Warrigal's Way

by Warrigal Anderson

  “Whatever you reckon. I’m easy. Want to go now?” he asked, standing and rinsing out his mug. We hung our mugs on a tree branch and set off.

  The afternoon was warm and balmy. The tide was coming in and all these small sharks about 3 to 4 feet long were coming in with it. There were mobs of them, and we agreed that swimming was a big no no. We watched a bloke on the beach just to the side of the wharf pull in an eight-foot shark.

  “Geez, look at that. Let’s go and have a look,” said Dave, so we put our gear down and walked over. The bloke had killed it, cutting its spine behind the head. I don’t know what breed it was, but it had the biggest mouth full of the sharpest teeth you ever saw.

  “What are you going to do with it?” Dave asked the bloke that caught it.

  “I just want the jaws, mate. You can have the rest if you want it.”

  There was an old feller standing nearby and he asked Dave what he was going to do with it. Davo sort of looked at him, then at me. “Give us the fishing knife,” he said. I handed it to him and he cut two big fillets off the shark. The meat was white and about an inch thick. “If it will eat us, we gonna eat it.” He looked at me and grinned. “It’s alright, I’ve eaten shark before. Let’s go back to camp and I’ll cook you a feed to remember.” Dave told the old bloke he could have the rest, and he asked us if we would give him a hand to load it onto his trailer.

  “What are you going to do with it?” I asked him.

  “Put it in my garden and grow vegies over it. Best fertiliser in the world,” he told me.

  So we helped him load it, then went back to camp where Dave cooked the fillets. I was a bit sus when first nibbling into it, but after I got past the first couple of bites it was tasty.

  “What do you reckon we have a camp, and try our luck again tonight,” I asked Dave.

  “Yeah, good plan,” he answered, lying down on top of his swag and nodding off almost immediately.

  I finished my mug of tea and did the same, and woke about nine to the smell of cooking.

  “I was just about to wake you,” said Dave, giving me a plate of fish and a couple of bits of bread and a mug of tea.

  “Thanks. You must of been up for a while. Couldn’t you sleep?”

  “Nah. Got off for a while, but woke about half past seven and couldn’t drop off again. So I had a nose around the rocks and got a tin of snails and some pippies for bait. Geez, you were doin’ alright though, sleeping like a baby.”

  “When are we going fishing?” I asked him.

  We could go now. The tide will be about half in—just perfect,” he answered.

  We did the dishes and squared the camp.

  “Okay, let’s go,” I said. I tossed Dave the keys. “You drive. I feel a bit full and lazy after that feed. Geez, we’re doin’ alright for beach bummin’. Two good feeds in four hours. I reckon we’re kicking on,” I said.

  The night was warm and velvet-black and the stars were hanging in the sky like jewels, giving us nice soft starlight to fish by. We set ourselves up on the jetty by the wharf and we started to catch good leather jacket. We threw the small ones back and just kept those that were pan size. There were about half a dozen of us on the jetty altogether. I pulled out my tobacco and rolled a smoke, and just as I lit it up a dark bloke came over and asked me if he could get a smoke off me. I handed him the packet and he rolled one, and I asked him if his mate wanted one too.

  “Christ, he’d probably give you his left leg for one,” he said.

  So we called him over and I gave him a smoke, and we introduced ourselves. Roy was the first bloke’s name and Phil was his mate. We told them we had just come down from Darwin and were going to muck around for a week or two then head on down to Port Hedland.

  Phil said, “I knew you weren’t from here. If we asked a local for a smoke they would tell us to bugger off. They reckon we’re lazy black buggers, but none of them will give us a go. Our families have lived in tin shacks up the back of town for years—out of sight, out of mind. If you go looking for work, it’s like I said—they call us lazy but won’t give us a go.”

  Roy agreed. “We usually get a bit of work on the fishing boats or we go crabbing. The bloke at the Chinese restaurant and the other Chinese will buy them off us. We get on pretty good with them, but there’s bad feeling between us and the young white blokes here in town. It’s been like that for years. The pearl boats used to like black crews because we were good sailors and could free dive pretty good, but the arse has dropped out of that. See out there? One boat—used to be heaps.”

  I told them my story over a few smokes, and Phil reckoned the same thing happened there. Both of them had brothers, sisters, aunties and uncles they had never seen or could only just remember.

  “What are you doing tomorrow?” asked Roy.

  “Not a hell of a lot, are we?” I said to Dave.

  “Not that I know of,” he answered.

  “Come and meet our mob in the morning and we’ll take you out crabbing—muddies, really good tucker,” Roy told us.

  They pulled in their lines and got ready to go, and I asked them if they wanted a lift home as it was a fair step from the wharf to town. They both said yes. I gave them what fish we had caught, and gave Dave the car keys, as he was going to drive them home while I kept fishing. I was going to give them my tobacco but Dave said he would get them a packet on the way.

  I caught another couple of fish just before the turn of the tide. Dave came back and said, “You want to see the way those poor bastards have to live. Makes you ashamed to be Australian. It’s probably the same back home in Kalgoorlie, but you know I just never seen it.” He threw in his line and sat with his back against a bollard and I could see his brain working. “Geez, they’re nice people you know,” he said to me, just as I got a sharp tug on my line.

  “Christ, this is a good one,” I said, as my line stretched tight.

  “Pull it in, it’s probably a skinny,” screeched Dave.

  It didn’t feel too skinny to me—it was fighting like stink. I pulled it in, and there on the end of the line was a huge pink sea snake. Dave, who had brought the knife over, shot backwards in about three big leaps. I was standing there looking this thing in the eye, as it was wriggling on the line, and all I could think of was that there’s no antidote for sea snakes. Dave was jumping about and screeching, “Cut it orf, cut it orf.”

  Christ, did I need telling? But he’s dancing about with the bloody knife. He brought it over after I shouted at him a few times, and I let the snake go—hook, line and sinker and quite a few feet of line.

  That was it for the fishing that night. We cleaned the fish we’d caught and went back to camp.

  Next morning we drove through town and up to where the boys lived. I was surprised to see another pub up there. Dave said it was the original and had been there for years. We pulled up alongside the shacks, which Dave reckons look even worse in the daylight. But they didn’t look too bad to me as I had lived in worse as a kid. Phil told us to pull up a stump and meet the mob. I met old men, old women, boys and girls—too many names to remember. But there were another three blokes about our age who were coming crabbing with us—Paddy, Lionel and Richard. We got a mug of tea, rolled a smoke each and sat down for a yarn.

  “Been crabbing before?” asked Paddy, a slim dark bloke about five feet six tall.

  “I have, in Queensland,” I told him. “Used to hook ‘em out of the holes with a piece of half-inch rod with a hook on it, and feed them a thong to get them in the bag—big buggers around Bribie Island.”

  Richard, a really dark nuggety bloke, laughed. “We do the same. They are really good at the moment—fat, not filled with water.”

  Lionel was a coloured bloke, slim and small and good-looking. The boys reckon he’s a whizz with the girls. “You blokes from Darwin, eh. I was up there for a while, had a great time too,” he said with a smile.

  “You blokes ready?” asked Roy.

  “As ready as we’ll ever be,” I told h
im.

  We followed the boys, each of us carrying a six foot pole with a hook attached and a sugar bag, through the long grass and into the mangroves and the mud.

  “Over here, Ed,” called Paddy. “Biggest mob of holes. Look.”

  I slopped my way through blue mud and up to my knees over to where he was, and sure enough, there were holes all over the place. I put the hook down the hole and felt a crab, so I worked the hook under it and jagged it out. Paddy sprang on it as it came out, grabbed it just behind the nippers, turned it over and looked at its tail. It was a Jenny so he let it go. I put the hook down again and hooked out a beaut. This was a buck—it had a square tail. We got about half a dozen good bucks from the spot, and then caught another three as we worked our way back to the bank. Richard joined us about ten minutes later and he had six and Lionel had five really big ones. We smoked and waited for about half an hour before Phil turned up with seven and a couple of minutes later Dave and Roy turned up with eight.

  “That’s thirty-five,” said Roy after the count-up. “What do you reckon we sell twenty-five and eat the rest?”

  We all reckoned that sounded pretty good.

  “The Chinaman won’t take them all,” said Paddy, “but we can sell the rest to the cook at the Roebuck Pub.”

  We took them back to camp and the boys gave the women the ones to be cooked while Paddy, Roy, Dave and I went downtown and sold the rest. The Chinese restaurant took ten. “We always give him first dibs. He pays the best—two dollars fifty. The other buggers only give a dollar a crab, so they get seconds,” Roy told us.

  We went back to camp with forty dollars, and Roy gave the money to an old lady. “She holds the bank,” he told me.

  The crabs were cooked and ready and after a feed and a cup of tea I told the boys we would shout them a few beers at the pub. As soon as we walked in, the grey-haired feller behind the bar looked at the boys and said, “You buggers can piss off. You know it’s the back veranda or nothing.”

  He was an ignorant old bugger who needed a kick in the arse. So I said, “Hey, you old piss ant! These blokes are with us!” The rest of the drongo mob in the bar were giving us vacant looks.

  “Well, you can piss off too,” he said.

  Dave, like me, was getting a bit warlike, but Roy told us it wasn’t worth it. So we got a carton of cans and went back to our camp for a beer and a yarn and took the boys home later.

  During the next week Roy and Phil came with us each day and we ranged around the coast. We saw wartime wrecks of the flying boats. I was surprised when the boys told us that Jap aeroplanes shot and killed people in the area, as I didn’t know they had got this far down. They showed us the dinosaur tracks in the stone out at Cable Bay, and we saw the caravan park that had just started out there. We had found a heap of really big sea snails out on the point around the dinosaur tracks, so we got the billy out and filled it with half fresh water and half sea water and put the snails on the barbecue to cook. We were just sitting down to hoe in when this big tourist bus pulled in, and caught us with our utensils at the ready. The Yanks thought we were mad, but the Poms joined us with bread, salt and vinegar and we all had a good feed, cooking up another couple of billys full. They reckoned they called them winkles back home, and said this had been the best part of their tour.

  We left Broome early one morning, with Dave driving and me sitting in the passenger seat sipping on a can of Emu. We hit a particularly bad bit of road, with pot holes you could hide a truck in. You don’t see them until you hit them, because they’re full of bulldust and look normal until you go over them. We saw a car and caravan on the side of the road up ahead.

  “Someone in trouble. We’d better pull up,” Dave said.

  “Yeah, they might need a hand.” The first thing we noticed was a woman holding an umbrella, and then we saw a pair of feet sticking out from under the caravan. The woman was old and we thought she looked a bit frail. (Man were we wrong! Nell, as we got to know her, was the type of lady who could monster and mother a bunch of Hells Angels in five minutes flat, drive wagons across endless plains, shoot guns, spit on Hitler’s boots and look him in the eye.)

  Frank, her husband, wriggled out from the under the van. “G’day. Put the jug on, Nell. You blokes have a cuppa?” he said, all in one bellow. It was a bit stunning. “Broken spring. Bloody tandem axle. I been trying to tie it up—no hope,” said Frank.

  We said we’d have a look, but Nell had the tea ready so we had a cuppa first and they told us about themselves. They were from New South Wales, had just retired, and had decided to have a look at the rest of Australia. We finished our tea and had a look at the broken spring. It had had it—broken about an inch from the hanger, main leaf too. Sandfire was close, about a hundred and fifty miles, but too far to take it off and weld it and bring it back. Nah, it would have to be a bush remedy. We sat in the sun mulling it over, with a can of beer for inspiration, and suddenly the opposite side of the road came into focus and I saw it I looked at Dave and knew he had twigged to it too.

  “Do you reckon it’ll work?” he asked me.

  “It works on wagons,” I said with a grin.

  “Have you got an axe, Frank? We’ve got one but it’s under a ton of junk.”

  Nell opened one of her cupboards and presto, one axe. She had a spare opera house in there, Frank reckoned, just in case someone asked.

  “You got an idea?” Frank asked us.

  “Yeah, we’ll make a wooden one,” said Dave.

  “Will it work?” he asked, a bit of doubt in his voice.

  “We’ll find out,” I told him as I followed Dave across the road. Dave started cutting a branch off the only gum tree for miles. It had a natural curve and being green would also be springy. We chopped and trimmed it to shape, then had to heat the Falcon wheel spanner in an open fire to drill the holes for the bolts. It bolted up a treat and after cutting a couple of grooves for the spring hangers, it looked pretty dinky-di.

  So with a final cuppa, we took off for Sandfire Flat, Frank leading the way and us riding shotgun. It worked perfectly all the way to Port Hedland. Frank was really tickled and saved the wooden spring. He later called into Kalgoorlie and told Dave’s old man about it. When he got home he took it down to his local paper and they did a story on it with a photo of Dave. It was a good write up—about Australian youth still having the skills of the past. We didn’t think what we’d done was any big deal—any bushie would have done it. I was a bit worried that my name had been printed in the article, and I thought the Department might see it. I expected a hand on the shoulder for the next few weeks.

  23

  A Family Man

  Nosing around Port Hedland looking for work, we went to the labour office, where they told us there was nothing doing. So we went to the pub, where we scored a job. We ran into Bob, who was a partner in the biggest engineering shop outside the mines, and he told us we could start at his place tomorrow. Both of us could handle a welder no sweat, and on our first day we welded up stress cracks on a gravel loader.

  Dave moved on after a couple of months, but I stayed on as I really liked the job. Bob knew a Justice of the Peace who we had a few drinks with one night and I told him my story. He said he would do some discreet checking, which he did, and told me that as of last March, when I turned twenty-one, I was free to spit in the eye of anyone. My race from the Department was run, and I was free to do whatever I wanted to do.

  I learned to scuba dive, as we maintained the buffers for the ore carriers at Finucane Island. They were 988 cat tyres, and sometimes the impact of the berthing would blow them, and we would have to dive to free the shackle that held them on the ocean floor. I also spent time in the drawing office with John, another of the partners, who improved my skills with plans. He taught me how to estimate a job, how to do cost planning and projections of a job three months, six months and a year ahead. Vern, another of the partners, taught me how to do a petrol-tank installation and how to change the computer in a pump and pu
t in line flow meters. I revelled in it. I had a thirst for knowledge and was keen to learn. I was sent to Goldsworthy, an iron-ore mine, to take charge of a gang up there, renovating Wabco haulpack trucks, P&H power shovels and miles of conveyors. I was there about six months, then came back to Port Hedland to take the job of outside foreman. This entailed meeting engineers and making sure our jobs all over the Pilbara were going smoothly and were on time. I was driving two or three thousand miles a fortnight and a weekend off was rare.

  I got back into town one night, booked myself into the Hedland Motor Inn and rang my mate John, who was shop foreman, and bullied him into coming for a beer and a game of pool. We put our names down for the pool table on the way to the bar. There we were served by a small dark-haired girl about five feet tall, with dark tan skin and big black eyes.

  “Hello John. Couple of beers?”

  “Thanks Jen. Meet Eddie, a mate of mine.”

  We got our beer, found a table and I started bending his ear. “Who is she? How do you know her? Is she married? Where does she come from?”

  “Hey! Whoa, back up. First, she’s a friend of Lyn’s. No, she’s not married. She’s just busted her engagement to a Kiwi bloke. She’s a Kiwi too.”

  “Come on, my shout, drink up.” I took the pots up to the bar. “Two more please.”

  Jenny took the glasses and put them in the tray and got two more out of the cabinet. She looked at me as she was filling them. “Do you know John well?” she asked.

  “Yeah, him and I work together. I’m the bush boss. I don’t get into town much, but I got this weekend off so I booked in here. Look Jenny, John, Lyn and I are going to dine here tonight. Would you like to join us?” I asked her.

  “I would love to. I get off at seven. I’ll meet you in the guest lounge at half past if you like.” She gave me a big smile. Her big black sparkling eyes made her whole face glow. Taking those two beers back to the table was real hard. I would rather have sat and just looked at her. I really had the bug.