Warrigal's Way

by Warrigal Anderson

  “Give it a try for you too, if you want,” he said.

  I thanked him and said I’d appreciate the help. We had tea, played a couple of games of pool and a game of darts, then went home. I got another three days at the meatworks, and on the Friday Roy said that his boss Harry had said he would put us on.

  On Monday we went with Roy to Nightcliff to a house site where we met the boss. Harry was a big, well-built bloke with an easy manner. Kevin stayed with Roy, and Harry and I went out to the workshop factory at the twelve mile and he told me we had to profile an office block and put the foundation in. The ground was so hard we couldn’t hammer the stakes in to hold our string lines for the profiles, so we had to nail a piece of twelve-by-one to the ground and nail the upright stakes to that. Harry made up the boxing, and we worked like slaves to hack the trenches for the reinforcing steel. We finished it by about lunchtime next day and the crane turned up. It was a ‘53 Kenworth, ex-Korean war tank carrier with a hydraulic crane on the back, which was operated from outside by levers. The driver got out and started to argue with Harry about money. He wanted an increased hourly rate, and as the crane belonged to the company, Harry was the boss. When he told him no, the bloke dropped his cool and pulled the pin.

  “What the hell are we going to do now?” Harry asked me.

  Being a cocky young bloke I said to him, “It don’t look all that hard to me.”

  “Do you think you could drive it?” he asked me.

  I told him I didn’t know, but if I could take it down the back for a while I could probably figure it out. He said to do it, so I drove it down the back and practised with the levers. There was a chart in the cab to follow for lifting different weights and another to show how not to overreach on the different angles and weights. I took it back and we put the half yard skip on the hook, and I did the pour very slowly and carefully.

  That night Harry gave me a book about four inches thick on operating the crane and safety measures and told me to read it up and remember it as I was the new crane driver. Mobile cranes were thin on the ground in those days. There was only ours and a fifty-ton P&H of Brambles, and John, their driver, did all he could to help me. After about a month placing beams and shutters on the houses we were building, I was confident of my ability, but was worried that someone would ask me for my licence.

  I spent a year lifting for houses and multi-storeyed blocks of flats for the Housing Commission, learning to read plans from Billy, our gang foreman, and learning to weld properly from George, who welded the beams and shutters into place. Everything went together like a giant jigsaw. It was a good job with good money and a great mob of blokes to work with. I was at last sort of beating the habit of looking over my shoulder, as I felt pretty secure.

  I was working in Nightcliff one day, on a big block of flats for the Housing Commission, when I saw a bloke in shorts, long socks, white shirt and tie and wearing a hard hat walking towards me. I brought the skip back and put it down and shook his hand. He told me his name was Dave and that he was from the Machinery Department and he wanted to know whether I had an operator’s licence. I said I didn’t, and he told me to finish pouring the truck as we only had two skips left and then to come over to the office. I thought I was in trouble for sure, but he was a really fair bloke, and he said he had watched me for a while and he thought I was competent. He wanted me to splice a rope strop and a wire strop, and he asked me some questions, which I answered to his satisfaction. He wrote me out an interim ticket which was good for six weeks, and told me to come into his office in town after that and sit the operators exam.

  I was convinced I would never pass a written exam, so I got myself into a fine old state and handed in my notice that night. The boys tried to get me to stay, but I had convinced myself I couldn’t do it. Harry asked me to stay at least until they could find another driver. On Friday the new driver turned up—a tall shaggy, hippie bloke—so I spent the next day with him and left that night.

  I spent the next week fishing and just mucking around with Nola, an Aboriginal girl I had met at the Dolphin Hotel one pool night. She was about eighteen and we just sort of clicked. I liked her parents and they liked me. Her dad worked at the Airforce base.

  The following Monday there was a knock on the door, and I opened it to find Noel, a Kiwi bloke, who was foreman on the building site now Billy had left. He told me that the hippie had demolished one lifting stage of the crane, over reaching to take a two-ton packet of Jarrah off the back of a truck. They had had to hire Browns’ hire crane, 25-ton hydraulic cap, which was the same as ours but cab-operated, and with a longer reach. Harry had sacked the hippie and they were stuck for an operator. I didn’t really want to go back as I wanted a change, but Harry had given me a go and now it was time to return the favour. I went back for a month until Blue, a very capable driver, turned up.

  There was one highlight during that month, Benny, one of the boys, organised a picnic and a day trip across the harbour to Mandorah. We were going to have a swim, a picnic lunch, a few beers at the pub, and dance until the last ferry took us home. It sounded great. However, it didn’t quite turn out as planned.

  About half a dozen of us managed to miss the first ferry, waiting for the wives and kids of some of the blokes. So Ben chartered a water taxi to take us across, but we had to go to Casuarina Beach to get it. The missing wives and kids had turned up, meaning there were now about fifteen of us. The taxi could take only five at a time, so the rest of us were sitting down on the beach, having a yarn and a beer while we waited. We had some people with us from the Buff club who we didn’t know very well, and all they could do was whinge. We got sick of it and Ben said something I didn’t hear, and next thing, pow!, one of these blokes had king-hit Ben and knocked him right out. Little Roy jumped up to say his two bob’s worth, and pow! he got the same. Now Roy was lying alongside Ben, and women were screaming and kids were howling. I poked out my jaw and asked him if he wanted to go for a hat trick. He must have been feeling a bit ashamed of himself and he declined, thank Christ. They left and we eventually got to Mandorah.

  The day had started with a bang, but little did we know what the night had in store. Things settled down during the afternoon. There were a couple of sore jaws and shattered egos but we were all determined to put the bad start behind us and have a good time. All was going well until one of the blokes in the band said something to the oldest of Ben’s three daughters that really upset her. By this time we were pretty tanked up. Roy’s mate Bill, a fiery sort of a bloke, told the offender to apologise or wear a thick ear. Down went the music and in the blink of an eye there was a tremendous blue going on. Everybody got a few licks in, and after about ten minutes the chap apologised and we all had a beer together and said what a great blue it had been. Bill and Roy were the subjects of another escapade. One Sunday Bill came around to see if I wanted to go to Casuarina beach for a swim, so I grabbed my gear and we collected Roy as well. Bill was a tall, rangy bloke, an ex-ringer with a dry sense of humour, while Roy was a nuggety game cock sort of bloke whose favourite saying was, “You can’t educate idiots”.

  At the beach Roy spread a towel in the lee of the sand-bank just below the grass line and as there was a nip in the wind he had put his jersey on. He was lying sort of uphill reading a book. Bill and I were walking back up the beach towards him when we saw a big brown snake poke its head out of the grass and bite him on the arm. God, the pandemonium.

  “Ahhh, the bastard’s bit me. Quick! Get the ute. Rush me up the hospital!” Roy screeched, hopping around. “I bloody tell you it’s really got me!”

  Bill fixed a steely eye on him, and his next sentence floored both of us. “I haven’t got much juice in the ute, Roy. Not enough to go galavanting all over town anyway.”

  I was now starting to have a small panic attack.

  “You mad bastard!” Roy yelled. “I’m dying of snake bite, and you’re worried about bloody petrol! Your best mate and you’re just gunna watch me die. Geez, you’re a bast
ard, Bill!”

  “We’d better get the bugger up there, Bill. He could be kicking off,” I said.

  Billy just laughed and said, “He’s been running around rabbiting for the last ten minutes. You couldn’t kill him with a brick. If it had got you, Roy, you’d be bloody dead by now.”

  We quietened him down and had a look. There was venom on his shirt and jersey, but the snake had not pierced his skin. How Bill knew it had missed I will never know, but it was closer than I ever want to get to a snakebite, I can assure you. Roy never really forgave Bill, and I know I will never forget him and his “not much juice in the ute”.

  I called into the Parap Pub about a week after I left the crane to Blue. I got talking to the barman, who I knew slightly, and he told me that Dowsets were looking for a bloke.

  “Give Tony a ring. It can’t hurt,” he said.

  Tony asked me to come into the office, so I got a taxi and went to meet him. He was a big, good-looking bloke, with black curly hair. He told me they wanted someone who could do a bit of all sorts of things—pour concrete, do a bit of boxing, drive the truck, relieve Trevor on the road-train.

  “But the first thing is to get the reo steel in down at Warrabri settlement, near Tennant Creek. We’re building a hospital there. Would you be willing to go down there?” I said I could, but I was wondering how Nola was going to react. She had been getting in my ear lately about rings on fingers, kids and cosy little houses. I had been taking large side-steps, and this job could be an opportunity to cool things off a bit.

  Nola was waiting for me when I got there, so I took her up to the Club for lunch. She wasn’t overly rapt when I told her about the job, but she agreed I could make better money out in the bush. I promised to ring whenever I could.

  As we were having lunch, Dennis came in and got a drink and came over and sat down with us. He worked for the same construction company, but in a different gang. Dennis was a Canadian, and I asked him what he was doing here in the middle of the day.

  “Didn’t you hear?” he said. “I’m going home at the end of the week.”

  “What, for good?” I asked.

  “Yeah. The old man’s taken crook and I have to take over the garage, there’s no one else. Hey! You still got your car?” he asked me.

  I told him no I’d sold it as it had been making rude noises in the motor.

  “Well, I’ve still got that old ‘62 Consul station wagon that I’ve got to sell. You can buy it if you want. I’ll tell you what—how much you got in your pocket?”

  I had the princely sum of twelve dollars.

  “That will do,” he said, taking it and giving me the rego papers.

  I wasn’t going to argue. It went alright. It blew a bit of smoke, but what the hell, and it had seven months of rego.

  “Thanks, mate. You have a good trip home,” I said as he handed me the keys.

  “It’s in the car park out back,” he told me.

  We dropped Dennis in town and Nola and I went down to Casuarina beach, we drove through the scrub down to the water’s edge, got undressed, had a good look for crocodiles, and went skinny dipping. We had great fun for a couple of hours, then I took her home. I didn’t stay. I told Nola I was going back to pack my gear, ring Tony and take off for Tennant Creek. She cried and made me promise to ring her as soon as I could.

  Tony told me to report to Charlie, the engineer, as soon as I got there. So I filled the station wagon up with petrol, got a patching kit, a couple of tyre levers and went out along McMillans Road past the dump to look for a couple of half-decent spare tyres. When I found these I was off.

  The trip was pretty good. The car used a bit of oil, but that was to be expected as the rings in the motor weren’t too flash. I got through Tennant and stopped at the road-house at Wahope Well for a feed and a drink. I had a yarn to Sandy, the bar girl, and Malcolm, the boss. Mal told me that the boys from the Warrabri job came in a couple of times a week to collect mail and pick up stores. He said that the turn off to the settlement was about ten miles down the road, and it was a further thirteen miles to the place from there.

  I was relaxed, the car was going like a well-lit cigar, when bang, clatter, clunk, it stopped dead. I got out lifted the bonnet and it wasn’t hard to see what was wrong. Half the inside of the motor was outside—chucked a rod is the casual term for it.

  About an hour later a blue International flat-top stopped and Charlie, the driver, introduced himself, then towed me into the settlement. Luckily for me it was a mail day, and they had told Charlie about me at the roadhouse. He pulled the car in past the police station and store, past the school and around the back of the cook house, where we left it. He showed me my tent and told me to watch for scorpions, as the site was full of them.

  “Probably won’t kill you, but make you bloody crook, and they’re painful,” he said, and left me to sort myself out.

  The area was dry, but the firm had a licence to drink on the site, but not outside the fence that went right around it. I was putting my gear away when a well-built, dark-haired white bloke came over and introduced himself.

  “G’day. My name’s Jim. I’m the concrete contractor. Come over to the mess for a cup of tea.”

  I followed him over to a building that had the kitchen, dining room and office under the one roof. Sitting at a table was a slim, dark-haired, olive-complexioned bloke with a moustache, who Jim introduced as Joe. His girlfriend Sylvia was the cook. She was white and blond, and a rotten cook. We had a cup of tea and Jim told me that the job was stop-start.

  “They can’t keep blokes here,” he said. “A couple of weeks of heat and flies and they’re gone, or mucking around with the settlement girls, Bert, the supervisor, he’s right down on that. He says it causes trouble and he’s right. Anyway, “Jim continued, “come and have a look at the plan. Don’t worry about Charlie. He’s got his two cartons and a couple of sheilas in there with him. We won’t see him until he runs out of grog. I think he hates the place. Anyway, this is what we’re doing.”

  He showed me how much work had been done and what we still had to do. “Geez, there’s a fair bit yet before we get off the ground,” I said to Jim and he agreed.

  The next morning I was on the job at half past seven to meet Jack, who lived on the settlement and was the leading hand for the casual Aboriginal workers each day. He was a good bloke and a handy carpenter and did all the boxing for Jim. He told me that the company had an agreement with the settlement to employ eleven blokes each day.

  “But it’s hard enough to get five, and even harder to keep them for a full day. They usually shoot through at lunchtime and turn up after work for their pay.” He pointed to a mob of blokes boiling a billy under some trees. “That’s the best of a bad mob. Come over and I’ll introduce you.”

  I met Graham, Moses, Henry, Toby and Don. Graham and Don tied steel before, but I was going to have to teach the others.

  Jack walked over to a trench with a half-built reo cage in it. “We got this for the other day, all that steel laid out there, that’s for here. You’ll work it out, eh? I’ll have to give Jim and Joe a hand.”

  I worked with the boys for about an hour and promoted Graham to leading hand and asked him to keep an eye on the boys while I went to have another look at the plan. In the drawing office Jim was waiting and I went over the steel plan for the floor with him. It was straightforward enough, with no tricky bits or problems, so I went back to the job.

  The boys told me they didn’t like the heat in the middle of the day, so we decided to start at six and work until one, with a half-hour break at ten. This worked well and we got more done. We were happy and Jim was happy.

  We used to go hunting in the afternoons, Graham, Don, Toby and I. The boys were teaching me to throw a boomerang and to use the woomera and spear. I wasn’t much good, but they were deadly, and I really enjoyed it. Graham is a bark painter and by the look of his work a very good one.

  Charlie eventually surfaced. He came staggering out of his
caravan and tripped over a piece of one-inch waterpipe cemented into the ground. Swearing horribly, he got a big hammer and pounded it right into the ground.

  “You know what this is?” said Jim to me. “That’s the datum peg for the whole job. Now we have to go over to the school and shoot it all the way back.”

  The next thing that happened was that Jim found Joe and Sylvia in a compromising situation on the dining-room table, and sacked them both. We got a couple of local girls to work in the kitchen, and I was working with Don just outside the door on their first day. One of the girls put the jug on, while her mate, Lena, was cutting bread and making sandwiches. The kettle had one of those whistling tops on it, and as it started to boil, it started to whistle. It got up a good head of steam and was whistling like dixie and Lena screamed to her mate, “Run for your life, it’s gunna blow!” and they both came out of the kitchen like wombats in front of a bush fire. Laughing, I went in and took the kettle off the heat and made the tea. Try as we might we could not get those girls back into that kitchen. So I ended up doing the cooking, until a week later Syd, the Alice Springs boss, came up and sacked Charlie and closed the job.

  I went back to Darwin to Dowsets and took over Trevor’s job on the road-train while he went on holidays. A red Acco with a trailer—a good little rig. I did two trips a week, depending on loads and turn-around time, carting building materials from Alice to Darwin. I did it for two months, with Nola getting in my ear every time I was in Darwin, so when Trevor came back I left.

  I had a week off and then one night in the Victoria hotel I ran into Snow, who I knew from the Buff club and who worked on a barge that travelled all round the islands off the coast.

  “You working?” he asked me over a beer, and I told him I had just pulled the pin. “If you want a job, come down the Forcroy, down Perkins yard at six tonight. We’re gunna do the milk run around the Gulf. Just stores, dry stuff for the Aboriginal settlements.”

  So at six that night after a big and final row with Nola I turned up at the gangplank with my gear. Snow took me aboard the barge and introduced me to the skipper, and the rest of the crew. We cast off at half past six and my career as a sailor had started. We rubbed, scrubbed and polished, doing a trick on the wheel in between, and painted what seemed like the complete ship from stem to stern. She was a trim and tidy ship. I got to see all the settlements around the top end. It was a good job that suited a gypsy like me. There are a few things that stick in my mind. Like the time we were at Maningrida. We’d unloaded their supplies and had to wait for the tide to lift us off, so Bob, Jim and I decided to go for a swim. We lined up on the stern rail and dived into the water, just as a twelve-foot hammerhead shark came swimming into view. Needless to say we got back on that boat in record time. We rigged our shark line, chained it to a 44-gallon drum and anchored it, and we got it, no sweat, about an hour later. We had to use the forward port winch to land it. Christ it was big.