Joining the Army

This Text is from an actual letter from a kid from Eromanga to Mum and Dad after joining the army.
(For those of you not in the know, Eromanga is a small town west of Quilpie approx 10 hours west of Brisbane in the far south west of Queensland Australia)

If you can 'hear' this with an Aussie accent it will definitely enhance the flavour Wink

Dear Mum & Dad,

I am well. Hope you are too.

Tell me big brothers Doug and Phil that the Army is better than working on the farm - tell them to get in bloody quick smart before the jobs are all gone!

I wuz a bit slow in settling down at first, because ya don't hafta get outta bed until 6am. But I like sleeping in now, cuz all you gotta do before brekky is make ya bed and shine ya boots and clean ya uniform. No bloody cows to milk, no calves to feed, no feed to stack nothin'! Blokes haz gotta shave though, but it's not so bad, coz there's lotsa hot water and even a light to see what ya doing!

At brekky ya get cereal, fruit and eggs but there's no kangaroo steaks or possum stew like wot Mum makes. You don't get fed again until noon, and by that time all the city boys are buggered because we've been on a'route march' - geez its only just like walking to the windmill in the back paddock!!

This one will kill me brothers Doug and Phil with laughter.

I keep getting medals for shootin' - dunno why. The bullseye is as big as a bloody possum's bum and it don't move and its not firing back at yalike the Johnsons did when our big scrubber bull got into their prize cows before the Ekka last year! All ya gotta do is make yourself comfortable and hit the target - its a piece of pi55!! You don't even load your owncartridges - they comes in little boxes and ya don't have to steady yourself against the rollbar of the roo shooting truck when you reload!

Sometimes ya gotta wrestle with the city boys and I gotta be real carefulcoz they break easy - it's not like fighting with Doug and Phil and Jack and Boori and Steve and Muzza all at once like we do at home after the muster.

Turns out I'm not a bad boxer either and it looks like I'm the best the platoon's got, and I've only been beaten by this one bloke from the Engineers - he's 6 foot 5 and 15 stone and three pickhandles acrossthe shoulders and as ya know I'm only 5 foot 7 and eight stone wringin' wet, but I fought him till the other blokes carried me off to the boozer.

I can't complain about the Army - tell the boys to get in quick before word gets around how bloody good it is.

Your loving daughter,

Jill