WHEN Noel Townsend left Griffith to deliver one of the first ever shipments of sheep to Israel, he never dreamed he would be arrested and accused of being a Yemeni spy. The story is just one of many the 74-year-old remembers from his time on board the Thala Dan as a stock man delivering sheep to the Israeli port of Eliat in 1958.
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“All the memories, it’s like yesterday for me,” Mr Townsend said. “My uncle, Claud Anderson, he rang me at Christmas he said ‘Noel ring your mum and dad, if they say yes we’re going to Israel in April’. Imagine, I’m 16 and 10 months old and I’ve never been out of Griffith.”
Mr Townsend was one of six men who left Griffith railway station on a train filled with 1500 sheep. The project was the brainchild of Dr Solomon Goldberg, a local medical practitioner who owned a farm in Griffith.
“We took the sheep to Sydney and putting them on the train was a massive job, I woke up the next morning and saw the ocean, and realised ‘wow this is really happening’,” he said. “When we were at sea we all had to handle the sheep every day. Of a morning you would go in a trap door to where the sheep were below, after an hour and a half you had to go back up because it was so hot, we had to shovel up the sheep manure into a bucket and tip it overboard - it was a nightmare of a job.”
The crew of the Thala Dan were the first passengers to ever land in the port of Eliat, a highly politicised spot in the middle of warring Israel, Jordan and Egypt.
“Because we were the the first ever passengers to land in that port there was no immigration so all our passports had to go to Haifa,” Mr Townsend said.
This proved to be problematic for Mr Townsend when he was eating dinner with another man one night and was unable to produce his passport.
“We were having tea and in came a policeman and we couldn’t understand him and we didn’t have our passports and so we were arrested and jailed as Yemeni spies, it was terrifying,” he said.
While in Israel the stock men taught the Israelis the art of shearing and caring for the different Australian sheep, as well as taking part in protecting the sheep from others who would try and steal them. However, they still had time to enjoy the sights of the exotic land.
“We swam in the dead sea, it was unbelievable, I can’t float but I did there,” he said. “I saw the wailing wall and I was absolutely dumbfounded, I even got to celebrate my 17th birthday in Tel Aviv.”
Mr Townsend returned home to Griffith and later worked on farms before beginning his career as a truck driver. He still has his photos from his unique adventure lovingly displayed in a photo album he treasures.
