IT WAS the popularity of his anecdotes at dinner parties that led 1970s Victorian rural journalist Michael Thornton to write his first memoir, Jackaroo.
Released earlier this year by Penguin, it is an account of his youth as a 17-year-old city boy sent to work on sheep and cattle station Habbies Howe in the Victorian Highlands - a station famous for turning boys into men.
It also tells of Michael's stint at Nareen Station, Hamilton, Vic, for the then Federal Minister for Defence Malcolm Fraser in 1971.
"As a rural journalist I interviewed and wrote stories on many farmers," Michael said.
"I always thought my story about being a jackaroo for station owner Dick Webb at Habbies Howe in north east Victoria was just as interesting.
"I told a lot of anecdotes at dinner parties, and eventually people started telling me to 'put it in a book', so I did."
Michael said the station's strong reputation as a tough school for jackaroos - recruiting 80 boys over 50 years, added impact to the book, which includes a chapter about the young Michael having to castrate lambs - with his teeth.
"I was a woosy choirboy from the city who was suddenly thrust into this tough and scary environment," Michael said.
"I tried to resign on my third day, but they wouldn't let me leave.
"The initial chapter on my school days is special, because it sets the scene for the reader, with this gangly under-achiever being told by another boy's mother at boarding school that he won't last a year as a jackaroo at Habbies Howe."
But Michael did last-out the year, of course.
The following is an excerpt from Jackaroo:
Mr Fraser phones on Boxing Day and asks me to start on Monday week - 4 January 1971. For mum, all the kerfuffle about my having quit the family wool-buying firm, and thus having spat the silver spoon from my mouth, is history. All is forgiven. Having a son who works for none less than Australia's Minister for Defence has to be the best thing that happened to her since getting past the first round at Wimbledon in 1938.
Michael started writing Jackaroo while living in New York with his wife Elaine Furniss in 2002.
But it was not until 2007 that he really set to the task.
"A writer needs to find his or her 'voice', and I knew once I found mine, that I had a story worthy of being published," Michael said.
"I changed the names of fellow jackaroos in case they did not like what I wrote about them.
"But they have since been in touch and are happy with what I wrote, so I need not have changed their names after all.
"I have now discovered that I got a few things wrong, like having confused the names of sheepdogs.
"It's amazing how readers will contact an author to point-out one word that is wrong, when there are 91,000 other words in the book."
Jackaroo has been nominated for the National Biography Award as part of the 2012 Sydney Writer's Festival and after its original release in June, had a reprint in September with another planned next year.
"It seems both city and rural readers are enjoying the book," Michael said.
"Every review has been very generous and complimentary.
"Interestingly, quite a few women have told me they wished they had been a jillaroo, and couldn't wait to read my book."
*Full report in Stock Journal, December 15 issue, 2011.
