The Bastard from the Bush: An Australian Life

by Jarratt, John

  In 1959, I was playing League for the Dapto under-sevens at Port Kembla. The ground was in the middle of nowhere, overlooking the ocean. Between the footy field and the ocean was a sea of corrugated roofing iron. Under this iron lived Aboriginal people, many of them drunk and growling and screeching at each other. It was the first time I’d seen a drunken woman. It was so surreal it felt like a weird dream, a trip. Strange, black, dusty, bent people living in something that looked like the tip Dad took us to. I didn’t ask questions because I somehow knew, even then, that nobody could give me an answer I’d understand. I still frequent the Illawarra district and I know there isn’t much of an Aboriginal presence. I wonder what happened to the corrugated-iron people.

  Inside

  Only in the house to eat, watch TV, do homework or sleep.

  Mum was a typical Australian cook. Meat, three vegetables, Deb mashed potato (just add water to so-called potato in powder form) and dessert, or pud (short for pudding), as we called it. The meat was chops, sausages, rissoles, occasionally steak, fish fingers or canned fish. We couldn’t afford chicken (in the days before it was hormone-treated), we only had it at Christmas along with ham.

  The vegies were the usual – peas, beans, cabbage, cauliflower – boiled until limp and soggy. Salad came out of a tin, except for the lettuce. We used to joke that if Mum broke her wrist, we’d starve.

  Dessert was bread-and-butter pudding, jelly and cream or rice and milk, mainly. Mum learnt to cook one thing really well, which she learnt from Aunty Nell (Dad’s mother’s sister, who lived down the hill): lemon meringue pie. She’d make it occasionally, and it’s still my favourite.

  There were always leftovers. Mum wouldn’t throw anything out, a habit from the Depression years. It was always a relief to get a brand-new meal.

  ‘What’s for dinner?’

  ‘Bread and duck under the table.’

  ‘Eat up and shut up.’ Bang. ‘Children should be seen and not heard.’

  Dad was a noisy eater; he ate like those Vikings you see in the movies. He’d take great chunks off his fork into his mouth and chomp away with his mouth open. He’d then lean across and clip you under the ear. ‘Eat with your bloody mouth closed!’

  We got TV in 1957. First house on the hill. Initially, all we got was the ABC. My favourite shows were Mr Squiggle, Bill and Ben The Flower Pot Men and the Friday-night and Sunday-night movies. Then WIN TV was established in March 1962. We had a year of commercial TV before we headed further into the bush in ’63. My favourite WIN shows were Disneyland, The Honeymooners and The Twilight Zone.

  Sunday night was Disneyland at 6 p.m., followed by the movie. We used to have what we called ‘a party’. The party was a bowl of mixed lollies and chocolates each and watching TV.

  Dad did shift work at the mine. We loved afternoon shift and night shift. Dad wasn’t home afternoons or evenings, bliss. Mum would put out an alert that Dad was moving to day shift the following week. ‘Try to behave yourselves, don’t do anything stupid and don’t argue with each other.’ Believe me, we tried, but kids live in the moment. I’d steal Brian’s truck, he’d stomp on my foot, I’d choke him, he’d scream. ‘Go to your room and wait for me, both of ya.’

  Homework was a nightmare. Dad was good at everything, I was good at nothing. It was different to a hiding but just as unbearable. Long division: ‘Four divided by twenty-five is…is…is…it’s zero, isn’t it, cause twenty-five doesn’t go into bloody four, does it… does it!’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know?…Jesus Christ, you’re just as happy without a brain as the people who’s got ’em.’

  This could go on for an hour or so. It felt like ten hours, punc­tuated with clips under the ear. I’d go to bed with my ear ringing. (PS I had to Google long division to write this paragraph.)

  Brian and I slept in the same bedroom. When we weren’t scheming Dad’s demise, Brian would tell the bedtime story, ‘The Adventures of Monkey Mick and George’. Brian told this story on a regular basis for a couple of years. Monkey Mick and George went all over the world and got into all sorts of bother. I loved those stories. Brian has a vivid imagination and a wonderful sense of humour.

  My name was ‘Get Outside’ and Brian’s name was ‘You Too’

  Home at 3.30, unpack your schoolbag. Mum would give us a glass of cordial and a biscuit of sorts. Vita-Weat and Vegemite was a favourite.

  ‘Did you wash your plate?’

  ‘Yeah, Mum.’

  ‘Well, why are you screaming around in here? Get outside!’ To Brian, ‘You too.’

  I loved getting out of that house, out of ‘the heat’ and back into ‘heaven’. We’d play cars, cowboys and Indians, wars, goodies and baddies, Rugby League, pretend fights, real fights. Dad got us a set of boxing gloves for Xmas. Brian and I went outside, put them on and punched piss and pickhandles out of each other. Dad came out, took one look at us, ripped our gloves off, laid them on the chopping block and chopped them to pieces with an axe. What was he expecting us to do, pat-a-cake?

  We loved playing TV shows like Cannonball.

  Barrellin’ down the highway

  Wheelin’ right along

  Hear the tyres a-hummin’

  Hummin’ out a song.

  The rumble of the diesel

  The shifting of the gears

  The rhythm when he’s rollin’

  It’s music to his ears.

  Cannon…ba-a-a-a-all!!

  Cannonball was a show about truckies. There was a rusted old wreck beside Dad’s garage. We got the steering wheel off, we’d sit on the roof with our feet on the bonnet and sing the Cannonball theme at the top of our lungs, followed by an action replay of the show we’d seen that week. Those were the general antics around the yard.

  Mr Feigh’s

  Mr Feigh and his brother lived next door. I think they were in their late forties or fifties. They seemed old to me. Their tiny little shack was encased in a bamboo jungle. You’d walk up the narrow front path to his house with bamboo suffocating both sides of it. Past a gutted bus parked in the middle of it, which looked like a giant’s vase, there was so much bamboo growing through it.

  Out the back were Mr Feigh’s beehives, and we weren’t allowed to go anywhere near them. So, one day we were playing with the beehives and the bees flew at us and stung us half to death. Brian and I were with our cousin Steven, who was Uncle Arthur’s son; they lived directly below us. We went screaming towards our house covered in bees and met Mum and Steven’s mum, Aunty Betty, racing towards our screams. They both had long hair and the thing I remember most was them pulling bees off us and putting them into their hair. Needless to say, lesson learnt.

  Mr Feigh’s shack was kind of magical. The outside of the house was yellowish, mildewed fibro that faded into the bamboo and a rusted tin skillion roof almost camouflaged by billions of bits of rotting vegetation. You walked up a few wooden steps to a porch. To the left was Mr Feigh’s bedroom. The front door took you into one big rustic room. There was a small wooden table with two wooden chairs, two dirty, dusty, ancient lounge chairs, a wireless, a food cupboard, a meat safe, a sink with a dish drainer beside it where they permanently left their cups, cutlery and dishes, all made of metal. There was a wood stove with pots and pans hanging above it, and a kerosene fridge. The bathroom was out the back and Mr Feigh’s brother’s bedroom was a tack-on to the side of the main room.

  I can’t remember Mr Feigh’s brother’s name. He hardly spoke, he kept to himself and hid in his bedroom most of the time. Mr Feigh was entirely the opposite. We loved spending time with Mr Feigh.

  We spent most of our time in his bedroom. I hasten to add, there was nothing untoward about him, in fact he always left his door open.

  Entering his bedroom was like opening a door to another house. It was clean and tidy, everything was in its place. An ornate rug on the floor, a single bed covered neatly with a woven quilt, curtains, paintings on the wall and a dark wooden lowboy. In pride of
place was his large wooden desk. Three drawers down either side and a number of shelves above the back of the desk. Everything was in its place, and there was a lot of everything.

  Using a beautiful wind-up clock with roman numerals, Mr Feigh taught us how to tell the time. He was a patient, tolerant teacher and therefore a good one. He was one of the few people I’ve meet who’ve made me excited to learn. I could hardly wait to go to his place to learn things. He told me something my dad and my teachers never said. ‘You’re a clever boy, you’re special, you’re gonna make the world sit up and take notice, mark my words.’

  The only other person who told me that on a regular basis when I was a kid was my mother.

  Mr Feigh taught us how to read a compass. He had a magnificent oil-based liquid compass. He taught us how to write in running writing before the school did. He had a sleek fountain pen and his writing was a work of art. He let us use his old fountain pen, which was gold to us. We were using pens and inkwells at school. The biro was brand-new and hadn’t infiltrated the schools back then.

  One of my favourite pastimes with Mr Feigh was looking at his globe. We’d pick a country and he’d tell us what he knew about it. He was a great raconteur and he’d mesmerise us with his knowledge and his stories of great historical moments on planet Earth.

  He knew we’d get into trouble if we went home in the dark, so he’d say, ‘You’d better go home, it’s almost time for the Never Wassers to come out, and if they get you they’ll drag you into the bush and we’ll never see you again!’ I was scared stiff of the Never Wassers. Sometimes Brian and I would go up the mountain and lose track of time, so we’d end up coming home through the bush in the dark. We could hear Dad’s booming voice calling us to come home to get the shit beat out of us. But at the time I was more scared of the Never Wasser getting us and ripping us apart. We ran through the bush in the dark as if we were running on a footpath. We never got lost, knew it like the back of our hands.

  Mum and Dad didn’t like Mr Feigh because he befriended our kelpie dog, Nugget. He’d take him for walks down on the Flat and because of Nugget’s nature, he learnt to chase cars. A car ran over Nugget and Mum and Dad blamed Mr Feigh.

  Brian and I came home from school, I think we were about six and eight. Mum was sitting on the swing and invited us over to tell us something. ‘A terrible thing happened, Nugget chased a car and the car ran over him and now he’s in dog heaven.’ She wrapped her arms around both of us and she started to cry…a lot.

  That heaving, swelling, stormy thing hit my guts for the first time. My stomach was full of emptiness, the emptiness of having Nugget drained out of it. My brain became full of it and the feeling rushed to my eyes like my brain had burst its banks. My eyes were like a spillway of tears and the sad emptiness in my guts made its way to my throat and roared out of my mouth with the wail that only comes from the depths of you. It’s deep inside you, it is you, it’s the pure heart and soul of you. I think that’s where your mind is, that’s where your soul is. I don’t know exactly where, but I know it’s there and I think it’s beyond the physical. Physicists grapple with it because they need a theory, some evidence and a reason. Humans can’t cope with the notion that something just is.

  Farms and fields

  All around us were dairy farms. The New South Wales South Coast is rolling green foothills from Wollongong to Bega. The countryside is emerald green, lush and beautiful. My favourite drive to this day is from the surf beaches and rugged rocks of Kiama south to the cottage shopping town of Berry, west through the rolling hills of Kangaroo Valley, up into the mountains past the spectacle of Fitzroy Falls, crashing over a 300-foot drop, then driving on into the Southern Highlands.

  Brian and I had to go for the milk once a week. We carried a large can with a lid on it and a thick wire handle. It was about twenty minutes there and back. Mr Smith would stop milking and attend to us straight away. He was a slow-walkin’, slow-talkin’ typical farmer. He had a son our age, Roderick, nice kid, we hung out with him at times. I loved the cows, big docile things, which would wander up of their own accord, shuffle into a stall, have their udders sucked by a machine, then walk off back into the paddock. Day in, day out. Contented, milk-giving tarts.

  The trip home was horrendous. Across a paddock for 300 yards, down to a dam with a willow tree beside it. We’d take a break there and swing on the tree branches. Up the hill to the beginning of the track through the bush, then take a break. Down the skinny bush track to a small creek. All the while constantly changing hands, as both were aching by now. Stop at the creek, drink water. Up from the creek another 200 yards. Find the road, walk up the hill past our friend Elwin Jordan’s house, past the Davies’, past Mr Feigh’s and into our house, aaah. Mum felt sorry for us and it wasn’t long before milk was replaced with the powdered stuff. Tasted like shit, some of the best shit I’ve ever tasted.

  The paddocks down on the Flat were great. We’d ride our bikes. Our gang was Brian and me, cousin Steven, Elwin and Raymond O’Hara. There was a flock of geese, about thirty of them, which seemed to have the Flat to themselves. They’d hiss and peck at you. The thing was to ride through them and try to stay on the bike. If you fell off they’d jump on you and peck the living shit out of you. I can’t tell you how funny that was to witness.

  Out in the paddocks were a couple of great swimming holes we weren’t allowed to swim in. So we’d strip to our undies, have a swim and beat our undies on a rock until they dried. That seemed OK, but swimming naked was wrong, don’t ask me why.

  The creek was dammed and all sorts of birdlife lived on it. It was a good-sized dam, which we called ‘the Dam’. Our parents told us there were thousands of electric eels in there and if you swam in it, you’d get electrocuted and die. They were freaked out about us drowning, and it worked.

  The teenage boys like my cousins, Tony and Greg, used to make tin canoes. Ben and June’s boys were gods as far as we were concerned. The eldest, Tony, is still my hero. A sheet of roofing iron bashed flat, two pieces of four-by-two about 2 foot long. Bend both ends of the sheet up and nail it to the four-by-two. Get a kero camp stove, bust bits of bitumen off the Flat’s tar road, put it into a billy can. Melt it and caulk the gaps between the tin and the four-by-two and she’s ready to launch in the dam. Most of them sank and the boys would spent a lot of time recovering them.

  ‘Hey Tony, how come you’re not gettin’ electrocuted?’

  ‘Cause we’re teenagers.’

  ‘Aww.’

  They were gods.

  A slag heap is a massive black hill of coal waste that’s left after the coal is processed. We had two of these at the base of Wongawilli Colliery. The roofing sheet had multiple uses in those days. Bend one end up and you have a slag-heap sled. Add a piece of rope to hold onto and you’re ready to go.

  I dunno, they seemed 200 foot high to me. It was a hell of a ride. By the time you hit the bottom you were doing 600 miles per hour, easy. The trick was to roll off before you hit the bottom or you’d come to a crashing halt and you could cut yourself to ribbons on the jagged edges of the sled. Amazingly, I can’t remember any major accidents.

  At the bottom of the hill were the bunkers. They were massive, I’m guessing 200 foot high by 50 foot wide. They were storage tanks for coal. The coal would come down the mountain on a conveyor belt, which continued up to the top of the bunker and poured coal into the bunker, not unlike a wheat silo. They held enough coal to fill a coal train. The diesels would back the train under the bunker, through to a back line. Then the train would slowly shunt forward and coal would pour from under the bunker into the coal cars below. So the bunkers were big enough to fill a train.

  Unbeknown to our parents, our game was to ride the conveyor belt to the top of the bunker and jump off just where the coal spewed into the cavernous hold below. That was the only place to get off; there were steel walls either side of the belt all the way to the top. You only had a 2-foot gap to jump off onto the walkway. If you went in, instant de
ath: if landing headfirst onto coal didn’t kill you, the coal coming off the conveyor belt would, and then you’d be buried in it. I’ve been there since and I can’t believe we did this on a regular basis, until we got caught.

  ‘Go to your room, both of ya, and wait for me.’

  Got a good hiding, grounded for a month, and had to do jobs all day for four weekends. Still the best ride I’ve ever been on, it was worth it.

  It was inevitable that we’d get caught. The miners parked their cars close to the bunkers and clambered into this wonderful trolley that took them up the mountain to the mine. The trolley could take about thirty men at a time. It ran on rails and it was pulled slowly and gently up the mountain by a large cable. The engine powering the cable was up top, so you couldn’t hear anything as it glided up and down between shifts. I never tired of watching this curved, metal-roofed cater­pillar climb up through a corridor of majestic eucalypts. It’s hard to describe. It was a quiet, poetic symphony, if that makes sense.

  The miners would alight from the trolley and take their black visages to the shower block. As a coal-dust-covered crowd, they had a kind of zombie look about them. They’d come out the other end in clean shorts and shirts, and head for their cars. ‘Hey you boys, what are you doing on that bloody conveyor belt!’ Looking down on three Brylcreemed heads running towards us, with no way out. Sprung!

  We saw Superman crush coal into diamonds on TV. We stuck lumps of coal on the BHP railway track. The train crushed and popped the coal brilliantly, but no diamonds.

  The Sellers

  Uncle Ben and Aunty June had five kids. Three older than me, Tony by seven years, Greg by five, Fay by three. Two younger: Kerry by two and Richard by six. Tony and Greg could do no wrong. When Mum and Dad needed babysitters, they’d usually oblige. Greg mainly. Greg has a genius IQ and he’s a bit eccentric in all the best ways. We used to call him ‘the Professor’. Tony is no dill, but Greg could help his older brother with maths. We had a ball when they looked after us. We’d play crazy games and sing songs like ‘She’ll be Comin’ Round the Mountain when She Comes’ and act it out or dance like lunatics.