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Overseer: A True Story of Adventure, Danger and Discovery
Paperback
Biographies GeneralTravel GeneralGeneral Asia
ISBN13: 9781764428224
Publisher: William Morris Stanford
Published: Dec 2 2025
Pages: 400
Weight: 1.58
Height: 1.09 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Overseer is written by Bill Stanford not as an autobiography but as the work of a memoirist, in that here he writes of the first ten years of his life after leaving school.
He has since made numerous journeys around or across the world and in 2019 he was invited to conduct the Armchair Travel class at Dubbo's University of the Third Age. Due to his acquired knowledge of some remote and different lands and people of interest those classes continue to this day.
Upon leaving school he was a jackaroo at Wingadee Station, north of Coonamble, NSW, where the 150,000 acres ensured a working knowledge of the station's 5,500 cattle and 60,000 sheep along with the self-replacing herd of station-bred horses. He followed that with more rural life at Ebor, via Armidale and also Mudgee. He then gained a position in a mining camp on Koolan Island, off the Western Australian Kimberley coast. Bill started at the bottom as a tradesman's apprentice and rose through the ranks to being in charge of the major drilling rig on the island.
Whatever he may have achieved on Wingadee Station and Koolan Island he attributes to the discipline he inherited by way of the overseers of the day. It was understood that there was work to be done no matter the hours required, the working conditions or the weather, for in both endeavours one should acknowledge Mother Nature, let alone all manner of mankind.
Many of his fellows amongst the workforce of 200 Koolan island men came from overseas and he was interested in the backgrounds of those who risked their lives to escape from Eastern Europe where they had been ruled by the harsh and narrow Soviet Union ideology.
Before he left Australia he avoided his own early death when he walked away from a plane in Alice Springs that moments later crashed on take-off, killing all on board. He bought a one-way ticket on a Russian ship to England, teamed up with an Australian bull-dozer operator who had been working in New Guinea and set off to see the lie of the land. He worked on a vineyard in Chianti, Italy, as a civilian employee at the headquarters of the American Army for Europe at Heidelberg, Germany where for a while he was the civilian overseer and as a tour guide operating in and out of England and then a club manager.
In Istanbul he made his way into the headquarters of the Turkish First Army after spending two days gaining military permission to visit the Fort. A Turkish Army Lieutenant-Colonel and another officer escorted him to the immaculately preserved rooms that were granted to Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War. He also found the home of Mary of the Mongols who had married Abaqa Khan, great-grandson of Genghis Khan.
Bill was stoned by Muslims in Iran while visiting a mosque and also stoned in Pakistan. His wife and a friend were stoned in Kashmir by Muslim children for no obvious reason. He was involved in various incidents in Afghanistan, Moldova, Ukraine, the Soviet Union, Germany and Bulgaria that necessitated unexpected departures.
After ten years of freedom he married an English girl in London and along with others they travelled for their honeymoon on a retired single-decker bus from London to Kathmandu where he encountered the Living Goddess before island-hopping to Australia. Bill readily acknowledges his fortunate life is in the main due to the company of his wonderful wife, Janice. To this day he relishes the early love and attention granted him by his grandfathers and their equally devoted wives and abides by the discipline instilled in and accepted by him courtesy of the overseers.
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