by Jim Haynes
Some vestige of the earlier hilarity returned when we got to bed. We giggled in whispers until Mum came in and said, ‘Quieten down and go to sleep now and you can have another talk to Uncle in the morning.’
But our visitors had a very early breakfast and left straight after.
We never saw them again, ever.
Dad, it seemed, had been convinced about the virtues of keeping up with the times and bought a new car from Heats Motors in Goulburn a few weeks later.
He didn’t buy a Ford.
Our new car was a Standard Vanguard.
WHERE THE COOLER
BARS GROW
LENNIE LOWER
I’M ONLY A CITY boy. Until a short time ago I’d never seen a sheep all in one piece or with its fur on. That’s why when people said to me, ‘Go west, young man, or east, if you like, but go,’ I went.
Truth to tell, I thought it would be safer. I had a shotgun and a rifle, and a bag of flour, and two sealed kerosene tins of fresh water in the luggage van. I thought of taking some coloured beads for the natives, but decided it was too expensive.
I forget now where it was I went. Anyhow, it was full of wheat silos and flies, and there was a horse standing on three legs under a tree. There were no other signs of life except a faint curl of smoke coming from the hotel chimney.
When I walked into the bar there was nobody there, so I walked out the back into the kitchen and there was nobody there. I went out on the verandah and saw a little old man picking burrs off his socks.
‘Good-day!’ I said.
‘Day!’ he replied.
‘Where’s everybody?’ I asked.
‘Never heard of him. Unless you mean old Smith. He’s down by the crick. You’re a stranger, aren’t you?’
‘Just got off the train. Where’s the publican?’
‘Do you want a drink?’
‘Yes.’
‘Orright!’
So we went into the bar and had a drink.
‘I want to book a room here,’ I told him.
‘Don’t be silly!’ he replied. ‘Sleep on the verandah with the rest of us if you’ve got blankets. They’re decoratin’ the School of Arts with the sheets. You going to the dance?’
‘I can’t dance!’
‘Strike me pink, who wants to? We leave that to the women. There ought to be some good fights at this one. When I was younger there wasn’t a man could stand up to me on the dance floor. Here comes somebody now.’
‘Day.’
‘Day. Don’t bring that horse into the bar! Hang it all, you’ve been told about that before.’
‘He’s quiet. I broke him in yesterday. Hear about Snowy? Got his arm caught in the circular saw up at the timber mill.’
‘That’s bad.’
‘Too right it is! They’ve got to get a new saw. Whoa there!’
‘Take him out into the kitchen. The flies are worryin’ him.’
‘Goodo. Pour me out a beer.’
‘Pour it out yourself.’
‘Go to bed, you old mummified ox!’
‘I’ll give you a belt in the ear, you red-headed son of a convict!’
‘Give it to your uncle. Giddup!’
‘One of me best friends,’ said the old man, as the horse was led into the kitchen.
‘I suppose,’ said the red-headed one, returning, ‘it’ll be all right if he eats that cake on the kitchen table? Won’t do him any harm, will it?’
‘That’s for supper at the dance!’
‘Well, I’ll go and take it off him. There’s a good bit of it left.’
Outside on the verandah voices were heard.
‘I wouldn’t sell that dog for a thousand pounds.’
‘I wouldn’t give you two bob for ’im.’
‘You never had two bob in your life. You ever seen a sheep dog trial? That dog has won me more prizes at the Show than ten other dogs.
‘Why,’ he continued, ‘you could hang up a fly-veil, point out one particular hole in it and that dog could cut a fly out of the bunch and work him through that hole.’
‘Good-day!’
‘Day!’
‘No sign of rain yet.’
‘No. I heard tell of a swaggie who had to walk eighty miles to get water to boil his billy, and when he got there he found he’d forgotten his cup and saucer, and by the time he walked back for his cup and saucer there was a bush fire in the waterhole, it was that dry.’
‘Don’t bring your horses into the bar!’
‘Don’t take any notice of the old crank. Why don’t you put this beer out in the sun to get cool? If it was any flatter you’d have to serve it in a plate. Going to the Show this year?’
‘Of course I am. Why don’t you teach that horse manners?’
‘Good-day, Mrs Smith.’
‘Who put that horse in my kitchen?’
‘Is he in the kitchen? Well, what do you think of that!’
‘Fancy him being in the kitchen!’
‘In the kitchen, of all places!’
‘Who could have let him in?’
‘Never mind about that. Get him out at once, Jack! Wipe up that counter. I told you to cut some wood this morning. And put the dog outside and get the broom and sweep up the bar. Wash those glasses first.’
By this time we were all out on the verandah.
‘She hasn’t found out about the horse eating the cake yet,’ said somebody.
‘Better go for a walk somewhere, eh?’
* * *
But that was all years ago. They’ve got radios and refrigerators in the bush now, and that’s why you see me mournfully wandering about the cattle stalls at Show time. I’m thinking of the good old days before the squatters all took up polo and started knitting their own berets. When men were men and women were useful about the farm when the plough horse took sick.
Wrap me up in my stockwhip and blanket
And bury me deep down below
Where the farm implement salesman won’t molest me,
In the shade where the cooler bars grow.
Ah, me!
ONE HUNDRED STUBBIES
KENNETH COOK
TO UNDERSTAND HOW THIS could happen, you have to know something about where it happened—Coober Pedy, an almost impossible town in the arid centre. Coober Pedy is an opal-mining town. The name is Aboriginal for ‘white man in a hole’. The ‘hole’ refers to the mines and to the houses, which are caves dug into the sides of low hills. In the summer the temperature averages around fifty degrees Celsius. You spend most of your time underground or in a pub, or you die.
I had driven up from Adelaide in an air-conditioned car and I thought I was going to die.
I saw Coober Pedy in the distance as thousands of tiny round bubbles in the shimmering desert heat haze. Soon these bubbles resolved themselves into the waste piles from the opal mines that stretch endlessly out from the town in all directions.
The whole area looks as though it is infested by the termites that build those huge nests of mud. Many of the mines are deserted and local legend has it that they contain the bones of reckless men who have welshed on gambling debts or tried robbing mines. I never actually heard of a skeleton being found.
The sight of the pub in Coober Pedy automatically brought my car to a halt. I needed cold beer, and lots of it. The heat out there is almost solid and you can feel it dropping on your head when you step out of the car. I trotted across to the pub, my whole being yearning for beer, totally unaware that I was about to witness an event that would put me off beer drinking for months.
The pub was moderately full of pink men. Almost all the men in Coober Pedy are pink because they are opal miners and the pink dust of the mines becomes ingrained in their skins. Or perhaps they never wash, because the water there is pretty foul stuff.
I ordered beer, found it deliciously cold as beer always is in outback Australia, often the only evidence of any form of civilised living, and began tuning in to the talk around me, as is my habit.
&nbs
p; Two pink men quite near me were having a conversation which was absurd, like most conversations in outback pubs by the time everyone has had five beers. The two of them were leaning on the bar peering earnestly into each other’s deep-etched faces. Like two grotesque dolls, they carried on a nonsensical argument.
‘He can.’
‘It’d kill him.’
‘It’d take four hours.’
‘It wouldn’t kill him. Nothing would.’
I leaned closer. Their voices were beginning to hit an hysterical note. Like buzzsaws, their shouts rose above the hubbub of the other drinkers. They were obviously used to yelling at one another fifteen metres underground with jackhammers going full blast.
‘A hundred stubbies in four hours. Do you reckon that would kill him?’
‘It’d kill anybody.’
‘He’s not anybody.’
They stared into each other’s faces, the importance of the topic growing in their minds as the beer ran down their throats.
‘Why are you so bloody sure?’
‘Because I’m bloody sure.’
One of them was almost middle-aged, with grey hair all over his exposed shoulders. At least, it would have been grey if he had washed off the pink dust. His face was dulled and brutalised by years of grubbing away in the ground all morning and drinking beer all afternoon. Or perhaps he had been born with a dull and brutal face.
His companion was younger, probably not thirty, a little fat but with the heavy shoulders and arm muscles of the opal digger. If men keep on digging in the ground for opal for a few generations, they will probably develop forequarters and arms like wombats. This younger man looked like a hairy-nosed wombat because of the three-day growth on his face. Not exactly like a wombat, though, because a wombat has some expression on its face if you look hard enough, while this character’s face was just a blob of pendulous blankness. With its pink-dusted stubble, it looked like a discarded serving of blancmange growing a strange mould.
‘Well, if you’re sure, will you bet on it?’
‘Sure I’ll bet on it.’
You couldn’t tell who was speaking because their voices sounded identical, like knives scraping on plates at an unbearably high volume. But you could tell the sound was coming from them and gradually a pool of silence was forming around them as the rest of the bar tuned into their conversation.
‘What do you reckon, Ivan?’
Now you could see who was speaking because the older man turned and addressed himself to the drinker alongside him.
Ivan turned slowly and I realised I was looking at a monster. He stood barely a metre and a half high and was almost as wide across the shoulders. His chest, black-singleted and covered with dust, stood out like a giant cockerel’s, a vast billow of muscles with dark streaks running over the pink dust as the sweat made its own little rivers. One great arm hung disproportionately low by his side, the other rested on the bar with an enormous pink hand almost totally concealing a glass of beer. His hair was short and closely cropped and he carried a comb of bristles over a face that for one mad moment made me wonder whether it is possible to cross a crocodile with a hippopotamus.
This was a face that displayed a complete lack of interest and malice, with a blank complacency that made it obvious no thought had ever disturbed the brain that nestled just under that absurd cockscomb of hair.
He was wearing shorts, and two massive legs, not unlike those of a hippopotamus except that they were pink and hairy instead of grey and wrinkly, propped up his body. It was as though the body was resting on the legs rather than being joined to them, because he seemed to have no waist; he was tree-trunk thick all the way down until suddenly he had legs. The junction was concealed by the baggy shorts, but I got the impression that the legs might walk away at any moment, leaving the body standing there.
‘What do you reckon, Ivan? I reckon you could drink a hundred stubbies in four hours.’
‘’Course I could,’ said Ivan. His voice was flat and deep, almost pleasant by comparison with those of the other two, but only by comparison.
‘There,’ said the older man, turning to his companion as though everything had been proven.
‘Bet you he couldn’t.’
‘Bet then. Go on, bet!’
‘What do you mean, bet?’
‘I mean what I say. What’ll you bet he can’t drink a hundred stubbies in four hours?’
‘Bet you five hundred bucks.’
The older man thrust his hand into his hip pocket and brought out a wad of notes. He counted ten fifties onto the counter. The younger man looked on impassively while Ivan, losing interest, turned back to his pint.
‘Match that.’
The younger man, having waited until the last fifty was laid down, dived into his own pocket and counted out his bundle of fifties. He paused before laying down the tenth.
‘Who’s paying for the beer?’ he asked cunningly.
There was a long pause while this was pondered.
‘Take it out of the centre,’ said the older man at last.
‘All right, Ivan. Here’s the biggest beer-up of your life, and on me,’ said the older man, grabbing Ivan by the shoulder. ‘Come on, Bill,’ he said to the barman, ‘set up ten stubbies. Ivan’s gonna sink a hundred.’
Bill didn’t react, just reached into the refrigerator and lined ten stubbies up on the counter. ‘Off you go, Ivan. Remember, I’m betting on you.’
‘He’s gotta be standing at the end,’ said the younger man, sullenly, now sounding worried.
‘He’ll be standing. Come on, Ivan. Sink ’em.’ Ivan was looking at the ten stubbies.
You could see he was thinking by the contortions on his face. You could almost hear him. The three men were now the centre of a large circle that had formed as the concept of the bizarre bet was grasped by the other drinkers. Money was appearing from dusty pockets as side bets were laid. Ivan was still thinking.
‘Come on, Ivan.’
‘I want a hundred bucks,’ said Ivan.
The older man was shocked. ‘What do you mean, you want a hundred bucks?’
‘I mean I want a hundred bucks.’
‘Whaffor?’
‘Drinking the beer.’
‘But you’re getting the beer free.’
‘I want a hundred bucks.’
Conversations tend to be limited on the opal fields.
‘You can go to hell.’
‘Right.’
Ivan turned back to the bar and ordered another beer. The older man looked at this disbelievingly. Ivan downed his beer. Obviously he intended to stand by his position.
‘All right then,’ said the older man desperately, ‘if you drink all of the hundred stubbies, I’ll give you a hundred bucks.’
‘A hundred for trying,’ returned Ivan, without even turning around.
‘God Almighty. What happens if you drink fifty beers and pack it in? Do I still give you a hundred dollars?’
‘A hundred for trying,’ said Ivan.
The older man stared at the impossibly broad and unyielding back. You could tell that he was thinking, struggling for a solution. ‘Tell you what,’ he said finally, ‘a hundred and fifty if you make it, nothing if you don’t. How’s that?’
Ivan was thinking. A long pause. ‘All right,’ he said, and reached for the first stubby.
‘Take if off the top,’ said the older man to his companion, which presumably meant that the winner would have to pay Ivan’s fee.
This seemed reasonable to the younger man, but he was slow to make up his mind. By the time he had nodded assent, Ivan had already drunk six stubbies.
His technique was impressive. He picked up one of the little squat bottles in each hand and flicked the tops off with his thumbs. Most men need a metal implement for this, but not Ivan, he had thumbnails he could use as chisels. Then he raised his right hand, threw back his head and poured the beer into his gaping mouth all at once, the whole bottleful, one continuous little jet of beer unti
l the bottle was empty. Then he did the same with the bottle in his left hand. Both bottles empty, he put them down neatly on the counter and reached for two more.
There are 375 millilitres of beer in each of these bottles. Legally, if you drink three in an hour, you are too drunk to drive a motor car. One hundred bottles would be 37,500 millilitres. The mathematics are beyond me, but it must be a monumental weight of beer. I timed him. It took just on eight seconds to empty a bottle, one second to put the two bottles on the counter, one second to pick up two more, one second to flip off the tops. He was swallowing a stubby every eleven seconds.
Swallowing’s not the word. There was no movement in his throat. He was just pouring it straight down into his stomach. A stubby every eleven seconds. At that rate, he would be able to drink 100 in 1100 seconds—that’s less than an hour. But he couldn’t keep that up. For obvious reasons; he’d burst, for one.
I wasn’t the only man in the bar making these calculations. In the great circle that now surrounded Ivan, men were looking at their watches and counting. To save time the barman had put twenty cold stubbies on the counter just as Ivan downed the tenth. Ivan didn’t pause. He was drinking, or working, as rhythmically as though he were on an assembly line: pour down one bottle, pour down the next, both bottles on the counter, pick up the next two, flip off the tops, pour down one bottle, pour down the next.
The only sound in the bar was the slap of the bottles on the counter and the metallic rattle of the bottle tops hitting the floor. All the drinkers were silent, watching in an almost religious awe, their own glasses held unnoticed.
I realised for the first time that the clock hanging above the bottles at the back of the bar had a chime. It chimed six o’clock just as Ivan finished his fortieth bottle of beer. As if it were a signal, he slammed the two bottles on the bar and paused. The silence became intense as everybody started leaning forward slightly, wondering. I was convinced Ivan would drop dead.
Ivan stood motionless, his hands on the bar, his body inclined slightly forward. The pause lengthened, the silence deepened, if silence can deepen. I could even hear the clock ticking. Suddenly, Ivan’s back muscles convulsed and a monumental belch erupted through the bar, breaking the silence like a violent crack of thunder. I swear the front rank of spectators reeled back. There was a burst of cheering and laughing and clapping.