Wool Away, Boy!

by Alan Blunt

  The Eagle turned back to a big mixing bowl containing diced mutton, kidneys and onions. ‘If you’re set on chin wagging – wind that handle and make yerself useful,’ he said. He added a pinch of curry, a few spices and bread-crumbs, then attached a cylinder of sausage skin to the spout of the mincer. I wound the handle while the cook, flicking his wrist like a table-tennis champion, laid out strings of tasty snags.

  We talked over old times and acquaintances, but never mentioned his fight with Jimmy G over twenty years earlier. For years the famous fight in varying versions had provided ready entertainment when shearers spun yarns around pubs and campfires. I was at first surprised that blokes I didn’t know from a bar of soap swore they had witnessed the famous affray: ‘Fair dinkum, mate – I was there! You’ve never seen anything like it. What a bloody turnout! Blood was spattered around the kitchen like a killing block. The Bald Eagle was on his way to hospital and Jimmy dancing around like a bantam rooster challenging all comers.’

  It didn’t matter that names and locations often changed as the story evolved, for in any society – at least since David KO’ed Goliath – the little bloke knocking over the big bully has been a popular angle. However, The Eagle’s order to ‘Shut the door! Were you raised in a tent?’ and the reply, ‘Maybe it was Jimmy Sharman’s tent,’ remained the constant punch line.

  Like me, The Eagle had returned to the wool industry after a long absence. ‘The old Eagle has roosted in a lot of places,’ he said, as he spun out the snags. ‘I’ve fed school kids, soldiers, nurses, even nuns; truck-stops, cafes, pubs. You name it. The Eagle was top chef at a Chinese restaurant. And I had my own restaurant for a couple o’ years – in Fitzroy.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked, still winding the mincer. ‘You must have made a quid. Did yer punt it up?’

  ‘No chance,’ The Eagle responded with a note of despondency. ‘Woman I was with for five years – Sheila – talk about style: a double for Dolly Dyer! She was alright – managed the place, and she wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty. But then, out of the blue, she employs a new head waiter, a smoothie, a Spaniard.’

  He laughed bitterly and fed the mincer. ‘I paid him off and told the bastard I’d kill him if he came near the place. He spun me a line and apologised. He said he knew he had done the wrong thing.

  ‘“You are her big man,” he says. “Please forgive her – for woman is weak and man is strong. God will punish me for my sins. Boss, you are good hombre, numero uno.” He said I wouldn’t see him again – and I didn’t. She made up lovey-doveys with me that night, and the next day she collared the loot from the cheque account and they hit the toe together. I tried to hold on, but I hit the grog … No fool like an old fool, as they say.’

  ‘Sounds like an episode out o’ Fawlty Towers,’ I said, laughing. ‘Did he go by the moniker of Manuel and come from Barcelona by any chance?’

  The big man stopped feeding the mincer. ‘It’s no laughing matter – nothing to joke about at all.’

  Often at the start of a shed the first meal was a hit-and-miss affair while the cook organised himself and his kitchen. Not so with The Eagle. His pride made a point of getting to the shed early to prepare to hit his straps with the first meal.

  More vehicles rolled up late in the afternoon, and The Eagle had a full team for tea. Enticing smells emanating from the kitchen drifted along the verandah and through the huts as we unpacked, made up beds and had a beer. We were on our feet and eagerly following our noses before the bell ceased clanging.

  A commanding figure as we entered the kitchen, The Eagle let everyone know we were welcome in his domain, but there were rules: ‘Line up boys, no rush; there are the plates, knives and forks, always in the same spot. Tidiness is my middle name. Mutton and veggie loop-the-loop – deliciously flavoured with The Eagle’s oriental spices – and Spanish mornay for entree. Two cutlets a man, plenty of snags and enough mashed spuds to feed the Irish brigade, plus peas and pumpkin. Make your own toast, and there’s tea – and coffee for the connoisseurs. There’s a plate scraper near the scrap bin: use it! Left-over soup, and cocoa till nine o’clock, but clean up your own mess, and be out of the kitchen quick smart: The Eagle has to rise while you jokers have got your hands on your cocks and are dreaming of sweet Adeline, so keep it quiet!’

  Chances were we could look to a cheerful shearing: the northern sheep were free cutting and combing for good tallies; Dick was a fair and square boss-of-the-board who often raised a laugh with dry, witty repartee; the babbler was top shelf, and there were no card-carrying cranks or snags in the team. Plus there was a respectful teenage jackaroo (the boys dubbed him ‘Silent’) who was learning how to run a station; and the cocky, Jeff, and his ringer, Kelpie, were hands-on blokes who looked forward to a yarn and a laugh at smoko time.

  There was the usual turn-up of entertaining individuals you’d find in a shearing team. Ralph White demanded a lot of space and attention. Dubbed Ho Chi Minh because of his resemblance to the Vietnamese revolutionary (he was also known as the ‘Chinaman’), he was the chiacking, obnoxious, sarcastic, entertaining epitome of the old shearers’ adage ‘He don’t shear many – but he’s bloody good company in the huts!’ A bantam rooster, often crowing with little man’s aggro, he could, in fact, shear pretty well when he cut back on a variety of illegal substances and booze – for a man who might weigh nine stone in a wringing-wet army overcoat.

  The shed overseer loved his rum but wouldn’t allow marijuana. He had quietly fronted Ho Chi and his roommate, Wardy, and a wool roller before the sign-on: ‘No dope around the huts or the shed. Get that! One whiff and you’re down the track!’

  ‘I’ll do what I like in my time,’ Ho Chi replied resentfully.

  ‘Try it on, cobber,’ Dick said as he walked away. Consequently, the smokers regularly took long strolls along the bush roads after tea each night.

  Ritzy was elected Union rep. He was fair-haired, stood about five foot nine and was pushing fifty, but his slender build and quickness of action belied his age. He had been a noted gun shearer in his early days, but no longer felt the urge to prove himself by taking the lead. ‘Only a fool lives to work,’ he would declare. ‘I work to live.’

  Ritzy and I had worked together on and off from 1958 till 1963, when we travelled with a Hughenden team to a station near Winton. A Winton gun had joined the team as the sixth shearer. He was fast alright, and he let the team know it; and he got under the Hughenden gun’s skin from the word go.

  Ritzy had taken him on, and they had gone at it sheep for sheep. After four days of unrelenting combat, when Ritzy was in the lead by thirty-six sheep, the Winton man had said he had the flu and pulled out. Ritzy then dropped back and shore along comfortably a few sheep a day behind the Laughing Kiwi. The Kiwi reckoned Ritzy had his measure any time he chose to draw the whip, but he was a fearless stirrer: ‘C’mon, Ritzy. Have a crack at a Kiwi – and eat sheep shit from go to whoa!’

  Ritzy laughed, and shore along behind the Kiwi until cut-out day came. Their tallies were dead even, setting the scene for a classic shearers’ duel. Ritzy went into top gear and McMillan went with him. The Kiwi gun pushed the Hughenden man to his limit. When the shed had cut-out at two o’clock Ritzy was the ringer – by one sheep. It was a cool winter’s day, yet when he pulled his grey flannel singlet over his wiry shoulders and wrung it out, a stream of salty sweat puddled the shearing board around his bag boots.

  Ritzy was a swift mover, deft and organised; he had unloaded his bog-eye and packed his tool bag before Doug pushed his last shornie, a hard-cutting cobbler – the toughest sheep in the pen – down the shoot. Laughing, Ritzy patted the weary Kiwi on the shoulder. ‘You keep studying my style, son,’ he said, ‘and you’ll soon learn how to shear like an Aussie.’

  With the shed in order, Dick rang the bell and the team pulled into gear. Perhaps Ritzy could have taken the lead, but he settled comfortably about fifteen a day behind Lance, who was close to the 200 stroke.

  On the second
morning Wardy installed his tape player on a disused piece-picker’s table under a window. He revved it to full blast, caught a sheep and pulled into gear. The discordant din drowned the chatter of the workers on the wool-table and buzz of the hand-pieces. Ritzy shore on, rhythmically placing his blows with the skill that only comes with dedication and long practice, shaping his sheep with artistic energy until he rolled it, a sculptured masterpiece resembling animated white marble, down the shoot.

  Then he strode to the tape-deck, extracted the tape and pulled Wardy’s machinery out of gear. ‘Listen, mate!’ he addressed the druggie, who was half a head higher, but looked like a witless drone with a half-shorn sheep between his legs and his silent bog-eye in one hand: ‘My advice is that you file the corners off this tape and grease it with Vaseline, because if I hear it again I’ll shove it fair up your arse!’ The recorder was heard no more on the board, the rousies resumed their chatter and shearing progressed in relative tranquillity.

  22

  JOE BLAKES AND A RAMBLING POMMY

  Later that morning as we yarned over smoko, Ritzy drew attention to a big snake’s track outside the wool room. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said gravely, ‘I’ve recommended to the Union organiser time and again that the Union should ensure that wool pressers are paid “snake money”. Our presser here –’ he went on amiably ‘– might recall that twenty years ago at Barenya I warned him to be careful. In those days I had only seen one presser die of snakebite, but since then I’ve seen two more pressers delivered to the arms of Jesus.’

  Because Ritzy was a noted yarn-spinner the boys tuned in. Cyril, a big Yorkshire lad, had been in the outback only a few weeks, but already he’d been dubbed the Rambling Pommy and been fed enough dire warnings of deadly taipans, death adders, Downs tigers and strangling pythons to make him tremble whenever the word ‘snake’ came up. Jeff hid his grin behind a large hand and a pannikin of tea, before he objected: ‘No snake money here, Presser! We work by the Award. Any demand for snake money and you can roll your swag.’

  ‘It’s not bad odds,’ Ritzy went on, as poker-faced as a judge donning the black cap. ‘Thirty-odd years in the game and I’ve only seen three blokes killed by snakebite – but they were all pressers. A lot of people think a snake strikes like a whiplash and pulls back, and then it’s all over, drover! That’s all bullshit! I can tell you a big Downs tiger, when he strikes, hangs on like a pig-dog swinging on a grunter’s lug. And I swear, boys – on the Bible – the dreadful memory of Mickey’s fatal screams and contortions still gives me nightmares to this day.’

  Apparently stricken to silence by the horror of the memory, he went to the tea urn and refilled his pannikin. He added four teaspoons of sugar to the brew – which he’d sip to maintain energy over the next two-hour run of shearing – while the Rambling Pommy turned pale and a variety of voices urged Ritzy to: ‘Get on with it!’

  ‘Kelpie’ Tom, a lanky ringer-cum-drover from Charters Towers, west of Townsville, was stretched out on the wool bales rolling a smoke. ‘You take yer time, Ritzy,’ he drawled. ‘When yer start shearing I’ll be obliged to leave this here air mattress to straddle a saddle an’ fetch a mob o’ hoggets for you hungry bastards to undress. You take all the time yer need, comrade. It ain’t often these young fellas get the opportunity to hear a real expert discuss herpetology.’

  Ho Chi Minh, compelled by his little man’s complex to grab attention, declared loudly, ‘Herpetology! That’s too big a word for shearers, Kelpie. For you blokes who don’t know, herpetology is the study of snakes and reptiles and amphibians.’

  ‘Is that so, Chinaman? I’ll remember that. I only threw it in for flavour, an’ I was wonderin’ what it meant meself till you elucidated.’

  Gaining the respect of silence and attention, Ritzy resumed. ‘We were having smoko that awful day. The presser was catching a bit behind, so he walked into the bin and began gathering a big armful of wool. We were sitting, just like we are now, when we heard this bloody awful scream – like a dingo bitch giving birth to a rabbit trap – and the presser burst out of the bin going backwards with a seven-foot Downs tiger swinging off his Adam’s apple. We knew it was a death grip! And everyone was paralysed except poor Mickey. He leapt and rolled and shrieked like the voodoo dancers you see in the movies; he went into awful contortions, like that sheila in the movie The Exorcist – only this was fair dinkum. He backflipped and fell flat on his back with the big Downs tiger on top of him. It took two of the boys, with their feet braced against poor Mickey’s shoulders, to grab the snake and pull and break the death grip. The snake broke free and went after more victims. We stood on wool bales and watched him thrashing around the wool room like an electric cable gone mad until the boss blew him to pieces with a shotgun.’

  ‘I do recollect yer advice, Ritzy,’ I said, stoically. ‘Since you warned me about taipans and death adders camping in the wool bins I’ve bloody near frozen whenever I’ve been arming wool and a mouse has run up under my singlet.’

  The picker-up, sixteen-year-old ‘Fritzy’, was a green-horn rousie from Brisbane. He and the Rambling Pommy were the only two gullible enough to swallow Ritzy’s yarn. Grinning, the team headed back to the shearing board, while Kelpie donned a mask of solemnity and insisted on shaking hands with me. ‘If that old Joe Blake fangs you, friend, we won’t meet this side of Judgement Day – so I’ll bid farewell.’

  The giant snake’s track and the ground-level wool room, which gave the reptile easy access, combined to make me wary. I quietly cut and trimmed a springy snake-stick from a branch and kept it handy.

  On Monday morning Ritzy and Ho Chi were seated in the wool room eating smoko when Ritzy mentioned snakes, as he often did, ‘to keep you sharp and alert, Presser, old mate – because I doubt my nerves are strong enough to see another man die in the awful convulsions of snakebite. This “Joe Blake” could be a harmless carpet snake or a young black-headed python; but more than likely this track is the call sign of a deadly Downs tiger, a seven-foot man-killer. More than likely he camps in the wool bins, old mate.’

  Ho Chi promptly objected. ‘No way! Judging by his track this snake is too big to be a Downs tiger; they don’t grow over five or five-and-a-half feet!’

  I said, ‘Around Hughenden and in the north-west, where I worked with Ritzy, they call a king brown or mulga snake a Downs tiger; but around Longreach it seems a Collett’s snake is often dubbed a Downs tiger. Take yer pick!’

  I admired the beauty of snakes. I always found their sinuous movement fascinating, and I would watch their intricate patterns of colours camouflage their swift disappearance as they mingled with multicoloured soils and grasses. So it was with regret that I killed the snake outside the shed later that morning with three quick strikes of the snake-stick. ‘Sorry, brother,’ I said aloud in regretful justification, ‘but it might have been you or me – or the station kids, or the dogs.’

  Recalling Ritzy’s well-earned reputation as a joker, I raided the first-aid kit for sticking plaster, taped the dripping fangs and put the coiled reptile in a corn bag before sauntering along the shearing board to stand in Ritzy’s catching pen. ‘More wool, more wool you presser-starvers,’ I shouted, as Ritzy strode past me to catch a sheep. ‘Yer kids will miss out on Christmas if you presser-starvers don’t fill the comb and push a bit harder.’

  Ritzy ignored me, then caught a ewe and dragged her to his stand. As he bent and positioned the ewe to shear the belly-wool I slipped up behind him, slung the gear cord over my own shoulder and dangled the snake in its place. The picker-up, rising from the next stand with a fleece in his arms, saw the snake and stumbled bum first into a locks-butt, while Ritzy reached back blindly for the familiar cord and seized the snake. Calmly turning his head without straightening his back, he glanced at the dangling killer: ‘Just as I predicted – a bloody great Downs tiger. Now pull me into gear, Presser – and piss off.’

  23

  THE LORD OF THE FLIES AND FLYING EMUS

  Some thirty yar
ds from the kitchen, beside the walking pad to the shearing shed, a 2000-gallon tank perched on an eight-foot-high stand. At shearing time it was regularly pumped full of sweet artesian bore water for the workers’ drinking water, kitchen and showers. The tank sometimes overflowed, forming a muddy puddle beneath, offering the great white boar a shadier midday wallow than the piebald shadows cast by the prickly acacias along the bore drain.

  The pig was wont to grunt courteous greetings to sweating toilers as they passed to and fro on their dinner excursions. Some replied politely with ‘G’day, you lucky bastard,’ while others, feeling betrayed by a fate that kept a pig in porcine luxury while they sweated for their daily bread, gave the boar some obscene advice. Ho Chi – when he was in the mood – bowed his knee, doffed his greasy tweed cap and requested, ‘Permission to pass, Lord of the Flies?’

  On the Friday morning Ho Chi surfaced in a foul mood, and the boys surmised that ‘the Chinaman’ was out of dope. Over dinner he stridently demanded the pig’s removal. ‘It’s not hygienic to have a pig wallowing in pig shit this close to the huts.’ Getting no response he continued his tirade: ‘It’s against Union rules and it breaches the health act. I can name twenty-seven diseases that are common to Homo sapiens and pigs.’

  ‘Well, name just five or shut your trap,’ Lance suggested.

  It was doubtful that Ho Chi could name any diseases common to man and porker, but ignoring Lance, he soldiered on. ‘If some idiot didn’t encourage the pig by feeding him under the tank he wouldn’t be there – he’d be in his f—ing place, in the bore drain.’

  The Eagle, who had palled up with Snowball and served him buckets of scraps each day, broke in with a bellow. ‘Lay off old Whitey, you runt. Pigs are clean. They’re not like a lot of people: they don’t shit in their nests! I’d rather cook for pigs than a lot of shearers – like big-mouthed runts.’