“I was born in Kurrajong at the end of the depression in 1933. In those days they were all timber cutters. My Grandfather on Mums side was the local village Blacksmith and that was my first job…a Blacksmith Striker. We moved to Leichhardt when I was small. My Grandmother brought me into the world and held me up and said he’s like a little skinned rabbit. I was the fourth born and I was small for my age for many years after.
I was a bed wetter when I was young and nobody wanted a bed wetter. My mother left me when I was 3 1/2 and I wet the bed till I was 5. I found out later that my mother wasn’t always like that. She had 2 miscarriages before she had a child and she was on drugs from then on. In those days kids were seen and not heard.
My grandfather made sulkies and my grandmother had the finest rig in town which she drove hard. One day she was driving it through a paddock and a hare jumped out, the horse shyed and threw her out. She was in a lot of pain for 8 months and then she snuffed it. She was a God fearing woman who sold Bibles and my grandfather swore, cussed and drank. They were such opposites. By the time they had 5 children she said to him…Jimmy Pye, I’ve had enough of you! From here on you will sleep in the other room.
My father and his brothers went into a floor sanding business started by my eldest uncle but he ended up keeping the lot and had lots of real estate including 13 houses in Haberfield and some apartments on the beach in Cronulla. Eventually they all went out on their own and became successful. All the Uncles had a tin under the bed or the floorboards. When I was 19 I remember Uncle Darcy had 20,000 pounds hidden under his mattress. My father was William.
My father remarried. My stepmother turned quite nasty and I remember one time I put my hands through a window. It was a Saturday and I went up into the chook yard. It had been raining and I was soaked and dirty. My stepmother locked the door. I said Mum..you locked me in. She said well you can stay there. I was 11 and I was a small boy. In anger I threw a couple of pebbles which hit her sheets on the line and she lost it. In anger I hit the window with both hands and did some damage to my hands. My father came home and said …Your real mother won’t take you so you’ll have to go to a reform school. I said…Anything is better than this!
He rang my real mother and my stepfather Headley Roy Staff who was the Licensee of a hotel in Forbes and by 8pm that night I was on a train going from rags to riches. He was an educated man and a very understanding man. I was very lucky there. Roy was a fine musician and an electrical Engineer. I remember him telling me he served his apprenticeship through the depression. They had to go from station to station to collect the pennies to pay the wages. That’s how bad things were.
I was working in my mid teens in the Blue Mountains where I became friends with a lady who was 16 years older than me. She was studying to be a Librarian. I was only living in her house for 2 weeks when she said..Rex, I’ve had to make arrangements for you to move across the street. I said..what’s the problem and she said..well it’s a very small country town and people are gossiping about this young man living with a mother and daughter so I moved across the road to Nanna Perrys. I’m 85 now and I wished I’d kept in contact with them.
I got a job as an apprentice Carpenter. Back then Sydney had a lot of strikes where the city would stop. There was only 5 million people in Australia in those days. I was working for the best builder at the time called Austin Edwards and I asked to go into the joinery shop. No-one wanted that job. A woman sat in a glass cage in the middle of the room watching. I went ahead and at the end of that I became the Foreman. One of the guys took a shine to me. The Cinemascope screens were coming in and Austin had all the contracts for Hoyts theatres. We would start at 11pm on Sat and finish at 9am on Monday morning. I made a lot of money but I worked hard for it.
I planned to go around Australia with two other fellows, Malcolm and Bill and we scored a job working on the Post Office at Murwillumbah. I turned 21 there. From there we went to Glen Innes for a job. We really only got as far north as Toowoomba because Malcom and Bill fell in love, not with each other but with two different girls. Bill was quiet, steady, a gentleman, not all that good looking and he became almost like a father to us all. Malcolm boxed and he was good. He could have got somewhere but he was a pretty boy and didn’t want his face disfigured. When we went out Malcolm was always so well dressed and I had this bloody awful pinstripe suit I wore everywhere.”