Under False Pretences
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491_9780992304652
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Bill Smith slid unobtrusively into Cairns, North Queensland sometime in the early 1940s. He arrived with several packhorses, a pony that he rode and very little else. Bill fitted the category of the post-depression drifter perfectly. Nobody knew or cared where he came from. He gradually insinuated his small presence into the Cairns horse racing fraternity and began to earn a bit of money from riding trackwork and shoeing horses, but still nobody thought it necessary to get to know him well. He would turn up before dawn, ride the horses to the instruction given to him, give a brief account to the trainer about the horses work and condition, collect his trackwork riding fee and then disappear from the course. Eventually Bill graduated from trackwork to riding in races and he competed in meetings in many of the small country tracks around North Queensland, but he went to the racetrack already dressed in his riding silks and refused to change them afterwards in the jockeys room with the other jockeys, preferring to go straight to wherever he was staying to change and bathe in private There was much speculation amongst the trainers and jockeys about Bills eccentricities and some believed that he was a woman in disguise at a time when women were not allowed to ride in races against the men.Bill eventually retired to the small community of Innot Hot Springs on the Atherton Tablelands in the 1960s with a couple of old racehorses for company and in early 1975 he was befriended by a community nurse, Mary Jane McConnell to whom he began to unravel the story of his life. Bill died at the Herberton Hospital on 24th June 1975 and was buried in an unmarked grave at Herberton Cemetery, his origins and family history a mystery to everyone, including the hospital administration.Unfortunately, Bill had died before he was able to complete the telling of his story to his last trusted friend in the world, Mary McConnell, but hed left documents for Mary to read that finally gave her
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