Old Days, Old Ways

by Alex Nicol

  The room was long, dark and cool, and a table ran down the centre. How many would it seat? I can’t remember now, but perhaps ten, maybe a dozen down each side. The table was covered with glass, and under the glass were some beautiful silk Indian shawls.

  ‘The jackeroos sat here,’ he told me. ‘And they dressed for dinner.’

  You really needed to walk outside and look about for a minute to comprehend that statement. I was there in a drought year. The country was that hard red-yellow colour, with a smudge of olive green provided by the tough plants that were hanging on. If you looked at the ground you saw pebbles, and under them the soil. Then the heat hit you. It didn’t just come up from the ground; it closed in from all around you—and it was dry, so dry. Nothing was going to get done in a hurry out here.

  ‘They dressed for dinner?’

  ‘Absolutely. They were young gentlemen.’

  I mumbled something about it being a bit hot for a collar and tie, and my host showed me the fan that cooled the room. It was a beautiful brass fan—it might have come from any expensive retro-furniture store—but they didn’t have electricity back then, did they, so how … ?

  He showed me the mechanism. It was virtually a little spirit lamp burning methylated spirts to make the fan blades spin. Heat producing a cooling draught—like the room itself, the whole thing was a contradiction.

  ‘Do you like the floor?’ he asked me.

  Because the room was dark, all I could see was that the floor wasn’t made from floorboards. It looked like polished concrete, but that couldn’t be right.

  ‘It’s dung,’ he told me. ‘Stamped dung, and it got that polish by being swept and swept and swept by the black girls who’d have worked here.’

  It occurred to me that I might be getting a glimpse of the colonial India that I’d read about in my Boys’ Own Adventure annuals. But this was Australia. Of course it must have been like that, but why hadn’t we heard our own stories of this sort of thing?

  I’d been a jackeroo. I know what I learned from a very good master. He taught me some things about myself that I found uncomfortable, and like every good teacher, he gave me some principles by which to lead a life. Who were the jackeroos who sat around this table? Who was their master and what did he teach them?

  Browse through the history of the old race clubs, cricket clubs and what have you of colonial Australia and you’ll bump into some famous names. Charles Dickens’ sons were sent here to learn to be men. Many of the young blokes who sat around tables like this one, and who dressed for dinner, had no qualifications other than that they were the sons of Victorian English gentlemen, sent to the colony to make their fortune. You’ve got to ask yourself: did they make the country, or did the country make them?

  I walked out into the light that hurt, and the heat.

  Please don’t broadcast the rainfall figures. Why?

  That request had come to me during the late 1980s, and the Ridge was now very different. I’d met Herman ‘The Shark’ Kreller, opal buyer and character, who’d set up business in the main street. He proudly displayed the ‘Shark’ pejorative as part of the name of his business.

  ‘People come here expecting to be ripped off when they buy an opal,’ he told me. ‘I don’t rip anyone off, but they’re tourists. It’s part of the fun to say they’ve bought an opal from the Shark.’

  The Ridge was changing. You could get a cappuccino and a counter lunch. Accommodation, including the now famous tram motel, was good, and people didn’t bother so much with noodling—they bought a piece of potch from the Shark. Tourism was all the go.

  There was a water supply—not enough, mind you, but a supply. But this was black-soil country, and the road into town was still dirt. If people thought they might get bogged while heading for the Ridge, they would bypass the turnoff.

  Please don’t broadcast the rainfall figures.

  BROADCASTING ON THE MOVE

  For a very long time I’d had a secret desire to have an outside broadcast unit—a caravan or some such that we could take to important events around our region and broadcast ‘live’ from.

  I’d broadcast ‘live’ from the first National Field Day, that now famous comparative exhibition of farm machinery and knowhow, when it moved to its permanent site at Borenore, just out of Orange. That involved me sitting on top of the office roof clutching a microphone and listening to what was happening back in the studio via an earpiece connected to a portable radio. Not ideal.

  But a portable studio was wishful thinking, of course. Such things cost money. Aunty had them in the capital cities—but for a region? Forget it.

  ‘You know, if we could get a caravan, I think we could build a portable studio.’ This was a tech talking, an old hand. He was with another tech, a very cluey young bloke on the way up. The young bloke, it was explained to me, needed to complete some practical examinations to get his next grading. This could be done by going through the charade of setting up dummy bits and pieces in the workshop, or he could do something practical—he could build a portable studio.

  ‘But the gear,’ I argued. ‘The microphones, turntables … I’ll never get a budget to buy that sort of gear.’

  It seemed that, like my Irish granny, these techs never threw anything out. When they replaced a turntable or a microphone or the like from the studio with a newer model, they stored the old one away. ‘It might come in handy one day …’ Well, that day had arrived.

  ‘It’ll be old-fashioned gear,’ they warned. ‘But it’ll do the job.’

  We did find an old-fashioned plywood caravan that was still registered, and those techs patiently stripped it bare and turned it into our own outside broadcast studio. It was hell to tow anywhere, but we loved it.

  A PUNCHY INTERVIEW

  Young boxer Spike Cheney was our local hope for the 1988 Olympic Games. A Lithgow boy, he took the adage ‘Never stand if you can sit, never sit if you can lie’ to the edge. I’ve never met a more relaxed athlete—until you put him in the ring. There he wouldn’t stop hitting you—very quickly, and very hard.

  We had a new freelance journalist operating in Lithgow. We wanted to build our audience in the coal city, and he wanted to go on to bigger and better things. The perfect match. He rang to ask if we’d like an interview with Spike.

  Everyone was doing an interview with Spike, he was told. Do something different, he was told. He did.

  He strapped his small recorder to his body, taped the microphone to his chest, pulled on the gloves and stepped into the ring with Spike.

  I got to edit the result. I heard a question being asked; then the unmistakable sound of a glove hitting flesh; then a cry of pain; then a muffled ‘Sorry’ from Spike, before he gave his answer to the question. This sequence would repeat and repeat.

  As editor, my only dilemma was: how many of our intrepid reporter’s cries of pain should I leave in? It was the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.

  RAIN AND POWER

  Silk stockings and chocolates were the keys to the Kidman empire. Sir Sidney (not Nicole) Kidman was known as the Cattle King of Australia. As a boy, he famously rode out on a one-eyed horse with £5 in his pocket; at his peak, he owned or controlled anywhere between 85,000 and 107,000 square miles (221,000 and 277,000 square kilometres) of country from the Gulf of Carpentaria to South Australia. He made his money following the rain.

  Those chocolates and stockings went to telephonists in tiny post offices all over the back country. When it rained, every station manager in the outback sent a telegram to head office recording how much had fallen. Kidman’s gifts came in exchange for a copy of those telegrams delivered to his office, and meant that he knew more about the weather than anyone else at any time until we got satellite technology There’s money in knowing when and where it’s rained.

  I gleaned that titbit from a senior CSIRO scientist who was working to ‘prove’ the colour of the salt in Lake Eyre against satellite images as part of the developing science of weather forecasting. Apparently,
Lake Eyre is one of the brightest white spots you can see on our planet from space, and colour plays an important role in the interpretation of satellite images. He told me that, at the time he was working at the lake, the satellite picked up a curious stain on the lake. ‘It looked,’ he told me, ‘as if someone had spilled a glass of port wine over grandmother’s snowy white tablecloth.’

  That had to be investigated. The stain proved to be a huge cloud of plague locusts, half a kilometre wide and several kilometres long, which had picked up a weather front that had petered out over the lake. There they were, a great smorgasbord of pickled grasshoppers on the lake surface. Weather is the stuff of life or death.

  Drought brings the dark side, of course, and I once visited a woman living in the Western Division of New South Wales whose life was centred around sweeping the never-ending drifts of red dust from her home and listening to the weather forecasts on the radio. She could pick up South Australian stations, and her day was spent tuning from station to station, chasing the reports of fronts moving across the country. One of them must bring rain. I can only imagine the torment she felt listening day after day after day and hearing that there was no hope of relief.

  Autumn rain was generally the excuse for a great outpouring of joy at 2CR. All planned programs would be shelved, and the phone would ring constantly as listener after listener reported: ‘Half an inch at Tullamore’, ‘Forty points at Mudgee’, ‘an inch at Wellington’, and so on and so on. Everyone was anxious to share the good news, and within a quarter of an hour you’d have a great picture of where the rain had fallen and how much it meant to so many people.

  You could fiddle with whatever you liked on the program, but the advice was ‘Don’t touch the weather forecasts’. But of course you had to be part of the action, and every self-respecting rural reporter had his or her own rain gauge, so you could add your tuppence worth.

  I had proudly reported a healthy total in my gauge one morning, when the phone rang and a very proper voice at the other end enquired as to whether I had a young son.

  I assured my listener that indeed I did.

  ‘He’s been using your rain gauge for an improper purpose,’ was his retort.

  It may be that because broadcasters are so associated with such life-and-death information, some listeners accord you a status you have no right to. We were in the middle of a locust plague, and facetiously one morning I suggested that there’d be money to be made in setting up a company to put up a huge net and trap the nasties. They could then be ground down and turned into sheep feed pellets. After all, they’d eaten so much of the sheep feed that it would be poetic justice to see them fed back to the sheep. After I’d said this, cash turned up—sometimes considerable amounts—to buy shares in the company I’d proposed. Tell me—the idea wouldn’t work, would it?

  Worse was to come one day when I was informed by a researcher from the Department of Agriculture that such and such a farmer would be worth talking to. This farmer had sunk a considerable amount of effort and money into a new and, to date, untried crop. ‘He must know something I don’t,’ suggested the researcher. ‘Give him a bell.’

  The farmer in question was delighted to hear from me. He drove me with considerable pride to the paddock containing the crop, and I set up the recorder on the bonnet of the car so that we could look out over what was a pretty impressive crop of linseed. My first question was: ‘Tell me, what decided you to try linseed?’

  This was met by an awkward silence, and then: ‘You suggested it on air.’

  The arrival of futures contracts on the farming scene produced a unique problem. How to explain the concept of selling the promise of delivering some goods sometime in the future that you had no intention of ever delivering, and then afterwards buying back your promise? Futures trading is now part and parcel of every successful producer’s marketing strategy, but there was a time when growers depended on the average price for fair average-quality wheat pooled from all over Australia, or the guaranteed cushion of support provided by the floor price of wool. Futures trading was then something akin to black magic. It was notional nonsense, but it was the future, and I struggled to explain it to my listeners.

  ‘You haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re talking about, have you?’ I’d been trying to explain the concept of the just-introduced prime lamb futures contract, and that was a pretty brutal, but accurate, summation of my efforts. It came from a listener who was one of the new breed of bankers selling this product. ‘You’ll never understand it until you’ve had the experience of selling and buying a contract,’ he said.

  ‘But I don’t have any lambs.’

  ‘And you don’t need any. That’s the point.’

  This savvy listener took me in hand. I’d sell a contract and he’d track that contract for me each week. He’d cover the cost of the contract, and if we made any money, we’d donate it to a charity.

  It worked. He’d pop into the studio with a breezy ‘You owe me such-and-such for a call.’ And then he’d proceed to explain on air the business of keeping the contract alive. His visit became a must-hear segment.

  I either knew more about the market than I thought, or I was just lucky, but when I came to buy my contract back, we had made some money. I was obviously good at this business.

  Shortly after, I was stopped in the street by someone I’d never met. ‘I’ve got a lazy $6000 play money,’ he said. ‘Would you play this futures market for me?’

  Because it excites your imagination, I think radio is, or was, the most powerful broadcast medium. Listeners form an image of you based entirely on the sound of your voice. ‘You’ exist in their mind, and depending on the mind involved, that produces some odd results. ‘You’ can take on the persona of wise sage, matinee idol or the Antichrist.

  Neil Inall was balding as a young man long before the look became fashionable. I remember as a young trainee trailing him to a property, where he was greeted by the wife of the establishment with a disappointed, ‘Oh, you’re Neil Inall—and I shower with you every morning.’

  THE BLUEY

  The man was a genius, a marketing genius. He took a coat, a bowl and a calendar, he put them together in his shop window, and people from all over the city went out of their way every day to look at them. They talked about that coat and that bowl at work. They bet money on what was going on in that window, and it was the subject of sweepstakes in offices everywhere. People followed this annual event with all the intensity of Test cricket scores. It was as exciting as watching paint dry—and that was the point.

  The city was Launceston, and I had a freelance reporter there with an eye for the quirky and a love of history. His story on the bluey hit the bullseye on both counts.

  My mother would have approved of the bluey. Those of us of a certain age remember a childhood when for half your life the sleeves of your ‘good’ clothes hung down to your knuckles, and then for the other half they rode up three inches above your wrist. Clothes were meant to last, and they did. Mothers had an ‘eye’: they’d pick up an inferior garment, feel the cloth and toss it aside with a dismissive ‘You could shoot peas through it’.

  But not the bluey. They say that the bluey descended from the ugly, shapeless, locally made coat that clad the convicts of Van Diemen’s Land, and even in its later manifestations the bluey belonged to the workers. If the provision of a bluey wasn’t part of the award conditions for Tasmanian wharfies, the union wasn’t doing its job. This dull, blue/grey waist-length work coat was guaranteed to keep you warm and dry, and our marketing genius could prove it.

  Each year, at the beginning of winter, he would suspend a new bluey from the ceiling of his shop window. Threads held up the body of the coat so as to form a shallow dish, and then he filled that dish with water. Under the bluey he set the bowl, and beside it the calendar.

  Each day another day was crossed off that calendar, and the people of Launceston took bets on when the first drop of water would soak through the bluey and drop into the
bowl below. Genius.

  PRESIDENT BUSH

  Devina, our receptionist, was in trouble. Her message was: ‘Come—quick!’

  These days all ABC studios are protected, after a fashion, by a security door and a keypad. But back then anyone could, and sometimes did, wander into the studio for a chat while you were on air. Not this time. Devina was defending the studio from a very angry visitor.

  I rushed in to be confronted by a very big man making incoherent threats. I cajoled; Devina rang the police; he left.

  The police were very cheerful. They knew him well. He was a patient at the nearby Bloomfield Mental Hospital, and was usually ‘gentle as a lamb, quiet as a mouse, harmless’. Chocolate set him off, they explained. He’d march into a supermarket, pick up a dozen or so large blocks and stalk out, leaving a string of protesting checkout girls in his wake.

  He’d eat the lot. Then he was trouble. We’d simply got him on a chocolate day.

  ‘Well, he threatened our receptionist,’ I answered, ‘and I want something done about it.’

  ‘Love to, mate,’ came the breezy reply. ‘Look, he’s a patient from Bloomfield. We know him and he’s generally no trouble. Now, if he actually hit you …’

  Yes, well that prospect was not inviting. Our friend was a big, powerfully built man in his mid-40s. Personal hygiene wasn’t a priority. He had a tangled mass of black hair, and when he was angry, as we’d seen him, his face was almost as black as his hair. He wasn’t going to hit me if I could avoid it.