Memories of Brown David

MANY will remember the upstanding colt, Brown David, owned by Mrs.

F. S. Stewart, and stabled and ridden by Major E, B, Ayris for many years, at Wau. New Guinea. They will remember how this beautiful horse won races at the Red Cross Meeting at Wau, with the Major up.

Some perhaps will remember an inci dent at the last Meeting (November, 1941) when Major Ayris lost a stirrup, ran second to Mrs. Fuller’s Dollar Prin-

cess (J. Cook up), and then went bush.

Eventually, Brown David threw his rider —at any rate he had to come off—and gave him a terrible hammering on the hard ground, from which onlookers thought he would never return. How ever, Major Ayris tottered back to the enclosure, to meet a barrage of whiskies from sympathetic hands.

Brown David met his end during the war he broke his stifle and had to be destroyed.

The accompanying picture records a strange co-incidence and may be of in terest to goldfields old-timers. Major Ayris is now on a large station, Maneroo, in Central Queensland. A horse-breaker was engaged at Maneroo and he proved to be no other than Paddy Bourke, who broke-in Brown David, on Mr. J. Y. Shannon’s property, at Rodney Downs, from whom Mrs. Stewart pur chased the colt about 1936.

Here you see Paddy and the Major mounted on two of the Maneroo young sters. which were in the course of being broken recently, in the stockyards at Maneroo.

For those who are interested in horse flesh, Brown David’s pedigree is; Brown David, by Prince David from Miss Tish; by Sir Tristram from Good Morrow; by Brakpan from Broadsides, by Golds brough. Broadsides is a sister to Cross fire, the g.-dam of Artilleryman, who won the Melbourne Cup. Prince David, the sire, was by Positano from Mary Dorset.

Thus it will be recognised that they had an aristocrat in their midst at Wau, thanks to that devoted horse-lover and great horse-woman, Mrs. Flora Stewart.

Mr. Utu Taramai, curator of the new Cook Islands museum, arrived in Auck land, in August and he will spend about three months at the War Memorial Museum there receiving instruction in museum methods.

According to a recent report in a North Queensland daily, New Guinea native “contractors” at Moresby, Lae and Wewak, are offering white men £l5 a week to drive their trucks. The paper states also that post-war New Guinea had become more fantastic than Alice’s Wonderland in that payment of war damage “far in excess of actual damage to their holdings” had disrupted the natives’ lives.