HEWAN Gibson fondly remembers a kind chap named Murphy, who manned the gate on the Cunningham Highway while the Warwick man was growing up at Gore in the 1930s.

Now retired, Mr Gibson has revived the old story of Murphy to share a slice of Southern Downs history with the next generation.

THE worldwide depression of the early '30s caused a lot of unemployment in Australia.

In those early days there was no safety net, so if you lost your job you starved or as a lot of men did, took to the roads and lived off the land, snaring possums and bears for their skins and hopefully finding the odd job such as splitting wood, and so the legend of the Australian Swaggie was born.

As a child, I saw lots come to our door and mother would give them some tea, sugar, flour, salt and a bit of mutton to help them on their weary way.

Murphy was such a man, but he was lucky as he found a gate on the recently constructed Darling Downs Rabbit Board fence and claimed it as his own.

He built a camp beside the gate and opened it night and day for motorists who usually gave him three pence (two cents in today's currency) for the service.

The gate was on the now Cunningham Highway between Karara and Inglewood where the road goes over Herries Range, which is just the high point on the road.

Murphy was a little man of indeterminate age, probably early 40s but looked older, with a shy smile and a little hand that shot out to retrieve his three pence.

He soon got to know everyone in the district and would address everyone by name, he was a fund of information, my father would say to him "Who's in town today Murph?” and he would rattle off all the people who passed that morning.

Like a lot of men in those days Murphy had a failing, he was an alcoholic, but he shunned the local drinking houses and went straight to the big smoke.

About once a month he took his big bag of silver coins and caught the train, not like you and I would catch a train, he chased as it passed his camp and threw himself aboard, and headed to Warwick.

This was easy to do as the train got down to walking pace as it chugged up to the top of the ridge.

Murphy would indulge his passion for a day and then by prior arrangement the publican would take him down in the sulky and put him in the guard's van of the evening train to Goondiwindi.

When the train driver knew Murphy was aboard he would go slow over the range and the guard would roll Murph out and down a grassy bank not far from his camp, where he would lie until morning.

We knew nothing about Murphy's past until a shearer went through the gate one day and then went onto the Karara Pub and told the landlord George Forbes, "I've seen that little bugger at the gate before, he was a rouseabout in a wool shed over near Stanthorpe a few years ago, I think is was Bendee, didn't even know his name, deaf as a post he was, couldn't hear a thing, so we decided he had wax in his ears and that we should do something about it, but what to use?”

One of the shearers thought that turpentine might do the job, so that night we grabbed the old fellah and held him down on his bunk and poured a teaspoon of turps into each ear.

When we let him go he let out a blood curdling yell and headed for the bush leaving his swag, we never saw him again.

Often wondered where the little bugger ended up.

The treatment was a bit drastic but the result was dramatic because Murphy had super hearing when he arrived at the gate, he could hear a car approaching when it was a mile away and he could tell whose car it was at night by the beat of the engine, and have the drivers name on his tongue as it pulled up.