by A B Facey
We set off about one o’clock. Tom drove a buggy and a pair of beautiful horses. When we were well on our way he said, ‘Do you think you will be able to handle those other two horses? They’re a pair of devils. They take fits and starts. Sometimes they’re good and then all of a sudden they’ll get nasty and refuse to budge.’
Tom started to tell me a story about how difficult they were. He said, ‘One day when the chap that is looking after them now came into the depot for wire and piping, we were a whole day trying to get those horses to budge the cart. All they would do is go around and around in a circle, and all the time they were doing this the wheels were cutting into the ground making it almost impossible to shift them. We dug trenches and put boards under the wheels; we belted them and done everything we knew to get them to move but they wouldn’t. It became late in the evening so we unloaded them. The driver stayed the night. The next morning we put them back into the cart and drove them around with the cart empty, then loaded it again and they played up again for awhile. Then all of a sudden they went off without any further trouble, but since then they’ve been very hard to handle.’
Then Tom said, ‘I’m glad it’s you that’s going to handle them and not me.’ He asked me what I was going to do. I replied, ‘I can’t give an opinion until I see them performing. Horses are a wonderful creature and usually when they play up like you explained there is something causing it. Anyway, we will soon see.’
We arrived at the gang’s camp just before sundown. The men had finished their evening meal and were sitting down talking. There were five of them – the ganger and four men. As we arrived, they all stood up and Tom drove right up close to them. They all knew him and he was very popular with them.
Tom introduced me to them all and said that I had been sent up there to take charge of the horses with no interference from anyone, by the request of Mr Sublet. The boss of the gang gave a grunt and said, ‘What? A kid! What next.’ His name was Harry Beet. Tom winked at me and smiled. (Later he told me that grunting was one of the Boss’s habits when he wasn’t very pleased.) One of the gang put the billy on, made Tom and me a cup of tea and gave us something to eat.
The man who had been looking after the horses had taken up a thousand acres and a homestead block and was leaving to start work on it. He said he was fed up with these ‘jibs’, meaning the horses. When we finished the meal this man, Maurice Green, asked me if I would like to have a look at the horses. He told me that he had come out from England about two years ago and didn’t know much about horses.
We had come to where the horses were tied up and I looked them over. They were very nervous and trembled when I went to pat them. I held the rope each one was tied up with and patted both horses on the neck and fondled them in turn. Green was watching me. After a few minutes the horses didn’t seem to mind being handled. They were beautiful horses – one was bay with a white star on her forehead, the other was shiny black with a white blaze down her face and four white stockings. They were in splendid condition and I told Green I would take them over right then. He said that he was going back to Wickepin in the morning with Tom.
We went back and joined the others and the Boss said he wanted to shift camp in the morning. They had finished the present job and the next one was fifteen miles out of Wickepin. They had to fence a dam, put a pump, troughs and stand pipe in, and clear the catchment. The dam was known as Spark’s Reserve – it was named after the settler whose place it was near.
We sat around the fire talking and telling yarns until near nine o’clock. Tom, who always carried his roll with him, slept in Green’s tent. After I fed and watered the horses (again patting and handling them), I made my bed in a tent occupied by a Scotsman named Jock McKay. He asked me what I thought about the horses. I said that they were very nervous and scared. He told me that Green, the Boss and Bentley knocked hell out of them. He said, ‘I have seen them knock them over the head with a shovel and bash them with a mattock handle in the ribs and on their rumps, and the more they belted them the worse they got.’
It wasn’t long before I went to sleep. I was very tired. Just before daylight I awoke and lay thinking about what would be the best way to handle the horses. They had apparently been ill-treated so I decided that I would do just the reverse, and try kindness. I remembered my uncle Archie saying that you couldn’t make an animal obey you with cruelty. He said to be firm, show them that you’re boss and be kind to them. I decided that that would be my approach to the problem.
As daylight came I got up, dressed and went to the horses. They looked at me with a sort of nervousness, tension and suspicion. I walked straight to them, untied their neck ropes and led them to the water-trough. They came along without any trouble and had a good drink. I then tied them up back at the feeder and fed them. They seemed to have relaxed and started eating. I then got the brush and commenced to rub the dry sweat off and brush them down. This made them stand taut for awhile, then each one relaxed as I brushed them. I stayed with them for over an hour, and when I left to go back to camp they were both very quiet and had let me brush down their legs, manes and also their heads, and I felt that they didn’t mind me.
At camp I told Jock that I had brought some stores out with me. He and I agreed to share the costs of our stores and living expenses while we were together on the gang, and to use the same tent for sleeping. We had our breakfast and packed up all our stores and beds, then took our tent down and had everything ready to move.
I went to the horses and put the harness on them. The bay mare worked in the shafts and the black worked in the lead – they were always driven in this tandem fashion. I changed this by putting the bay in the shafts, and hooking the black in front. Driving this way, there were two pairs of reins – one for each horse. I got into the cart, got a firm grip on the reins and gave a short sharp whistle and yelled, ‘Come on! Get up!’ and shook the reins at them. They started to prance so I called, ‘Whoa’ and they stopped prancing. I waited for a few seconds and again whistled and shook the reins and called, ‘Come on! Get up!’ in a loud voice, and they moved off without any further bother.
I drove them out onto a nearby road and along it for about half a mile. Then I turned them around and drove them back to where the gang was waiting to be picked up, stopping and starting them to get them used to me. When I got back I pulled up near where the men had their gear stacked, and told them to load it on. While they did this I made a fuss of the horses, patting them and seeing that the harness was comfortable.
When the loading was finished, two men sat on the back of the cart and the Boss and the other man sat in the front with me. When all was ready I asked the Boss and the man in front not to call out at the horses if they started to play up. I said, ‘Just leave it to me. They’re my concern.’ I took hold of the reins and gave a sharp whistle and called to them to get up. They made to go, then the leader started to do a bit of a dance, stamped her feet and tried to turn around, so I called, ‘Whoa’. The leader stopped and I got down, patted her and brushed the flies away from her eyes. Then as I walked back to get into the cart, I gave them both a friendly pat. The Boss was holding the reins for me while I was letting the horses settle down. I got back into the cart and tried again. To the surprise of all, both horses moved up into their collars and moved off as if there wasn’t anything wrong.
With all our gear, stores and tools plus five men, we had quite a load. Tom, who the Boss referred to as ‘Johnson’, drove along behind us for a few miles and Green was with him. We still had ten miles to go to Spark’s Reserve when Tom saw that the horses had settled down, and passed us. We didn’t have any further trouble with the horses and they turned out to be two of the best I had ever worked with.
42
TAKING CHARGE
I stayed with this gang and our job took us to many places in the wheat-belt, until all the dams were fenced-in and rabbit-proof. I was told that there were four or five other gangs doing the same work.
When the dam fencing
was finished a message was sent to the Boss to take two men and me, and go to a place called Kunjin, a new settlers’ district a few miles from the well-known Corrigin. There was a well at Kunjin – it was ninety feet deep and had a solid granite stone bottom. Beautiful fresh water was seeping into the bottom but the settlers and the men who were carting water supplies couldn’t get enough water for their horses. There wasn’t enough pressure to force the water up to make a large enough catchment.
This job took us six weeks and the work was hard. I had to take my turn going down the well and helping put holes into the granite. One man had to hold the drill, while the other struck it with a heavy hammer. The man holding the drill had to give it a quarter of a turn after each blow. It took hours to put a one-inch hole down into the granite to a distance of two feet for blasting.
We managed to blast eight feet of rock out of the well (we always did the blasting just before we knocked off in the evening so that fumes would have cleared by next morning) and there was fifteen feet of water in the well, so our job was well done. The last blast had broken through the granite.
We reconstructed the windmill that we had had to take down from over the well before starting the blasting. It pumped the water up out of the well into a thousand-gallon tank on a four-foot stand, and from there, the water ran down a pipe into a trough. The trough had an automatic water control that kept it full.
The day before we finished working on the well the Inspector called on us and camped with us that night. He was full of praise for the job we had done.
Harry, our boss, took ill with some kind of back trouble. He said that he had had Bright’s disease some years ago, and working down in the dampness had started it again. The Inspector decided to take him to town to the doctor. That left only three of us – Jock McKay, Bentley and me.
The Inspector asked us if we would clean up a well – it was at Jubuck, which was a few miles west from where we were, and was very deep. The Inspector told us that it had been put down years ago by sandalwood carters who had shored it with bush timber. He didn’t know what condition it was in but he said that it could be dangerous. The settlers, who had no experience with hauling water out of a well with a windlass and eight-gallon buckets, had let so many buckets fall down into the well that they had blocked it. They now had to cart water many miles.
‘Now,’ the Inspector said, ‘one of you will have to take charge and of course will get boss’s pay. You will have to decide which one.’ I suggested Jock but he wouldn’t be in it. Bentley said he wouldn’t be in it either, so the Inspector said to me, ‘It looks like you.’ I said, ‘I’ll do my best but I haven’t had much experience at this sort of work.’ He said, ‘All you have to do is one of you go down the well and fish the buckets out of the water. Hook them two or three at a time onto a grappling iron – there’s a three-hook one with the tools – then the men at the top can just haul them up. You also have a long steel rod with a hook to fish the buckets out of the water at the start.’
He told us where the well was, then dropped a shock on us by telling us that it was about one hundred and forty feet deep. We looked at each other with amazement. The well we had just done was, we thought, deep enough.
The Inspector gave us our pay and made Harry comfortable in his buggy. Tom was with them. When they were ready to depart, I asked the Inspector what he wanted us to do when we were finished cleaning the well. He said, ‘Come to the depot at Wickepin. I’ll see you there. You should be there in about eight days.’ Then they drove away.
We pulled our camps down, packed everything onto the cart, and set off for the bucket-retrieving job that none of us liked the sound of.
When we got to Jubuck we found a good place to camp close to the well, unloaded our gear, and went and had a look down it – we didn’t like what we saw. It was dark but we could see some water. There was a two-man windlass on the well and a very strong wire rope with a hook on each end for buckets – the idea was that one bucket would go down while the other was coming up. The shaft was large – six feet by four feet – and the timbering was very rough, with four to six inch gaps in places, between the sets of timber.
Jock and Bentley refused to go down the well, so that left me. We fixed our camp, had some lunch, and talked about the well and how we would go about it. Then I gave instructions to the men about how to let me down so that I could have a good look at the condition of the timber. I had fixed a rope loop to put on the bucket hook to hold me. Taking a hurricane lamp we went to the well.
There were two eight-gallon buckets hooked onto the rope, so we took one off and put the rope loop on. The men lowered me down slowly. At about seventy feet there was a lot of water seeping in and running over the timber, so from there until the bottom I got very wet – the water was as cold as ice. I managed to keep the lamp alight by holding it under me away from the falling water. At the bottom there were three buckets which were partly out of the water. I had a good look at the situation, then called to be pulled to the top again.
When I got to the top I was shivering with the cold and wet through. There was no foul air in the well and the water – which I had tasted – was fresh and beautiful.
The seeping water made us alter our plans. I said that I’d change into some fresh clothes and put on a water-proof overcoat. I went up to the camp and did this, and when I went back I took a flat, solid piece of jarrah and a handsaw with me. The board was one and a half inches thick and eighteen inches wide. I cut the board the right length to fit in between the well timbers just above where I would be fishing out the buckets. This was to protect me from falling water and anything else while down there.
With all the necessary tools for my work, I was again lowered down. I still had to have the lamp, because without it I couldn’t see a thing. I also took some matches in case the lamp went out. I told the men that when I got settled at the bottom, I would call out and they were to pull up the end of the rope I had come down on, fix the three pronged grappling iron onto it and lower it down to me. I would then hook the eight-gallon steel buckets on to the grappling iron to be taken out of the well.
Everything went all right and that afternoon we managed to get eight buckets out. When we knocked off at five o’clock I felt much better about the whole job. We had plenty of water now, as each time the dislodged buckets had gone up, an eight-gallon bucket came down and I had filled it with water. Jock and Bentley at the top, filled our camp bucket and cans, and put the rest into the trough for the horses.
The next morning we started at about eight o’clock. I took a length of rope to the well – it was about one hundred and fifty feet long and one inch thick. (We had used it with blocks to take down and reassemble the windmill at Kunjin.) I tied one end of the rope to the windlass stays and let it hang down the shaft. As the men lowered me down I used it to steady myself, especially when passing the bucket that was coming up.
The buckets were now proving hard to lift. Because they had been down for so long they had wedged into the mud and clay at the bottom. I got two out after a lot of manoeuvring and pulling and had to send them up out of my way to give me room to work in. I called to the men to pull them up and to be careful, as there were only two buckets and the left hook was protruding. It was hard to make them understand from so far down with the noise of water dripping and the wind that was blowing strongly at the top.
Jock and Bentley commenced pulling and all seemed to be all right, so I started to fish for more buckets. Then, all of a sudden, there was a loud bang about half way up, then a rattling noise like something hurtling down the shaft. I swayed under the board that I had put above me for protection. All hell seemed to break loose and large lumps of timber and earth came tumbling down. The lamp was knocked from my hands and went into the water. Everything went dark…
I couldn’t see a thing and the water was rising. I had been clear of the water when the accident happened but now it was up to my knees. The noise of falling earth and timber stopped just as suddenly as
it started, but the plip, plip of occasional pieces of rubble could be heard – all else was quiet. I was sure this was the end for me. It was pitch dark and only a matter of time.
Then I remembered the matches inside my pocket. I got them out and struck one. The light showed that the board I had placed above me was stopping a lot of timber and earth from falling further. After striking several matches I thought I could see a way out. By pushing some timber sideways away from where I was, I thought I might be able to squeeze through and get on top of the fallen debris.
After awhile this worked – I got through. ‘Now,’ I thought, ‘if there’s another fall I’m a goner!’ I struck some more matches and could see that the timber in the shaft was sound, so the fallen timber must have come from higher up. I decided to climb up by placing my toes in between the timber on each side of the shaft, moving up about a foot to eighteen inches at a time. I felt my way with my hands as I went, and about every twenty feet or so I struck a match to see if I could see where the shaft had caved in.
At last I came to the spot. I struck another match and what I saw was terrifying. All one side and one end of the shaft had broken away, and most of it had gone down to the bottom, leaving a cavity on the west side, roughly seven feet deep and eight feet high. It looked like more would go at any minute.
I climbed into the cavity and looking up, I could see the top of the shaft – the cave-in was about sixty feet from the top. My matches were getting less but I chanced striking another. Then I saw my only chance of getting out of this death trap. The rope I had tied to the stay on the windlass was hanging down on the east side of the shaft, still intact. My hopes mounted. I stepped gently across and got hold of that precious rope and pulling on it, I went up and out in a few minutes.
When I was well away – about twenty yards or so – I couldn’t help it, I cried bitterly and couldn’t stop. Yet while I was down the well in great danger and scared stiff, crying was the furthest thing from my mind.