Tommy and John Crowe reckoned it was a bloody good thing as the graziers who put themselves in charge were generally a bunch of old farts. What made it worse for these elder statesmen in the brigade was that many of the new regional officers were ex-servicemen. The old-timers couldn’t come right out and be critical, though privately they reckoned the ex-soldiers were given the jobs because of what they’d done in the war and that they knew buggerall about fighting fires. So it was a sort of Mexican stand-off, both sides reckoning the other side were a bunch of bloody wankers.
Mr Reed was our regional fire officer, he was known as Nick to one and all, except to me and a few of the other young blokes. Like Mr Gee and Tommy, he’d been a prisoner of war under the Japanese but his real sin was that he lived in Wangaratta, which was a big mistake. You see, Wang wasn’t a little town like Yankalillee and it had its own municipal fire brigade and everyone reckoned you had to be a real bushie to know about fires.
As far as I was concerned, Nick Reed was a pretty good bloke and he and Tommy worked well together. He respected Tommy for being ‘the real maloney’ and Tommy said he was a sensible sort of bloke who wasn’t likely to make too many mistakes and didn’t big-note himself.
He’d always be out there for the real big fires but the small local ones, like the one where we rescued Mrs Rika Ray, he’d leave to Tommy, who could always reach him on the HF radio when he was needed or if the fire got out of hand. The old blokes would say it was a conspiracy between war veterans, which was pure and utter bullshit. Nick Reed trusted Tommy’s judgement and his ability to get on with the job.
It was just that some of the older blokes never got used to taking orders. They’d been a law unto themselves for so long they resented anyone but their own. So the Owens Valley CFA weren’t always happy little Vegemites. For days after fighting a fire there would be post-mortems in the pub, mostly about what an idiot Nick Reed was and where he’d made his mistakes. It wasn’t true and was just the usual whingeing and big talk and thinking the old ways were the only way.
Tommy, being like a petty criminal, couldn’t stand up and tell them they were talking shit. When a fire was over, his standing in the community vanished with the last embers, except for those who knew a bit about fires and that certainly wasn’t the majority.
For instance, when Tommy first got back from the war, he wanted the Owens Valley Brigade to buy up six armysurplus high-frequency radios to be used for firefighting. To raise the money, the bushfire brigade would have had to have a fete as well as raffles in the pub, cake stalls and that sort of thing. The people who were against having the radios, which they called newfangled nonsense, were mostly Church of England and among the toffs, some of them on the shire council. Their catchcry became ‘You can’t put a fire out with a bloody wireless set, boy!’ And since their wives were all in the Anglican Women’s Guild and many also members of the Country Women’s Association, who would also have needed to be involved, all it took was for the men to put the kybosh on their wives’ involvement with the fundraising.
Tommy, who at the time wasn’t into crime and wasn’t yet known as an alcoholic, put it to Nancy that the Catholics could do something similar to raise the money. ‘Show them toffee-nosed Anglicans the Micks can do it without ’em, hey?’
Nancy reckons that’s fair enough, time the Catholics took the initiative, and she takes the proposition to Father Crosby, suggesting they run their own fete and raffle.
Father Crosby isn’t so sure. Privately he isn’t game to take on the powerful elements in town and he ums and ahs before he finally says he’ll have to refer the matter to the Bishop. Well, he’s back soon enough with the Bishop’s opinion, though Nancy said she doubted he’d ever asked for it, just drank some altar wine and cogitated in the priest’s house and as usual took the coward’s way out. She said having Father Crosby on your side was like having a large thorn in the sole of your foot at the start of a race.
‘The Bishop is of the opinion that the purchase of five wireless sets is not an issue that is sufficiently important to disturb the good relationship which exists at the present time between Catholic and Protestant in Yankalillee.’Just to come out with a dumb sentence like that shows Father Crosby’s invented it. Then he goes on, ‘Besides, there are some very important people in the district, all of them experienced in firefighting, who see no value in acquiring these wireless sets.’He didn’t even know that they were radio sets, not the wireless sets like you hear the ABC on at home.
‘Yeah, all of them Protestants and all of them bigwigs!’ Nancy replies. Remember this was way back in 1946 and she wasn’t a fully collapsed Catholic yet and still had some faith in the Church and didn’t yet have the goods on Father Crosby like she does now.
Father Crosby then points out that the last big fire hap pened in 1939, before the war, and that a lot has been learned since then. Which was a whole load of manure. It was funny how everyone seemed to think, because there had been a war, a lot had been learned. In fact, Tommy said bugger-all had been learned, that just the opposite had happened. The war sort of put all civilian things on hold, and bushfires are a voluntary civilian occupation left to the volunteers to fight and so things hadn’t improved one bit since the tragic fires of 1939.
Father Crosby’s cautionary words, after supposedly consulting with the Bishop on the matter, were, ‘The fifty pounds you’ll need to buy the wireless sets with the installation and the power packs to make them work, which I am told on good authority will cost the same again, is a poor use of such a large sum of money.’
He’d wagged a finger at Nancy, ‘Are you aware, Nancy Maloney, that’s the cost of feeding a hundred orphans at the St Vincent de Paul’s Boys Orphanage in Melbourne for three whole weeks?’ Father Crosby looked accusingly at her, ‘The Bishop has chastised me for my lack of priorities and my diminished sense of where God’s charity should be placed! He has pointed out that we are in the business of avoiding hellfire and not bushfires!’ He also said that the Bishop had recommended that the Catholics of Yankalillee contribute the selfsame sum of money to the saving of heathen souls in New Guinea.
‘Now, Nancy Maloney, where are we going to get such a sum of money, I ask you?’ His manner suggested that it was Nancy’s fault and that she’d compromised the Catholics of Yankalillee.
All Nancy could manage to say in reply was, ‘Father, what about the seventy-one souls that died in the Black Friday fires of 1939?’
‘Ah, my dear,’ Father Crosby replied, ‘they were souls already saved and only ten of them were Catholics, all of them elderly and granted the last rites and absolution by special dispensation.’
Anyway, the end result was that there were no radios in the Owens Valley Bushfire Brigade even after the disastrous 1952 bushfire hit north-eastern Victoria. The old-timers won out and we still don’t have them. Some of the old blokes are proud of the fact that they’ve fought off ‘the radio gimmick’. One old codger said to me, ‘Mole, the fires ain’t changed none and we’ve fought ’em before and won without them stupid things crackling away confusing matters. Government’s now talking about bombing fires with aeroplanes, water bombs, next we’ll have pelicans trained to do the same thing, never heard nothing so stupid in me life. Radios and water bombs, that’s Canberra for yer, pure mahogany from the bloody neck up.’
In the end Tommy shrugs and says it would be good to have radios, cut some of the danger out, but it’s how well you know the bush that counts. He even admits that the radios have a problem. When there’s a lot of static around, it’s because of lightning and thunder, the sort of weather bushfires bring. In other words, in bushfire conditions, HF radios often prove difficult to use and sometimes you can’t hear a word for the static and interference. Sometimes you can hear people talking in South-East Asia but not ten miles away where a fire is raging. But on the other hand, the radio can save lives and get people to a fire as well as direct them when they get there.
That’s what I’ve been learning since my twelfth birthday and Tommy reckons I’ve picked it up a fair bit, although in five years you can’t even begin to know all there is to know and every time we go out I learn some thing new that’s important.
One thing that’s happened is that Big Jack Donovan has spoken to Mr McDonald, the District Forestry Officer at the Forestry Commission, and since I’ve been thirteen he’s taken me on work experience for three days a week during the summer holidays and taught me their side of things. It’s okay by Tommy, but some of the others in the volunteer brigade reckon I’m consorting with the enemy. The bushies reckon the Forestry Commission is up its own arse, but Tommy says to take no notice, to ignore them, the Forestry Commission has facilities and practices any firefighter should know about and fuck the silly bastards that think different.
They’ve got high frequency radios and all sorts of gear and I reckon I now know just about the lot. One of the things I’ve been trained in is fire spotting from a fire tower. There’s eight Forestry Commission towers all around, in places you can see a fair distance, like about thirty miles. So you’ll spot a fire no matter where it starts. The tower I use is called Mt Pilot and it stands just above a large forest of Scribbly Bark and has a good view of the flat land and to the north. On a good day you can see the heavy eucalyptus forest that follows the meandering Murray River.
I know how to read all the instruments, like the relative humidity, wind speed, the temperature and the extent and nature of the cloud cover. I know all the HF-radio call signs to the district fire brigades and exactly how to report the presence of a fire. All this is theoretical, mind you, I’ve never really been in the tower when a big fire happened and I don’t know how I’ll go if I’m there and there’s fires to report. A person can panic and do it wrong so I hope I won’t.
Tommy and John Crowe and myself are sort of a team when it comes to working with fires and John Crowe reckons Tommy knows more than any professor of botany about things like eucalyptus trees and what to expect from a big burn.
I don’t want to go on too much about things, but if you’re going to be a bushfire fighter you have to know a fair bit about what’s burning and, if it isn’t a grass fire, it’s usually eucalyptus and the stuff that lies under the forest canopy. So I’ll need to tell you some of the history of this remarkable tree for you to understand how a fire works on the driest continent on earth.
If you get bored just skip this part, though that would be a pity, because all Australians should know why we’re a different country to anywhere else and that’s mostly because of eucalyptus and fire.
I’m going to sound like I know more than I do because Tommy’s the one that knows most things about the bush and fire. I mean he’s uneducated and probably a bit thick with some things, but when it comes to the bush he uses the right terms and likes to get things correct and goes crook when I don’t learn the Latin names for things.
John Crowe laughs and says he’s always been like that. They’re real good mates and have been since they were kids and he tells how when they were just little nippers and they’d go out shooting birds with sling-shots, he’d be aiming at a regent honeyeater and Tommy would fire a stone into the bush and the bird would fly off. ‘Why’d you do that?’ John would yell at him, really pissed off.
‘Don’t see too many of them around here, best not kill it,’ Tommy would say. Even then he was a conservationist without knowing it.
‘He showed no bloody mercy on crows though, even this one,’ John Crowe laughs.
Tommy and John Crowe are a funny pair together, sort of a contradiction in terms. Tommy looking the way he does and such a little bloke who never says boo to a goose and John Crowe a big bastard and the full operator, real quick on the uptake and not scared to get into a donnybrook if he has to. He’s always got a scam he’s working on and an opinion on just about everything.
Funny that, small ratty blokes are supposed to be the lightning lips and the big blokes the slow ones, but Tommy and John Crowe are just the opposite. Though nobody says nothing bad about Tommy Maloney in John Crowe’s presence if he doesn’t want his nose broken. He’s the one who most often brings Tommy home when he’s been on a bender and is down at the lake with the other deros.
Sometimes he has to carry Tommy over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and throws him in the back of his ute because he stinks to high heaven. John Crowe then takes him to the abattoir, undresses him, hoses him down and makes him sit in the sun in the nuddy so he can’t escape. Little Tommy sitting in a corner with his broken face resting on his clasped knees, all hunched up, drying out in the sun. John Crowe leaves him there while he comes home and gets a clean shirt and trousers then goes back and dresses Tommy before he delivers him to us in some sort of respectable shape.
Other times Tommy’s gear is that ratshit, that John Crowe just throws it in the abattoir furnace and buys new stuff. He never lectures Tommy, they’re mates, that’s all. He doesn’t judge him or try to change him. I reckon Tommy loves him more than a brother, even more than us.
No, a lot more than us! Tommy doesn’t have that much reason to love his kids and only Sarah and little Colleen are his anyway. Nancy, though, doesn’t work things that way. As far as she’s concerned, for better or worse, Tommy’s our dad.
When Tommy’s been up the hill, John Crowe visits him every day, come rain or shine, he never misses. We’re his family and have to keep to the visiting hours, which are once a week and strictly observed unless an inmate is sick or something and even then he has to be practically dying for them to let you in.
I dunno how he does it. John Crowe just walks in every morning on his way to the shire workshops, says gidday to the warder at the gate, who waves him past. Some people say he’s got something on Mr Sullivan the governor but they don’t say what it could be, because the boss of the prison is a pretty respectable bloke and well regarded even by the Protestants.
Anyway, John Crowe sees that his old mate is okay and usually brings him a bit of tucker, a couple of Vegemite and cheese sandwiches or a homemade rissole and a roast potato. Tommy eats like a bird anyway. John Crowe always brings in a packet of twenty Turf cigarettes and the book Tommy’s asked for. The librarian, Mrs Botherington, must think John Crowe is just about the best reader of things about nature in Yankalillee. He’s never explained to her that the books are for Tommy. She’s a bit prim to say the least and he doesn’t want to take any chances.
‘Mate, never know how people in this town think,’ he once said to me. ‘Maybe she’d reckon a bloke doing a stretch couldn’t be trusted with books. Can’t take no chances, if the little bloke couldn’t read, he’d go round the twist in there.’
Tommy reads a book about, say, the various types of native grasses to be found in Australia and in the book will be a reference to another book about some aspect of flora and he’ll be onto it. John Crowe will then ask Mrs Botherington to get it in from the State Library in Melbourne. Sometimes she kicks up a stink but John Crowe’s got her twisted around his little finger and he looks after her little Morris Minor so she’ll usually make the effort. ‘I wouldn’t do it for anyone else, Mr Crowe, but I know your bushfire research is very valuable, one day perhaps you’ll write something we can be proud of?’
‘Sure thing, Mrs Bother,’ he’ll laugh, ‘Maybe a whole library to make you even busier, eh?’
When he told me this, he chuckled. ‘Last time I wrote something real serious was this heart I carved into the trunk of a Scribbly Gum and carved me initials and the initials of this sheila I was in love with, Elizabeth Logan.’
We were sitting down and he drew this heart in the dust at his feet with his finger and added the initials:
J.C.
L
E.L.
‘I got to kiss her once but that was about it. I used to dream about touching her tits but she’d never let me. She married some bloke over in
Bright and had seven kids, every one of them got plenty of what I got nothing of. There’s been a kid hanging on them beautiful boobs for bloody years.’
When we are in the bush together, John Crowe knows Tommy’s safe from the dreaded grog and, while they don’t say much, you can see them both sort of relaxing, enjoying being together, having a smoko next to a creek or laughing when they find a wombat hole or come across a veined sunorchid tucked away under an overhanging rock. Or they’ll be sitting on the bank of a river fishing, even John Crowe not chatting on for a change, the two of them watching a white-faced heron land in the reeds and, turning and grinning, sharing the moment, saying nothing but knowing something together only they know.
I’m the kid with the .22 rifle who tags along and who is being taught things. And a lot of what I’m being taught is about eucalyptus trees. ‘Know your eucalyptus and you’ll know your fire,’ Tommy says. I also do the rabbit shooting and an occasional fox. Sometimes the cow cockies ask us to cull the roos, but Tommy won’t, even when their numbers have grown to plague proportions.
‘It’s not them that’s grown to plague proportions, it’s us! Rabbits and foxes are vermin, introduced by the white settler. The kangaroo and the wallaby were here before us, fuck the sheep and the cattle. Far as I’m concerned the wildlife’s got the first right to the grass!’ I guess Tommy, like Mr Baloney before him, would never had made a living on the land, both too interested in allowing the wildlife to have a go at surviving after the white man cometh.
Four Fires Page 56