Perponda Guitar

In the early 1940s my father went to live with his uncle and aunt for a while at Perponda, a very small, isolated town in the Murray Mallee, South Australia. He went to school there (there was a school right next door) and helped his Uncle Charlie on the farm. It made a big impression on him, he often talked about his experiences with bullock drays, cows and uncle Charley’s pithy Irish sayings.

It is a hard, dry area. The school closed in the late ’40s and the railway line was torn up in the 1980s. Now there is only one inhabited building in the area. I went there for the first time recently and, amongst the piles of rubble where houses used to be, I had an idea.

The old railway line was lined with a wire fence made from Cypress Pine posts. I used the post next to this one for the neck of the guitar.

There was plenty of old galvo lying around, some of it already flattened for me!
The post had more cracks and holes than I thought but I managed to glue enough together to get a usable neck blank and fretboard.
Despite it’s flaws, Cypress pine has a beautiful, smooth feel to it. It makes a fine neck.
The post was in the ground for nearly 100 years