In Mine Own Heart

by Alan Marshall

  I had been travelling in stages for a week when I picked up the three men by the side of the road. I had given lifts to quite a number since leaving Melbourne but this was the first time I had loaded the car with three of them.

  The smiling man had a sharp pixie-like face with a thin neck and a large Adam’s apple. He was wiry, lean and tough and swayed like a horseman when he walked. He wore elastic-side riding boots, the uppers breaking away from the soles, and riding trousers made to be laced round the calves but now gaping and threadbare with the lace holes torn into gaps. They were held up by a plaited leather belt of kangaroo hide encircling his waist. A faded blue shirt completed his attire. He wore neither socks nor hat.

  His mates were different types.

  ‘Good day,’ one of them said shortly, his eyes arriving at conclusions in one sharp glance at me. He was a brooding thickset man with puffed unshaven cheeks and small deep-set eyes. He wore a brown chalk-striped suit, the trousers dust-patched from the ground upon which he had sat. He had made no attempt to brush them with his hands when he rose. His collarless shirt was reddish-brown from inland dust and his shoes were the colour of the road upon which he stood.

  The last of the three was a knockabout man with a confident jaunty air and the voice of a spruiker in a sideshow.

  ‘How ya goin’, sport?’ he said in the manner of a showman making himself agreeable to a potential patron. ‘Is the this bus for Sunny Queensland the state of opportunity?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said in a similar voice. ‘Step up closer please. Purchase your tickets at the door of the marquee.’

  ‘You’re in the game, are you?’ he asked as he clambered in beside me.

  ‘No. I’m one of the mugs that keeps you fellows going.’

  The thickset man slid in beside him while the smiling man sat on top of the swags and cases in the dickey seat.

  After we had travelled some miles I explained to the two men that I didn’t travel long distances each day. I had to study the petrol.

  ‘I’m going to camp about four o’clock,’ I said. ‘If you chaps want to keep going after that you’ll have to get another lift.’

  ‘I haven’t got an appointment for today,’ said the man with the spruiker’s voice ‘We’ll stay with you.’

  I learnt that he was known on the track as ‘Showman Harry’. The man in the back had worked with him as a star rider in a buckjump show over which Harry had presided until it had gone bung.

  The rider was called ‘Dubbo Slim’ to distinguish him from the other ‘Slims’ on the track.

  It was common for some bagmen to put the name of the town from which they came in front of their nicknames. In conversation with them one dropped the full title but when their name was mentioned by others it was always with their home town added to establish their identity.

  Amongst themselves the men on the track were known collectively as ‘bo’s’, an abbreviation of hobo. The public referred to them as bagmen. Gradually the word ‘bo’ became a title that distinguished its possessor from other bagmen who were called ‘whalers’.

  A bo regarded himself as superior to a whaler, having established his superiority by his habit of train-jumping between towns and an attention to his appearance.

  The whaler, a term that had originated from the name given to those swagmen who in the early days spent their time moving up and down the Murrumbidgee River getting handouts from the stations on its banks, now applied to those who walked from town to town in preference to jumping trains.

  They were generally older men not equipped physically to jump trains or lacking the temperament to cope with railway detectives or local policemen hiding in railway yards to arrest the men coming in concealed in railway trucks.

  ‘Darkie’, the nickname of the thickset man sitting in front with Harry and me, was such a man. He had been walking from town to town across Australia for three years, he told me.

  He knew every shelter shed for the unemployed, every worthwhile camping place. Later in the afternoon he directed me down a grassy bank beside a bridge crossing a river. The bank beneath one end of the bridge was sheltered by a brick wall, the buttress upon which this end of the bridge rested.

  Upon the wall were countless names and messages left there by bagmen passing through.

  ‘I’m making for Townsville, Snowy. Join up with me there. Greta Blue.’

  ‘The baker in Bundawillock is a bastard. The butcher’s good for a hand of snags. Copper vags you—three days.’

  ‘Jobs at Innisfail—roadwork in the rain. Never stops.’

  The charcoal remains of camp fires littered the ground. It was a sheltered spot, disturbed only by the rumble of traffic overhead. When a big truck crossed the bridge dust and grit fell on the heads of those sheltering there, an inconvenience accepted without comment by bagmen, familiar with discomfort.

  Darkie lit a fire from wood Harry and Slim had collected from amongst the gum trees near the river.

  ‘Have you got any tucker with you or will we have to go in and bite the town?’ he asked me in the tone of a judge questioning a man he suspects will prevaricate.

  ‘There’s a tucker box in the car,’ I said. ‘You get it. Put it here near the fire. I’ve got enough sausages for the lot of us. There’s bread there too. And there’s a pan on the floor wrapped in newspaper. Fetch it too while you’re about it.’

  He went to the car and returned with the tucker box and the frying pan which he placed beside me. The box was made of galvanised iron with a perforated square of zinc on each side for the circulation of air. It contained bread, butter, tea, sugar, pepper and salt, two tins of bully beef and four pounds of sausages wrapped in sodden paper. At the bottom of the box were three enamel plates and some knives, forks and spoons.

  I packed the pan with sausages and placed it on the fire. Slim and Harry filled a couple of black encrusted billies with water from the river and stood them on the fire beside the pan.

  When they were boiling a dirty froth welled up over the edges of the billies and fell spluttering on to the coals. It was speckled with fragments of gum leaves, twigs and water insects. Darkie scooped it from the surface of each billy with a stick then tossed in some tea he had taken from my box.

  ‘She’ll be a good brew, that,’ said Slim. ‘You can’t beat it strong.’

  Harry cut and buttered some slices of bread and we squatted round the fire and began eating. We held the sausages in our hands, wrapping bread around them to protect our fingers from the hot fat.

  ‘This is the first meat I’ve had in three days,’ said Slim reaching for another sausage from the pan. ‘It’s easy to get stale bread on the track but not meat. I’ve never seen a woman yet that liked giving you meat.’

  ‘It’s easy to kill a sheep,’ said Darkie, experience giving confidence to his remark.

  ‘It’s hard to catch the bastards,’ said Slim.

  ‘You drive ‘em into a corner,’ explained Darkie.

  ‘Yair! What’s the owner doing while you’re running round his paddock like a dog?’ argued Slim.

  ‘He’s asleep.’

  ‘In my experience,’ said Harry, ‘owners of anything never sleep. It’s a law of nature. I was climbing through the window of a girl’s bedroom at three o’clock one morning. Years ago, it was. It was all arranged; she’d left the window open. I was no sooner in the room than her old man knew it. To this day I can still hear those footsteps coming up the passage.’

  ‘How’d you go?’ asked Slim.

  ‘Through the window,’ said Harry. ‘I never touched the sides.’

  ‘Most old people sleep light,’ he went on. ‘You never sleep like you did when you were a kid. You’re too worried. Like on the track … You can’t sleep on an empty belly. By hell, I’ll sleep tonight! Listen!’ He changed his tone and addressed Slim, ‘We’ll have to get cracking early tomorrow. Bundawillock is only a mile further on. I’ll do the butchers and the bakers; you do the privates.’

  He turned to
me. ‘What are you doing tomorrow? Where are you making for?’

  ‘I’ll camp here for a couple of days,’ I said. ‘My sister’s going to send some mail to this town. I’ll have to wait for it.’

  ‘All right. We might move on. But then again we might come back here.’

  ‘How’re ya holding?’ Darkie asked me, looking intently at me with hard, suspicious eyes.

  ‘I’ve got thirty bob,’ I said. ‘It’ll last me until I get another couple of quid in the mail.’

  ‘Kept by your sister, eh!’ he said, and I detected contempt in his voice.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ I said, angry at the inference. ‘Those sausages you ate tonight were bought with money I earned myself. What’s left over will make you a good breakfast.’

  He didn’t reply but stared moodily into the fire. He was still sitting there when Slim and Harry turned in. They wrapped grey blankets around themselves, made pillows of their tucker bags which they stuffed with dry grass, and lay down beside the fire.

  I had a sleeping bag in the car. I got it and spread it out on the ground beside them. Like them, I didn’t undress, contenting myself by taking off my shoes before edging my way into the bag.

  For a while I sat up with the upper half of the bag crumpled around my waist while I smoked a cigarette. I kept thinking of that silent man across the fire. I wondered what sombre thoughts were going through his mind.

  I was afraid of him. He hated people he thought were better off than himself. They were his enemies. Behind him must have been years of complacent self-satisfied people fronting him with contempt, insult, arrogance, injustice. I had a car and a sister who sent me money he believed I never earned. Despair and hunger did not show upon my face.

  I threw the butt of my cigarette into the fire and took out my wallet.

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘This is my wallet. Would you like to look through it?’

  He glanced at the wallet then at me, at my eyes which he did not search but into which he cast his hostility.

  He did not answer but I felt he had. I felt there was only truth between us now. My fear of him had vanished.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll show you what’s in it.’

  I took out the papers and the two notes it contained. ‘There’s the thirty bob I told you I had,’ I said, holding the notes up for him to see. ‘Now, my trousers pockets …’

  I emptied them into my hand and counted the coins that lay amongst a number of other things my pockets had contained.

  ‘Eight and elevenpence,’ I said. ‘Now, that’s the lot. And here’s the key of my car.’ I held it up. ‘I’m leaving the wallet and the key and the coins here on the ground beside me. There they are—beside this stick.’

  He looked at them lying on the ground and a cynical smile was on his face.

  ‘If you are going to shoot through in the night,’ I continued, ‘there’s the lot. Don’t touch me. I don’t want to be hurt. And another thing: I’m not the sort of bloke that runs squealing to coppers. Now I’m going to sleep.’

  I pulled the sleeping bag over my shoulders, over my head, and lay down.

  He was still sitting there when I fell asleep.

  21

  When I awoke in the morning the wallet, coins and key were still lying on the ground beside me.

  Darkie was asleep on the opposite side of the mound of ashes that had been our fire, his covering blanket pulled up over his face. The sticks and pieces of wood that had fed the fire lay in the pattern of a clockface around the mound, their burnt ends buried in its heart. The two billies still containing a sediment of tea leaves stood powdered with ash a few feet from my head.

  I raised myself on my elbow and looked around me. Slim and Harry were down by the river’s edge to the left of the bridge where a fallen tree trunk thrust its way through reeds before disappearing beneath the surface of a pool.

  The two men were standing on this log washing themselves. A vaporous breath from water warmer than the air held the sun within its slow spirals as it eddied away from hands splashing soap bubbles into life. Beyond the river magpies were carolling. In a paddock towards the rising sun grazing sheep were edged with light.

  I hurriedly put on my shoes, got a towel and joined the two men.

  ‘This is the life!’ I exclaimed joyfully.

  ‘Right!’ said Harry promptly. ‘I’ll sell it to you for a quid. It’s yours. You can have the lot, bridge and all.’

  I hesitated, realising his response contained a reproof. A feeling of guilt kept me silent.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re not a taker. It’s that feed of sausages last night that makes it good, not the scenery. Have you got any soap? Here, take this.’ He handed me a cake. ‘I knocked it off in a pub I was barbering. Kneel on the log and shove your head in. It freshens you up.’

  Slim was drying the back of his neck with a towel. He was thinking of other things.

  ‘Have you got any eggs?’ he asked. ‘Bacon …?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to finish off the sausages for breakfast.’

  ‘Have you got enough bread for toast?’ asked Harry.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘There’s still a couple of loaves in the tucker box. There’s plenty of butter.’

  They lit the fire and put on the billies while I was washing. Darkie joined me before I had finished.

  ‘Sleep all right?’ he asked with irony in his voice.

  ‘Good,’ I said shortly.

  ‘Drive us in to Bundawillock this morning, will you?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Get some tobacco.’

  ‘Goodo.’

  ‘Do you want a hand off that log?’

  ‘No, I’m right.’

  ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘Infantile paralysis.’

  ‘Everybody’s got something,’ he said, dismissing it; then, reaching out his hand, ‘Lend me your towel.’

  After breakfast I drove them in to Bundawillock where I bought them some tobacco and stood with them in the main street while they debated the role each was to play in biting the town.

  Slim and Harry were to do the butchers and bakers. If these men didn’t come good they would do one of the residential streets, seeking handouts from householders.

  Darkie was going to occupy himself cold-biting the street while they were away. I stayed with them till he got his first victim.

  He watched the people pass, apparently without much interest. Slim described the art of cold-biting to me while Darkie was thus studying his prospects.

  ‘You wait till a couple comes along,’ he explained. ‘Not a married couple. A bloke and his sheila. You’ve got to get a starry-eyed bastard holding his girl’s arm. He thinks she’s marvellous and she keeps looking up at him—two like that. You strike them in every place. When they show up you front the bloke. You’ve got to do it quick, like as if you won’t take no. He’s walking along in a dream and there you are. You step up right in front of him. He’ll have to guide the girl round you to go on, see.

  ‘ “I’m out of work sport,” you say. “Things are tough. I haven’t had a feed for two days. Could you give us the price of a meal?”

  ‘The bloke gets thinking fast. He wants his girl to think him big, see. She’s watching him. You give the sheila a smile to get her in. The bloke goes for his pocket. He don’t like to refuse in case she thinks he’s lousy. He forks out two bob. You sort of bounce him into it. Darkie’s good at it.’

  Darkie got his two shillings from a young man with a girl on his arm and came over to where we were standing. He made no comment but continued his observation of those who passed while at the same time watching for policemen.

  I bade them goodbye feeling depressed at the thought of being alone again.

  ‘Pick us up when you catch up to us,’ said Darkie.

  ‘All right,’ I promised him.

  I went down to the post office and picked up my mail before returning to the bridge with some fresh supplies of food.


  Later in the afternoon I was sitting in the car typing an article when a young man appeared from the direction of the railway line that ran parallel to the highway but some distance from it.

  I had seen a goods train going through to Bundawillock half an hour before. Its resolute puffing as it climbed a grade made me lift my head from the typewriter and look across the paddock to where I could see it labouring beneath a streamer of smoke. I concluded the young man must have come in on this train, leaving it on the grade up from the river valley. He was approaching the bridge along the river bank.

  A tucker bag hung from his shoulder. The rope that bound its neck went back over this shoulder to his swag which was not strapped to the shape of a cylinder but squared like a case. The neck of his tucker bag had been pushed through the handle of a billy which hung against it away from contact with his clothes.

  He wore a brown crew-neck sweater and dark trousers with twenty-four inch cuffs. On his feet were patent leather dancing pumps. I noticed later that he had overcome the inconvenience of the holes in their soles by closing them with insoles of waterbag canvas.

  Youths on the track favoured patent leather dancing pumps as footwear, not only because they were the cheapest shoes they could buy—seven and six a pair—but because they could be instantly cleaned with a damp cloth. These shining shoes also afforded them a link with the world of dancing and girls which they glimpsed by ‘biting’ their way into local dances.

  They were the lairs of the track, the equivalent of the larrikins of past days. They liked to be flash, to wear trousers of extreme width in the cuffs, to oil their hair and pick fights with the local youths they found so smug and inexperienced in their security of farms and orchards.

  The local boys returned their dislike. They were losing their girls as dancing partners. Girls bored with life in depression-ridden country towns responded to the glib line of a bo confident in territory that had not witnessed the humiliations he had experienced in his city poverty and defeats. He could be anything in this place. He would be gone tomorrow.