Bill Tapp
Open-knowledge reference entry
Charles William Tapp, best known as Bill Tapp (2 June 1929 – 22 May 1992), was a pioneer and cattleman from Killarney Station in the Northern Territory of Australia.
Early life
Tapp was born in Sydney on 2 June 1929 and grew up in Vaucluse. His father was Earnest Charles Tapp, a radio technician in the Australian Navy and his mother was Sarah Ann (Sadie), a managing director of Rosenthal Australia – a German-owned department store in George Street, Sydney. He was an only child.
Tapp lived in a house with a tennis court and a maid during the 1930s and later became a full-time boarder at the Scots College in Bellevue Hill. A champion sportsman and scholar, he represented his school in many sports, swimming, cricket, football, rowing, diving and played tennis at a state level. It is said that he played with, and against, Australian tennis champions Lew Hoad and Frank Sedgman.
He was known to be agonisingly shy and had a pronounced stutter.
While at Scots College, Tapp read the Ion Idriess book 'Cattle King' about Sir Sidney Kidman who owned large cattle stations in the Northern Territory. The book had a lasting effect on him and he decided that as soon as he finished school he would become a cattleman.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bill Tapp” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.