The Tales of Swaggy Joe

About the Book

It all started in the 1970s when my own children were on the threshold of adulthood. The Roving Roo adventures were created around 1989 after a trip to the USA, where my daughter introduced me to a mascot named Kirby Kangaroo. Swaggy Joe became the romantic character of my childhood—when itinerant workers still walked the roads. I have fond memories of some of them, notably an old timer of Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, named Brian Rice, who my Grandma Lyle employed in exchange for food and rudimentary accommodation in the back shed. Another was a chap named Ruben Webb, who my dad gave work to at our home. He worked well and then wandered his way. Great icons of honesty, integrity, and the freedom to live as they would were both of these men and others of their ilk. I recognize that the normal way of life for me as a child has slipped by as prosperity and technology altered what my grandchildren know as their way of life. I felt that it could assist the new generations if they could be given some insights into life as it once was before their time, albeit in romantic tales of the imagination. For me to express this, I found the lyric ballad came naturally to be the utility of sharing. Although untrained as a writer and communicator, the urge to share a little of “what was” or “maybe was” prompted this little booklet. I hope that the readers, those young and those not so, enjoy the unique sharing reading provides.

About the Author

Kg. Lyle was raised in a country town in Victoria. He is the fifth generation of his family to have grown there, and now the seventh generation of the family continues in what is now a commuter abode for Melbourne. Kg. experienced the interdependent farming, secondary and tertiary society of rural towns as he grew from childhood to fifty years when circumstance called him to move. The valley of Bacchus Marsh, in those days, still held benefits for growing minds in a safe community. At age fifty, having exhausted his value to his family and community, he ventured forth into the very different culture of inner suburban culture Melbourne. He was fortunate to find sanctuary with people who exposed him to newer thoughts and understandings. He was introduced to the Usui System of Natural Healing called Reiki and became a practitioner of level 1 in 1992. His teaching master, Klaudia Hockhuth of Bungarie, elevated him through second degree before initiating him to master level shortly after. Kg. Lyle’s background was as the child of self-employed small business entrepreneur parents, who instilled community service as an ethos of responsibility to the society which supported them. He first started writing verse in the 1970s as he observed the growth of his town from its rural state into the urban reality of its present. Some of his work was printed in the local Express newspaper as commentary upon the local scene and administration at the time. Heritage has always been a stimulant to Kg.’s imagination as history is the base of the world we have now. Time moved on as it does, and with it, new people passed through the line of his life, each one gifting him with different aspects of living. Most of these gifts have stayed within him, even as the people travelled their personal paths, as he did his. Today he finds himself as a retired pensioner living with his lady of choice, Suzanna, in the beautiful region of East Gippsland, Victoria, with its natural charm of verdant bushland and gentle rivers, albeit challenging winter climate. It is in this tranquil paradise that Kg. has found the space to collate the journey of his writing. He hopes others enjoy the trip too.