by Alex Nicol
There was no need to ask twice. I wasn’t going to do this again.
I’ve seen the film. The flames look realistic. They were—my lack of eyelashes and fringe proved it.
Now for that scene where the hero looks manful and the pretty girl cries. That scene where the body is brought in, strapped to a horse. I was much more relaxed about this. I’d been around horses. I could ride. This would be easy.
Don’t ever try it. Your backbone is bowed, and every time the horse moves, your back flexes where it’s not meant to. It hurt like hell. I never scoffed at a Western again—those bodies earn their money.
THE COFFIN
It was a pub in Queensland, and in a shed at the back there stood a coffin. Not the sort of thing to set a cheerful note, I thought. I wondered why it was there.
A hangover from a time when transport was less reliable, the publican told me, and added that he wished he’d ‘had one on hand once before’. There followed a story that, if it isn’t true, should be.
The town had in previous years depended on the railway for all its supplies. The beer arrived that way and the service was regular—if you could call once a week regular. Plenty of other places like it.
One regular customer was ‘a gentleman’, the publican assured me, ‘a real nice old bloke’. The old fella turned up at the pub once a month. He was a prospector. He kept himself, and whatever he might have found, very much to himself. But once a month he’d turn up at the pub for a bath, a shave, a good meal and a clean bed.
On his last visit he didn’t come down to breakfast as expected, and a search found him dead in bed. Nobody knew anything about him, whether he had a family or not, and there was nothing in his possessions to give them a clue. The pub would have to bury him.
The publican rang to have a coffin added to the beer quota on the next train. That was four days away, and in the meantime they’d have to find a place for their guest. The pub cool room was the obvious choice.
The coffin duly arrived, and they set about putting their old mate to bed for the last time.
‘He was a long stringbean of a bloke,’ the publican remembered, ‘and he wouldn’t fit. I thought all coffins were the same size, but he was longer than the coffin, and when we tried to bend his knees a bit … well, he’s been in the cool room for four days, hasn’t he?’
They had a problem. The next train and the next possible coffin were a week away, and their regular had already overstayed his welcome. While they scratched their heads, the pub handyman announced that he had a solution. ‘He comes back with a saw,’ said the publican.
Suddenly I’m not liking where this story is headed.
‘No,’ the publican reassures me, ‘he bores a hole in the coffin so he can cut a little square out of one end. We slip the old bloke in, and the very top of his head just pokes through the hole. He just fits.
‘We put the lid on, and got his old hat and attached that to the end of the coffin. And we buried him all dignified and proper.’
STEP BACK IN TIME
None of the interviews I collected for All Ways on Sunday survive. That’s disappointing. Not because my work has been lost, but because the voices of the people who told the stories have been lost, and often so much of the story was not in the words but in the voice that spoke them.
In most cases, the people I spoke with let me look back one generation. I was talking with my father’s generation, if you like. On a couple of rare occasions I was able to look further back, and hear the voice of a very different Australia.
Once I talked with a very old man who claimed that, as a youngster, he’d witnessed the Kelly Gang’s hold-up at Jerilderie. He had a laugh as he remembered the ‘strange police sergeant’ cutting down the telegraph post in front of the police station. It is just possible that he did see Ned—the gang struck in 1879—though he’d have been a very young child. Most likely his memory of the event was a memory of what adults had told him.
Things were very different when I met a Light Horseman who had fought in Palestine in the First World War. Like the driver for the original Cobb & Co. coach service, he was old and ill, but his memory was sharp and, make no mistake, he’d been there.
The Light Horseman hailed from Western Australia and, as I expected, he talked about the dirt and the flies and the bond that grew between horse and rider. He complained about ‘Barcoo Rot’—sores that wouldn’t heal, and which he put down to a lousy diet—and the heat, and he reckoned that ‘they took better care of the horses than they did of us’. He told me one story that sent a chill through me.
They were moving in a column through a town, and a beggar sat at the roadside, he said. The horseman’s picture of the man was of something that was barely recognisable as human—he was clothed in rags and probably blind. The horseman was looking at this apparition when a young officer rode up. He looked down at the beggar, and then pulled out his pistol and—in the horseman’s words—‘gave him a pill, put him out of his misery like’.
I think it’s very wrong to judge past generations by the standards of today, so I make no comment. What I can’t recapture, and what you’ll never hear, is the matter-of-fact way in which the old man told his story. He didn’t seem to find it exceptional. It was just part of his experience of a war that’s rapidly passing into Australian mythology.
COOKTOWN CEMETERY
I can only guess at what Cooktown looks like now that our tourist industry has sandpapered the edges to fit its specifications, but when I saw it, the place was magic. Where else could you pick a ripe mango growing on what we’d call a nature strip?
I really wanted to see the town because it had been the gateway to the Palmer River goldfields, and came close to being Australia’s Hong Kong—at the height of the rush it was home to many more Chinese than Europeans. It had a marvellous museum stuffed with artefacts from the goldfields, including what purported to be a miner’s last words, scratched inside a tobacco tin as he waited for a gruesome end.
That part of Australia was the coastal tip of our rip-roaring west. Inland, Maytown, which grew to service the goldfields, claimed to have staged the first striptease show in the world. Salome might dispute that, and Joh would certainly never have allowed it as a boast in any tourist publication, but by all accounts the town was a hotspot before it was swept away in a flood. Divine retribution?
That history is neatly summed up in a study of the Cooktown cemetery. The plot names reveal a model of colonial convention. You’ll find good Anglo-Saxon Protestant names up near the front. The Chinese are over the back. And the prostitutes are scattered freely among them all.
RUM DOES FOR LASSETER
It was Jimmy Hereen who reckoned that rum had played an important role in Australia’s greatest outback drama, the search for Lasseter’s gold.
Lewis Lasseter surfaced at the height of the Great Depression in 1930 with the story that he’d discovered a veritable mountain of gold … out there.
Exactly when he’d discovered it depended on the listener. It was either as recently as 1921, just nine years previous, or in 1897, 33 years earlier. The problem was that although he was an experienced sea captain, he’d used an inaccurate watch to calculate the position of this lode. Yet while he couldn’t pinpoint its position, he was sure he could lead a party to it. All he needed was money, and a lot of it, to equip an expedition.
There were so many holes in Lasseter’s story that it’s a wonder he got a hearing, but eventually he convinced some backers to put up the money for an expedition. It set out from Alice Springs in late 1930 and rapidly fell apart. Eventually, it was reduced to Lasseter and two companions, and then Lasseter went on alone with a couple of camels. When they got away from him, Lasseter settled down to do a perish.
Enter Bob Buck, and Jimmy’s story.
The news had reached Alice Springs that Lasseter was missing. Perhaps he’d found the reef? Send for Bob Buck!
Bob Buck was a bushman par excellence. If anyone could find Lasseter, it was Bob.
But at the time he was at Hermannsburg, about 80 miles (129 kilometres) away. A team of camels, loaded with emergency rations, was despatched forthwith.
‘Somebody made a terrible blunder,’ according to Jimmy. ‘When Bob checked the rations they’d sent, there was no rum. Naturally, he came straight back to Alice to remedy the situation, and that delay was the reason that when Bob found Lasseter, he was dead. Lack of rum is the reason we don’t know the position of Lasseter’s Reef.’
Bob had died almost ten years before Jimmy spun that yarn, so there was no way it could be verified, but even when he was alive there were people who doubted that Bob had found and buried Lasseter’s body. He used to settle the argument by producing a set of false teeth from his pocket and tossing them on the table with the assertion: ‘They’re Lasseter’s.’
And the reef?
It’s pretty obvious from the accounts of the bushmen who accompanied Lasseter on his search that he’d never been in that part of the country before. But never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Bob Buck. He’d be the man to find Lasseter, but be sure to pack the rum.
A LAND FIT FOR HEROES
Julius Caesar knew the benefits of land grants for veterans. Gratitude meant they’d support you politically, and with them away in the country they’d cause no trouble. No ruler wants a trained army loose in a city after a war.
When I was a young paperboy, ex-diggers were my regular customers for Smith’s Weekly, the diggers’ newspaper. They were starting to understand the political pressure they could bring to bear, and their paper kept the pressure on politicians to honour the promises they made to returned servicemen and women. Politicians of all stripes were quick to back soldier settlement schemes after the First World War for all sorts of reasons.
‘It will open new country and break up the big runs’ was a frequent cry. Some believed that settling a shattered man in the peace of the countryside would help return him to health. Bizarrely, there were instances of diggers still suffering the ill-effects of gas attacks or other debilitating injuries drawing blocks of virgin country that would require years of backbreaking work before they’d be productive.
Many of our most productive farming areas were built on the back of the soldier settlement schemes, and many successful second-and third-generation farming businesses owe their start to a ‘block’. But that block will have been added to over and over by the blocks drawn by the blokes who didn’t make a go of it. For many, the schemes were a disaster.
I broke with the general format of All Ways on Sunday to produce three half-hour special programs in which I interviewed First and Second World War blockies and their wives. The programs were called ‘A Land Fit for Heroes’. Of all the interviews I collected for the program, they were the only ones I was able to save. They were sent to the National Archives and have sunk without trace. They must be there somewhere; hopefully, someone in the future will come across three seven-inch tins of recording tape and wonder what is on them. They will find the voices of a generation now gone. In the meantime, I have to make do with an imperfect memory.
I floated the idea of a couple of programs devoted to the blockies, and a simple brown envelope arrived in the mail. Inside was a leather notebook that contained page after page of the most perfect history of a blockie family. Drawings were a feature. A talented artist had drawn the plants, the flowers and the animals that existed when the digger took up his block in the Victorian Mallee, and there was also a detailed history of the brutal work needed to force that country to grow wheat.
The plans of the original homestead were there, right down to the bush timber that had been used in the construction and the recipe for the wattle and daub that had plastered the walls. Family stories of good horses and good dogs were told, and the narrative widened to include neighbours, some good, some doubtful and some obviously troubled.
Which of the neighbours was caught ‘fishing’ in the chookyard with a long line and a small hook baited with bread? Which of the neighbours was it who, coming home from a bender and finding himself locked out, piled the morning’s wood against his own front door and burned his way in?
There was a time when you’d hear some strapping young man being described as being ‘fit as a Mallee bull’. Now I know why. You were rich indeed on those Mallee blocks if you owned a bull, and he got very fit walking from farm to farm, to where his services were in demand.
That book was without doubt the most beautiful and the most precious thing anyone ever sent to All Ways on Sunday. Written in longhand, it was designed to be passed down through the family, and yet it had arrived in an ordinary envelope, sent by ordinary mail. I sent it back registered, with a plea never to let it part from the family again.
Drawing a block might have seemed like winning the lottery, but the block was no gift. To keep it, you had to begin capital repayments within two years. It had to be fenced within three years, and you had no equity, none at all, until you’d lived and worked on your block for five years.
The great problem was that often the block you drew was too small, or it was in the wrong place. All too often it might be identified as suitable for orchards, and yet the area would be found to be frost-prone. It was a brave man who took up a block in a place called Willigobung. Or you might draw a grazing block thought to support 150 breeding sheep in a good year, but the rain never came at the right time or in the right place.
Blocks of one square mile (how impressive that sounds, but it’s just 640 acres) outside the recognised boundary for arable land were offered for wheat farming, but they were never big enough to let the farmer make a living.
The mateship that had developed during the war stood the blockies in good stead. Tiny—why are all big blokes called ‘Tiny’?—was a pioneer in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, and he gave me a picture of how he and his mates built their farms. ‘Four or five of us,’ he said, ‘would get together in a “mess”.’ They’d live together under canvas on one of the blocks, and share the business of cooking and maintaining the camp while they worked cooperatively to set up each of the farms in turn. No one would leave the cooperative until all the farms were up and running.
Tiny was not the only blockie to tell me that, on occasion, the mates would take turns at being ‘the horse’, harnessing themselves to the small, tined equipment when the real horse was busy elsewhere.
Cooperation was the key to the success of the blockies in Western Australia. There, a group made up of men with varying skills would be given hand tools and some sheets of iron, and sent to clear the forest by hand and start farming. Those sheets of iron were very important. They would form the group’s first communal shelter; using nails to fasten them was strictly forbidden, because the iron was reserved for the roofs of the houses that each of them would build in time, and those houses would all be the same four unlined rooms.
I spoke with a lady whose husband had drawn a block in Queensland and then been forced off it. He’d recently died, and nostalgia had led her back to have one last look at the old place. ‘The whole district had disappeared,’ she recalled. ‘There was nothing but pine trees.’ Her husband wasn’t the only failure.
Often those blocks threw together strange bedfellows. She remembered those four unlined rooms very well, and their former next-door neighbour, who’d become a firm friend. Her neighbour was a member of the English aristocracy who’d made the ‘mistake’ of falling in love with an Australian digger, and then found herself in a land and in circumstances totally foreign to her. ‘She couldn’t cook and so I taught her,’ the blockie’s widow recalled, ‘and she taught me how to sew. We were two women together and we needed each other.’
You didn’t have to come from another land to find the life of a blockie a foreign experience. A Melbourne lady told me how she’d carefully packed her trousseau in tissue paper before setting out to join her new husband on his block. She insisted on changing into her prettiest before she joined him in his swag on the side of the road
. I can see her now as she wrung her hands: ‘There was red dust through everything. I could have cried.’
And there were women with their own war memories to deal with. A lady who’d nursed diggers in New Guinea was reluctant at first to talk with me. She believed that she had a duty to keep her memories to herself. I suggested that, all these years later, she probably wouldn’t be revealing anything about that campaign that was still secret, but I was wrong.
‘I can remember being briefed on how to behave in captivity,’ she said. ‘We really thought we’d be captured by the Japanese—they were so close, and our boys weren’t very good, you know.’ She was talking about the militia units that were the first to go into battle against the Japanese, and her assessment was practical rather than critical. ‘We got to see them, you know. We were nursing them, and most of them were only boys. Some of them didn’t even know how to load a rifle.’
I was learning a lot.
‘The RSL was the first effective farmers’ union,’ an old blockie from Griffith told me, and he had the proof. He was enormously proud of an old photo that showed hundreds of men—no longer in uniform but all still in possession of the discipline a life in the Army had drummed into them—lined up outside a government office. They were in dispute with the government office, and their leaders were inside having ‘a bit of a chat’, to see if they could straighten things out. They got what they wanted. Perhaps it was wise to move those troops to the country and out of the way.
The blockies were quick to play up the larrikin behaviour of their days off. I was told the apocryphal yarn of the canny bloke in dispute with the bank. He owed money on an early model tractor, and the bank was about to foreclose. Without that tractor, he might as well have given it away. In due course the bank’s servants turned up in their shiny shoes to claim their prize, and he marched them grimly down to the dam, where all that was visible of ‘their’ tractor were the mudguards and the steering wheel sticking out of the water. ‘You want it, you go get it’ was the challenge. Of course, the bank johnnies declined to get their feet wet, and when they were safely out of the way, the farmer waded into the water, retrieved the steering wheel and mudguards, and put them back on ‘his’ tractor.