After Colombo, a Great Cricket Match between the first- and second-class passengers ‘was the principal topic of conversation in our little world for days’. Then the cakes ran out but disaster was averted by the ability of the ship’s baker to produce as many as the passengers required.
As the equator was crossed ‘the heat was trying, but nights were delightful’. They ploughed on via Albany in Western Australia. At their destination, Melbourne, they ‘were ever so long getting to the pier’, anxious to greet waiting friends and family. Even so, and after all their adventures and pleasures aboard, ‘it was good to be at home again . . .’
This was how the privileged travelled in the great age of ocean voyaging. From the secure heights of the first class lounge, they journeyed very comfortably, looking down on the lives and deaths of those less fortunate.
LES DARCY’S GIRL
Among its vast collections, the National Museum of Australia holds a tiny gold locket that once belonged to the sweetheart of boxing legend Les Darcy. The delicate nine-carat gold locket is worn from handling. It contains a miniature portrait of Les together with a lock of his hair, thought to have been clipped from the champion’s head as he lay dying in Memphis, Tennessee. The locket belonged to the woman who rushed from Sydney to the doomed boxer’s bedside in 1917. Her name was Winnie O’Sullivan.
The object of Winnie’s enduring affection was the remarkable young boxer from a coal mining community in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales. Born in 1895, Leslie Darcy first came to public attention as The Maitland Surprise Packet in 1912. The following year one of his early local victories provided enough money for his parents to buy their own cottage.
It was the beginning of a career in which he was rarely bested. His stunning footwork was honed by practising Irish and Scottish dancing and he enjoyed the natural advantages of a long reach and great strength. Darcy was also musical, playing both the harmonica and violin. He was also considered one of the finest gentlemen to step into a ring; his respectful treatment of friends and opponents, good humour and film star looks quickly making him a public idol.
When he was narrowly—and controversially—beaten by the American Fritz Holland at the Sydney Stadium in July 1914, 2000 of his enraged supporters tried to burn the building down. Two months later he again lost to Holland over three fouls he allegedly delivered in the last three rounds of the fight. Over the next six months Darcy lost only one out of six high profile fights. He faced Holland for a third time in March 1915 and won on points. At just twenty years of age he was a national celebrity.
That year, Darcy met and fell deeply in love with Winnie O’Sullivan. The O’Sullivans owned the popular Lord Dudley Hotel in Sydney’s Paddington where the champion enjoyed socialising with Winnie’s show-business set. They wanted to become engaged but Winnie was only nineteen. As Winnie would later write, ‘Mother said I was too young, and I mustn’t have a ring until we could announce the engagement, so Les gave me a diamond bracelet instead.’ Darcy fitted into the family easily and the pub became his second home. He even helped out behind the bar after returning from a fight. Darcy’s easy way, big toothy grin and warm personality made him everyone’s friend. Well, almost everybody. His brilliant career soon ran into trouble.
The Gallipoli campaign plunged the country into war and grief as the casualties mounted. The government was desperate for men to enlist, especially young men. The popular press began to question why the great fighter had not volunteered to fight. After receiving white feathers in the mail, he signed up in an emotional response. As he was not yet 21, he needed his parents’ permission, which his mother refused to give, after which he was further vilified in the papers, a galling contrast to his previous lionisation.
He began to receive offers to fight in the United States, which was not then at war. Keen to ensure the financial security of his family, Darcy wanted to go. But he and his management fell out with potential backers and he sought a deal with the Commonwealth government instead. The deal struck was that in return for a passport, Darcy would post a thousand-pound bond against his return after contesting the title and promise to enlist when he got back. This arrangement fell through, however, largely due to the machinations of one of Darcy’s former backers, Hugh D. McIntosh, the owner of the Sydney Stadium and a man with considerable influence with the newspapers. Three days before his twenty-first birthday, and a day before the results of the bitter conscription plebiscite would be known, Darcy stowed away aboard the Hattie Luckenback, bound for the United States. Such was the need for secrecy that Darcy told no one he was going, not even Winnie.
When the news got out, Darcy was vilified as a coward and a ‘shirker’ by the popular press at home, although the reaction of the American newspapers would be exactly the opposite. When he arrived in New York in December 1916, his first act was to telegraph his mother that he had arrived safely and to ask her to telephone Winnie.
Then Darcy was feted by reporters, cheered on stages, honoured with dinners and even appeared in vaudeville shows. No other visiting boxer had ever received such a welcome and reports of his doings even drowned out war news in the American press:
Darcy is always smiling. He is quiet and modest in his manner, and boasting seems to be entirely lacking in his make-up. His twinkling grey eyes disappear entirely when he laughs heartily. His hair is brushed straight back over his massive head in true college boy style. When he smiles he displays two rows of even white teeth . . .
All this was widely reported back home. But crucial questions remained unanswered: when and where would he fight? And who would he challenge?
While his management tried to arrange a bout, the negative depictions of Darcy from the Australian press began to filter through to the American papers. The United States was about to enter the European conflict and patriotic war mongering was on the increase. The governor of New York state banned Darcy from fighting, and other states followed suit. So he travelled to Memphis, Tennessee, a city with a strong sporting tradition. Here the mayor and local interests were happy to have Darcy fight, especially as by then he had registered to become a United States citizen. In a private match, Darcy defeated the main American heavyweight contender in two rounds, even though the Australian was suffering from a mysterious sore throat at the time.
Impressed, the Memphis sports organisation agreed to organise a title fight but suggested that Darcy enlist in the American forces. He joined the aviation section of the Reserve Signal Corps as a sergeant. Darcy was given two weeks’ leave from service to prepare for the bout. But despite being described as the most perfect specimen of manhood the enlisting officer had ever seen, Darcy collapsed during training. He had blood poisoning caused by two unhealed front teeth broken in a fight in Sydney the previous year. The teeth had spiked back into the bone beneath his gums and become ulcerated. This developed into inflammation of the heart, then pneumonia. It was soon clear that the champion was losing his last fight.
Before all this, Winnie had been missing Darcy, and so she had begged her reluctant parents to let her go to him. They agreed only because she would be effectively chaperoned by some of her showbiz friends bound for America to try their luck in Hollywood. And Winnie promised to return to them.
Winnie left with her friends on 17 March and while in San Francisco managed to telephone Darcy, who told her that he was doing well and not to come to Memphis until he had proved himself in that ring. While in Los Angeles, she heard about Darcy’s case of tonsillitis. But one Saturday night Winnie received a telegram saying that Darcy was sinking fast and asking her to come at once. ‘I was just paralysed with worry,’ she later recalled.
It took three days to reach Memphis, and Winnie was unable to see Darcy until the following day. When she did he said, ‘Oh, Winnie, when they told me you were here I thought they were joking me.’ He joked about dying but Winnie was distressed at his wasted appearance and the bandages swathing his arms. Darcy rallied, but two days later his sister asked Winnie not to be to
o long with her visit, so she briefly spoke to him and then said goodbye. But as she reached the door, Darcy’s sister called her back. Winnie ran to embrace him once again, but the champion was already dead.
His body was embalmed and received a sportsman’s funeral in Memphis attended by the greats of American boxing. The coffin, draped in the Australian and American flags, was shipped to San Francisco amid widespread mourning, and then back to Australia. There was ‘barely breathing space’ at the dead hero’s requiem mass at St Joseph’s in Woollahra. They say that nearly half a million mourners filed through the church to view the dead champion one last time. A massive crowd followed the casket from the church to Central railway station. Street sellers did a strong trade in memorial buttons and a man sold a ballad sheet in the streets reflecting the inaccurate belief that the Americans killed Les Darcy:
Way down in the USA
Where poor Les Darcy died
His mother’s only joy
Australia’s bonny boy
How they longed for that night
To see Les Darcy fight
How he hit them
How he beat them
Every Saturday night
The critics ’round the door
Said they had never saw
A lad like Les before
Fight on the Stadium floor
They said he was a skiter
But he proved himself a fighter
But we lost all hope
When he got the dope
Way down in the USA
Les was finally laid to rest in his home ground at East Maitland cemetery but Hugh D. McIntosh’s press interests continued to vilify the champion, attacking what they portrayed as the graveyard canonisation of Les Darcy, ‘the shirker’. But Les Darcy’s legend ultimately bested the gutter press and has lived on long after the newspapers of the day have been forgotten.
Winnie married in 1921. Once asked by the writer Ruth Park whether she thought that Darcy might have ended up as a ‘tubby publican’ if he had lived, she replied, ‘No, he would have been a farmer: I was agreeable, the man mattered, not the place.’ She kept the gold locket but never spoke to her husband and children about her love for ‘Australia’s bonny boy’.
CAB ACROSS THE NULLARBOR
Bea Miles was one of Sydney’s great eccentrics. Born in 1902, Bea, or just B, had a difficult relationship with her conservative middle-class family from an early age. At Abbotsleigh school she made political comments and wrote essays criticising World War I, which was then raging. An inheritance allowed her financial independence but conflicts with her father over what was then considered her immoral bohemian lifestyle continued. After a brief enrolment at Sydney University, Bea contracted encephalitis. The disease reportedly sharpened her independent outlook, and what some considered her anti-social behaviour, allowing her father to commit her to the insane asylum at Gladesville in 1923.
Bea remained in the asylum until 1925 when an article about her plight titled ‘Mad house mystery of beautiful Sydney girl’ on the front page of the Smith’s Weekly newspaper led to her eventual release. Bea then became a notorious ratbag about town, sleeping rough, jumping into stationary cars with a demand to be given a lift and reciting Shakespeare on street corners to anyone who would pay. But her main pastime was boarding taxis and refusing to pay the fare. Three race-goers encountered Bea in the mid 1950s:
The lady was large, very vocal; and she wore a worse-for-wear tennis shade rakishly tilted over one eye. She sat beside the worried-looking taximan piloting yours, etc., and a couple more males to try our luck at the races. She offered to bet us a couple of bob each that the taxi wouldn’t pass more than 39 cars on our way from Ashfield to Canterbury. Recovering, we declined politely. Foiled, the lady went to work on the driver, issuing loud commands on the route to be taken. The driver, not so politely, said ‘nertz.’
Outside the racecourse, we three mere males alighted, but the large, vocal lady with the tipped-over eye shade refused to budge. ‘Stone the crows,’ moaned the taximan, giving us an anguished look as we left him stranded with—Bea Miles.
On being abused by unhappy taxi drivers, Bea was sometimes known to bend the passenger door right back on its hinges to show her dissatisfaction. She had a few friends in the taxi business, though, and they were happy to drive her on some legendary journeys. John Beynon took Bea from Sydney to Hobart, Adelaide and the long way to Melbourne through Broken Hill. But Bea’s greatest trip needed two taxi drivers: Beynon and Mrs Sylvia Markham. The two drivers secured the greatest fare of their lives when Bea booked them to drive her to Perth—and back again.
The details of this epic of public transport have become muddied over the years but it seems that Beynon, Markham and Bea left Sydney early in January 1955. They made it to Perth after about seven days of very hot travelling, in the age before automobile air conditioning. Bea spent four days there, apparently behaving herself, and then they set off back to Sydney.
Bea was paying one shilling a mile for the trip. That worked out to be around 300 pounds one way across the Nullarbor. Every 100 miles, Bea handed over a five-pound note to her driver. It all added up to a lot of money at the time.
On the way back, in Eucla, Bea explained the reason for her unusual journey in a telephone call with a journalist in Perth:
Primarily I undertook the trip to collect flowers for the Sydney herbarium but the weather has been so blazing hot—up to 108 dig(rees) [sic] at Madura—I’ve not seen a flower worth collecting along (the) Eyre-highway. However, we are having a lot of fun and the open-air life suits me fine.
The journalist also spoke with Sylvia Markham, who said: ‘I got a bit of a shock when asked to drive across Australia and back, but I’m glad I agreed.’ Sleeping outside each night, as they had on the way, the intrepid three expected to be in Adelaide about 24 January and back in Sydney a few days later. All up, the cab fare for the round trip was 600 pounds.
Bea continued her wayward life. She claimed to have been convicted of charges 195 times, 100 of them fairly. As she aged, Bea’s antics became increasingly irritating. She wore out the already thin welcome she had at places like the State Library of New South Wales, where she was in the habit of spending the day reading, and was banned in the late 1950s. Now old and ill she was taken in by the Little Sisters of the Poor at Randwick in 1964. One of the many colourful quotes attributed to her comes from this period: ‘I have no allergies that I know of, one complex, no delusions, two inhibitions, no neuroses, three phobias, no superstitions and no frustrations.’
Gems like this, together with Bea’s utter irreverence towards authority, the police, the law and respectability in general, made her a folk hero to Sydneysiders. In 1961 her portrait was entered in the Archibald Prize by artist Alex Robertson.
Even at the end, Bea went out in outrageous style. When she died in 1973 her coffin was covered in Australian wildflowers and a jazz band played ‘Waltzing Matilda’, ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’ and ‘Advance Australia Fair’.
Bea’s larrikin life has featured in a musical, in a poem by Les Murray, and in Kate Grenville’s 1985 novel Lillian’s Story and the subsequent film of the same name. Now mostly forgotten, her legend is kept alive through the occasional media article and in the B Miles Women’s Foundation.
A CRUSH OF CRABS
While first discovered in 1615, Christmas Island was rediscovered and named on Christmas Day 1643. The small uninhabited speck in the Indian Ocean was not settled until the late nineteenth century when rich phosphate deposits were mined with an imported workforce of Malay, Chinese and Sikh people. Japanese forces occupied the island in 1942. After World War II the island became first a dependency of Singapore, then part of Australia in 1958. This diverse history gives the island the unique character it has today.
Its culture is not the only unique feature of Christmas Island: it is the location of what has been described as a wonder of the natural world. Once a year at the start of the wet season, usually betw
een October and November, the millions of red land crabs that populate the island forests make a journey to the sea. For a week or so they swarm across the island. They mass across roads, where their hard shells have been known to puncture tires, so tunnels and plastic barriers and bridges have been constructed to divert them off the streets as they crawl, clicking and crackling, towards the ocean.
This annual migration is so the crabs can mate. The males usually arrive at the beach first, where they build burrows in which to mate with the females. After this, the females stay in the burrows for a couple of weeks. Then their eggs are spawned in the last quarter of the moon at the turning of the high tide. The eggs wash out to sea, where they hatch and the larvae spend three or four weeks washing round in the ocean. Meanwhile, the females return to the forests. Their larvae wash back to shore and become young crabs that then crawl back across the island for nine days until they reach the same forests in which they live until reaching maturity after four or five years. Then they take their turn in the yearly parade.
The crawling crabs have become an international tourist attraction. While the yellow crazy ant, introduced from Africa, poses a threat to the population, at the time of writing this seems to be under control. Tourists ask if the crabs can be eaten. The answer is no, though the crabs do eat each other.
Since 2001, the island has been the location for a controversial asylum seeker reception and processing facility for those who have undertaken journeys of a very different kind.
ON THE HIPPIE TRAIL
Between the mid 1960s and 1979, the overland route between Istanbul and southern India, and sometimes beyond, was a rite of passage for the young adults of the postwar baby boom. Hundreds of thousands, possibly more, adventurous men and women took to the often rough roads that led from Turkey through what is now Iran to Afghanistan, Kathmandu and, ultimately, Goa. There were a few side trips along the way, including to Kashmir, Chitral and Manali. The appeal of these exotic locations was partly the availability and legality of marijuana and hashish.
Great Australian Journeys Page 16