Tony followed Mum Watson through the hallway to the front door, a screen door snapping open to a wide verandah and a view of red dirt, diesel drums and a shearing shed half a dust-churning mile away. More dust, from an arriving car, drifted across the front of the house. Mum stood with her fat white legs apart and reached over and took Tony’s hand. There was the sound of topknot pigeons flying low overhead—small tinkling bells of hope, they were.
Major Marks, wearing his Army jacket in the gritty blow, brought Judy in. The Salvos were always the ones. Judy Compton-Bell had frizzy hair, freckles, a snub nose like Orphan Annie. At eleven years of age she was ready for play. Tony grinned, and they ran inside together.
Tony drew her in pencil, tiny circles all over her cheeks, on a sheet of butcher’s paper. The wind blew the paper all over the room. They dressed up and played weddings at her command. He pulled her along in a billycart, the bridal car, and read stories at night, doing all the voices. Mum and Pop Watson stood in the hallway, listening. They’d lost one. Now there were two.
As far as Tony could ever remember (and his way of remembering wasn’t always this straight), Judy Compton-Bell was the last person he allowed to make rules relating to his domestic life. When he peeled a Blindale orange (the pith like kapok and the juice running down his arm) and hurled the peel over his shoulder, it landed on the dirt making a perfect J.
‘When I was married . . .’ he liked to say. Or: ‘At my wedding . . .’ It gave people something to think about—Tony Watson with a woman in his life who wasn’t a former prime minister’s grass widow or a similarly positioned needful one with whom (note the grammar) he attended the charity balls of the Eastern Suburbs set. The gist of it was: ‘I was putty in her hands . . . Not a grown woman—great heavens— Judy Compton-Bell was my kid sister.’
‘This was back in my Army days,’ Tony likes to say, watching for a reaction. See him in his first long trousers, stovepipes worn when shaking the donation box outside Fitz’s pub in Bourke. ‘My Life As a Salvo’ will be chapter two of his bio when he puts pen to paper. A story of interest, surely, but with an in-built quandary in the telling, the problem being that by the time Tony was taken under the Salvos’ wing (that is to say, taken in by the Blindale Watsons and their honest ilk) he was twelve years old, and of his first twelve years Tony has nothing to say. Never will have, either. So there you have it: there can never be a chapter one and so no book when all other celebrity know-alls of a certain age have one. Something sticks in the craw: the leached, bleached, despairing information that has made him who he is. A fretwork of hints, lies and hopeless inventions. A feeling of stupidity and failure, of having been born as a mistake, half alive, half dead—a worm—the strongest sense of where he came from given by a scarecrow woman from the ladies’ lounge of Fitz’s pub who came out onto the street and knocked the collection box from his hands, and told him, with whale breath, that his mother had been that fuck-house, O’Malley.
Relating to whom, however, there might have been something to embellish—if Judy Compton-Bell hadn’t taken charge of a sequence of early-life events in a book of her own, blabbing tales of their Blindale paradise. Tony would like to wring her adventurous little neck for telling the world that he’d come to Blindale from institutional foster care, when he’d long stated in press releases that he was a born Watson, ‘rolled onto the linen’ on the Louth road. It made him look stupid, and he was called a con-job in the Tele and Mirror—only just possibly gaining appeal from never being able to be pinned down to any sort of wholesome truth at all. And the truth about Judy at the Blindale Watsons was that she was a paid boarder from a station in the outside country, a child parked with good folk for the convenience of a mother wrapped up in herself and a father at a loss to know what to do.
Where was Judy now, you might ask, after a lifetime of chasing around the world? Sailing aboard a seventy-foot Greenpeace steel yacht in the approximate vicinity of sixty degrees south, a venerated crew member taking seawater samples on behalf of fish; her bulk emails (satellite sent) throbbing on Tony’s desktop computer screen twice weekly. Her cruncher in Bluebell’s Voyage (her lone-sailor-around-the-world topseller) was: I grew up with Tony Watson, a ward of the state.
Now she writes: I am down among the icebergs.
He wishes she’d stay there (not really). His broadcast opinion of environmental activism is that it says more about the people protesting than about what they are trying to save: so get up a tree and stay there, he barks into the mike, you bunch a’ monkeys. It’s all to keep his listeners revved, blowtorched, attentive. Works like that with Jude. Keeps her close on his heels. Lose ’em, lose your life. How does this work? What’s the recipe for eternal listening life, you mean? Don’t ask him. The words are lightning on the branches of dead trees. The words are fistfuls of dust thrown in the wind.
‘A bunch a’ galahs,’ he’ll say—though if one bird brings him up short (in memory) it is galahs in the Bourke park, near the band rotunda, crowding along telephone wires when the Salvos played. All the old derros they’d pulled from the gutter would be sitting on park benches nodding their appreciation. Tony was on the trombone, a tricky instrument to master. Judy would be there, wearing a black straw bonnet with a scarlet ribbon tucked into the pleats of the bonnet trimming, rattling the tambourine and giggling sidelong at Tony’s cissified wrist action on the trombone slide. By the following day or the day after, the rescued would have the screaming blue heebie-jeebies again.
A compulsion dictates with Tony: he’s always tried fitting in with the lowest common opinion, from a conviction of belonging where he comes from, but never being able to say where that is. For this reason he thinks his opinions never count (though never lets on), and this stops him from working them responsibly. To be real he must grate, irritate, exasperate and peeve. He knows that Judy defends him in her corner as never meaning what he says. But nor does she listen to him. As befitting a former ward of the state, Tony is always reaching past the mike to some sort of paradise the government doesn’t want him to have, while Judy’s always saying that paradise is what you’re standing on, but it’s under threat.
A Kodachrome shows them standing on a kerosene crate grinning at the camera, Judy wearing a muslin curtain, Tony with a pair of baggy trousers held up by a too-large belt and one of Pop Watson’s felt hats flopped down to the level of his eyebrows. Other not-quite-so-old photos show Tony with his hair parted in the middle in a style worn until the Beatles put an end to the lairising look and Brylcreem and hair combs altogether.
At Bourke school there’d come a day of remembered importance when a young man named Warwick Mickless was seated next to Tony after a fair bit of whispering between teachers at the door of the room. Tony was fourteen, Warwick Mickless fifteen, a drover’s son who couldn’t read or write (or hardly), and Tony was asked to help bring him up to scratch before his next drove. Promoted from the class below, Judy was placed on the other side of Warwick from Tony. She was the cleverest girl in the school, winner of spelling bees and general knowledge quizzes—beating older kids (though there wasn’t much competition)—and at Sunday School reciting the Bible backwards, winning cardboard boomerangs and a trip to Bible Camp at Bathurst, from where she returned with some sort of bacterial bug so was sent to the Far West Children’s Health Scheme, at Manly, to recover. That was where she saw the ocean for the first time and went to the Aquarium to look at the fish.
Warwick was another sort of wonder, his long doggy face bearing burn scars from being rolled into the ashes of a campfire as a baby. They did ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ as a hush fell over the classroom, and Warwick, in a deep (halting) voice, read what seemed to be his very own part, thumbnail dipped in tar and all that. He’d never lived in a house, hardly knew what it was like to sleep with a roof over his head.
At the Brewarrina rodeo Warwick was a sensation; he picked up the ropes after the buckjumpers had thrown their riders, leaning down from a galloping pony and snatching them from the dirt. T
hen, with the reins looped over his arm, he leaned back and rolled a cigga.
Tony was handed the mike to read the adverts between events. You should have heard him carry on. There was a trick he had, where the pony’s galloping gait and swivel turns gave tempo to a line of patter. It was rock-and-roll, and made Tony known around the rodeos and district shows before he was seventeen.
Tony, Warwick and Judy formed a trio in those in-between years. Being seen with Warwick was to be seen with a star. Tony, his little mate, was acclaimed for verbal skills, but sometimes scorned, on the side, as befitting one with the power of words. Judy’s favourite term of approval was ‘hot dog’. ‘Hot diggety dog,’ said Tony when the three got together. On Friday nights when they went to Randall’s flicks for the double bill, Tony laughed at the clever bits and looked at Warwick to see if he got the subtler jokes. Sometimes he did; he was a fast learner. When he worked his hand down Judy’s blouse he winked at Tony to count him in on his luck.
After the flicks they went over the dialogue and Tony remembered slabs of it which they acted out, sitting on the verandah till all hours and hearing Mum’s stifled giggles from the sleepout.
Following the Intermediate year Judy went to Meriden at Strath–field. A sportsmistress took her sailing in a Gwen-class dinghy, and that was when a lifetime of simpatico communicado started each way by lettergram, news of the day, Tony and Judy in touch weekly at the very least, their two worlds, their two bubbles of life, leaning on each other till the colours ran like rainbows to the very end.
2DU Dubbo was where Tony made his start. His golden tonsilation was more in the style of an ABC bloke’s as a result of the ABC being the only network with a transmitter strong enough Out West to give him something to imitate. He’d come there via counter-jumping at Permewan Wright’s and part-time cattle and sheep auctioneering for Pitt, Son and Bender in Bourke, Bre, Warren, Coonamble and Narromine.
Sydney had Joe the Gadget Man selling people what they didn’t need; the West had Tones Watson. You ached with laughter hearing Tones do his hundred and one voices. ‘Just Orf the Train’, ‘Milkun the Goat’, ‘Who Brung You?’ and ‘Lennie the Plague Locust’ were just a few of the skits that brightened our dry toast in the mornings.
Dubbo was a party town. There was nowhere else to go. Tony arrived at the door with a bundle of 45s hot from the record companies and gave some away. ‘Eines harten Tages Nacht’ (‘A Hard Day’s Night’) was already a collector’s item the year of its release, and he kept that one for himself (still has it). Onwards then towards the year of ‘Sergeant Pepper’. Tony wrote his own jingles and testimonials, achieving status in the eyes of Macquarie network executives through a broadcasting belt more or less contiguous with the growth range of native cypress, from the Queensland border down to approximately Peak Hill. Later—in Sydney, making his name—he liked to rib ABC types on the occasions when they met, as being a bit too Sir Robert Menzies with it, and not being of the people. Any young fellow seeking his advice about a career in national radio he warned to wear lead underpants. Was he ever tempted to go over to Aunty himself? You must be out of your mind (though he never lost his ‘plum’).
Tony had a studio visit from Warwick, who’d been to some outfit that made tapes of hopefuls playing guitars and yodelling cowboy songs, and transferred them to 45 rpm extended plays for a whopping fee. A ludicrous amalgam of doggerel and strummed chords was Warwick’s offering. ‘There’s no easy way to be any good,’ said Tony, as he walked Warwick to the door. They did not see each other for years after that, not for decades, it’s true, though birthdays and Christmases weren’t forgotten. There was a feeling, always strong, that their connection was close to a blood relation. But there was a feeling of offence, as well, and as they didn’t have blood relations to judge this by, they didn’t know that a feeling of offence equally defined what they so definitely felt they lacked.
On 17 April 1967, live telephone conversations were made legal broadcasts and Tony Watson was born—let me calculate: for the fourth time? There were to be no further incarnations. Answering back to the nation (eventually) on ninety-eight syndicated stations, Tones would keep on doing it till the wind blew itself out, by which time the clock of the years would hook around the dial into the spiderwebs of disbelief, and if you doubt me, recall when you peered through the soundproof glass and saw liver-spotted Tony with a slack turkey-gobbler jawline doing the countdown still.
Tony was known Out West as a terrific snob—but home-town-hatched, familiar in his scorn, loved to death for loving them along the shrivelled Darling. He never forgot those cards and letters, birthday and Christmas presents, nor telephone calls where he never announced himself by name but was the unmistakable owner of that tremulous helloo—as the promos used to say, ‘smooth as a triple malted’. Of late, the promos merely call him the King Of, a tired appellation for a tired old ratings’ ruler, while pundits headline in the industry press: When Will Tones Pull the Plug On It? Judy asks the same question.
Tony had a curious experience recently, on a Qantas flight to London. The bloke he was sitting next to said, ‘Your voice reminds me of someone.’ Tony preened and said, ‘My voice reminds you of me, my friend.’ He was Tony ‘Give Me Your Ears’ Watson: the bloke who’d invented talkback or near enough. But no, said the bloke, it was someone else. Had Tony ever lived in the Territory? ‘Nooh,’ said Tony. They advanced through degrees of separation until they came to the name Warwick Mickless. ‘That name rings a bell,’ said Tony with self-protective affability. He didn’t want to give too much away. There was the dead son, Chicka Watson, whose ghost he’d brought to life, just by living, and there was Warwick Mickless. Then there was Judy. The four of them—dead and alive and alive and alive— occupied an indefinable space, elbows linked, feet scuffing through the dust of Bourke backstreets as through some sort of foreverland, dipped in Technicolor. Tony somehow, without realising it until of late, had lived his life in a mood of indefinite postponement, becoming one whose entire being was based on launching his voice into the world of the microphone at nineteen past nine every morning (after a barrel of adverts), and holding together that world, by an act of word-spinning, till noon. The feeling was of a sentence starting at the bell and not finishing till the gong. It was all one blast of breath rushing along. As early as the evening of the same day Tony would have the blue heebie-jeebies over microphone deprivation. At cocktail parties and openings he’d find himself either ranting or sulking. One day, for one so made, there would be a reckoning.
Warwick Mickless, said the man seated next to Tony on the plane, had a radio spot on a Darwin ABC rural program, ‘The Stock Route’, reporting on tropical breeds of cattle. The bloke said, ‘Wocka’s a cracker, he keeps the Top End in stitches.’
‘Does he now?’ said Tony with a low chuckle. ‘“The Stock Route”’s a listening must, even for people who wouldn’t know what a cow was?’
‘It sure is.’
‘Ho, ho,’ said Tony.
It was a little too much for the wordman of note to swallow. After checking with Neilsen’s he found he was losing listeners in Darwin faster than anywhere else. Something would have to be done (as it always was). His childhood playmate, surrogate sister, Judy, beats him to the draw on getting her story in print, and now his illiterate pupil (that Brewarrina Centaur) challenges his lifelong playpen by having a radio spot, struth, doing some public good, so claimed, while getting a laugh, a point upon which Tony dwells in the post-midnight hours.
What is the good he’s done? Red Shield Day jams the switchboard annually. The Westmead Children’s Hospital has a wing named after him. Many a soup kitchen gets his cheque, and he’s to be found down there, in the stinking washcloth light of East Sydney, ladling out scrambled eggs through cold winter mornings.
But all Tony can think is that banishing bad to the shadows sums it up. His bad. His shadows. The best Tony has ever been able to do is sell things. Selling people what they don’t need by virtue of having it wrapped
in words: corkscrews, flame weeders, luggage wrappers, eggtimers. His garage is full of gratis junk. (Eggtimers make him weep.) There’s also real estate and luxury cars: he owns a good deal of the former, drives three of the latter, knows he doesn’t need as much as he has, far from it, but wants to get rid of it less than he wants to keep it for the reason of holding on to himself. Words made these solid objects out of thin air.
Interesting the letter that reached Warwick Mickless (signed Tones). It included a neat transcript of a bunch of Warwick’s pieces, collected by the clipping service Tony used. The grammar, sentence construction and vocabulary were corrected in red ink. It looked like an attack of mad spiders on the page. For your benefit, Tony signed off, old friend.
This brings us almost up to the present—to a day last year when Tony rang Alan Corker at Whistling Flats, and closed on a parcel of land in the Southern Tablelands he’d been looking at, after selling his place at Bowral, where he’d lived, on and off, for years—always with the thought that somewhere less tamed and manicured by visiting gardeners would be a requirement before the end, if reality was to meet truth in the image of who he was, as being sprung from a patch of raw dirt in a raging windstorm.
The deal was five thousand acres of which about one-fifth was usable for stock, the rest comprising dry forest running up into steep ridges and gullies, rocky outcrops, messmate, brown barrel and alpine ash, formerly milled. Then upwards and on to a spine of granite tors, from where, as Corker told it, you could see out over an entire province of the Great Dividing Range. ‘Halfway to Bourke,’ said Corker, dramatising the view, at which point Tony felt his heart lurch with the possibilities of possession. ‘Sold,’ he said, experiencing a rush, a gush, of feeling. The two men shook on it. They were to be neighbours. Corker’s chunk of land, the Bullock Run, was on the western boundary.
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