Once a Pommie Swagman

by Thomas, Nick Arden

  For some reason I was never too bothered by verbal abuse. I might not have been very good in a punch-up, but from an early age I realised that returning insulting abuse with even more insulting abuse was far more effective and hurtful than a smack in the mouth. It meant, of course, that I got the odd smack in the mouth myself occasionally for my troubles, although I always felt it was a bit of a victory if they had to resort to violence. But it has always been fairly easy for smug Pommie bastards to get under the skin of sensitive Aussies. Just asking what ‘cultured’ meant usually did the trick, although there were plenty who thought you were talking about oysters.

  I suppose I can claim, with a modest amount of shame, to have contributed to the change in the social fabric of Australia in the 1950s. After all, it was because of thieving little arseholes like me that rules, laws and regulations were enacted and people became more cynical, less trusting and obsessed with security; locks, burglar alarms and insurance. Although in my defence, on this day Davy Crockett and Cassandra Roberts were as much to blame.

  The car was parked in Epping’s High Street, with the passenger side window fully wound down and there, sitting on the passenger seat, was a big fat purse, covered in colourful beads. It was Saturday morning and I was heading for the pictures early, knowing the queue would be long; for in two hours the premier of the film of the century was about to be screened. No Saturday matinee had ever been as important as this! “Davy! Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier. Born on a mountain top in Tennessee … something or other … you ever did see.” It cost nine pence to get in, which I had from my paper round, plus sixpence for a Fanta and a bag of chocolate bullets at interval. What I didn’t have was the hat, which, to my despair, I saw almost everybody in the queue did have; Eric and Dave, Brian Seymour and Ronnie Watson; even Cassandra Roberts had a hat! A girl! Oh, the humiliation! How could I possibly stand in a queue, already snaking up the street, if she had a Davy Crockett hat and I didn’t!

  Being the fashion accessory of the decade, Martin’s, the gentlemen’s outfitters at the top of the street, had cunningly ordered in dozens of them to coincide with the film, retailing them for three shillings and sixpence and even staying open late on Saturday especially for the event. There was I, desperate for a hat; there was the purse, shouting ‘open me!’ There were the hats in Martin’s window, shouting ‘buy me!’ But most of all there was Cassandra Roberts, shouting ‘look at me!’ Wrong, immoral, disgusting, disgraceful as it might be, there is a certain spine-tingling excitement about stealing four shillings from a purse in broad daylight in front of dozens of people. See, I wasn’t all bad! I rarely took more than I needed.

  I wore my Davy Crockett hat with great pride and pushed into the queue in front of Cassandra. Inside, four or five of us be-hatted eleven-year-old ‘Davys’ sat in a row, and were so busy being loud and obnoxious that we didn’t notice the anthem begin. Suddenly I was clipped around the ears and my hat was ripped off by a man behind me. “Take your hats off and stand up!” he hissed, prodding the others stiffly in the back. “Show some respect, you little bastards!” And he caught up with the song with vigour and passion. “Long live our noble Queen! ” I recognised him from the pub, an ex-digger. He was a mate of Jack Cooper’s, and just as bitter and angry when it came to Poms. If that wasn’t confusing and ironic enough, the following weekend I wore my hat to the milk bar and left it sitting in a booth while I played the pinball machine. When I went back half an hour later it had gone. Somebody had pinched it. Utter bastards! Was there no decency left in the world!

  * * *

  Constable Tyler of the Young police more than restored our faith in policemen. “’Course you can, boys,” he smiled when we asked if we could have a voucher. “Understand how these things work, do you?”

  “Yeah, we know we’ve got to get work after this but that’s why we’re here. We have a job to go to in a few weeks.”

  “Good on yer; who would that be with, then?” And when we told him, he beamed with pleasure.

  “Johnny Richards! Well, bugger me!”

  “You know him?”

  “Know him? Went to school with him. Bonza bloke is Johnny. Does he know you’re here?”

  “No. We need to find out where he lives. We’re supposed to call in and meet him.”

  “I can do better than that,” the constable said. “I can take you out there! Come on,” and he grabbed his hat. Why couldn’t they all be like that!

  Fifteen minutes later we drove into the front yard of John and Emma Richards’ small farm. Playing on the veranda of the weatherboard cottage was a boy of about four years old. He was hiding behind a large firewood basket, firing his toy rifle at us as we came up the steps. Most notably he was wearing a Davy Crockett hat and instantly I was transported back to that Saturday matinee; not all that long before perhaps, but, whatever your age, a third of your life always seems a long time ago.

  I think both Glen and I fell in love with Emma Richards the moment we first saw her. Twenty-six, tall and elegant, she was truly beautiful, with a wonderful smile, gentle eyes and easy manner. She was three months pregnant with her second child, and had that complexion and air of serenity that so often accompanies that condition early on. “Hello, boys,” she greeted us brightly, coming out onto the veranda. She waved at Constable Tyler as he hooted his farewell and headed back to town. “We’ve been expecting you. John’s out at the orchard. I’ll take you out there later. How about a cup of tea first? Have you eaten? Robbie, Robbie, come and meet these two nice boys.”

  Replete with ham and pickle sandwiches and lovely fruitcake, Emma drove us the four or five miles to the orchard in a very battered 1947 Ford half ton pick-up. We squeezed into the front with her, Robbie sitting on our laps and Morgan, their black and white sheepdog, panting happily in the back. On the way she explained that they didn’t live on the orchard as there was no house there. “We’re leasing the farm at the moment, but we hope to build a house on the orchard after this crop,” and then she swore softly under her breath as the gears crunched. “This is my dad’s. He lent it to us so I would have a vehicle while John was at the orchard. I’m still getting used to it,” and she did a very professional and smooth double shuffle to engage the gear and grinned triumphantly. “But I’m learning!”

  “Woof ” agreed Morgan from the back.

  John Richards was a sort of male equivalent of his wife (although he wasn’t pregnant) — the same age, he was tall and striking with the air of someone at ease with himself and the world. Just inside the front gates of the orchard were two weatherboard sheds with iron roofs and dirt floors, and we found him inside one, his head buried in a tractor engine. He shook our hands warmly, after picking up Robbie who rushed over to him.

  “Good to see you, boys,” he grinned. “Have a good trip down?”

  “Well … it was entertaining.” He smiled at that.

  “Yeah, I can imagine. The back of removal vans aren’t the smoothest, but they’re great blokes, the Bourke brothers, aren’t they?”

  “You know them!”

  “Oh yeah. Emma’s brother went to school with them.”

  Although both Glen and I were surprised by this, we probably shouldn’t have been. Since leaving the throngs of Sydney we’d been all too aware how sparsely populated the countryside was, and frequently came across people who knew, or at least knew of, other people, hundreds, even thousands of miles away. “The back of beyond,” the documentary filmmaker John Hyer had so vividly described the outback. The residents of Julia Creek might have scoffed at the idea of Young being called ‘outback’. After all, it was only a hundred miles or so from Sydney, where people were flat out knowing their neighbours, much less anyone ten miles away! Even so the phenomenon of country people all seeming to ‘know’ each other was a stark illustration that despite its enormous size, Australia was really a very small place.

  “Right,” John said, putting his son down and briefly touching his wife’s stomach and smiling at her. “I guess
you want to know the score.”

  Probably eighty percent of the orchard was still in bloom, lovely little white flowers tinged with pink. There were roughly seven hundred trees, John told us; neat, straight rows disappearing over the undulating land, only to reappear in the distance. The grass strips down the middle of each row were neatly mown, and the earth at the base of each tree was freshly turned and free of weeds. “They’re looking good,” said John, stopping by a tree with no blooms, tiny little fruits just beginning to emerge. “We had a good, cold winter; cherry trees love cold winters. I reckon some of these will be ready to pick by the end of October, love,” he addressed his wife.

  “Bit earlier than you thought, then,” she smiled.

  For half an hour we strolled through the orchard, Morgan and Robbie running about while Emma picked blossoms, cleverly entwining them around a length of paspalum grass to make a sort of Roman crown. “There are two major problems for early season cherries,” John explained. “The weather, of course, but we can’t do anything about that. The biggest headache, though, is birds, especially crows! In a few more weeks the fruit will be starting to get plump enough to interest them. Then they’ll arrive in their squadrons.” He grimaced. “That’s where you come in.”

  “What I’ll want you to do is stay out here in the sheds and walk around the orchard several times a day to scare them away. Sounds easy, eh, but believe me, crows are the most cunning creatures on earth so you’re going to have to be on your toes. Some of the orchards nearby use carbon guns that go off at set intervals, but I’m not so keen on them, the birds get used to them. Nothing beats unpredictable human intervention, especially when you’ve got a shotgun,” he grinned. “But as I say, that won’t be for a few weeks. Meantime, how do you feel about going down to Leeton to pick oranges? I know the owner. He has a bit of a reputation as a slave driver but his bark’s worse than his bite. He pays good money, and says you’ve got a job if you want it. I can take you down there, but you’ll have to make your own way back here. Three or four weeks down there, then come back here and work for me for five or six weeks. What do you say?”

  We stayed the night with them, sleeping on cushions on the floor of Robbie’s little room, a situation he found hugely exciting. As soon as his mother said goodnight and shut the door he was out of bed and jumping all over us, and all-in wrestling became the order of the day. “For heaven’s sake, boys!” his mother burst back into the room. “Stop it! Get back into bed, young man,” and she tucked Robbie in again, scowling at us, but she was smiling as she left. We giggled ourselves to sleep. Early the next morning John drove us the one hundred miles or so down to Leeton. We went straight out to the orchard, which was about eleven miles from town, with a large, brightly painted orange sign greeting us at the gates.

  “Welcome to Golambino Bros Orchards. The finest oranges in the world from the finest orchards in the world.”

  “They have a healthy opinion of themselves,” John smiled.

  Half an hour later, having introduced us and chatted for a bit, John shook hands all round and set off back to Young, the case of oranges he’d received as a gift on the seat beside him. “See you in four weeks, boys.”

  EIGHTEEN

  The Golambino Bros.

  The Golambino brothers had arrived in Australia with their families in 1950. In total they numbered eleven: the two brothers, their wives, and seven children between them. A distant cousin had migrated in the 1930s and settled in Leeton, where he started growing oranges. So it was that only a few days after getting off the ship in Pyrmont, both Golambino families ended up in the town. Within five years they were successfully farming two orange orchards of their own, side by side. “We own the businesses, but we don’t own the land,” Pietro, the twenty-six-year-old second son of Giovanni Golambino explained as he showed us where we would sleep. “But we will in a few years,” he added proudly. “Here you go,” and he opened the door of the small weatherboard shed. It was about fifteen foot square with a rough wooden floor, two windows on each side and half a dozen canvas stretchers that looked like they’d come out of a hospital or somewhere; spaced out, three on each side. Beside each stretcher was a plain wooden stool and a small, two-foot high old wooden fruit box to use as a cupboard and table. “You’re the first to arrive,” he said, “so you can grab any cot you want. Come up to the house later and get a pillow and a blanket,” and he left us to it.

  There were six or seven sheds, two of them partitioned off into three small rooms for married couples, and over the next few days they filled with workers. We were joined by four men in our hut, considerably older than us; two were friends from Melbourne who told us they came up to Leeton every year, although it was the first time they’d worked on this orchard. The other two were newly arrived Italian migrants who’d been sent out to the farm by the police. At the back of the main house, about a hundred yards away, there was a shower block and two chemical toilets. The showers consisted of canvas bags with shower roses attached, which when filled with water were hauled up over wooden poles with a rope and pulleys. There was hot water, but you had to fetch it in buckets from outside the kitchen, which was eighty yards away. Most pickers couldn’t be bothered, so cold showers were the order of the day, ensuring nobody stayed in there too long!

  An equal distance on the other side of the house were two large sheds where the packing, sorting and dispatching was done. The sheds were used by both the brothers as the two orchards produced different sorts of oranges, an early and a late variety, meaning they were picked at different times and the brothers could share equipment like sheds, tractors, wooden bins and ladders, and workers too. All this we learned from Pietro over the few days we were there before picking began. He’d sort of taken us under his wing and shown us about the orchard, which was beautifully maintained, as was the whole place, in fact; Golambino Bros orchards were obviously as highly organised and well-managed as the sign outside suggested, a situation made perfectly clear to us the afternoon before picking started.

  “Okay! Welcome everybody. I am Giovanni Golambino, this Mrs Golambino, these my daughters Gina and Rosina, and my sons Dario and Pietro. Over there my brother Roberto and his wife, also Mrs Golambino,” he grinned. “Next my nieces Giorgina, Sonia and Carlotta. All work here; now you come work here too, so we welcome you. Tutti benvenuti, as we say in Italy,“ and he beamed with pleasure and opened his arms wide as if to embrace each of us. He was a short, squat man, and even standing on the second rung of an ‘A’ frame ladder many of the pickers were as tall as him. Wearing a pair of worn, baggy overalls, his family and his brother’s family were lined up on the ground on either side. Standing in a gaggle in front of them, just outside the main packing shed, were about twenty workers, all summoned to hear the boss, Glen and I among them.

  “Right!” he shouted to regain attention, pleasantries plainly over. “Golambino Brothers like everything be simple. First: simple plan; must have plan, no plan, much confusione; so dis di plan. Tomorrow we start pick six o’clock.” Then he held up his hand, ticking off fingers as he spoke. “Eight o’clock breakfast; ten o’clock smoko; twelve o’clock lunch; three o’clock smoko; five o’clock finish; six o’clock dinner.

  Every day same plan; simple plan; easy understand plan. Yes!” A few murmured their consent, but we were all a little subdued by his Mussolini-like manner. “Excellente!” He smiled briefly before continuing. “Next: simple aim; to finish picking in twelve weeks, first this farm, then my brother’s. Yes!” And he waved his arm vaguely in the direction of the trees growing on the hillsides in the distance. This time nobody said anything, as it was obvious he was not asking our opinion on these matters and he went on quickly. “Last: simple hard work. We pay good; give good bed; good food; Sunday off. You give us simple hard work. Yes!” And he held out his arms again, this time with a “What could be simpler!” expression and smile. Then he stopped smiling, and added, “You donna like-a dis plan, you donna like-a dis aim, you donna like-a di hard work! An
swer also simple! We donna like-a-you stay here!” and he climbed down from the ladder, simple lecture over.

  His plans may have been simple, but he seemed to have one for just about every aspect of life on the farm, not just working but living and eating as well, none of which were debatable options. You either did everything like Mr Golambino wanted or you left. I suppose because we were nearer childhood than adulthood, this control of our lives and the fairly rigid regime didn’t bother Glen and I too much; we were accustomed to being told what to do. If anything, it was reassuring; you always knew where you stood, what you had to do and how you had to do it. Stick to his conditions, and Mr Golambino was a reasonably kind and considerate boss. Stray from them, or attempt to do things in your own way, and he was a “bad tempered arsehole”, as one of the pickers called him when he quit.

  The day’s picking began at six am sharp. Mr Golambino was pacing up and down in the orchard long before the few people who turned up late more than once showed up to face his wrath. Three times late and he fired you. No matter that you were paid by the weight you picked and not by the hour; if you didn’t work as hard as he thought you should, he let you know. On our second day, Pietro had taken us out into the orchard and shown us how to pick the oranges and place them in the canvas bags that hung around our necks. He demonstrated how to position the wide-based, ‘A’ frame wooden ladders, sort of burying the tripod leg in the tree between the branches for stability. The ladders were ten to twelve feet tall, and standing at the top with a heavy bag of oranges swaying around your neck could be quite hairy if they were not correctly positioned. We were each given a pair of tough canvas gloves, to which Mrs Golambino and her daughters had attached old shirt sleeves, enabling us to cover our arms up to our elbows. The branches, leaves and twigs of orange trees can be deceptively sharp and spiky sometimes. Each picker had his own wooden bin, and the bins were towed out on a trailer by Pietro or his brother each morning and parked between the rows of trees. It was Pietro’s job to keep an eye on these bins, and as they filled up he brought out another empty one and took the full one away. Each picker had his own colour, usually just a daub of paint on the end of his bin; mine was yellow and Glen’s was brown. Back in the picker’s shed the contents were weighed and a note of the colour taken and ticked off against our names. This job was the responsibility of Mr Golambino’s oldest daughter Gina, who was also the paymaster and tally clerk. In fact each member of the respective families had responsibility for various tasks while the two brothers sort of oversaw the whole process, constantly moving about from orchard to shed, checking the quality of the fruit, exhorting people to work harder or faster and berating those who didn’t.