Best Australian Yarns

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by Haynes, Jim


  This type of payback humour is nothing new. There is another example from the Brisbane area where, in colonial times, white settlers pushed out the Aborigines, cleared the bush and formed a farming settlement. When the settlers asked the dispossessed Indigenous Australians what the place was called they were told ‘Goona’. Only years later did the settlers discover that ‘goona’ was the local Aboriginal word for shit.

  According to Indigenous writer Tyson Yunkaporta, the town’s leading citizens then decided to insert a ‘d’ and thus make the name incorporate the positive English word ‘good’—and ‘Goodna’ it has remained to this day, an outer suburb of Brisbane.

  Often Indigenous Australian humour is about the underdog who may not win in the end but has the last laugh. I am sure that this is where we get some of that element of self-deprecating deadpan humour, which is part of the ‘Aussie’ character, although I think the Irish also added to that sense of supporting the underdog in our culture.

  Interestingly, some yarns which turn up often in our folklore have an interchangeable hero, sometimes an Irishman and at other times an Aboriginal Australian. Here is an example that I first heard as an Irish–Australian yarn but which is also now commonly told with an Aboriginal hero.

  The fishing inspector catches Paddy putting a mud crab into the boot of his car.

  ‘Hey! You can’t do that! I saw what you have there. It isn’t mud crab season. I’ll have to fine you!’ he says.

  ‘Hang on,’ says Paddy, ‘it isn’t what it looks like. This mud crab is my pet. His name is Marty. Everyday I bring him down here for a swim.’

  ‘A pet mud crab?’ replies the inspector, ‘Never heard of such a thing!’

  ‘It’s true, mate,’ says Paddy, taking the mud crab from the boot and stroking it. ‘Look, I’ll show you.’

  Before the inspector can get his thoughts together, Paddy takes two steps to the edge of the mangroves and puts the mud crab gently into the water.

  ‘Go on, Marty,’ he says, ‘have another swim.’

  The mud crab slides into the muddy water and disappears.

  Paddy stands silently, arms folded, as the minutes tick by. Finally the inspector asks, ‘Well, when is he coming back? Where is he?’

  ‘Where’s what?’ asks Paddy, innocently.

  ‘The mud crab.’

  Paddy frowns at him quizzically and asks, ‘What mud crab?’

  Our sense of humour and love of a yarn has no doubt something to do with the Irish heritage in Australia. Over one third of convicts and early settlers were Irish and the tradition of yarn spinning is very strong in Irish areas of Australia such as the Warrnambool, Koroit and Port Fairy district.

  The folk festival held at Port Fairy is the biggest and best in Australia and the tradition of ‘shanakee’ or village storyteller was alive and well until recently at Port Fairy in the guise of the late Pat Glover, after whom the annual storytelling competition, held at the Port Fairy Folk Festival, is named and to whose memory this book is dedicated.

  The yarns we tell every day at the dinner table or in the workplace are not usually well-constructed stories like the mud crab joke. They are mostly anecdotes from life. When we have a good story to tell, something unusual or amusing or quirky, we often say we will ‘dine out on that yarn’ for a period of time. This refers to the fact that a good yarn spinner is popular as a guest. Someone with amusing or entertaining anecdotes to tell will be invited to more dinner parties than a boring person. So, being a good yarn spinner makes you popular and in demand among your peers.

  We all love amusing or strangely coincidental stories, whether they be family yarns or work-related anecdotes. If you have ever socialised with a group who are all from one profession, you have no doubt heard their yarns. Teachers’ reminiscences, doctors’ stories, truckies’ stories, builders’ experiences—every profession or sport or hobby has its own store of folklore and yarns. Anything amusing or strange or salacious gets passed around the office or workplace or social group fairly quickly.

  Human beings have a need to communicate and yarn spinning is one way of building the bond we all desire to form between individuals—that thing that makes each social group unique.

  Shared yarns help us to become a group—a family, good neighbours, a team, a profession . . . friends.

  Among Australian men, the social group was often the drinking group, and yarn spinning in the pub after work was a very strong Australian tradition. In the bush, men yarned around the camp fire or in the pub, while women formed informal groups for afternoon teas or yarned at the CWA hall, or over the back fence in the town and city. Families shared anecdotes and amusing stories about work or school or relatives at dinner or after dinner. In a more formal way, the art of after-dinner speaking was a very important element of the semiofficial meetings and celebrations and fundraising events of community or professional groups.

  While there are millions of good yarns, not everyone is a good yarn spinner. Those who have ‘the gift of the gab’ or the ability to tell a yarn in a well-structured and entertaining fashion are highly regarded in most social groups.

  The word ‘raconteur’ is not so common these days but we all know someone who is ‘the life of the party’ and can entertain when appropriate. We also all know those who cannot tell yarns well, or who think something is amusing or worth hearing when everyone else realises it is not. So, just as we value good yarn spinners, we will avoid at all costs those who are poor yarn spinners!

  Some yarns are generic. Urban myths and gossip spread fast and the same stories come around again and again. In the world of journalism these can be useful when it is a slow news week or during the ‘silly season’.

  The ‘silly season’ in Australia is the period immediately following Christmas. During this time there is not as much real news because the whole nation shuts down and politicians and businesses and the entertainment industry are not issuing any media releases. After Christmas, advertising is slow due to everything having been done before Christmas. Permanent staff from newspapers and radio and television stations are on annual leave and stand-in presenters and journalists are left with little to talk about or write about. This is the season for recycled urban myths and apocryphal stories.

  The newspapers drag out the old furphies about sightings of Tasmanian tigers or mysterious large beasts, such as the Emmaville panther or yowie. Poltergeist stories appear, or that yarn about the fish falling from the sky, or the one about the pelican that takes the family chihuahua from the wharf at Coffs Harbour, or Kingston, or Albany—or somewhere. These are ‘generic’ yarns, designed to interest and fascinate anyone.

  Many yarns are, however, more specifically related to a group, a family or a profession, or a group of friends. Most of us think our profession or family have the best stories and yarns. Many of the best yarns are only meaningful if you know the character in the story, or the jargon of the profession or group, and its past history and folklore.

  Most families have a few characters whose eccentricity or meanness or ability to get into crazy mix-ups is legendary—within the family at least.

  Often a good family yarn just appears from nowhere but is worth telling, at least to other family members. Those outside the family group can also often relate to a family yarn or anecdote that contains a poignant human truth or circumstance.

  My dad passed away while I was working on this collection. He was one of those blokes who never talked about his experiences in World War II. He served in the British Navy and I knew he’d been on a destroyer in the North Sea and the Mediterranean in the early years of the war and on a troopship that was torpedoed and almost sank limping back to Gibraltar over Christmas 1943. Later, he was on an aircraft carrier that was part of the final thrust against Japan and was twice hit by kamikaze suicide planes.

  He never talked about any of that, but my mum, a great yarn spinner, used to tell us things about the war. Dad had sent her photos of the damage after the kamikaze attacks. She kept them wit
h other wartime photos in a small Globite school bag and I’d look through them now and then as a kid.

  After I wrote a book about the Australian experiences in World War II several years ago, I was trying to make conversation with my dad at the nursing home, never an easy thing to do. I started telling him I was working on a book about Australians at war and researching the events at Tobruk. He let me talk, as he always did, so I went on telling him how ships on their way to Tobruk with supplies, or returning with wounded were constantly pummelled from the air and raided by German U-boats.

  After enemy propagandists on Radio Berlin called the supply-line ships ‘a pile of scrap iron’, Australian troops christened them the ‘Scrap Iron Fleet’.

  ‘You Brits used the term the “Tobruk Ferry”,’ I told him, ‘But the Aussies called it the “Scrap Iron Fleet”.’

  ‘Being part of the Tobruk Ferry was no picnic,’ I told my dad. ‘Lost on the supply run in the eight months of the siege were two destroyers, three escort vessels and twenty-one other ships.’ He appeared vaguely interested in my chat for once, so I went on, happy to find any topic to engage him in conversation.

  ‘You were on a destroyer in that first part of the war, weren’t you?’ I asked.

  ‘The Antelope,’ he said, quietly.

  ‘Ahhh, that’s right, I remember now,’ I said smiling, ‘you were in the North Sea at that time, weren’t you?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘we were on the bloody Tobruk Ferry for seven months!’

  I didn’t realise I’d researched and written an account of something my dad actually lived through. That yarn will be part of our family history from now on.

  Some family yarns involve uncanny coincidences. My wife’s family had been trawler men for several generations and her parents built a state-of-the-art, sixty-foot trawler in the 1970s and named it the Lauryn G.—after their three kids, Laurence, Robyn and Garth. The Lauryn G. was the family business for thirty years, but was sold when my wife’s parents retired.

  Now, my brother-in-law, Garth McMillan, is a paramedic who sometimes worked the Westpac Rescue Helicopter. A trained diesel fitter, ambulance officer and surf lifesaver, Garth once received the Royal Humane Society Medal for bravery for jumping from a helicopter, swimming to a disabled yacht in a severe storm, reviving and administering first aid to the solo yachtsman who had been injured, fixing the yacht’s diesel engine and taking it to shore. He was the right man for the job, you might say.

  Garth happened to be on call one night in 2006 when there was a report that a vessel was in trouble out to sea off Noosa Heads. A trawler had suffered a hook up on an unknown object while trawling and the vessel overturned and sank. As it turned out later, the boat was lost and the skipper drowned, but two crewmen were rescued and survived. None of this was known as the helicopter flew to the scene, but more information came to hand via radio. When Garth heard the description of the vessel he went rather quiet and then asked its name. It was the Lauryn G.

  If a family or a group of professionals spends a lot of time together, the yarns seem to multiply and become more a part of the social fabric of the group. Touring with groups of entertainers, musicians and crew in the 1980s and 1990s was a rich source of yarns and show business folklore for me. Every show provided some hilarity or calamity or situation that was worth yarning about, and was often recalled years later.

  Of course the yarns are embellished and retold and become funnier over time. Col Joye and Frank Ifield are two characters who stand out to me as being fabulous yarn spinners with limitless stores of amusing and nostalgic yarns to tell backstage.

  Frank, who is no longer able to sing due to a serious lung operation in the 1980s, now has a show where he yarns about his past, while Wayne Horsburgh sings the famous songs and I provide Aussie humour.

  Col is so fond of yarning that he often forgets the purpose of an interview or media appearance. One Christmas he was supposed to be promoting an album of rock and roll Christmas songs on my 2UE spot with George Moore and Paul B. Kidd. We had yarned and taken calls from fans for almost half an hour when George, looking at the big hand of the studio clock approaching news time, became worried and tried to get Col focused on what the record company and publicist wanted from the interview.

  ‘Now, you have a new album of rock and roll songs out for Christmas,’ said George, the ultimate radio professional, prompting Col to wax lyrical about the album.

  ‘Do I?’ said Col. ‘Oh, yes, that’s right. I’ve heard it too—it’s good.’

  The late Slim Dusty, Leonard Teale and Smoky Dawson were all a treasure trove of great yarns and stories. Often it was all you could do to drag yourself away from the dressing room and onto the stage—the best show was the one going on backstage.

  I suppose everyone thinks that their profession has the best yarns and the best yarn spinners, but I think showbiz people are the best; most of them are natural show-offs and many can talk underwater. ‘Vaccinated with a gramophone needle’ was what my mum used to say.

  I tour now and then with a variety show called Back to the Tivoli. It’s owned and hosted by my mate Wayne Cornell, who has been in show business for most of his life and sang in the Delltones years ago. Wayne could fill ten books with stories about entertainers and touring. He told me a story about asking a famous entertainer for a tip to help him succeed as a young aspiring singer. While young Wayne waited expectantly, the legend put his hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Never leave your wallet backstage.’

  For some reason, certain trades and professions seem to have more yarns than others. As you will find reflected in this collection, horseracing people and railway workers seem to be especially good at remembering and passing on great yarns from their work.

  Of course, war always creates great yarns, not always amusing but often fascinating and redolent of great heroism and sacrifice. Often these are infused with the black humour that comes in the face of great danger or suffering. Digger yarns from both World Wars have always been favourites with the Australian public.

  We all love ghost stories and tales of supernatural or at least mysterious and inexplicable events. Sitting around a camp fire as kids taking turns to shine a torch into our own faces and tell scary yarns was a great source of pleasure when I was growing up.

  I have attempted to make this selection a varied and entertaining collection of yarns related mostly to Australian history and events. This means that most of the yarns are of the more generic type, not too specifically related to one group or section of the population.

  There are sections devoted to horseracing and railways and war, but I have tried to make the yarns in those sections the type that have an element of amusement or interest that will appeal to most people who just like a good yarn.

  I have tried to avoid those yarns that are really just jokes with a local twist. I have heard thousands of jokes in my time and very few of them make good yarns. Hosting the Pat Glover Story Telling and Yarn Spinning Awards at the Port Fairy Folk Festival for almost twenty years has been a great pleasure for me. It has made me realise that a true yarn is a very different thing to a joke.

  Jokes are mostly brief, momentary entertainments and a few are usually enough in a social gathering. Yarns, however, can be spun for hours around a camp fire or dinner table and the conversation will never become boring, especially if most people around the table can pick up a thread and make something from it by adding an experience or story.

  I would love to make a collection of real family yarns one day, but I have no idea how to go about collecting them. There are hardly any in this selection because most families never write them down. They remain as part of the family folklore and are rarely passed on to outsiders.

  The internet seems overloaded with meaningless, useless and trivial information and unfunny generic ‘jokes’, but it should be possible to start using it to collect and share the yarns that all families have stored in their collective memory banks—the meaningful stories and memories that make us
who and what we are. But I am not the man for the job.

  We need more blokes like my mate Frank Daniel who has spent most of his life remembering and writing down the yarns and stories that he has heard and experienced from childhood to the present. In lieu of this collection having a whole section of family yarns, I’ll just end this introduction with one of Frank’s family yarns.

  A Family Memory by Frank Daniel

  The Daniel family was well-known in the Southern Tablelands as sawmillers, blacksmiths, carriers, and farmhands, as well as being good drinkers, musicians and storytellers. The first Daniel family set up a sawmill at Holroyd Park in the suburb of Ashfield, Sydney.

  They were cedar cutters, and when their original source of supply depleted they went in search of new millable timber south of Goulburn to a place known as Bungendore. Here the so-called ‘good timber’ that they were told about was of no value at all; so they moved further south to Rossi in the Black Range, a part of the Great Divide, where they pioneered the sawmilling industry in that area.

  They were an industrious lot and keen on progress, never taking time off for trivial matters, but they all had big families and the birth of new offspring, no matter which side of their family tree, was always an occasion to celebrate.

  Weddings were the next best reason for celebration, as long as there was plenty of liquid refreshment to go with the yarning and the music.

  Funerals were another good reason for a day off. You never knew what you might buy or trade at a funeral, plus there’d always be plenty of cups of tea and scones as well as a good supply of grog on hand to see the dearly beloved on his or her way and it was a good chance to catch up with distant relatives.

 

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