by Rick Stein
Roger the Bludger, the cook, snatched it (left in a hurry). Clem arrived and the relative harmony of our lives at Deepwell was made whole. Most mornings Clem would cook us steak with gravy for breakfast. Lunch would be just cheese or ham sandwiches. Tea, on the other hand, was splendid: we had roasts or fry-ups every night, all cooked in a wood-fired range, followed by tinned peaches, apricots or pineapple with evaporated milk. We had a fridge at the camp driven by paraffin, but no fresh vegetables, so it was roast potatoes, pumpkin and tinned peas. Most nights we’d play euchre after dinner.
Many of the fettlers had been in some sort of trouble with the police. They used to say that the Northern Territory was a bit like a prison anyway because there were loads of people there with some sort of criminal secret who were safe as long as they stayed there. Far from being a wilderness into which you could escape, it was an enormous swathe of land with a tiny population so that unless you were an aboriginal and could survive in the bush everyone knew where you were.
Deepwell was one of about 45 track maintenance camps on the line. There were usually five fettlers, a ganger and a cook. The fettlers were Billy, an Irishman called Mick, a Torres Strait Islander called Mike, and an aboriginal called Robert. Our ganger was called John Kopsandy, a magnificent boss who ruled by a certain enigmatic quality so you never knew whether he was pleased with your work or not. I wrote in my diary, ‘Christ that bastard gives me the shits when he puts on the Julius Caesar/God act.’
He bestrides the world like a colossus.
And we petty men run in and out of his legs and peep about.
Not having access to a copy of Shakespeare I didn’t get it quite right. But he was a bit of a role model for me. Probably about five years older than me, tall, dark and lean, he was of Hungarian origin. He perfected a style of showing his muscly arms right to the shoulders by ripping off the sleeves of the Bisley shirts we all wore, like team shirts of the Australian rules players. We all followed suit.
A month after I arrived at Deepwell John Kopsandy left and Billy took over. Billy was not a good boss. He was dangerous and paranoid but he was highly intelligent and I liked him. At long last I had found someone I could really talk to. On the strength of his history, ours was not a likely friendship. From Sydney, he had been living with two prostitutes and pimping them. He had spent time, much of his life, actually, in Goulburn and Long Bay prisons for robbery and violence. His father was dead and he didn’t know where his mother was. He was quite short, about 5-feet 5-inches, but very well built, wide-shouldered and strong, with thick, short dark hair and a powerful nose. He had bright green eyes and a number of tattoos, a snake going up one arm and over his shoulder to his neck and two words on his index fingers: love and hate. He had personally tattooed dick on his penis.
He described endless fights which he called ‘battering people’. He occasionally hit his prostitutes. His life in jail was shocking. If these tales of sodomy, stand-over and random violence had been told by one of the slaughterhouse workers I would have put them down as another example of why outback Australia was a depressing place. But Billy made his past come alive and – for all his vices – it was very entertaining. There was also a frisson of excitement in that, finally, this sheltered boy from middle-class England was learning some of the darkest secrets of real life. I existed in some fear of Billy because he was unpredictable, mostly when he was drinking. We were a ‘dry’ camp but that only meant we chose not to order beer, flagons of wine or rum. But once we found booze in the caravan of a digger driver who was repairing a bridge, and on another occasion, rum which one of the gangs had given to Clem the cook. Billy became menacing and started laying into me for being privileged and wet behind the ears. He called me Pom and patronised me at the best of times. In the camp there was a white cat called Snowy and a dog called Warregal. No one was quite sure where Warregal came from, he was just there and Clem quite happily fed him. The dog was black, with a wide head, said to be half dingo. For reasons that still escape me, Billy decided that Warregal was a bad thing. One night he said Warregal would have to go.
‘I’m going to put Warregal down. He fucking irritates me.’
‘Why on earth does he irritate you?’ I asked.
‘I don’t fucking know, don’t ask fucking stupid questions, he just does.’
I was terrified but also angry at what I took as his baiting of me. It was as if he was trying to shock me with his horrible intention and wanted me to react – to plead with him for Warregal’s life – and I bloody well wasn’t going to do it.
‘I see,’ I said. ‘And how are you going to do that?’
‘With a fucking axe.’
So he went off and killed Warregal with an axe and came back and told me. I said, ‘OK, fine,’ but I was quivering with rage and indignation, horror and fear that this lunatic might go for me next.
It passed. Most of the time life was peaceful and nothing like as dangerous. Robert, the aboriginal fettler at Deepwell, worked hard when he was there but quite often he wasn’t. He’d literally go walkabout. I used to watch him just standing in the bush looking at things, a stone maybe, stock-still as if he were communicating with it. He was about my height but fatter. He never wore shorts, always jeans, and had the elastic-sided riding boots and the khaki shirt with the sleeves torn out. He smelt a bit of sweat but not unpleasantly. There was a calmness about him. You couldn’t really talk to him, because, though he spoke English, he didn’t really use it like we did. He lived in a parallel world. I think that’s what really got to me about Deepwell, this extraordinary effect that the landscape of the outback has on you.
Mick was good-looking, Irish, tall, thin and very strong, probably in his mid-forties, with a slightly sarcastic demeanour. On good days, he reminded me of Patrick McGoohan in Danger Man. He never said much but what he did say was often confrontational. He was a real loner. What, I always wondered, had happened to him? Broken heart maybe, double-crossed and sent to prison for someone else? He viewed me as a tiresome youth. On one occasion, I said I didn’t like Melbourne to which he replied, ‘Ah, you stupid young bugger. You probably only stopped there three days in the rain, then pissed off because it was too fucking cold.’ This happened to be the absolute truth. I’d got off the Ellinis, wandered around the docks on Port Philip Bay, bought a Big Ben pie, taken a taxi to Collins Street. It was freezing there and I went back to the ship.
On another occasion at Deepwell I rolled out of bed and went straight to the table, and Mick said, ‘Don’t you usually wash before you come to breakfast?’ I was a large, fit, bolshie 20-year-old who hadn’t washed his face. But I’ve washed before breakfast ever since.
Mick once found me killing redback spiders, which had webs all round the veranda that surrounded the house, and asked what the fuck I thought I was doing.
‘There’s redbacks everywhere.’
‘Have you been bitten by one?’
‘No.’
‘Nor has anyone else. Leave the fuckers alone.’
He was a bit of a martyr. He was like Boxer in Animal Farm. He kept trying to work harder but it was not out of the goodness of his heart. He made us do things round the house. He organised the building of a stockade of sleepers round the camp to keep the dingoes out, then we did the same to make a vegetable garden. We all joined in but found his almost competitive work-hard ethic exasperating. Yet at the same time we all felt affection for Deepwell, we wanted to build the garden. We were proud we didn’t drink and in spite of the fact that we didn’t work as hard as we were supposed to, we probably worked harder than most of the other camps on the line.
It was very early one morning and I was still in bed when Mick strode through the house banging a shovel on the walls. He smacked it against my door shouting, ‘I’m going to kill that fucking Pom.’ Then he walked out of the house. In my diary, I wrote, ‘I acquainted myself later with the fact that it would not be entirely ludicrous to consider an attempt to murder me by Mick.’ Some months later I said goodbye to
him. He looked me in the eyes, shook my hand, smiled and said, ‘Good luck, you’ll be all right.’
And I thrived, I grew up a little more, I guess. There were boundaries. At times, I was the young Pom who needed to be taught a thing or two, at others I was like Billy’s mum or wife. I was the one who listened to his stories about low life in Sydney, his dark secrets like becoming some powerful tobacco baron’s ‘girl’ in prison so that in return for sex he got protection. I was in awe of him but I also understood him and at times felt very sorry for him. I often thought about how in another life he would have been really quite something. He had a death wish. Why else would he have cut here tattooed on his throat? I also felt that I mattered to him because our conversations were an intelligent connection. For all my youthful naivety, I was a breath of fresh air.
I also had a particular role in the camp which gave me great pleasure. I was in charge of the bore pump. The reason that the Ghan railway ran on the route it did from Alice Springs to Adelaide was because it followed a line of bore holes; without the bore water there could have been no steam engines. The Deepwell bore was pumped up from a long way down by a twin-cylinder diesel engine through a four-inch pipe and up to a water tower. Though the diesel engines which passed through no longer needed water, it was still used for watering the cattle who were mustered at Deepwell once a year and herded into cattle trucks, and it also supplied us with water for washing and for the garden. It was unpleasant to drink, as it was quite salty and sulphurous. Showering in it was not brilliant either, as you were always left with a feeling of scum on the skin, but it was a lot better than the dust of the day. The water was heated by wood chips which seemed even then to be a masterpiece of energy efficiency. Maintaining the diesel engine and pumping the water gave me a feeling of worth and happiness, and standing on the top of the water tower was the best view in Deepwell. In the cold clear air of an early morning I had a feeling of breath-taking distance, seeing the line stretching way off between some red flat-topped hills south towards the next camp at Rodinga. It was like being in a Western. Wandering through the cattle yards with all the redness of central Australia around me and standing on the hard dirt left by the cattle’s hooves and thinking ‘Those pens will be empty for a year, those cattle come from nowhere miles away, are briefly seen in a melee of movement and then are gone forever’. Walking through empty wadis, much deeper than me, seeing the washed-out roots of trees hanging down at the sides and big balls of a spiky weed called spinifex torn up and blown down into those instant gullies. Climbing out, all the effects of the rain still evident in the confusion of purple and yellow flowers everywhere, mingling with deep green and paddy melons with the fruits already beginning to bloat and rot with the first frosts of winter, the stark spindly branches of dead trees and the foliage of the desert oaks hanging down in vision-blurring wisps. It’s incredibly beautiful and I feel it belongs to me, to everyone. Almost as if I know how it feels to be Aboriginal. I sort of get it in that landscape. It influences me subliminally and there’s such an ache in the emptiness. A song on the radio at the time, Slim Dusty’s ‘Mt Isa Rodeo’. There’s a verse about wandering around the empty showground after it’s all over for another year:
Now when the dust has settled, and the crowds have all gone home
It’s kind of sad to wander through the rodeo grounds alone.
The day finally came when the Ghan was flagged down to stop for me. I got on as a passenger and did the trip to Adelaide.
V
Adelaide was the last place in Australia where the pubs shut at 6 p.m, called the six o’clock swill. I joined in, ordering two glasses of beer like everyone else. I felt like I’d just been let out of prison. There were pretty girls everywhere. In the bush I’d switched off. Adelaide was waking me up but at the same time I found it daunting. Part of me wanted to be back in the camp at Deepwell with my books. I missed my room, listening to my radio – ‘Hey Joe’, ‘Penny Lane’, and ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ – with the collage I’d done over one wall mostly from pictures out of Australasian Post and Snowy the cat sleeping at the end of my bed. I moved on to Melbourne where I met a girl called Nonny at a party. The diary says it all,
Jesus was I rapt. I mean she wasn’t exactly a knock out drop but I was so starved of female company after the bush that when we got round to close dancing I could have put her on a pedestal and worshipped her.
By the time I arrived in Sydney I was ready for some fun. I got a job as a clerk working in the personnel department of the naval dockyard at Garden Island. Most of the staff were very attractive girls. I travelled to work every weekday on the ferry, made lots of friends and at the weekend went to wild parties. After one such party, I spent the night with a very pretty naked nurse from the Royal North Shore Hospital but was too drunk to do anything. The next morning I rolled out of bed to answer the banging on the front door. It was Ed Ifould. The pretty nurse had gone and told him what happened. He expressed the view that in my complete failure I had become a true Australian male.
Ed was the star in everyone’s firmament. It’s rare that you find someone so positive. He had a seemingly unending energy, so that he was always doing something – surfing, swimming, running, going to the pub, going to the football, going to dinner. I knew that he had a disagreement with his father, Lister, about his future, just as I’d had with mine. They both expected great things of their sons and neither Ed nor I wanted to toe the line. Indeed, Ed upset his by opening a sandwich bar soon after he left school. Thereafter he worked at things he wanted to do. He never seemed to doubt himself, unlike me. He just got up every day and got out of the house. He was, like many Australians, refreshingly outward-looking. He enjoyed other people and took pleasure in their company, so much so that he was always quietly the centre of attention – confident and interested in everyone. He died suddenly of a heart attack while out in his boat sailing in Pittwater. He was in his late forties. I miss him.
I started cooking again in Sydney, not expansively but occasionally. I did spaghetti Bolognese or pea and ham soup or tomato and onion salad, the things my mother used to prepare, but I noticed that whatever I cooked my flatmates seemed to like. The fish and chip shop up the road near the arches of the Harbour Bridge in Kirribilli was about as good as food got in Sydney, at least for us. They did battered Tasmanian scallops which I was particularly fond of. I had never tasted scallops before. I was inordinately fond of Chiko rolls which you could get there, too. A Chiko was a bit like a Chinese spring roll, but it had a thick flour wrap, which became crispy in the deep frying, and it was filled with cabbage, onion, green beans, soft barley and beef.
Judy Wheeler was stepping out with one of my flatmates. They were almost engaged. Nevertheless, she and I got on very well; in fact I’d go as far as to say she was the first girl I ever felt completely alive with. She was pretty and very funny and took the piss out of me. She was bright and illuminated my world. We never became intimate but that perhaps made it more memorable. We sought out each other’s company and the fact that she was unavailable made her even more delicious. I remember sitting with her in a car listening on the radio to Sgt. Pepper before the LP was released. I can’t hear a single track of it now without remembering that time and that place in Sydney.
Meanwhile, in personnel at the naval dockyard I filled in forms. They called it ‘higher orders’. I had to work out the extra pay for dockyard workers when they temporarily took on a better paid job to fill in for holidays. I found it tiresomely complicated. Naval architects, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, boiler-makers, painters – each had three or four grades of pay and the forms slid mercilessly into my in-tray, the pile getting ever higher. I’d drop the Sydney Morning Herald on to the toppling pile to hide it. Another job was checking who was registered for the draft to fight in Vietnam. Since I wasn’t registered and had no intention of being so it was only a matter of time before the job would have to come to an end.
I left Australia before the draft could c
atch up with me. The pretty girls in the office threw a leaving party – such nice drinks in the Fortune of War in The Rocks – and they gave me The Australian, a lovely book of photographs with a picture of a gnarly Australian farmer in a battered hat on the cover. They all signed it: good luck, Rick, pleasure knowing you, etc. I felt bad about the mess I’d left behind.
VI
In no time at all, I found myself parting from a country I had no wish to leave. As the ship drew away from Circular Quay heading for New Zealand the sight of Judy in a black and white dress waving furiously felt like leaving my mother at the station when I went off to boarding school.
The Wellington pubs smelt of disinfectant and the beer was weak. I was running out of money but discovered that there was plenty of work in Hawkes Bay on one of the fruit and vegetable farms owned by the tinned food company, Wattie’s. Soon I was picking asparagus and tinning peaches.
What I needed – as always – was company. I hitch-hiked and stayed in youth hostels. New Zealand was convivial, but I missed Australia and Judy. The evening before my twenty-first birthday my lift dropped me about 40 miles out of Kaikora. It was getting dark and I was thinking wanly that I would have to spend the night of my coming-of-age under a bridge. Then miraculously, I was picked up by a farmer in an old Ford V8 Pilot. Our conversation was not about farming but about the price of cars in New Zealand. I could hear curious muffled thumps from the back. He dropped me right by the beach and let six sheepdogs out of his boot. Then I went into a restaurant and celebrated my birthday: I ordered crayfish (a spiny lobster) and sat in solitary splendour eating it. This was the first time I’d deliberately treated myself to expensive food. These days I go to New Zealand once a year and adore it.