Old Days, Old Ways

by Alex Nicol

  Over the next couple of days I rode with taxi drivers who recounted how they’d pick up ‘Old Albert’, who wouldn’t have the money to pay the fare. ‘He gave me one of his paintings, you know,’ they would say. ‘I just chucked it in the bin. Silly, eh?’ Albert must have given a lot of paintings away, and the taxi drivers must have been lamentably ill-informed about the value of those bits of paper.

  I had introductions to bush ‘characters’, who spun me wonderfully improbable stories over glasses of rum, and they were dutifully recorded and stored away for the program. But I couldn’t help wondering whether everyone wasn’t trying a bit too hard.

  Henley-on-Todd was something else. Everyone in Australia must by now have seen images of this nonsense regatta in the dry bed of the river, but nothing you’ve ever seen on film can capture the spirit of the thing. This is a marvellous and clever piece of entertainment. It has a nice ‘larrikin’ feel about it that tourists expect—and, best of all, it’s the tourists themselves who provide most of the entertainment.

  We’ve all seen footage of feet protruding from the bottom of ‘sailing boats’ held waist-high as the crew plough up the sand of the river, but we never see the halfway mark. That’s the spot where the ‘boats’ have to turn; all too often they suddenly discover that they’re turning right into the path of a competitor. It was sheer genius to design a course where collision is inevitable.

  The action never stops. There’s an event for the so-you-think-you’re-strong men, who are invited to ‘paddle’ up the course using a shovel for propulsion, and there are events for the kids. The noise never stops, and the supply of beer seems inexhaustible.

  I noticed that there were supply trucks fully loaded with the amber fluid parked ready in the streets. Unlike the Todd, the pubs would not run dry.

  During the week, I met an old-timer who described the days when the river did run, when the Alice was cut off from the outside world and food supplies became problematic. Trying to be funny, I asked him what he thought Alice might do if it ever ran out of beer.

  He looked thoughtful for a while, sucked on a hollow tooth and assured me, ‘We’d probably drink Swan.’

  I wondered what John Flynn would have thought about this modern Alice.

  Flynn himself was all about change. His idea to use aircraft to provide medical assistance was revolutionary. That marvellous invention the pedal wireless, developed by Flynn’s offsider, Alf Traeger, was cutting-edge stuff. Even Flynn’s hospital, the last bit of ‘old Alice’ that they’d almost pulled down, featured a marvellous ‘modern’ cooling system. He was certainly in favour of change, so of course he’d have understood. But the thing was it had all happened so quickly.

  When I was there, Flynn’s ashes had been laid to rest at the edge of the town, under one of the Devil’s Marbles, a huge boulder that had been brought there from 400 kilometres away as a fitting memorial. It was a symbol of the outback, the country he’d served so well. No one at the time bothered to ask the Aboriginal custodians whether it was appropriate to disturb one of their sacred sites to pay homage to a white man.

  Years later, ‘his’ stone was returned to its original site, and another boulder took its place. That seemed to neatly capture the Alice enigma.

  MAN WITH MULE

  During my week in the Alice for the Henley Regatta, I’d been told to visit an old bushman living at the old-timers’ village. ‘Take him a case of stout,’ was the advice. ‘He loves a drop of stout.’ I got a grin from the bloke in the bottle shop when I placed the order; he knew where I was going.

  The old fella lived in a little hut, and I was to discover that similar little huts were dotted around the site. Modelled on a boundary rider’s hut, they’d been placed so you could stand on your doorstep and not see any others.

  Inside was a small living area, and on one wall was a long, narrow, old-fashioned photo—a ‘fish eye’ photo. It depicted a donkey team, and the man I’d come to see was standing proudly at the head of his team. All he was wearing was a hat, a pair of boots and a long, but not quite long enough, beard. He had a mule beside him, and he told me that that mule was his bread and butter. Now, this was a bit more like the romantic bushman I’d hoped to find.

  Within a couple of kilometres of where television cameras were recording the goings-on of tourists in a dry riverbed, I was meeting a man who claimed to have made the first road in the Territory. While jet planes were delivering the next batch of the curious to modern hotels, I was sitting in a boundary rider’s hut learning the difference between horse teams, camel teams and donkey teams.

  They didn’t get on, he assured me. Donkeys didn’t like horses or camels, and the feelings were mutual. I wondered whether it was the animals or their human masters that was the problem. The camels were largely in the hands of the ‘Ghans’—handlers brought from every country where the beast had been worked—and they were known to undercut the prices charged by the horse owners. For his part, he reckoned that donkeys worked harder and were less trouble.

  He would make his road by dragging along a sort of plough or grader, and I guess it did no more than follow established tracks. For provisions he had to go to the stations he passed through, but that came at a cost. He had to sing for his supper, and it was his mule that did the singing. Cattle working then was a brutal business. Cattle were caught and manhandled for castration and branding, and a man with a mule was a useful addition to the workforce. He used his mule to pull up young cattle and was rewarded with a supply of provisions. He was a solitary man, his best mate a mule.

  His final story was about an occasion when he’d ridden that mule into a station to pick up his supplies. There he was dressed as I’d seen him in the picture, astride a mule with a chaff bag across the mule’s withers, ready for the supplies. He explained that it was a hot day; he thought it might have been a Sunday morning. In his words, ‘The boss came out, took a look at me and said, “Jesus Christ! It’s Jesus Christ!”’

  It was a great interview—a wonderful piece from a time that was just out of reach, but which could have been a hundred years ago. And it had a great punchline. But could I put the boss’s words to air on a Sunday morning?

  Now comedians use language that would make a sailor blush and no one turns a hair, but at that time putting the wrong word to air was a sackable offence.

  I thought about it and decided it was too good not to air. Nobody complained. It could be that no one noticed.

  LIGHTNING FAST

  I was once invited to start a race. Nothing sanctioned by the AJC, I’m afraid, but the first billy goat derby at Lightning Ridge. It was one of those ‘seemed like a good idea at the time’ things. The main street was the venue, and anyone and everyone could, and did, enter.

  If you know anything about the country around the Ridge, getting a starter wasn’t a problem—but building the cart the billy was going to pull might be.

  There were some ingenious contraptions, and some that looked as though they really might work. No expense had been spared in grooming the entrants—there were ribbons around horns; indeed, there were some pretty impressive horns—but, unfortunately, not much attention had been paid to trackwork.

  Stewards eventually marshalled the field and assorted kids climbed into assorted contraptions and grasped the reins. The spectators pressed forward, forming a solid barrier down each side of the track—they’d come to regret that—and cameras flashed. I raised the starter’s flag in professional fashion and the field took off.

  Some went back the way they’d come. To others, those barriers of human flesh were nothing more than flimsy impediments between them and home in the red stony hills around town. Did I mention that there were some pretty impressive horns?

  As I remember it, the winner made it about three-quarters of the way down the track before tipping the cart and its contents over. Close enough.

  JIMMY HEREEN

  I bumped into Jimmy in Alice Springs, and I doubt it was an accident. Jimmy could tell a tale
and he liked an appreciative audience. Jimmy Hereen was a yarn spinner, a miner and a bushman, and you could put his attributes in any order you liked and you wouldn’t be wrong. He spun me and my listeners some old yarns and introduced us to some Territorian lore that was new to me, if not to some of them.

  He backed his claim as a bushman with an account of being sent out to retrieve the body of a young public servant who, it was assumed, had got bushed and perished. Jimmy had dismissed the task with a sniff and the observation that it was ‘a waste of time’. To him, there were only two possibilities.

  Either the young man had made the fatal error of camping in a creek bed and been caught when the creek came down. In which case, ‘his body will be up a tree somewhere and we’ll never find it’. Or he’d simply done a ‘perish’. In which case, ‘the dingos’ll have found the body and it’ll be in a dozen different places’.

  An unforgiving place, the Territory, and Jimmy should know—he had a mine ‘out there in the Tanami’.

  Jimmy spun me the old yarn of the importance of rum as a bush measurement. If you’ve never heard it, then let me tell you: the concept is as important in any four-wheel driver’s arsenal as the recovery winch.

  If you drive in the Territory, it’s a given that somewhere, sometime you’ll get bogged. The severity of that dilemma can be a measure of your status when discussing similar incidents with other unfortunates. The universal measure of catastrophe is the number of bottles of rum needed to be consumed before you free yourself. A really bad bog might be a four-bottler. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever claimed the disastrous situation where the supply of rum was exhausted before the vehicle was extracted.

  What I didn’t know was the significance placed on rum as emergency rations, nor the cunning methods used to ensure that, no matter what the disaster, those rations would arrive intact. Jimmy told me that in the days of camel loads, to make sure that emergency rum arrived in good order and condition, each bottle would be pushed into a loaf of bread for protection. He claimed that the practice has continued up to the present day’s helicopter drops.

  It made perfect sense, he argued. ‘If the rum arrives safely, you can eat the packing. If a disaster has occurred, you can at least suck the rum through the bread.’ Irrefutable bush logic.

  Jimmy was in partnership with an Aboriginal mate in a mine ‘somewhere out in the Tanami’. There are gold and silver deposits in the Tanami Desert, but Jimmy never specified which they were chasing. He did, however, spin a great yarn at his own expense about a disaster at that mine.

  Things had been going well at the mine, and there was a need for some further development—some blasting was needed. Jimmy confessed that he’d decided ‘to lair off a bit’. He’d bought an electronic blasting device: ‘You know, one of those ones you see in the cowboy movies.’

  His Aboriginal mate had never seen anything as high-tech as this, and Jimmy planned to spring a surprise on him. In his words, the two of them worked down in the mine, placing charges in the appropriate shot holes and wiring them up. Then they returned to the surface, where Jimmy grabbed his newfangled device, turned to his mate and said, ‘Watch this for a bit of whitefella magic,’ and pushed firmly on the plunger.

  Nothing. Nothing at all happened.

  ‘I went cold,’ Jimmy recalled. ‘I mean, there’s got to be a connection off somewhere down there and someone’s gotta go and find it. I don’t mind telling you, it took a bit of talking to myself to get me back down there.’

  He did eventually pluck up the nerve and started his descent. He carefully counted the number of rungs on the ladder down into the mine—thirteen. A thought crossed his mind: ‘That’s the same number the condemned man climbs up to the gallows.’

  Jimmy checked everything thoroughly and could find nothing amiss. He climbed back into the sunlight with relief, to be greeted by his mate, who said: ‘I think this thing’s fucked, Jimmy. I’ve been pushin’ it, pullin’ it all the time you been down there. Nothin’!’

  TED EGAN

  Ted Egan and I met for the first time in the bar of a pub in Horsham, in western Victoria, in 1970. Ted was coaching music out of a cardboard box and I was putting together a segment for A Big Country. Ted was a bonus, and we worked him into the story.

  We met again in Canberra, where Ted invited me to join him in writing a film script about a celebrated clash of cultures that happened in the Top End in the 1930s. On the face of it, this had been a case of mass murder: a group of Aboriginal men had fallen upon a party of Japanese trepang fishermen and speared the lot of them.

  Beneath the surface, though, it was a much more complex business. The case was clouded by unanswered questions. It may have been that they were warriors simply protecting their country. There was no attempt to take the attack further afield, and a neighbouring party of white Australian fishermen was never threatened. Was it true that the Japanese had interfered with the local women?

  The attack had taken place at a time when there were considerably more Aborigines than whites in the Territory; a white trooper who was sent out to investigate the situation was speared and killed. Nervous might be one way of describing the white population at the time.

  I wasn’t up to the business of writing a film script, and the idea of collaboration died. Much later, Ted earned a Master of Arts degree for his carefully researched account of the incident, and would have been pleased to be involved in a recent documentary uncovering some of the facts behind the story.

  I admire Ted. I’m completely unmusical, so his ability to conjure music from a beer carton never fails to amaze me. I admire his ability to write politically charged songs, such as ‘Gurindji Blues’, and have people of all dispositions happily sing along with them. And I admire his integrity. Employed as an Aboriginal Welfare Officer in the Northern Territory, he resigned from the job when he could no longer agree with the philosophy of the department.

  It seems to me that he has a happy knack of being able to respect Aboriginal culture and explain it in the most practical terms.

  After an unexplained death in a camp, an Aboriginal group might burn the camp and move on somewhere else. ‘You might call it witchcraft,’ Ted once told me, ‘but it makes pretty good sense. Who knows what infection might have killed that fella?’

  He once showed me a pair of ‘Kurdaitcha shoes’. The shoes are made from human hair and feathers, and are worn by a man on a mission of revenge. Myth says that the shoes leave no tracks. ‘Not a bit of it,’ Ted told me. ‘They leave very definite tracks for anyone who knows what to look for, and the Kurdaitcha man is not invisible, he’s just painted in a particular way. If you see a Kurdaitcha, you recognise him for what he is; you know you shouldn’t see him, and so you don’t.’

  Ted Egan isn’t above poking a bit of fun at himself. He told me of a fishing trip he had with an old Aboriginal mate. They’d hooked a beautiful barramundi, and Ted was looking forward to seeing it cooked in the traditional style, wrapped in a coating of mud and baked on the hot coals. Imagine his disappointment when his mate opened his tucker box, produced a roll of aluminium foil, added a dab of butter and rolled the parcel up for baking.

  When Ted protested that he was looking forward to eating in the traditional way, his mate enquired: ‘Do you like the taste of mud, Ted?’

  If you’ve never heard Ted’s song ‘The Drover’s Boy’, you should. It will bring you up with a start. At its heart is a story of murder and rape, overlaid with tenderness and pragmatism. A ballad from a time when marriage or cohabitation between blacks and whites was illegal in this country, it’s a hugely complex narrative in a simple song.

  Ted tried to raise the money to film the story behind the song; he reckoned he needed $7.5 million to get the job done. Ordinary people from all over the country put their money up, but not enough to have the film made. The Baz Luhrmann film Australia cost around $130 million. There’s no justice.

  There’s a rougher side to Ted. He has a song called ‘We’ve Got Some
Bloody Good Drinkers in the Northern Territory’, and that’s exactly what it’s about. I played it to air and a listener rang to complain that the word ‘bloody’ had been used ‘at least ten times’. I played it back to check, and counted 26. All of this is by way of saying that you underestimate Ted Egan at your peril.

  OLD BROOME

  I know that Broome these days is a high-end tourist destination. But I saw it before the camels strolled at moonlight along Cable Beach, yet long after it had been the centre of the world’s pearl fishing industry. And I interviewed a man who, more than anyone or anything else, personified that change.

  The Broome I saw had a pearling lugger proudly displayed as the focal point of what still looked like a frontier town. The shops were as you’d imagine the marketplace in some small Asian town might look, with wooden shutters that could be closed against a cyclone.

  You could walk up the coast a bit and visit Anastasia’s Pool and reflect on the love story of the lighthouse keeper who’d cut this pool from the living rock so his invalid wife could enjoy the sea.

  Yes, you could see the wreckage of our planes that had been shot down into the harbour by the Japanese in March 1942, but they were less of a curiosity and more of a gentle reminder of how close we’d come to defeat. And the Japanese history of the town was writ large in the cemetery, where there were hundreds of (at the time) unkempt graves of young Japanese divers.

  But I was staying in a comfortable modern hotel, and I had an appointment to meet a man at the centre of Broome’s new industry—cultured pearls.

  I’ve never conducted a stranger interview. This 20th–century pearl diver would meet me at my hotel at precisely 6.30 p.m. He would join me for ’one beer’ and he would leave no later than 7 p.m.