Great Australian Journeys

by Seal, Graham;

  Well, I’m crook in the head and I haven’t been to bed,

  Since I first touched this shanty with my plunder,

  I see centipedes and snakes and I’ve got the aches and shakes,

  And I’ll soon be shifting out over yonder.

  This bloke has lost his horse along with his money and has no choice but to continue his dismal journey to search for work.

  I’ll take that Old Man Plain and I’ll cross it once again,

  Until me eyes the track no longer see,

  And my beer and whisky brain looks for sleep but all in vain,

  And I feel as if I had the Darling Pea.

  So hang that blasted grog, that hocussed shanty grog,

  And the beer that’s loaded with tobacco,

  Grafting humour I am in and I’ll stick the peg right in,

  And I’ll settle down once more for some hard yakka.

  Then the chorus repeats again, reminding us that the alcohol provided at the shanty was probably adulterated with tobacco, increasing the effect:

  And it’s all for the grog, the jolly, jolly grog,

  The beer that’s loaded with tobacco,

  I spent all my tin in a shanty drinkin’ gin,

  Now across the western plains I must wander.

  In 1925, a Tasmanian newspaper reminisced about the old days when this song was sung and the life it describes was lived by many itinerant bush workers:

  In the bad old days of the Coast, as well as other places, as far as the ‘old hands’ were concerned, rum was the national drink, and many of the old fellows could swallow it like drinking new milk. In the early days of Latrobe a good many of those old fellows, who led a nomadic life, would come down to Sassafras for the harvest and potato digging, and as there were some good workers among them, at the end of the season they would have good cheques, coming to them. During the time they were working they would deny themselves various necessaries, so that, they could have a good ‘rum-burst’ at the finish.

  Well, about a mile out of Latrobe, on the road to Moriarty, there used to stand an old two-roomed place which was always known to us kiddies as the ‘Swipers’ Hut’, and this place was often tenanted by as many as a dozen of these old follows at the one time. On wet days one of their number would be deputed to bring rum out by the gallon from Latrobe to the old camp. Needless to say, the carousals there were often fast and furious. Many a time other boys and myself would hide in the scrub that surrounded the hut, and listen to the wild singing, and, I am sorry to say, cursing that went on.

  Another lambed-down shearer turned up in a newspaper column in 1894:

  I’m a broken-hearted shearer, I’m ashamed to show my face,

  The way that I got lambed down is a sin and a disgrace;

  I put a cheque together, and thought that it would do,

  So I just slipped into Orange for to spend a week or two.

  I thought I was no flat, so resolved to cut it fat;

  I dressed myself up in my best, put a poultice round my hat;

  I went to have a nobbler at a certain house in town,

  Where the barmaid she was cautioned for to lamb a fellow down.

  I would get up in the morning to have a glass of stout;

  She cost me many a shilling, for she was in every shout.

  She would toss me up at Yankee Grab, and keep me on the booze:

  But somehow or the other I was always bound to lose.

  My money getting short I resolved to know my fate;

  I asked this pretty barmaid if she would be my mate,

  When she said, ‘Young man, on my feelings don’t encroach,

  I’m a decent married woman, and my husband drives the coach.’

  I had two-and-six in silver and half-a-bar of soap,

  A box of Cockle’s pills and a pot of Holloway’s;

  I thought to turn a farmer and grow pumpkins near the town,

  But she squashed all my pumpkins when she had me lambed down.

  I had two old shirts, but they were all in rags;

  A pair of moleskin trousers and a hat without a crown.

  This was my ten years’ gathering when clearing out of town;

  But it’s nothing when you’re used to it to do a lambing down.

  BY TRAIN TO HOBART TOWN

  Early in 1876, the mayor of Geelong took a trip to Tasmania, then popularly referred to as the Tight Little Island, a reference to its English character. While there he took the train from Launceston to Hobart and back again, describing his eventful journey in a letter to his constituents. They would have been very amused at his entertaining yarn and may have quietly decided not to travel by train if they ever visited Tassie.

  The carriages and engine having to turn sharp curves are made, the first to travel on two sets of wheels called the Bogie principle, whilst the latter have the doors at each end, not fastened. They are connected together with a pin, which allows them to move to the right or left easily.

  The trains aside, the track itself seems to not quite have been built with the care and attention needed:

  Without mentioning the particulars of our down journey other than to say that the rails being very light and placed on small sleepers without the necessary weight to keep them down, floated on the water when the flood came, and were in many places clear of the permanent way, in others the soil had been washed from under the sleepers.

  As a result of these long washed-out sections of track much of the mayor’s ‘train trip’ actually took place by coach—which he drove himself:

  After waiting some time four horses were brought knocked up, having just come a journey of 27 miles. We started with a very heavy load, and it was not long before the pace was reduced to a walk. The coachman asked me if I could drive, I answered in the affirmative, at once arranged the reins in the most scientific manner possible, and there I sat in my glory whilst the coachman got down and ran or walked alongside the horses, which, by means of a tickle now and again with the whip, he succeeded in making go at the rate of fully four miles an hour.

  The picture the mayor offers of the sight they must have made on the road sounds like the beginning of a joke: a mayor, a priest and a coachman caught the train one day.

  Anyone meeting us must have thought we were a comical turn-out—myself driving, a priest on the box next me holding an umbrella over my head, the coachman running by the side cracking his whip, and some of the passengers also stretching their legs alongside of him.

  Despite these hiccups the merry band arrived safely at Hobart Town, although likely a little damp. On the return trip, finally on the train again, this travelling mayor ran into the vexed issue that would come up time and time again in early Australia: the different train track gauges in each state. Perhaps betraying his parochial preference for his own state’s rail gauge, he found Tassie’s narrow gauge to be highly inferior:

  The line, I may mention, is on the narrow gauge, 3ft. 6in. wide. The carriages have no springs similar to those used on the Victorian lines, but rest on spiral wire springs, and these, when travelling fast, nearly shake the inside from you. During the latter part of the journey I was glad to stand, as when we were travelling at the rate of forty miles an hour to make up for lost time the motion was almost unbearable.

  And when the rattling wasn’t the problem, it was the want of it—they were late to start out and later and later thereafter:

  The hour at which it was announced the train would start was 8.30 sharp, but at that hour everything apparently had to be got ready. The water was carried in three four-hundred gallon tanks lashed on a truck, coals on a truck behind. However we got off at last at about 9 o’clock, and progressed steadily for about an hour and a half when the train came to a full stop. We all jumped out to see what was up, and found the draft of the boiler was so strong that the small pieces of coal had been drawn through the tubes so as to choke the three or four bottom rows; the back pan had to be opened and cleaned out, then steam was again raised, and away we went.r />
  After some time we stopped at a station to drop some freight, which occupied some time, as it consisted of two bags of sugar.

  But the Victorian mayor showed a good sense of humour, despite the delays, and was not above rolling up his sleeves and pitching in to help get the train going:

  Away we went again, and were suddenly brought to a dead stop. On looking out I saw some of the passengers collecting wood to assist in livening the fire, so I ran back, and shouted ‘All hands forward to collect wood,’ and amid general laughter we all lent a hand.

  In fact the accumulation of problems seems to have lent the trip an air of levity and adventure and unreality:

  Suddenly another stop was made at Jerusalem. Having got to this remarkable locality we all jumped out to amuse our selves while the freight for the thriving place was deposited on the sand. Some of the passengers played at duck stone; others threw up one stone and tried to hit it with another; a priest amused himself playing with his dog. I saw the goods unloaded; they consisted of two or three bags of sugar, some packages of canvas and a case, the whole being saturated with boiled oil. It appeared they had placed a kerosene tin of boiled oil on the top of the goods, and had succeeded in piercing the tin by carelessly placing some scythes against it.

  After a great deal of time had been lost in discussing this accident, and who was to remove a box covered with boiled oil from the van, the hands generally objecting to touch it, we made another start.

  Good fun aside, water would insist on plaguing this trip in one way or another. During the first leg, there was too much of it washing away the track, and on the return trip, it was the getting of it that posed the problem:

  in about an hour [we] pulled up over a creek, at which we were to take in water by bucketing it up. After some discussion about a rope, during which some of the passengers suggested that we should tie our pocket handkerchiefs together, they set to work. The chief engineer, with the rope, dropped a bucket into the stream, hauled it up, handed it to the man who took the tickets, and who transferred it to the second engineer, and the latter emptied it into the 400-gallon tank. Meanwhile, a garden being near, a number of passengers, accompanied by the third engineer, rushed and helped themselves to fruit. After some time the ticket collector, finding the bucketing rather hard work, sang out for the third engineer to assist, the latter thereupon was seen rushing up with both hands filled with fruit, and took the place of the first engineer, being cautioned not to break the bucket, as that was the only one they had.

  The watering was completed in about half an hour; we made another start, and an hour afterwards pulled up at the large tank, at which I supposed a sufficient supply of water would be taken in in about ten minutes. Not so, however; when they tried the hose, which was new, they found it impossible to get either end on, so had to use a V-shaped piece of wood to support it near the aperture in the tank, and the poor fellow who held this got well soused with water.

  The mayor and his well-shaken travelling companions arrived back at Launceston at 8.30 p.m. ‘All’s well that ends well,’ he wrote, ‘and I thoroughly enjoyed my trip to Hobart Town.’

  TRUDGING THROUGH PURGATORY

  Henry Lawson’s trek from Bourke to Hungerford marked him for life. The literary critic and editor A.G. Stephens, not a man given to overstatement, described it as the ‘journey of a damned soul trudging through purgatory’. Lawson set out on the journey at the suggestion of J.F. Archibald, his editor at the Bulletin, who provided a train ticket to Bourke and a five-pound note in the hope that Lawson would write some stories to further fuel his verse debate with ‘Banjo’ Paterson about the good and bad aspects of bush life. With his mate Jim Gordon, Lawson struck out in the midsummer heat of 1892 on a 450-kilometre walk.

  Lawson never wrote a complete account of his experience but came back to it in one way or another in much of his subsequent writing. He did write a story called ‘Hungerford’ that gives some idea of the parched emptiness of the outback, ‘a blasted, barren wilderness’:

  One of the hungriest cleared roads in New South Wales runs to within a couple of miles of Hungerford, and stops there; then you strike through the scrub to the town. There is no distant prospect of Hungerford—you don’t see the town till you are quite close to it, and then two or three white-washed galvanized-iron roofs start out of the mulga.

  They say that a past Ministry commenced to clear the road from Bourke, under the impression that Hungerford was an important place, and went on, with the blindness peculiar to governments, till they got to within two miles of the town. Then they ran short of rum and rations, and sent a man on to get them, and make inquiries. The member never came back, and two more were sent to find him—or Hungerford. Three days later the two returned in an exhausted condition, and submitted a motion of want-of-confidence, which was lost. Then the whole House went on and was lost also. Strange to relate, that Government was never missed.

  However, we found Hungerford and camped there for a day. The town is right on the Queensland border, and an interprovincial rabbit-proof fence—with rabbits on both sides of it—runs across the main street. This fence is a standing joke with Australian rabbits—about the only joke they have out there, except the memory of Pasteur and poison and inoculation. It is amusing to go a little way out of town, about sunset, and watch them crack Noah’s Ark rabbit jokes about that fence, and burrow under and play leap-frog over it till they get tired. One old buck rabbit sat up and nearly laughed his ears off at a joke of his own about that fence. He laughed so much that he couldn’t get away when I reached for him. I could hardly eat him for laughing. I never saw a rabbit laugh before; but I’ve seen a possum do it.

  Hungerford consists of two houses and a humpy in New South Wales, and five houses in Queensland. Characteristically enough, both the pubs are in Queensland. We got a glass of sour yeast at one and paid sixpence for it—we had asked for English ale.

  The post office is in New South Wales, and the police barracks in Bananaland. The police cannot do anything if there’s a row going on across the street in New South Wales, except to send to Brisbane and have an extradition warrant applied for; and they don’t do much if there’s a row in Queensland. Most of the rows are across the border, where the pubs are.

  At least, I believe that’s how it is, though the man who told me might have been a liar. Another man said he was a liar, but then he might have been a liar himself—a third person said he was one. I heard that there was a fight over it, but the man who told me about the fight might not have been telling the truth.

  One part of the town swears at Brisbane when things go wrong, and the other part curses Sydney.

  The country looks as though a great ash-heap had been spread out there, and mulga scrub and firewood planted—and neglected. The country looks just as bad for a hundred miles round Hungerford, and beyond that it gets worse—a blasted, barren wilderness that doesn’t even howl. If it howled it would be a relief.

  I believe that Bourke and Wills found Hungerford, and it’s a pity they did; but, if I ever stand by the graves of the men who first travelled through this country, when there were neither roads nor stations, nor tanks, nor bores, nor pubs, I’ll—I’ll take my hat off. There were brave men in the land in those days.

  It is said that the explorers gave the district its name chiefly because of the hunger they found there, which has remained there ever since. I don’t know where the ‘ford’ comes in—there’s nothing to ford, except in flood-time. Hungerthirst would have been better. The town is supposed to be situated on the banks of a river called the Paroo, but we saw no water there, except what passed for it in a tank. The goats and sheep and dogs and the rest of the population drink there. It is dangerous to take too much of that water in a raw state.

  Except in flood-time you couldn’t find the bed of the river without the aid of a spirit-level and a long straight-edge. There is a Custom-house against the fence on the northern side. A pound of tea often costs six shillings on that side, and yo
u can get a common lead pencil for fourpence at the rival store across the street in the mother province. Also, a small loaf of sour bread sells for a shilling at the humpy aforementioned. Only about sixty per cent of the sugar will melt.

  We saw one of the storekeepers give a dead-beat swagman five shillings’ worth of rations to take him on into Queensland. The storekeepers often do this, and put it down on the loss side of their books. I hope the recording angel listens, and puts it down on the right side of his book.

  We camped on the Queensland side of the fence, and after tea had a yarn with an old man who was minding a mixed flock of goats and sheep; and we asked him whether he thought Queensland was better than New South Wales, or the other way about.

  He scratched the back of his head, and thought a while, and hesitated like a stranger who is going to do you a favour at some personal inconvenience.

  At last, with the bored air of a man who has gone through the same performance too often before, he stepped deliberately up to the fence and spat over it into New South Wales. After which he got leisurely through and spat back on Queensland.

  ‘That’s what I think of the blanky colonies!’ he said.

  He gave us time to become sufficiently impressed; then he said: ‘And if I was at the Victorian and South Australian border I’d do the same thing.’

  He let that soak into our minds, and added: ‘And the same with West Australia—and—and Tasmania.’ Then he went away.

  The last would have been a long spit—and he forgot Maoriland.

  We heard afterwards that his name was Clancy and he had that day been offered a job droving at ‘twenty-five shillings a week and find your own horse’. Also find your own horse feed and tobacco and soap and other luxuries, at station prices. Moreover, if you lost your own horse you would have to find another, and if that died or went astray you would have to find a third—or forfeit your pay and return on foot. The boss drover agreed to provide flour and mutton—when such things were procurable.