Matt

"giant he recalls only as ‘Clarrie’ took him under his wing. Clarrie was, according to his protégé’s haphazard memory, a barrel-chested bull of a man ‘about six foot four’, originally from Tasmania. He wore a boiler suit buttoned to the neck and a porkpie hat, was the strongest man in the crew and reputed to have once been a champion shot-putter. This made sense, because he appointed himself as the wayward teenager’s coach. Clarrie wasn’t your average itinerant labourer, and he must have seen the spark of something better in the boy too. ‘He took me aside and told me I had a foul mouth and since my vocabulary was so poor I used to cover this by swearing. He told me I had one choice: his way or a clip over the ear and if that didn’t work he’d slap me around a bit. Clarrie always got his way without having to fight anyone. I was very impressed.’ The giant Tasmanian’s way was a small Spirax notebook, a pocket dictionary and a pencil. His instructions were to learn three words a day well enough to put them into a sentence that made sense. ‘He said he didn’t care how I wrote something so long as I knew what I had written,’ Stokes would recall. ‘Every time he heard me swear he kept his promise and I’d get a slap over the head — on one occasion a short right to the face that put me on the ground with the taste of blood in my mouth.’ Another time, Clarrie heard him swearing and said, ‘Give that dictionary back to me. It cost good money.’ The boy got the message. The three-words-a-day routine became a habit. It seemed Clarrie had picked him for a self-improver. When the season’s work ran out in the wool stores, Clarrie and some of the others joined a small shearing contractor’s team. Some could shear; others would be shed hands and rouseabouts. Clarrie suggested there might be room for Kerry in the team, so he went. It wasn’t until a long time later he worked out that Clarrie might have kept an eye on him because he knew Matt."

"Matt’s ambition was humble and his world was small, but in him were pride and perseverance and a bottomless capacity for work. It’s one definition of true grit and they shared it."