He probably was 19, had family living in Oz world at the time(sister and nieces) of those movies which just amplified a vision I had of the country and desire to see it.
My parents made it over for an extended stay fulfilling a long time desire for my dad. They made lifelong friends with a family, owners of an itty bitty 2 million acre station, that visited us probably a dozen or more times over the next 20 years.
I remember sitting out on the dock at Burt lake with my dad and his friend Ollie, the father of the clan. He looked out wistfully over the lake and muttered 'what I couldn't do with this back home'. During meals my mom would busy herself in the kitchen and helped with the cleanup and said cleaning the dishes involved running them thru' the sand out the back door. Lack of water being the biggest struggle on a daily basis, you can imagine how old Ollie felt being in the middle of the biggest concentration of fresh water on the planet.
When the grown kids with their kids came over they begged to go water skiing and could slalom better than a few of us, never got a good explanation for that one. Something to do along the lines of country bumpkins and city slickers no doubt.
Another daughter and her family owned the Horse Caves in Kentucky, neat place but another anomaly how that came about. Resourceful bunch those Ozzies.
