I continued to explore the southside. There was a bit of a park on the left-hand side of the bridge just down from the intersection in front of Ben Tapps pub. I kept following the road alongside the river, and from the pub down to the next corner on the right-hand side of the road were shops and pubs. It seemed like there was a pub on every corner. The Australia hotel was in the middle of the shops, and I think it was the Crown on the next corner. I walked past a big house that was built on stilts out over the river, and a shipyard. I walked right down to the wharf and looked out to sea. There were a couple of boats tied up, and one that looked like it was being worked on, but the area was pretty quiet, so I walked back to Ben Tapps and down the other main street. It ran out into houses after one block, and it had the usual pub on the corner. I think it was called the Coronation, with the billiard saloon alongside it up the side street. I walked up the side street past the billiard saloon, and saw the house.
4
The house
The grass out the front hadn’t seen a mower for at least two generations, and the windows told the story with that forlorn abandoned look. I zipped in the gate, crunched a track to the front door, and knocked, getting a hollow boom of an echo. I put my face to a window pane and saw that the house was empty, and looked. So without fear or thought of snakes, I battled my way around the back. Everything was overgrown but that was to my advantage. The back door of the house was locked, but the wash house with its copper and two tubs was open. The back shed was also open, which was a boon, and there was a forgotten broom, which I used to give it a sweep. And I had a warm dry place!
I jammed some old rag in the drain hole of the tub, half filled it with water and had a bath. After drying off and dressing I went to the shop and bought bread, eggs, tea, sugar, a can opener, two big tins of peaches—they would be my cup and billy—two boxes of matches and two candles. I went into the hardware store and bought a pocket knife with a big main blade. It cost four and six, so it was a good one. It had a tin opener, a screwdriver, a corkscrew, tweezers and a needle—a real handy knife. I went back to the house and had a feed of peaches and bread, and made myself a bit sick, being a guts. But I had to have the tin to make a cup of tea. Other than that, I was pretty snug.
Several weeks later I ran into a boy down on the bridge. He was standing in my favourite place looking at the boats, as I liked to. I sort of stopped and leaned on the rail and he said, “What do you think of that big blue job with the two masts and the white top?”
I gave him a glance. I had seen a movie called “Captain Blood” with Mum, about pirates and treasure, with Cornell Wilde as the main actor, I think. So I said, “Be neat to smother it with guns and be a pirate. You know, capture treasure and rescue sheilas.”
He laughed out loud. “You keep the treasure, and I’ll have all the sheilas. Deal?” He held out his hand. “I’m Danny Kelly from Quilpie, wandering and lookin’ for work. Got here yesterday, no work yet, and busted arse broke.”
“Eddie Anderson,” I said, taking the hand he held out to me. “But call me Warrigal. That’s what me Mum called me.”
I told him my story and how we had to run, and I found out he was much the same as me, white dad, Aboriginal mum, and he also was doing some fancy footwork. He called them the bureau or some name like that. He said it was just another name for the Department. I asked him where he was staying, and he told me he had left his gear at the billiard room and was going to sleep out. So I showed him where I was camping, and told him to get his gear and stay with me.
It was great to have a mate. We found we had a lot in common. He was six years older than me, at sixteen, but we had both had much the same life, except that they took him and he ran away. He told me hair-raising stories of hidings for not moving fast enough, getting all your hair cut off, and being told you were a heathen and that their God can’t see you. “I tell you, mate, they’re bloody weird. My best advice is don’t let them catch you, or you’ll be sorry.”
I sat, eyes agog, mouth open in wonder, every fear I had ever had of the Department now confirmed. “What about them eating young Aboriginals and babies?” I asked, as he seemed to know about these things.
“Well, I never seen them do that but I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said darkly.
I didn’t sleep well that night. I had a big mob of fat blokes in black suits chasing me all night, and when I stopped for a rest, one would put a pot on the stove and the other would set the tables. I woke up exhausted.
Danny said the local meatworks out at Ross River picked up casual workers and you could earn from four to eight quid a day. So we walked what seemed like three million miles out to the gate, and lined up at this little window.
“Tell him you’re sixteen,” said Danny, “or he’ll think you’re only mucking around, and won’t give you a start.” Danny got put on straightaway.
“Name? Age? Experience?” a man barked at me through the window. I stepped back.
“Warrigal Anderson, sixteen, and none,” I told him.
He sort of fixed his eye on me. “You sure you’re sixteen? You look a bit scrawny to me. Shouldn’t you be in school?”
I thought he was a cheeky feller, but I didn’t say so. I just told him I would rather work.
“Hang around outside and we’ll call you if we want you. I hung around for a week. Danny got four days and I got nothing.
He told me he was going to Brisbane to look for his uncle, now that he had a quid. We had bought a couple of cord fishing lines and some hooks and sinkers, and we took them down to the wharf. We hunted about for barnacles and found a few. The bream love them, and we got about half a dozen in an hour’s fishing.
“We gunna eat well tonight,” said Danny. “Give us a hand. We might as well clean them here. Look, I’ll show you.” And he grabbed a fish and gutted it, so I did the same.
That night he showed me how to cook them on the coals. He had already shown me how to cook spuds and make damper in the coals, but the fish was the best I ever tasted. As soon as the skin splits, turn the fish over and a couple of minutes and a shake of salt and you have a meal you would never believe.
We were pretty well-off for tucker. There was a giant mango tree loaded with fruit, a couple of pawpaw trees with ripe and green fruit, an old grape vine with fruit, and a persimmon that Danny said was great. They were all gold and red, and looked like you would walk a hundred miles to eat one. Wrong. It was the most horrible taste and dried your mouth out instantly, leaving a sort of chalky taste that took a bit to get rid of.
Monday morning saw me at the station seeing Danny off. I was a bit sad as he was a good mate.
“Look after yourself, eh. Here, take this. You gunna need it till you get work. Give it back when you see me again.” And he gave me ten quid and shot away and got on the train.
He hung out the window waving and I waved back until I couldn’t see him any more. I was sad, but glad our paths had crossed. He had shown me lots of ways to look after myself, and during our talks at night he had explained to me about poofters, and what they did to boys. “If one grabs you, mate, yell your head off scream if you can, don’t stop, keep yellin’. That’s your best chance. Someone will help you or he’ll bugger off. Don’t forget, if you think someone is sus, don’t let them get near you. Run off.”
We talked about all sorts of things after we put the candle out—families, whether we would ever be people in our own country, and whether we would ever be given the opportunity to take charge of our own affairs. We both agreed we didn’t think so, not in our lifetime anyway. Danny said, “I would love to be a fisherman and own my own boat, but how can I do it? If I get a job, the government will take my pay. I’ll get nothing.”
“What do you mean? They take your pay and you get nothing?” I asked him.
“Same thing. Bloody welfare, they take your money off you, pay your board and say they are banking your money in an account in your name. But the thing is, you never see it. I don’t know anyone that’s got their m
oney either. It’s all bullshit. Just another way to keep us down. It will all come out one day,” he said without conviction. “You want a good life, Warrigal, keep out of the way of those white bastards. They will treat you like shit. Because you’re white-skinned, you’ll remind them of their own weakness,” he told me.
I didn’t understand what he meant, so I just stayed quiet. Yep, I was going to miss Danny alright, but I wasn’t going to forget him, not in a hurry, anyway.
5
Meeting Hugh
I walked the beat out to the meatworks every morning for a week and got nothing. It was Friday, three days until my eleventh birthday on Monday, 16 March 1959. I had just walked back from the meatworks and was at my favourite spot, the bridge over the river, sailing my pirate ship to tropical islands covered in flowers and coconut palms looking for hidden treasure. I was getting right into it. I had a plank on the bridge and was just about to make that personnel bloke from the meatworks office walk it while I prodded him with my dirty big sword.
“G’day,” this voice said, breaking into my daydream, and rescuing that personnel bloke, right at the very last step. I decided to let him live and put my sword away and told the sharks infesting the river to come back tomorrow. I turned around. Well, did I get a shock! I was lookin’ at a kneecap dressed in moleskin pants, held up by a shin as tall as me, balanced on a boot I could use as a weekend runabout. The voice roared again. I looked around for a beanstalk, convinced he was a giant. I leaned back and followed my eyes up, taking a step back before I fell over. He must have been six or seven feet, if you counted the boots and hat. He sorta tapered down from shoulders a mile wide to riding boots with three-inch heels. He was the tallest bloke I’d ever seen.
“You look a bit lost, so I thought I’d wander over for a yarn. You one out?” Meaning was I on my own—that’s Australian English, not American drivel.
We had talked, Danny and I, about being accosted, but as he said to me, you can always tell. I dunno what it is, a feeling or just nouse, but it’s very rare you can’t sus one. I sort of took another step back and looked this bloke over again. There definitely wasn’t anything sissy about this bloke. He looked like he could fight the town. With a grin on his face, you sorta felt he was a mate.
“Yeah,” I told him, “I came up from Melbourne a month or so ago lookin’ for work. I been out the meatworks, just walked back in.”
Holding out a hand as big as a dinner plate he said, “The name’s Hugh.” And we shook hands.
“My first name’s Eddie, but most people call me Warrigal,” I told him.
“You old enough to come for a beer?” Hugh asked with a grin.
“Nah. It’s no good for me, and they wouldn’t let me in anyway.”
“Yair. I reckon you’re right. What about a cup of tea then? There’s a cafe over the road.”
“You won me,” I said, and although I don’t like to admit it, I had lost, out of my pocket I think, seven pounds that was change from the ten Danny had given me. I had it on the Tuesday morning when I walked out to the meatworks and I couldn’t find a penny when I got back in. I walked back out and searched but found nothin’, so I had been living on mangoes, pawpaw, and spuds cooked in the ashes. I had been fishing, but didn’t do too well, so right at this moment a cup of tea sounded like heaven. We went over to the cafe and sat in a booth, with a plate of sandwiches and a big pot of tea.
“Get around those,” Hugh said, and I proceeded to give them the treatment. I cleaned up the plate and started on the tea.
“Look Ed, do you mind if I ask how old you are?”
“Nah. That’s alright. I’m eleven,” I said, trying to sound it.
“You sure?” he asked, fixing an eye on me.
“Nah. you’re right. I’m ten. Won’t be eleven until Monday.”
“What the hell are you doing running around here all on your Todd Malone? Where the hell are your parents?”
“You mean me Mum? She’s in Melbourne.”
“Then how come you’re here?” he asked in a puzzled voice.
“I come on the train. Are you the police?” I asked getting ready to bolt.
“Nah, hang on! I’m not the police. Have you run away from home?”
“No. Mum said the Department were comin’ for me, so she packed my port, give me a fiver and told me to leg it, and not to let them get me, or they will lock me up. You the Department then?” I asked fearfully, heart in mouth.
“No mate. I think I know now. Is your mum Aboriginal?”
“Yeah. How did you know?” I asked in wonder.
“Oh, I come from the bush and we know these things. How would you like a job?”
“Doin’ what?” I asked, curious.
“Drovin’,” he said.
I thought about it while I sipped the tea. I needed a job. “Drovin’, what’s drovin’? I don’t think I can drove. What do you do?”
“Babysit cattle,” laughed Hugh. “I’m a drover for the meatworks. I got my own plant out at the Drovers Cottage, that’s where we got our camp. We contract to most works—Grascoss at Pentland, Angliss in Rockhampton, Swifts in Rocky, Alligator Creek, Mackay, Ross River, Merinda at Bowen. They pay, we work. We cover a lot of country at times. There’s three of us at the moment, Mike my brother, and Ted the cook and part-time horse tailer. They’re in the pub now. Can you ride a horse?”
“I dunno, never been near one.” I was feeling a bit worried.
“You’ll learn. Do you want the job?” Hugh gave a great big laugh at the look on my face. He paid the lady and we walked outside.
“You are fair dinkum, eh? If you’re fair dinks, I’ll take the job alright, by crikey I will, real quick.” I felt ten foot high, a real job.
Hugh stooped and looked at me, put his hand out and said, “You’re on,” as we shook hands. “The pay’s five quid a month all found. Alright with you?”
“Cripes, anything’s okay with me,” I told him.
He just laughed. “Come on, mate, we’ll go and prod the boys out of the Crown.”
Hugh went in and flushed them out and I waited on the footpath. Ted was a big grey-haired bloke, and I mean big. Two buses wide and one bus thick is how Mike described him, and I can’t disagree. He is just big all over, and as strong as he looks, but a real nice bloke and mostly gentle.
“Nobody’s mad enough to rouse him,” Mike told me. “A stockman was flogging a horse tied to a fence with a piece of number eight wire, and Ted hit him twice—first one broke his jaw and fractured a bone in his neck, the second broke all the ribs on his left side. The doctor reckoned this bloke was lucky Ted wasn’t wild. The RSPCA and the police reckon he should have given him another one for good measure. They had to put the poor bloody horse down. Yep, he’s a wild one, our Ted, but you got to stir him up.”
He looked like someone’s happy grandad to me. He shook my hand, or wrapped his around mine, gave me a smile and a pat on the head and said, “Welcome aboard.”
Mike was an entirely different type of bloke. He had the aura of the outdoors about him, always happy and easygoing, nothing seemed to worry him much. Everything he did was easy, or he made it seem easy. He had that knack. He was about the only one I ever heard razz Ted and get away with it. “You would make the biggest mistake of your life to pull Mike on,” Ted told me. That puzzled me a bit, why a big tough bloke like Ted would say something like that about Mike. Mike was a lover—all the girls liked Mike. He was a good-lookin’ bloke, about half a head shorter than Hugh, with jet black hair, black eyes that sparkled when he was happy or up to mischief, naturally brown skin made darker by the sun, and a slim Errol Flynn moe which graced the top lip and gave him the air of a dasher. Him and I hit it off straightaway. He draped his arm around my shoulder and offered me some advice: “You watch that moaning old pommy. He’s just a sour old bugger who’s lost his first sixpence and won’t be happy until he finds it again. I tell you, these pommies are all the same, mate, always moaning.” He said this with a great big laugh.
“Get out, you colonial swine. I can’t get a word in to moan over your drunken ravings,” Ted hooted triumphantly.
Hugh looked at me and raised his eyes to the sky. “Like a pair of bloody kids. You’ll hear plenty of this, mate. These buggers can never agree, just don’t listen.”
It was all an act. Ted, Mike and I became the best of mates. They sort of became my older brothers, and when they found out I couldn’t read or write, Mike became my first teacher. He got this book for me. Had it sent up from Brisbane, I think. Jane or John and Janet. My first school-book, anyway.
Around the fire at night they all became my teachers. And there were newspapers and Mike’s dirty Mickey Spillane books. Ted, who was well educated, had a good collection of the classics, and after a while I could read pretty well. I would be on my horse at the back of the mob but riding with Ivanhoe, the Three Musketeers, chasing pigs with Ralph, Jack and Peterkin, looking for bread growing on trees and candle-nut fruit, nuts that burn like candles, hard to believe eh! That’s where I learned to send my head for a walk.
I didn’t understand everything I read and would sometimes skip over the hard bits. They, the boys, would make me read three pages out loud every night. I got good at reading, but my spelling is still pretty rank. But I think they did a fair enough job, especially Ted. He would turn into Hitler’s brother at school time, with verbs and vowels, adverbs and adjectives, and other strange things that lived in books, and were real hard to grab. Ted reckoned education was riches and the more you got the richer you were. We didn’t entirely agree on that in those days. I couldn’t see the point.
Anyhow, we went and found Hugh’s truck—a 1948 Austin 8 tonner, with four feet added to the chassis and a lazy axle, Mike told me. I thought it was a good start that me and the truck were the same age. It had a big wooden crate on the back. “It’s for carting horses and gear,” Mike said as Ted and Hugh climbed in the cab.
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