Bill an individual to the end

Press, 15 August 1984, Page 1

Bill an individual to the end

By

LINDA CLARK

Bill Murray was a man with a rugged sense of adventure. On Monday, at the age of 73, he died, but not before arranging a death notice that would leave everyone guessing. Bill, with a precise sense of the macabre, oversaw his own death notice. It tells of a man who “walked most of Aussie, swag on his back.” He was a loner, a determined man who travelled and lived alone. Because that’s the way he liked it. Mr Rex Sandford met Bill when he was lounging about in Cathedral Square way back in 1944. What started as a chat and a “look-see” ended up as a life-long friendship. “Bill was a hard man. There’s no doubt about that.”

Bom in Sydney, he was given up, an orphan with low prospects. He was fostered by a fanning family who were just thankful for the extra pair of hands. So Bill began a life of hard grind. “He worked all day from four in the morning till dark. He used to say, ‘Those chooks never got off their perch. They were there when I fed them in the morning and they were there when I went to bed at night’,” said Mr Sandford. At 15 he ran away.

“He had caught the travel bug and it was something he never lost.”

He worked his way round most of Australia, shearing, picking fruit, and mining opals. “He could turn his hand to anything and he usually did.

“He used to reckon he’d had more jobs than hot dinners. I think he probably did. The thing was he just never stayed still,” Mr Sandford said. Bill came to New Zealand in 1951, but his roaming didn’t stop. After “looking round the place” he returned to Australia, this time with a wife.

He and Margaret had met at a dance in Christchurch. She didn’t mind the idea of

travelling, which was probably just as well. In an old Morris 8, which they had taken across the Tasman with them, the two set out on the honeymoon which would take them from one side of Australia to the other.

Laden with petrol cans and water supplies and with no mechanical know-how, they set out across the Nullarbor Plain. It took almost three weeks.

“In those days there wasn’t any road, just a dirt track. It was a nightmare. We were so weighed down we could only crawl along at 20 miles an hour,” Margaret recalled. Just out of Sydney the radiator blew up. A couple of hundred miles on the steering column fell out.

“There was a clunk and then that was it. Someone

who was travelling along stopped and tied it up with a piece of fencing wire,” she said.

The limping car carried on but not for long. This time it was a spring and a case for Ocker ingenuity. “A man hooked some fencing wire and tied a manuka stump under the front of the car. I don’t know what we would have done without fencing wire,” Margaret said. But the marriage was not to last.

“I, just don’t think Bill was a marrying man. He never really wanted any family. I guess he was bitter about the way he was treated and when you look back at it you can’t blame him,” Rex said.

Margaret returned to Christchurch and Bill, he just kept on going.

Bill Murray was a man in love with the outback. He learnt the art of bush survival from the Aboriginals.

“He had quite a lot to do with them. They taught him how to live on leaves and plants. He had a great respect for them. He reckoned they had a good way of life,” Mr Sandford said.

In 1977 Bill went on the inaugural flight to Antarctica. He thought it was a chance too good to miss. He later had the Air New Zealand certificate framed. Rex Sandford reckons he is lucky to have known Bill. “He was a loner but you couldn’t help liking him all the more for it.”

He was a man with a down-to-earth sense of humour. The sort of man who would walk into a

crowded Melbourne department store, dragging one foot as if he was crippled. People would scatter with kind looks and curious whispers. He would go straight to the counter, be served without waiting, and then stride right out with a smile on his face.

“A lot of his friends gave him away because he was impulsive and if he wanted to do anything he just did it. He never thought twice. He was a true individual, but he’s had the last laugh now,” Mr Sandford smiled.

In 1983 Bill came back to Christchurch on the same plane as the Prince and Princess of Wales. He liked the idea of that.

He knew he had only until August 16, 1984, to live. The prediction was out by three days.