"If you haven't been to Birdsville Races, you haven't been anywhere in Australia," Fred Brophy says. Photo: Stephanie Gardiner/AAP PHOTOS

When the Keys brothers were growing up in the bush, there was no electricity in their home and they had to ride a pony bareback 10km into town.

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It might sound like one of those tall tales older generations tell their children and grandchildren to demonstrate just how easy they've got it.

But for siblings John, Ken and Robert Keys, stories of those frugal early years on a King Island farm, in the middle of the Bass Strait, have come to define both

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