by Barry Heard
The Tongio school was tiny, like a shed. The country kids viewed us warily — all thirteen of them. They were a tight-knit bunch. One became very inquisitive about my one and only jumper, a Cub jumper with badges that indicated I could swim and had been invested. They had never heard of, or seen, a Cub before. Straight off, the kids viewed us with suspicion.
The teacher was a young man with thick glasses who continually pushed them against the bridge of his nose. More importantly, he used the strap freely. This was different from Ringwood, where no one got the cuts — or no one that I saw. However, after a couple of days attending this tiny, one-roomed school, I could see why the teacher wielded his strap. Two of the boys were a handful, and continually disobeyed his instructions. Their entire time at school seemed to be an endless adventure involving ways to distract the teacher. Their most common prank was to find, and then hide, his strap. Their best effort was a gem.
It was lunchtime. The teacher rang the hand bell and let us out into the playground, or paddock. Raucous laughter replaced giggles when the two boys pointed to the strap, high up, dangling from the top of the flagpole. It had replaced the Australian flag. The teacher’s reaction was amazing. Quickly, he rounded us up and marched us back into class. With the large blackboard ruler tapping his open palm, he grilled us collectively. Obviously, he hoped to find the guilty party, but he had no such luck. He then disappeared into the storeroom at the rear of the school for a while. Quickly, he lined us up and, one at a time, we had to march into a narrow passage, where he asked for a confession. Again, he got nothing from us. After another grilling, he disappeared back into the storeroom, fiddled with something for a while, and re-appeared with a most bizarre request. Yet again, we formed a single file. One at a time, he called us into the small room. Once inside, we had to place the palm of our left hand into a bowl that contained a white, milky fluid and had two wires coming from it. The teacher said it was a lie-detector device. Cripes, it took a lot of courage to put my hand in there, I can assure you. However, our schoolmaster must have rigged the thing up the wrong way, as he could detect no culprits.
The whole school went quiet for the remainder of the day. That interrogation method certainly put the wind up us kids. I must admit I admired the fact that none of us owned up. We all knew who had hoisted that damn strap in place of our holy Australian flag.
I’ve often wondered afterwards what our parents would have thought if we’d told them about the interrogation — I assumed it was a school secret.
Unfortunately for the teacher, the pranks didn’t stop. About halfway through my first year at the Tongio school, he bought a new car, a grey Ford Prefect sedan. I guess it was his first car, and he proudly announced his purchase to the school one morning just before the first bell. Lined up outside, we were marched down the steep driveway to admire the vehicle.
Admittedly, a new car was something very special at the time; the only people who drove cars, or new cars, were farmers. We circled it, looking inside as he explained the whiz-bang extras that came with the vehicle. Finally, he showed us the inside.
Back in the classroom, he announced that he would have to go to the township of Swifts Creek at lunchtime, and we would be on our own.
Come recess, I didn’t notice anything unusual happen. However, after the lunch bell, the two larrikin boys said we all had to gather around the teacher’s car, real quick — to wave him off, or something, they said. The teacher, quite chuffed, started the car up and headed down the road. Admittedly, it was making a sound that I had never heard a car make before — a sort of loud, hissing squeak. Most vehicles I knew made a rumbling sort of noise. About 100 yards down the road, the hiss changed to a loud blurt and then a huge bang. Hell — we all looked at one another. The two boys with the reputation for mischief were giggling. The teacher stopped, got out, scratched his head, pushed his glasses against his nose, looked back at us kids, and then drove off to Swifts Creek. The car sounded like a Harley Davidson motorbike. When he disappeared around the first bend, the story came out.
The lads had snuck across the road at recess, pinched a couple of spuds from the farmer’s paddock, and managed to thump three spuds up the new car’s exhaust and return to school undetected. I don’t think the teacher ever worked it out.
The school at Tongio was completely different from the one at Ringwood. As I mentioned, the kids were a very tight-knit bunch. It was soon obvious to my younger brother and me that our days of fun and playing after school at Ringwood were gone. There were no shops just around the corner, no deliveries of milk or ice — nothing. It was the backwoods, the wilderness. Consequently, for the first few weeks in my new home at Tongio I faced nothing but continuing demands to learn more skills, complete numerous chores, and be in bed at dark. It was like a labour camp.
I would rise at 6.00 a.m. in the morning and milk the cow. Have you ever tried that? No one explained the knack to me. The poor cow nearly got mastitis while I worked out how to milk her. She would swish her tail, and thump the back of my head with disgust as I massaged her teats with not a drop of milk coming out the bottom. You would think that just squeezing the teat and pointing it in the direction of the milk bucket would work. No, the secret is to squeeze with the top finger, then the second top, and so on — a sort of rolling squeeze, like strumming your fingers on a tabletop.
Once I got the hang of it, I became quite quick, so Mum got a separator and I had to separate the milk as well. This meant we had an abundance of cream. It was great on my Weeties. All up, this would take about 45 minutes.
Then Mum got a butter churn, and I had to make the damn butter. It was only once a week, admittedly, but — what with feeding chooks and then giving the milker a biscuit of hay, to mention just a few of my chores — the demands on my time before and after school were increasing. By now, I was rising at 5.00 a.m. every day.
The first really positive change came about when Mum arrived home with a poddy lamb. She’d got it from a farmer somewhere. It was a female, and we called her Mary-Anne. Bottle-feeding this bundle of fluff with its vibrating tail was a sheer joy. Robbie, little brother John, and I would fight over whose turn it was. The confidence I gained from handling this tiny sheep encouraged me to befriend the milker’s calf. We called him ‘Sooky’. In no time, this gorgeous little fellow became a pet. We smothered him in pats and hugs, then soon found ourselves perched up on his back and taken for rides. Over the next few weeks, we adopted another poddy lamb, and then another. We were farmers.
But I have left the darkest part of our move to last. It was our new house at Tongio. Well, it wasn’t new. It was a fallen-down, creaky, leaky, cobwebby bloody hovel that Robbie and I reckoned was haunted. It was a rented house that had no power, hot water, heating, or any other familiar city conveniences.
The lavatory was horrific. It had a new name — the dunny. It was way out the back, and built over a hole that disappeared into the bowels of the earth — the sort of place where a monster or hobgoblin would live. Down in this deep cavern, where one day I finally had the courage to glance, I saw a pinnacle of poop at least six feet high. It tapered like an upside-down ice cream cone, with tufts of pages from an old telephone directory poking out all over it. Blowflies, at great risk to the person about to lower themselves over the hole, buzzed in and out when you opened the creaky lid. However, that was nothing. The kids at school told us to check under the dunny lid for red-back spiders. They said that, after a bite from one of them, ‘Y’are dead in no time.’ God, had I died and gone to hell?
It was torture going to that dunny. The lavatory paper was an old Melbourne telephone directory. Admittedly, I became fascinated with the strange names and accompanying phone number before I smeared them and dropped the page into oblivion. What’s more, the smell around the dunny was putrid. Have you ever tried doing a number two while holding your breath? Both Robbie and I reckoned this was the best method.
Ev
eryone kept on complaining until an enterprising local told Mum the secret of killing the smell, the blowflies, and the spiders. It was a thick liquid called ‘Phenyle’ that came in a dark-brown triangular bottle. A disinfectant of some kind, its smell reminded me of warm tar. More importantly, it worked.
Inside the house was also a worry. For starters, Mum didn’t have her radio, so there were no serials to listen to. There was also no electricity for lights or anything else, and we had to be in bed by dark as there were only two lamps. They were tall, glass lamps filled with kerosene, and lit with a match. If they smoked, the wick had to be trimmed. Mum continually reminded us, ‘If you knock it over, you’ll burn the jolly house down.’
It fascinated me that a small flame could produce such a strong, soft light. As for the rooms, there were no curtains, so someone gave Mum some hessian. At least that meant we had a bit of privacy, even though we had no neighbours. The only water tap in the entire house was over the sink, and new rules now applied to water use — we were to bathe once a week in a large, galvanised tub. The water wasn’t changed as we each had a turn. Daily, we got constant reminders about turning off the tap and saving water, as we only had one tank.
For me, the changes required to adapt to this different life seemed endless. Thankfully, my best source of information for learning about my household and farm jobs — or so I thought — was the kids at the school. They were great, and offered endless advice. This was helpful when it came to unusual chores, such as which axe to use to cut and split firewood and kindling, how to put a cow in the bale, how to hold the bucket between your legs and, finally, how to strip the cow’s teat to get the most milk.
But with the new churn, working out how to make the butter edible took some experimentation. How much salt should I add? Initially, even though I followed advice, I used too much. However, over a period of months, I mastered a fit-for-human-consumption square lump of butter, shaped with serrated butter pats, or bats.
Finally, how was I to wash the separator and then reassemble this complicated machine? That took even longer. In fact, as a city kid, I had arrived in the bush with almost no practical skills. Added to this, the kids at school were forever leading me up the garden path when I asked them how to do things. They suggested that, to get the cow to let the milk down before I tried milk it, I should recite a poem to it — preferably an Australian one. Mum frowned when I asked her if we had a poetry book; she told me to ask at school.
They also told me that new poddy lambs could freeze at night, and that most farmers took them to bed. I got into big trouble for that one, as Mary-Anne left her calling card on the sheets.
They also recommended that I use two cupfuls of salt for the first pound of butter I ever made. Mum reckoned the resulting batch would almost make you vomit.
It wasn’t just with chores that these country larrikins took the mickey out of us. They advised Robbie and me that all the animals in the area, particularly the wild ones, were dangerous, man-eating, or poisonous — particularly kangaroos, wombats, and emus. Fortunately, we only ever saw a few of them. However, the biggies were kookaburras and magpies, which they called ‘tossle snatchers’. The kids at the Tongio school unanimously agreed on this one. Never, ever have a piddle out in the open, they said — always use the dunny. They added that they knew of some boys from somewhere ‘above the Gap’, who had had their little willies severed from their torsos while peeing in the open. Magpies — the main tossle-snatchers — were particularly savage. That’s why they swooped, apparently. My God, that sounded scary. Consequently, some days we found it really hard to hang on during the hour’s walk to or from school. The changes and new challenges never seemed to go away.
After a month, I thought I’d seen and heard it all. But there was a final revulsion I had to deal with — Mum introduced me to rabbit traps. How could I use such a thing? What a dreadful contraption. They were dangerous-looking gadgets with a powerful spring and a nasty pair of jaws.
In time, I learned that many poorer people lived off the rabbits. They were plentiful, or ‘in plague proportions’, according to the kids at school. Not only were they a good source of food, but their skins helped to pay for the groceries.
There was a buyer for them, who travelled once a month to Bairnsdale. Many people sold him gutted rabbits or skins, and Mum hinted that we might use him — which meant we were poor.
Setting the rabbit traps cost me many a bruised finger. Damn things; they would snap shut as I tried to cover them with a fine layer of dirt to conceal their whereabouts. But that was the easy bit. The rabbit — a beautiful, fluffy, brown-eyed little creature — was killed, gutted, and skinned. That didn’t seem right. I thought meat came from a butcher’s shop. Consequently, my attempts at killing those first poor bunnies, with their mutilated feet, were pathetic. Most managed to get away. Then the kids at school showed me how to give them a ‘rabbit killer’. You had to flatten your palm, hold it rigid, and administer a severe chop behind the poor animal’s head. Now I was a rabbit murderer.
I was just about to jack up and tell Mum that this was the last straw when I met an old bloke across the road. Well, it wasn’t quite across the road. It was quite a walk, through a paddock, some light bush, and just behind the cattle yards. He was a really old man — maybe 40 or a bit more. Our first meeting was a coincidence. My brother and I had ventured outside our house paddock, for the first time, to find the Tambo River. Apparently, it was about half a mile away. We had to walk through a couple of paddocks and some tangled low bush. On the way, we spotted a hut or living quarters of some kind behind some cattle yards, and we wandered over for a squiz. It looked deserted, but then we spotted a shrivelled-looking old man in an army overcoat, kneeling near a log. He was setting a rabbit trap. There was a dog nearby; it, too, looked old and scruffy. I called out ‘Hello’. The old man roared with fright, and dived behind the log. He frightened the hell out of us, and the dog didn’t help. It barked savagely. We turned to run away when the strange bloke called out, ‘It’s okay, lads. You jist frightened me — eh, shuddup, Croney!’
I guessed Croney was the dog. Cautiously, I turned back. My younger brother Robbie walked right behind me, very close. The old man asked us who we were and where we had come from. I did all the talking — and I didn’t do very much. I was scared of this hermit-looking old man who wore mittens with the ends worn off, old hobnailed boots, and funny trousers that had string tied around each leg, just under the knees.
‘I’m Les, and me dog here, Croney, does tricks. Let me show you one day, eh?’
We didn’t even answer, and our first cautious steps were backwards before we turned and ran, not to the river, but back home.
That night we told our parents, and Mum said, ‘That’s Les. He’s a character — used to be a drover, they say.’
It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I saw Les again. I had started trapping rabbits myself, on the flats down near the river. I wasn’t having a lot of luck around the paddocks near our house. The kids at school said that near the river was the best place, as there were ferns and blackberries — all good cover that rabbits like to hide and play in.
I was searching for fresh burrows when I noticed that one hole had a trap sprung with just the rabbit’s paw in the jaws. It was fresh. Maybe I had ventured into old Les’s territory. This could be dangerous, as I wouldn’t know where the traps had been set. I guessed I had better go and see Les. That was a worry. The kids at school reckoned he was a strange one.
I ventured across the flats, headed towards the river, and turned up near the cattle yards. I found Les sitting outside his hut on a log, clutching a beer. He was shaking and weeping softly. He reminded me of Uncle Jock; he used to do that sometimes. At the time, I assumed this was what must happen to all old men. Stunned at what I saw, I turned to walk away when the damn dog barked and Les spotted me.
‘G’day, son. Come over ’ere, mate
. Take a seat. Shut up, Croney.’
Hesitantly, I sat and stared at the ground. From the corner of my eye, I could see his right arm shaking. He had trouble getting the bottle to his lips as he sobbed softly.
‘Never spills a drop, mate. Not bad, eh? I only has one beer a day. Bloody stuff gives me the shakes.’
I didn’t know what to say. We sat in silence for a while when Les said, ‘Croney, get me ’baccy, mate.’
The dog, which was busy licking its private parts, jumped to its feet and pushed open the door to the hut. It then emerged with a leather pouch in its mouth, and sat at Les’s feet. He took the pouch, patted the dog with affection, gave its neck a good scratch, opened the pouch, and began rolling a cigarette. The dog just sat, looking at Les with panting admiration, alert to any command. When Les finally slid his tongue along the paper and sealed the fag into a tight, neat rollie, he again looked his dog in the eye and said, ‘Git the matches, Croney, me boy.’
The dog pranced to his feet, shot back into the hut, and came out with a box of matches in his mouth. The matches were in a metal folder that exposed one side of the box and allowed the ends to open. Les went through the patting and scratching ritual before he lit his fag. He placed the pouch and the matches on the ground, and told Croney to put them both back. The damn dog returned them both to the hut.
‘He’s a good dog, eh? I used to use him droving cattle with Alan Taylor. We’s been here for years now, ain’t we, Croney, me old mate?’
My head was bursting with questions. To date, I hadn’t said a word, and I didn’t know how to bring up the conversation of rabbit traps. Then Les spoke.
‘Likes a brew, mate? Time for Marg to puts the billy on I reckon, eh?’
‘Yes, sir,’ I replied, not really sure what he meant, although I guessed he had a wife inside called Marg — or Mrs Haylock, if ever I spoke to her.