A hut on the banks of the Karuah River held great freedom for twin brothers

For decades, they'd spent much spare time at a corrugated iron hut that they built at the confluence of the Karuah and Branch rivers [not far from Karuah] in the late 1950s when they were aged 19.

"The hut stood for over 50 years - they were the best years of all I reckon," Bob said.

They'd catch fish and crabs, shoot roos and cut timber, often with mates.

"It was a great life," said Bob, a bush poet.

Look closely at the photo and you'll see a rickety wharf, showing how close the hut was to the river.

Asked what he most liked about staying at the hut, he said "freedom".

Bob and Dave owned the land [650 acres], which they bought for about "1500 quid". They eventually sold the land, but retained permission to stay at the hut for years.

When they built the hut in 1958, they camped there one night under sheets of corrugated iron to "keep the mozzies off us".

The hut is gone now, but it lives on in Bob's memory - and this poem he penned.

For nigh on fifty years, this old hut stood

On the banks of the Karuah stream

Although it's now gone, it somehow lives on, for I go there at night when I dream.

I see the big open fireplace

Its frogmouth chimney, we built from tin

The corrugated iron window flaps

That we'd open, to let the breeze in.

I recall long days on the river

The flathead and crabs that we caught

Oft' cooked in the coals for supper

And washed down with a drop of rough port. I taste the tang of black billy tea boiled on a blazing log fire, and the flavour of damper cooked in the coals that we'd toast on a fork made from fencin' wire.

I recall wild rides through the bushland

Among the rough boulders and logs

And that time the old grey horse went and dumped me when he was spooked by a pack of wild dogs.

I hear the echo of distant gunshots

Further out there in the scrub

And the exciting sound, of a baying hound

Such sweet music we certainly did love.

I hear the call of ibis and plover

And the kookaburras' joyful laughter

I smell the sooty possum that camped

On the old plank high up on the rafter.

I smell the sweet scent of bloodwoods in bloom, hear the buzzing of small native bees

I see the misty blue of wood smoke

Drifting up through the tops of the trees.

I hear the splashes and blows of the dolphins, as they circle the big oyster rack

To wake me at night in my sleeping

When the sky was an inky jet black

I hear the murmur of the breeze in the oaks, as a nor'easter blows up the river

Yes in my dreams to me it seems

The old hut will live on forever.

We wrote on Tuesday about a rare insect called a mountain katydid that Glenn Albrecht spotted on his Duns Creek property, near Paterson.

Bob Skelton said this brought to mind "the huge spiders that were in the mangrove trees on the Hunter River, just below Ironbark Creek, back in the '50s".

"The '55 flood wiped them out. It would be interesting to know if they returned. The local blokes called them leopard spiders - they had yellow stripes across them."

Pivoting to another yarn from another time, the Magster told us that he once saw a small dead bird caught in a big spider's web near Stockrington.

Yikes!

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