“Room fourteen my arse!”
By ten o’clock we were on the road again, Barcaldine, Blackall and Tambo going by without incident, and it was just getting dark when we stopped a few miles from Augathella. Jim opened the passenger door, and by standing up in the cab he could lean out and talk to us, more or less through our window. “How youse doin’, getting pissed off yet?” he grinned. “Joe wants to get down to the Warrego Highway tonight if we can, ‘bout another sixty mile. Reckon you can handle that?”
“Do we have a choice?”
“Not really,” he grinned again. “Beer and T-bone steaks for dinner, though, should be worth waiting for,” and we set off again.
They certainly were worth waiting for, and once again we fell asleep under the stars beside the fire, entertained by Jim and his guitar in his own inimitable way.
“What’s grey and got a trunk?
“An elephant!”
“No! A mouse going on holidays!”
Then we sang a rousing rendition of a song even us city boys had heard of, even if we didn’t know or understand some of the words, but clinking beer bottles and thumping an esky made up for our moments of silence. Even Joe joined in.
“… and glory if he gets her, won’t he make the ringer go!
Click go the shears, boys, click, click, click,
Wide is his blow and his hands move quick …”
After this we settled down as Jim slowed the pace, gently strumming his guitar.
“Our gran taught us this one,” he smiled.
“Two old ladies, we sit down to tea,
I’m eighty-four and she’s eighty-three.
I hate her and she hates me, but we’re the only ones left now you see.
We meet every Wednesday at half past three
I go to her, then she comes to me.
I bore her and she bores me, but we’re the only ones left now you see.
She boasts of a party at number three
When Fred kissed her instead of me
But I wear his ring, so it’s plain to see why I hate her and she hates me.
Never trust your best friend, so the rest say
And I don’t trust her, not to this day.
But the rest are gone, so we’ll pour some tea, for we’re the only ones left now you see.”
Then he stood up, tall and erect, and gave a little drum roll on the back of the guitar; the national anthem at the end of the show.
“Australians all let us rejoice, for we are young and white.
The yellow hordes are on their way, but we know we are right.
Though we can see, undoubtedly, our neighbours are all Asian
We’ll sing and dance and wave the flag because we are Caucasian.”
Early the next morning we arrived in Mitchell, only to discover the road they wanted to take to St George was cut by floods and we would have to go the long way round through Roma. We were over halfway there when we had the blowout. It was not quite as dramatic as hitting the kangaroo, but it still frightened the life out of us. It wasn’t a loud bang … more a pop like a rifle shot, but the truck lurched precariously and we could sense Joe struggling to control it for a second or two. The burst tyre was on the inside wheel of the nearside double wheels at the back, making it slightly more complicated to replace. “Could have been worse, I guess,” Joe sighed. “Yeah,” Jim added cheerfully. “Front tyre goes, you’ve got no steering at all!” and he knelt down, examining the damage, stripping off a piece of the split rubber. “Right,” Joe stood up, getting all businesslike. “You two, cup of tea while we fix this.”
Watching the two of them work together was amazing. Without communicating at all they went about their tasks independently yet perfectly coordinated, as if they’d done it a hundred times before. No jobs were replicated, and they never got in each other’s way. While one got the jacks out, the other got the spanners and tools. One loosened the nuts, while the other retrieved the spare wheels from under the truck; Jim punctuating the process with his little asides as he worked.
“I reckon we’ll use the round wheel today …”
“Why wouldn’t the spanner go out with the nuts? Because they were all such tight bastards!”
“Knock, knock!”
“Who’s there?”
“Amos!”
“Amos who!”
“A mosquito!”
Despite their efficiency, it still took them nearly two hours to change the wheel. Just jacking and chocking the truck up level and secure took half an hour.
In the meantime, Glen and I had taken the primus stove out of their food box and began making tea. As we dug in amongst their tins of food we saw the tin of apricots, and immediately agreed we should make our hosts a little treat. Over the weeks, and especially on Magnetic Island, we had experimented with dampers, not only with the consistency of the dough and the heat of the fire but with the ingredients. We discovered they tasted a lot better with a bit of salt sprinkled into the dough, sugar too sometimes, even a dollop of Carnation milk; then, instead of twisting the dough round a stick and losing or burning half of it in the fire, we began making lots of little dampers, like thick pancakes, and frying them slowly in the fat of tinned corned beef, or preferably bacon fat when we had any. Then one day, more or less by accident, Glen poured some coconut juice into the dough instead of water, and the result was really nice. It got us thinking about what else we could put in them, and the only thing remotely suitable we had in our stash at the time was a tin of apricots. Emptied onto a plate and chopped up finely, we poured that into the dough and stirred it thoroughly, binding the mixture together before patting them out into little flat cakes and frying them. Bingo! Eat your heart out, Mrs Beeton! They were terrific, or at least we thought so.
The ones we made that day may not have had any coconut juice in them, but they were just as nice and the look on Jim’s face when he ate one was priceless.
“Well, bugger me!” he exclaimed. “These are beaut! What do you call ’em?”
“Don’t know. Apricot cakes, I guess.”
The blowout happened about half a mile outside a small village and the truck was stopped just in front of the sign. “That’s what you should call ’em, I reckon.” He nodded at the sign. Muckadilla cakes they were. We buried the empty apricot tin beneath that sign — it might still be there!
In Moree, after we delivered the motorbike, Joe gave us an hour to stock up on food and cigarettes and we were anxious to find out if they were still giving out vouchers in New South Wales. They were, but by the time we left the police station we were beginning to wonder if it was a legal requirement to hand out welfare in a patronising manner. Still, I guess if it were dispensed with dignity and no questions asked we’d all be on it, wouldn’t we? When we got back to the truck the brothers were waiting for us.
“Okay?” Joe asked, and we waved our vouchers victoriously.
“So you didn’t meet anybody you liked better than yourself, then,” Jim stated.
“Sorry?”
“Our granddad used to reckon that if you went out and didn’t meet anybody you liked better than yourself, then that was a result. Although he didn’t say if it was a good or bad result; that was up to you,” he grinned.
By now it was the thought of spending the night under the stars listening to Jim that fortified us as much as anything during the long hours on the road, so we were a little disappointed to hear he was going to stop off in Walgett that night to see his girlfriend. As it turned out, we were still royally entertained. We got there at about seven o’clock, and having dropped Jim off in the town, Joe parked up on the banks of the river next to a barbecue pit. Within an hour Jim returned with his girlfriend and five or six of his young mates, and over the next hour or so dozens of cars and trucks arrived as word spread that the brothers were in town for the night. Eventually there must have been about fifty people there, mostly young men getting wilder and louder. Glen and I joined in for the first few hours and had a few bottles o
f beer each, listening to them tell stories, abuse each other and catch up on the gossip. Then Jim and his girlfriend left and Joe came over to us and suggested it might be an idea if we slept in the truck. “Could get a bit rough out here soon.” He had to shout to be heard over the noise. “You can watch all the action from up there,” he suggested.
He was right. By midnight most of them were paralytic, shouting and yelling. They played mindless games like seeing who could climb highest up a large gum tree. Bottles were smashed and tempers flared, two blokes had a wrestle and fell into the river and there were two fistfights that Joe allowed to go on long enough for the participants to land a few blows before he intervened; and we thought only people our age behaved like that! The police arrived at one stage, but when they saw it was Joe in charge they went away, satisfied he could handle things.
In the end the party wore itself out as parties do, and the next thing we knew Joe was bashing on the side of the truck to wake us. Yawning copiously, we emerged to find hundreds of bottles strewn about and half a dozen young men flaked out beside the fire, Joe going from one to the other retrieving his blankets. “Come on, get up, I’m outta here!” Groaning and holding their heads, they rose and went stumbling off to their cars. “Can’t handle it, you shouldn’t drink,” he called after them, grinning. After a quick breakfast we helped him clean up the area before we left, dumping the bottles into two old forty-four gallon drums. Jim was staying on in Walgett for a few days, so we were able to cram in the front with Joe for the remainder of the trip and we arrived in Dubbo late that afternoon, four days after leaving Cloncurry.
Joe invited us to stay at his place for the night. Cathy, his wife, was more than welcoming. She cooked a fantastic meal and made us smoked ham and tomato sandwiches for our lunch, and gave us a loaf of her lovely home-made bread. The next morning Joe drove us out to the Newell Highway at the southern end of town, and we shook hands. In some ways it was almost a relief that Jim wasn’t there; saying goodbye to nice people didn’t get any easier, especially when we knew we would probably never see them again. Although we were both certain of one thing; if we didn’t get to ride in the back of another removal truck for fifty years, it would be too soon.
SIXTEEN
William Forsyth Remington Fellows
By midday we were eating Cathy’s sandwiches by the side of the road, three miles south of Peak Hill, having been dropped there by a farmer at the turn off to his property. I’m not sure why exactly, but both of us felt quite elated and buoyed; it was as if somehow we were starting out on our trip all over again. Young had become our Magnetic Island and here we were, already only a hundred miles or so from it. Although there were some dark clouds on the horizon it was a lovely day, with a gentle breeze, peaceful and calm and a brilliant blue sky. The scenery added to our feelings of wellbeing and we were not in the slightest bothered there was no traffic. Gum trees, cockatoos, Merino sheep, and rolling hills of brown pasture all being uniquely Australia, sort of makes you want to walk through it. So, we set off with a jaunty stride.
“Where the blue gums are blowing, the Murrumbidgee’s flowing, beneath a sunny sky.”
Two hours later the dark clouds on the horizon had become black angry clouds above our heads, split asunder by bright lightning flashes. The gentle breeze had suddenly picked up to gale-like proportions, and we were about to get ‘a wet fish and no bottoms’, as my grandmother used to say. Ten minutes before, we’d passed a large three-sided barn in a field, so we raced back down the road. We were too late; five hundred yards from the barn the rain began pelting down like steel rods, so hard it hurt our heads, and scrambling over the fence we sloshed across the field and burst into the old wooden building in a rush of sopping wet, panting excitement, shouting to be heard over the thunderous din on the corrugated iron roof.
“Wow! Talk about rain!”
“I’m fucking drenched!”
“Shit! The bread’s all soaked through!”
“Everything’s bloody soaked through!”
Funny how very loud noise sometimes acts like a stimulant, creating a sort of gripping excited tension, which doesn’t really exist but still leaves you feeling buggered when it stops.
“Let’s light a fire!” Glen yelled. “I’m freezing!”
“What with?”
“There must be something in here!”
“Right, you look for wood and I’ll find a place to sleep before it gets too dark!” And we set off in different directions with urgent fervour.
The old barn was cavernous, at least a hundred feet long and about twenty feet high, with a ten-foot wide open-sided loft running around two sides, supported on rough wooden poles. There were a couple of old hay carts and ploughing implements strewn about, with harnesses and other bits of equipment hanging on the posts, and in the corner, under the stairs leading up to the loft, were several bales of hay.
“I’ve found somewhere!” I shouted, running over to test the hay. It was bone dry and reasonably fresh, and I bounced up and down on it for a moment. “Yeah! Fantastic!” Meanwhile, Glen had found a back door and gone outside.
“Out here!” he yelled. “There’s a fire and everything!” And he came rushing excitedly back into the barn. “Come and see. It looks like somebody lives here!”
“That’s because somebody does live here! Now will you two stop shouting!”
“Jesus! Who said that?”
“I did!” And looking up, we saw a dishevelled man with a matted grey beard looking down at us. He was sitting on the loft floor, his legs dangling over the edge, the heels of his socks completely worn through.
“For Christ’s sake! You scared the shit out of us!”
“And you woke me up!”
“Sorry … we didn’t … I mean … do you really live here?” By now both of us were shivering with the cold, and with a wave of his hand he dismissed our apologies and motioned to the back of the shed. “Go and dry yourselves, you’re making my floor wet; go on then! You won’t get dry staring up at me, will you?”
A sloping corrugated iron roof attached to the wall and supported at the front by half a dozen rough poles ran right along the back of the barn. Although open to the elements it was remarkably dry underneath despite the ferocity of the downpour, which was now beginning to ease. Halfway along there was a large semi-circular fireplace made of stones, with three or four logs burning brightly and a billy full of steaming water standing on a metal plate over one corner. Next to the fire was a rusty camp oven hanging from a metal tripod, and beside it several large logs were obviously used as seats. A kerosene lamp hung from the roof and a rough wooden shelf was nailed to the wall, and on the shelf were an enamel plate, mug, knife, fork, spoon, some tea and sugar, and various tins of food. There was even a piece of rope to hang our clothes on strung between two of the roof beams. At the far end was a water tank.
“Crikey!” exclaimed Glen. “He’s got everything out here.”
“Yes; and I know exactly what’s there, too!” The man’s voice came
from the other side of the wall.
“Can we light the lamp and hang our clothes on the rope?” I called out.
“That’s what they’re there for, my boy, and while you’re at it you can make us all a cup of tea, two sugars and a dollop of Carnation in mine, and fill the billy up afterwards. I’ll be out in a tick.”
We’d changed our clothes, hung up our wet ones, put a couple of tins of food on the metal plate to warm up and made three mugs of tea by the time he came out to join us.
“Ah! Tea! Very civilised.” He was now wearing an old worn cardigan and slippers, and as he sat down it was impossible not to notice the telltale whiff of stagnant sweat and dirty clothes. In fact he was almost as scruffy and smelly as Jerky Joe, with a similar paucity of teeth. His hair was as matted as his beard, and his fingernails must have been at least half an inch long.
“Now then,” he smiled, getting settled on a log. “I suppose introductions are the order of the d
ay. I’m William, and you are … ?”
“Nick, Glen. Do you really live here?”
“Do you mind if I ask you first how old you are?”
“Thank you,” he nodded when we told him. “I suppose I could ask what you are doing out here? But that would be prying, and I have no wish to pry.”
“Are you English?” Glen asked.
“Unlike yourself obviously.” But the rebuke was gentle, and he smiled as he said it. “Yes dear boy, I am a Pom, or at least that is where I was conceived and born, but I don’t claim allegiance to any one nation. I am a citizen of the world. Like a migratory bird, nationality means nothing to me. But do I detect just a touch of Burnley in your voice?”
“Blackburn.”
“Ah, yes, close though, close. Right ho! Youth before beauty!”
“Sorry?”
“You tell me all about yourselves, then I’ll tell you about myself.”
We ate while telling him our tale, and after we’d made up our beds on the straw bales we sat around the fire and listened with growing amazement to the story of William Forsythe Remington Fellows.
“Very grand name, isn’t it? The Remington bit is from my mother’s side. She had something to do with the American Remingtons. Which is where the joke originated, I believe — ‘My mother was a Remington and my father was a Colt 45.’ He grinned.
Once a Pommie Swagman Page 22