Living to beat of a different drum

Making the racket was her husband Ron, who had been critically injured in a car accident 18 months earlier.

Somehow he had survived, but was like a nine-year-old boy with no memory of his marriage, no knowledge of his teenage children Christopher, Michelle and Shane, nor his bulldozer business near Crookwell.

One afternoon changing a tyre by the side of a straight stretch of the road to Binda, a wayward driver knocked Mr Evans senseless.

Surgery saved his life, but the best prognosis was long-term risk of post-traumatic epilepsy.

His ribs were fractured, jaw broken, internal organs split and brain permanently ruined. He'd forgotten how to read, how to drive and had lost all interest in life.

Neurosurgeons said he'd never speak much again, nor drive, let alone resume playing the drums or sketching.

''Further recovery is expected but likely to be permanent deficits, could be permanent word-finding difficulty in speech, lack of co-ordination in upper limbs,'' a specialist wrote.

Mrs Evans said: ''I'd lost my husband.

''All he wanted to do was go back to the hospital. He'd come home on a sheepskin rug and the skin on his shoulders was rubbed raw (from swaying side to side).

''We were in a situation where you'd try anything. I heard a set of drums advertised on the radio and bought them for him.

''I put them inside. I heard him about 2am. Time meant nothing to him and I thought, 'Gee that sounds all right' as much as I didn't appreciate the early hour.

''I was just pleased. So pleased. Everything that he did extra, it brought such excitement and pleasure.''

That was 30 years ago. Today Mr Evans still plays in a band that has given him some quality of life. Entertainment has moved a million miles from the music he grew up with, but in the iron-roofed community halls the cobwebs are swept aside every now and then for a country dance and this 79-year-old musician plays in their revival.

When a musician friend, John Warn, heard of the 2am rendition he offered to come around and play alongside Mr Evans.

Mr Warn, who died two years ago, had started the Crooked Corner Band as a teenager and kept it going for 50 years. The band's other members, Ian Baxter (button accordion) and Peter Painter, also came around regularly to accompany Mr Evans.

Instead of the drummer kicking off the band's next song with a one-two-three-four, he waits until the others' tune carries him into the tempo.

''I usually don't know what they're playing until they start. I like the fast ones, not real keen on jazz waltz or foxtrot,'' he says with help from Mrs Evans.

He spends months carving wood into model Clydesdale horses and teams of bullocks hauling wool drays, with delicate details of their harnesses and water bags hanging off the back.

Yvonne met Ron at a bush dance when she was 11. She used to play with him at subsequent dances, and remembers him grinning behind a drum kit at a dance she went to with her mother, Florence, when he was 14. ''We were ready to get married at 16. I sort of begged and pleaded and got married at 20,'' she said.

Now married and working dawn till dusk, Mr Evans built their future clearing land, grading fire trails for the shire and sinking dams with bulldozers. Not stopping for lunch, he ate sandwiches on the dozer.

Then the car smash changed everything.

Working at a pre-school, going to the Canberra hospital after work until 9pm and running a farm so exhausted Mrs Evans she once lost track of three days.

Still determined, she fought with nurses, demanded X-rays when staff refused, sold their bulldozers and kept the farm going, including organising the annual shearing.

Mr Evans was too weak to help with fencing and couldn't operate any machinery.

''He started the tractor one day and cried. He said 'I don't know how to stop it'.''

Mrs Evans taught him to read, struggling at first, until she showed him passages of the Bible he liked reading before the accident.

Playing at dances and parties, he lingers over the drums rather than going for a drink during breaks.

''I draw,'' he said, pointing to the tops of his drums, where cartoonish sketches of well proportioned toes poke out at the end of feet, a friendly fat pig with floppy ears smirks and a bushman smiles beneath a broad-brimmed hat.

They're nothing like the postcard-like sketches he used to draw, but they show the music in Mr Evans never died.