Once a Pommie Swagman

by Thomas, Nick Arden

  At five-thirty that evening all the casual workers were lined up outside the show secretary’s tent, where we’d been summoned to be paid. The half dozen or so of us who’d worked in the dining marquee had become quite friendly over the show days and a certain camaraderie had built up, us against the formidable Mrs McDonald as it were, so there was a slight air of sadness that it was all over, that the next day we would all be going our separate ways. The talk was all about where and what people were going to do next, and addresses were swapped and invitations made. Most of them, including Mrs McDonald, had long since known about our plan to go to Magnetic Island, which, we were to discover, was why we were the last to be called in to receive our money.

  “Ah, boys! I’ve kept you until last as I have a proposition to put to you. How would you feel about staying on and helping the maintenance staff clear up? Nothing too taxing, picking up rubbish, bit of humping and shifting, should take about a week. You can stay sleeping in the barn.”

  I suppose we’d been readying ourselves for the final push to Magnetic Island, so at first we were a little hesitant.

  “As we won’t be feeding you, we can pay you ten shillings a day each and you can use the showers and the cooking facilities in the kitchens. Also at the end of the week I can guarantee you a lift to Townsville. What do you say?”

  It was the lift to Townsville that did it. At least we could now be certain of getting there in one go. So it was we stayed on at the Proserpine Show for seven more days, three of them spent simply picking up rubbish. It’s amazing how much mess accumulates at an event like that. It must take a fortnight to clear up after Sydney!

  ELEVEN

  Dunny carters, public bars and Mr Personality

  Ray Cooper’s dad drove the dunny cart and very few children ever let him forget it. He was a few years ahead of me in primary school so I didn’t have much to do with him there, but I know he was the butt of constant taunts and jibes. The boys in his class wouldn’t play marbles with him, and the girls used to change their skipping song whenever he came near them in the playground.

  “I’m a little Dutch girl dressed in blue

  These are the things I like to do

  Salute to the Captain

  Bow to the Queen

  And hold my nose when the dunny man’s been!”

  And they’d stop skipping, hold their noses, screw their faces up in disgust and scream at him to go away. Gee, kids can be cruel! We might have taunted him when he was young, but as he got older no one was game to say a word to him or his dad.

  Jack Cooper was the first of the trio of people who never let me forget I was a Pom. He was a huge, unimaginative brute of a man with massive hands and a violent temper. An ex-soldier, like Mr Archer he’d been incensed when “That cunt Churchill and those Pommie arseholes!” initially refused to let the Australian Army go home from North Africa to defend the country after the Japanese invaded New Guinea. Trouble was Jack Cooper had few, if any, of Mr Archer’s finer characteristics to offset this bitterness, and as the Coopers only lived four or five doors away from us it was difficult not to cross paths with them occasionally. When we first arrived in the street I was four and Ray, who was nine or ten, sort of befriended me for awhile, I suppose because he could boss me about and be the main man when we played Cowboys and Indians. It was a few weeks after we moved in that I went to his house for the one and only time.

  “What’s that fucking Pom doin’ here! Get him out!” Mr Cooper yelled when he found me in the kitchen eating a chocolate biscuit Mrs Cooper had given me, and for a moment I thought he was going to grab me and chuck me out himself.

  “He’s only a kid for Christ’s sake!” Mrs Cooper screamed back at him, getting between us.

  “I don’t give a stuff! I won’t have any of those cunts in my house!”

  Of course I was far too young to understand why he was so angry. All I knew was he frightened the life out of me, and I ran home in tears. Such was his hatred, I’m surprised he ever stopped at our house to take our dunny can away.

  The dunny cart wasn’t really a cart, it was a truck, but I suppose the name stuck from when, not so many years before, the job was done with a horse and cart. The back of the truck was split into two horizontal levels, like an upper and a lower deck. When the truck left the sewerage depot at four in the morning the lower level was empty while the upper level was full with fifty or more empty dunny cans. Each truck had a crew of three — a driver and two carters — and their round might consist of several streets, returning to base at intervals to get rid of the full cans and bring back a load of empty ones. It was an indescribably awful job, yet there was always a queue of fit young men waiting to do it as it paid quite well and they were usually finished for the day by half past ten.

  The driver had the best of it as he always remained in the vehicle, driving it slowly up the road as the carters jogged from house to house, taking an empty can and returning with a full one which they slid onto the lower level. As was the norm, most dunnies were in the back gardens of houses and each empty can had a lid with a special hinge which clanked loudly as the carter ran, giving ample warning of his approach; this lid was to clamp on the full can before they picked it up. It was prudent to know what day was dunny day as shit carters stopped for no one, and would more or less take the full can from under you and replace it with the new one as you sat there, if you happened to be in situ when they arrived. They always carried the cans, full or empty, on their shoulders, draped across which were pieces of canvas like a sort of poncho to protect their shirts. By the end of the first truckload of the morning this canvas sheet, and the protective cloth caps they wore, would be wet and stained brown as the lids never fitted securely and the contents sloshed about, slopping out as they ran. By the time a dunny cart was full the stench around it was ripe, to put it mildly. The stench around the dunny carters was pretty ripe too, but nobody dared say so, and certainly not to Jack Cooper when he was in his domain: the public bar of the Epping Hotel, where he held court most evenings.

  For five years I did an afternoon paper round on my bicycle, and when I finished I spent an hour or so outside the Epping Hotel selling papers and “Pix” and “Post” magazines. In the late 1950s the public bars of Australian hotels had long been male-only bastions, and for a decade and more after the war they were like barometers of the stresses and strains that bedevil all societies after major conflicts; victor or vanquished, trauma doesn’t discriminate. Always raucous, often vulgar and usually intimidating, violent arguments, fist fights and even all-out brawls were common events in many pubs, especially in the larger cities. Nothing has changed, you might feel; the difference, however, was that fifty years ago the perpetrators were grown men in their thirties, forties and fifties, self-medicating away their terrible memories and seeking the comfort and assurance of understanding comrades. Today it is young people in their eighteens, nineteens and twenties, self-medicating away their youth and seeking the comfort and assurance of understanding policemen. Adding to the mix in the 1950s were the plethora of peculiar licensing laws in place at the time, including women being banned from entering public bars — although it was difficult to imagine any woman actually wanting to go into them — but there were two other equally contentious laws.

  As it happened, the first and last years of my paper round coincided with the ending of those two laws, and the first, repealed in 1955, was one of the most amazing licensing laws ever imposed anywhere in the world; a law so incomprehensible and silly that it was known universally as “the six o’clock swill.”

  This law demanded that all pubs had to shut for an hour between six and seven in the evening. It was introduced in 1910 in the belief it would force men to go home after work for dinner, or at least go home. What happened, of course, was precisely the opposite, a situation merely exacerbated by war. Evening commuter trains returning workers to the suburbs from the city spewed out men intent only on one thing, getting in as many schooners as possible before the
deadline. With ten minutes to go men would order two, three or even four more schooners, lining them up on the bar. By the time six o’clock came they’d have consumed twice as much as normal, drunk it three times faster than normal and when they were kicked out into the street they took their unfinished schooners with them. By half past six there were probably as many drunk men stumbling along the gutters of the nation’s city streets as sober ones sitting at their dinner tables.

  The other law, which was in place until 1960, was that all hotels had to stay closed on Anzac Day, supposedly as a mark of respect but truth be known it was simply because the authorities were terrified at the prospect of tens of thousands of old soldiers roaming the streets pissed out of their heads. As it turned out, they were right to be wary. On that first Anzac Day after the law was changed, the dignity and solemnity of the Dawn Service had long been forgotten by sunset in many pubs, monumental piss-ups being the order of the day.

  Although public bars may have seemed like a seething cauldron, to us young boys they were fascinating places full of drama and excitement, and we couldn’t wait until we were old enough to drink. Of course, paper boys weren’t supposed to go into the bar but we frequently did, ignoring the curses, avoiding the vomit and ducking the clips round the ear from the landlord. It was worth it though, as the tips were usually much bigger, drunk men being far more interested in hearing the end of the latest crude joke, or continuing their argument than bothering with a few pennies change.

  When tempers flared in the Epping Hotel Jack Cooper was more often than not in the thick of it, even if the argument or fight didn’t involve him. In time I got used to his abuse, and by the age of eleven I realised he was never going to do anything other than shout and yell. In fact I found his ravings quite amusing, strangely enough. The same couldn’t be said about his son, though. By the time I was eleven, Ray Cooper had not only inherited his father’s size and imagination but his violence and hatred of Poms, and whenever he saw me he would either push me in the gutter or take my bike and dump it in the storm drain or in the bush somewhere. I always got it back, but for many years until they moved away I was petrified of Ray Cooper and used to make complicated detours to avoid going near his house or meeting him in the street.

  * * *

  In size and demeanour, Colin Tucker reminded me of Jack Cooper. He wasn’t as bad-tempered and abusive, nor did he smell like a dunny carter … well, not quite as bad. Glen and I had spent our last day at the Proserpine Show helping to dismantle the fences and jumps in the equestrian arena. It turned out the majority of them had been borrowed from the Townsville Showground and, the night before, a battered old Bedford Commer flat back truck that was a bit like ‘Uncle’ Alf’s only in much worse condition had arrived from Townsville to pick them up. The driver was Colin Tucker. Like Jack Cooper, he was a mountain of a man; bare footed, he had massive arms and hands and his beer belly made his very short rugby shorts appear even shorter, and stretched his much worn and battered ‘Townsville Brothers’ rugby league jumper to bursting point. On the doors of the truck, the words ‘Tuckers Transport Townsville’ were crudely painted in large faded letters, the colour matching his jumper. Beneath this in smaller letters, but similarly crudely done, it said ‘Colin Tucker Proprietor’.

  The truck was not fully laden so the load had been split in two, the metal stands and supports over the rear axle, the wooden planks and poles stacked hard up against the back of the cab. In the middle was a four or five foot space where a few spare tarps and empty hessian sacks were stacked. At first, after Mrs McDonald had introduced us and asked Colin Tucker if he could take us to Townsville, he didn’t seem all that keen and just continued tightening the ropes of his load; then he grunted, without looking at us.

  “They’ll have to ride up there,” and nodded to the back of the truck.

  We were actually standing by the open door of his cab and could see there was no passenger seat at all, just a mess of his belongings, including a badly rolled up sleeping swag, completely filling the space.

  “Yeah, fine,” we agreed.

  “Six o’clock outside the main gates,” he muttered, and went around the other side of the truck, the conversation obviously terminated.

  It turned out Colin Tucker had been working for the Townsville Showground for years, and bringing the borrowed fence planks and poles down for the Proserpine Show for as long as anybody could remember.

  “He owns the truck himself, “Mrs McDonald explained. “Bought it just after the war with some compensation he received from the army, but I’m told he is almost incapable of running a business, or getting any work. If the Townsville Showground doesn’t need him, he just sits in the pub all day, so I believe.”

  “Is he alright?” Glen asked. “He looks a bit dodgy to me!”

  “I agree he’s not exactly Mr Personality,” she smiled, “but I know he has to get the fences back to Townsville before the weekend, and that is where you want to go, isn’t it? I doubt you’ll have any problems. He’s harmless enough. Just don’t expect him to entertain you!” And she smiled reassuringly again.

  That day she was wearing a frilly pink blouse, which if anything made her breasts appear even larger, when she sat down her entire front quivered, like an enormous pink blancmange.

  “Now then, boys, how much do we owe you?”

  Apart from cigarettes and the odd hot dog we’d hardly spent any money at the show, so we still had most of what Mrs Hayes had given us, and with this extra ten pounds ten shillings to put in the kitty we were rolling in it. We were also raring to go, and well before six o’clock the next morning were waiting expectantly outside the gates for our lift. One more day and we‘d be there: Magnetic Island at last!

  * * *

  In the end it took us nearly fifty hours to get to Townsville, despite it only being about a hundred and sixty miles. True, the road was pretty bad in places and the truck was laboriously slow, but at one time we thought we would never get there, so often did Colin Tucker stop. Being in the back didn’t help, as it severely restricted conversation so we could never find out his intentions, but even when we did stop he rarely spoke to us or told us anything. Of course we could have left at any time and taken our chances on the road, but because we were never too sure what was going on, or how long he was going to be, it was difficult to know what to do; besides, there wasn’t that much traffic and he was a definite lift right to Townsville.

  The first time we stopped was in Bowen, mid-morning on the first day. He just parked in a truck stop near the salt flats outside town, jumped down from the cab and disappeared down the street without a word. We were left sitting in the back like lemons, expecting he would return at any moment and arguing about what to do when he didn’t. When he did come back over two hours later it was obvious he’d been drinking but he said nothing, just climbed into the cab and roared off.

  The next stop was in Home Hill. It was just getting dark as we pulled up, but this time he did at least tell us we would be there for awhile and that we should go off and get something to eat. In the end we spent the night there, as he was so drunk when he came back he could hardly open the cab door, never mind drive. He yanked his swag out of the cab, cursing and struggling with it, then he just let it drop to the ground and collapsed on top of it, not even bothering to get into it. Within a minute he was snoring his head off. There wasn’t much else we could do but make up a bed for ourselves on top of the tarps and sacks, which was surprisingly comfortable.

  Next morning he didn’t wake up until gone eight o’clock. We’d been up for hours, and as he stuffed his swag back into the cab we asked him if we would get to Townsville that day.

  “Dunno,” he shrugged, and then he had a “dingo’s breakfast” — a yawn, a leak and a good look around — and set off without another word. We only got as far as Ayr before he stopped again, and as he climbed down, mumbled, “Get yourselves some breakfast” before setting off.

  This time we followed him, and sure enough
he went straight into the first pub he came to. Glen and I found ourselves standing outside in the street debating what we should do. In the end we did as he suggested, went and had breakfast, but we still couldn’t make up our minds. One minute Glen was all for leaving the weird bastard and getting another lift, next minute I was, then suddenly Glen got up. “I’m going to go into the pub and ask him,” he said. “I mean he could be in there for hours, couldn’t he! It’s not fair on us!”

  I wasn’t so sure, but Glen set off before I could argue.

  We stuck our heads round the door and saw Colin Tucker sitting at the bar with several other fairly rough-looking men, their filthy black clothes identifying them instantly as cane cutters.

  “Excuse us, Mr Tucker,” Glen called across as politely as he could. “How much longer do you think you’ll be?”

  For a second you could have heard a flea fart. Everybody, including the barman, just stared at us in astonishment, and then to a man they burst into howls of laughter.

  “Ooooo!” One of the men howled, mimicking Glen. “Excuse me, Mr Tucker, but how much longer do you think you’ll be!” and they all fell about in hysterics again.

  “Give him a chance, son, he’s not pissed yet!” shouted another man, and Glen’s face went bright red as the howls rang around the bar.

  Fortunately Colin Tucker didn’t seem the slightest bit concerned by our interruption. I think he quite liked being addressed as Mr Tucker and as we exited he shouted, “Won’t be long, just finish this,” and held up his glass. The raucous laughter followed us up the street.

  An hour later, he returned.

  “Let’s go!” was all he slurred.

  By six o’clock that evening we were only fifteen miles or so from Townsville, but to our amazement he stopped again at a pub near Alligator Creek and without a word disappeared inside. We wandered about the place for a bit, never letting the pub or the truck out of our sight in case he came back and went off without us. Wandering round Alligator Creek wasn’t a taxing task; if you blinked when you passed through, you’d miss it. We ate the last of our tins of food and then went and stood outside the pub for awhile having a smoke. We could see him sitting on a stool, waving his arms about. It didn’t look like he was ever going to come out, but there was no way either of us were going to go in and ask him, so we just went back to the truck and made up our beds. This time when he returned he was so drunk we had to help him get his swag out of the cab.