to last forever and with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide it is something that I will never forget.