Great Australian Journeys

by Seal, Graham;

  In this way the saw doctor travelled the country from town to town for many years until his death in 1969. Harold kept a map of their journeys which was lost and Jean sold the wagon to a scrap dealer where it would have probably rotted away, but for a stroke of fate: in 1977, Peter Herry, who had often seen the wagon as a child, fortunately stumbled across it in Wangaratta. He purchased it, saving a unique slice of Australia’s vast nomad history. The National Museum of Australia purchased the saw doctor’s wagon from Herry in turn in 2002, installing it in the foyer of the museum where it intrigues everyone who visits, young and old.

  JUMPING THE RATTLERS

  The era always known as the Great Depression devastated the lives of everyday Australians in the early 1930s. Many were forced onto the roads and railways to search for work. Catching illicit rides on goods trains became an art practiced by many unfortunates, known variously as ‘bagmen’ or sometimes by the American term ‘hobos’. In 1932, the skipper of the yacht Symbol gave temporary shelter to one of these men.

  He was a young Australian, about 22 years of age, formerly a bank clerk in Brisbane. When the banks retrenched he was thrown out of work, and, unable to obtain another position, when his meagre savings were gone he was forced to ‘roll up’ a few clothes in a blanket and go on the track in search of work, and decided to make for North Queensland, where he hoped to obtain work on the sugar plantations.

  When travelling in the more densely populated Southern Queensland he was often given lifts on his way by passing motorists. However, after a while, when he reached country where there were no roads he was compelled to travel in goods trucks, and became one of a great band of young unemployed men who roam over Queensland by taking rides in freight trains—‘rattler jumpers’ being their nicknames.

  Of course, the police were out to check this illegal riding on trains, and I was told of many amusing experiences in this respect. On one occasion, he and three others were returning from Western Queensland, where he had journeyed in search of work in the mines, to Townsville, and at each township on the plains they went into a police station for their weekly rations. They had obtained rations there the previous week, and the sergeant, a good sort, recognised the party.

  ‘Did you fellows come in by train?’ he asked them. When they replied in the affirmative, he said: ‘How the blazes did you get past those policemen of mine? I’ve had three of them meeting every train each way in order to catch some of you rattler jumpers.’

  When they explained that they had come in on the mail train and dropped off about a mile from the station, he almost exploded. ‘I’ve a good mind to run you in, for I’ve got a good fortnight’s work here, and could make use of your fellows. But I’ll get you yet, for I’ll have every train watched, and you will have to walk out 20 miles to the nearest siding if you want to get away.’

  Of course, this was all said good-naturedly, and one of the hobos said: ‘Well, I bet you my ration ticket, Sarge, that your, “boob Johns” won’t catch us.’ The sergeant replied: ‘I’ll bet I have you fellows working in my garden before the week’s out.’

  They parted on good terms, the hobos returning to their open-air camp by the railway.

  Later on the sergeant told his policemen that they had been called ‘boob Johns’ and instructed them, to catch the four men.

  Not only were the hobos watching the police, but they also went down to every train that came in and watched the three policemen systematically searching the trains, at the same time making encouraging remarks. In the evenings a policeman would come down and have a yarn with them over the camp fire and an old black-tracker was often prowling about watching them.

  At last the four decided to shift camp, as the provisions were running low. They thought out a plan of campaign. They made a big fire and then wrapped some large stones up in old empty bags and left them lying around the fire. Then they walked two miles along the line in the opposite direction they actually intended to go, and caught the train that was travelling slowly up grades to the first siding.

  Here they waited for the down train containing about a dozen trucks of silver lead ingots. These steel trucks have false bottoms, which can be lifted up in order for coal to be loaded, and having located a truck in which the ingots were not stacked over the trap-door, they got inside with their swags, let the hatch drop on themselves, and then worked their way to either end of the truck, where it would be almost impossible for them to be found.

  About half an hour later the train was in the station. Sure enough, they heard the policemen clambering up the sides and searching the trucks, and heard a constable say: ‘No sign of them in here.’ An hour later the train was passing over the plains and the four hobos had got through.

  When they reached the next town ship they sent an unstamped postcard to the Sergeant, saying: ‘Dear Sarge, I think the boys are too smart for your Johns. Please send ration tickets you lost to us in Townsville.’

  According to the writer of this account, he found someone who gave the mischievous bagman a job in a shipping office, hopefully bringing his illegal rail journeying to an end.

  But ‘jumping the rattler’ was not entirely new in the 1930s. Even in the 1920s it was common to see large numbers of men dropping off goods trains before they pulled into the station. One of these bagmen boasted that he had travelled all around Australia without paying a fare. His most recent trip, early in 1925, had begun at Sydney from where he had an uninterrupted train ride to Bundaberg. Three days later he left comfortably seated in a Ford motorcar being conveyed by rail to Rockhampton. Another train brought him to Sarina on the coast of Queensland, where he ‘came a terrible gutzer’ hopping off, a heavy fall that was a frequent and painful experience for jumpers. He boarded another goods train that night bound for Mackay, intending to travel on to Townsville ‘as soon as a train suited’.

  In August 1930, a fifteen-year-old boy appeared at the Newcastle Quarter Sessions as a victim of indecent assault by a railway guard. He was asked by a solicitor:

  ‘What have you been doing since you left school? Running all around the country hopping trains?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You call it “jumping the rattler” don’t you?’

  ‘You can call it that’, the boy indifferently replied.

  When asked where he lived, he replied simply, ‘Nowhere. On the track.’

  The guard, who claimed to have only given the hungry boy and his mate a meal, was found not guilty.

  SYDNEY TO DARWIN ON A NINE-BOB PONY

  Work was still hard to find in Depression-era Australia when, in February 1937, 25-year-old self-described ‘jobless authoress’ Shirley Howard announced her intention of riding horseback the 12,800 or more kilometres from Sydney to Darwin. Howard planned to gather material for a book as she worked her way around the country over the next two years, starting from Sydney’s General Post Office.

  This ‘unusual woman’, as the papers called her, purchased a pony at the Flemington saleyards for just 9 shillings in 1932 ($40 or so today). Howard named her Mary Lou and rode her from Sydney to Cairns the same year, and from Sydney to Adelaide via Melbourne a few years later. But these rides were just limbering up exercises for her planned epic crossing to Darwin and, perhaps, down through Western Australia and back to Sydney.

  Howard began her epic journey on 22 February 1937, heading north from Sydney. But after only a few days, Mary Lou came down with cattle sickness in Port Macquarie. Howard walked and hitchhiked to Grafton, arriving on 4 May. She had to return to Sydney and find work as a waitress until the following July.

  After this false start she was back in Grafton in August 1938 to contest a dispute over a horse she claimed to have purchased. After a court hearing in which the other party said he would rather shoot the horse than have Howard ride it, the police magistrate found in Howard’s favour. The magistrate decided that Howard had more right to the animal—known as Kermen—than the stockman who had detained it. She rode on to Lismore where she stayed
for three weeks or so selling soap to local housewives to cover the expenses for her ride. She then continued her quest for Darwin, making next for Brisbane.

  Journalists were amazed that a woman might attempt such a feat. Asked if she ever felt lonely on her rides, she replied, ‘Why should I? I feel just as lonely in town when I am by myself.’ Questioned about the dangers she told reporters, ‘If an accident is to happen, it will just happen, that’s all.’

  The press was particularly shocked by Howard’s preferred camping spots: in cemeteries. Was she not afraid of ‘bagmen’? Howard replied that there was no chance of swaggies dropping their swags in a graveyard.

  But Howard did not ‘cast off her femininity when on these trips’, as a newspaper reassured readers. She sent her luggage ahead by train, and so during her stay in Grafton she appeared in a brown coat and a black dress ‘with a natty brown sailor’s cap’.

  While in Brisbane, Howard accepted a wager that she could ride the 362 kilometres to Grafton in 48 hours. She covered the first 200 kilometres in 36 hours and with this record-breaking speed was on track to win the 50-pounds bet (about $4000 in today’s value). But her horse Kerman injured a fetlock between Murwillumbah and Tweed Heads.

  On 6 April 1939, Howard and the recovered Mary Lou left the Brisbane General Post Office at 10 a.m. bound for Darwin. Shirley Howard kept to a travel itinerary of 50 miles a day and by mid April had reached Maryborough, after stopping at towns on the way to earn money. Between Brisbane and Maryborough, she had survived accidents and an attack by a 6-foot tree snake. Described as ‘independent and a battler’, Howard was still selling soap and taking any available work.

  Miss Howard has had a variety of experiences and met all manner of people. She has undertaken all kinds of work, from waiting in cafes to milking on [a] dairy farm, mending a tank for three feeds (‘I cleaned and soldered it and hoped to earn a few bob’), woodcutting (‘I chopped a load of wood for a baker, and he gave me a loaf of bread’), shoeing horses for a blacksmith, and so on.

  Shirley had also ‘taken short cuts and been lost, helped pull cars out of bogs, and been given £1 for a month’s work on a dairy farm after sacking herself by cleaning up the cow bails—‘for shame’s sake’.

  At this stage of the trip, the faithful Mary Lou was now accompanied by the thoroughbred Kermen as a pack horse, on this epic trip to Darwin and beyond.

  But we don’t know with any certainty what happened between that point and sixteen months later, when, on 26 August 1940, Howard rode into Sydney. She claimed to have reached Darwin after leaving Brisbane and then made her way back to Sydney through Western Australia.

  The brief accounts don’t say which of Howard’s horses she was riding when she returned to Sydney—possibly Kermen—but we do know the horse was rigged with a battery-operated automobile headlight and a tail-light. Perhaps people, and therefore the papers, were more preoccupied with the war than by a woman riding a horse. Even so, there are no press mentions of Howard’s movements after her arrival in Maryborough the previous year. Considering the fascination of the newspapers with Howard’s ride up until that point, it seems unlikely that her arrival in towns and cities in the Northern Territory, Western Australia and South Australia would not have produced at least some copy.

  Sharp-eyed readers of this one brief mention of her return to Sydney might have noted that Howard was not reported to have actually ridden all this way, only that ‘she went to Darwin and thence to Western Australia and back to Sydney’. They might also have been surprised to read that in three years her stated age had mysteriously risen by seven years to 32.

  Did Shirley Howard make that very, very long ride, even if only in various stages? Probably not, at least not all of it. What began as a youthful adventure and genuine search for employment in the Depression might have turned into a publicity-seeking enterprise by 1940. When she entered Sydney on her well-lit mount Howard was still insisting she would write a book about her adventures. It never appeared. But let’s admire her sense of adventure, her courage and her determination to travel in her own way and in her own time.

  FOREIGN FABLES

  For most of us, important journeys take the form of holidays. But pleasurable and relaxing as these are meant to be, things can go wrong. Back in the 1960s, folklorists around the world began picking up an odd story. The details of the time and place varied wherever the tale was told but the basic plot was much the same.

  The story went that a family was travelling by car across a deserted part of the country on a long-anticipated holiday trip. Dad was driving, Mum was in the front passenger seat and the kids were in the back with their grandmother. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Granny suddenly died.

  The car screeched to a halt and the horrified family spilled out onto the road, aghast at the body of their granny growing cold in the back seat.

  What should they do?

  They couldn’t leave the body by the side of the road, and neither the parents or the children were keen to sit next to a corpse for the considerable distance to the next town. There was nothing else for it but to hoist granny up onto the roof rack and get to a police station or hospital as quickly as possible. With the body strapped above them, the family tore along the road to town.

  When they finally arrived it was very late at night and most of the small town was closed up. But they managed to find the local police station. Parking the car at the entrance, the family all rushed into the building, leaving the stiffening corpse of Granny where they had strapped it on top of the car. Distressed, the family approached the astonished desk sergeant to report Granny’s unexpected demise.

  After taking down the details on the official form, the sergeant asked the family to accompany him back to the car to identify the body and have it properly removed. They pushed open the doors of the police station. Their car had disappeared. Along with Granny.

  The father gasped, the mother fainted and the kids screamed. The sergeant was unimpressed, suspecting a prank. But the family recovered sufficiently to convince him that the body of their grandmother had indeed been on the roof rack of their now unaccountably vanished vehicle. The car and body were never found.

  One of the things that the different versions of the tale had in common was the location of Granny’s death. It was usually said to have happened in a remote area, often on or near a border between countries, states or regions. And, of course, it was all true, wherever the tale was told. In Australia, the favoured location was somewhere on the Nullarbor Plain or just the Outback. And it wasn’t always Granny who died; sometimes it was an aunt or another female relative.

  What could this creepy travel story mean? The incidents described never took place. The tale is a contemporary legend or urban myth. And like many other unsettling yarns it seems to hint at the dangers inherent in journeys, especially as those who tell these tales always insist that they are true, usually because they heard it from ‘a friend of a friend’ or perhaps read it in the newspapers or on social media.

  Another often-told legend of journeys to exotic places concerns the favourite Australian holiday location of Bali. In this one a holidaymaker (usually female) is enjoying the sun on a Bali beach when she feels a small sting on her cheek. She starts upright and slaps at her face, revealing a small black spider has bitten her. As there are no apparent ill effects and the stinging goes away she forgets about the incident and enjoys the remaining week or so of her holiday. When she returns home she notices that a small blister has formed on her face where the spider bit her. The blister gets bigger and bigger and eventually she rubs it too hard and it bursts. A host of baby spiders crawl out.

  In some versions this happens on the way home or in a doctor’s surgery. Sometimes the baby spiders number in their thousands. Sometimes the woman was holidaying in Penang, Vietnam, or somewhere else. Like other urban legends, this one has been around for a long time and relates to many other such tales of bodily invasions, toxic contaminations and generally dreadful things tha
t could happen to you during a journey of almost any kind.

  Urban legends tell us you could be kidnapped at Disneyland, attacked by Greek vampires or bitten by snakes infesting any number of amusement parks and venues. Even in Australia you need to watch out for yowies, bunyips and blood-sucking yaramas.

  Much ink has flowed in analysing these and the many other similar stories that have been circulating for decades. Are they a warning to be careful when away from home? Especially in remote or different places? Seems reasonable. What about the consistent features, like the death of the female relative? Maybe it has to do with the very reasonable universal fear of death. Or perhaps it is a reflection on the youthful orientation of modern society with the consequent discomfort with ageing. Whatever we might try to make of these allegedly true and unsettling tales, there are certainly a good number of them on the theme of travel, holidays and other journeys. Best to stay at home.

  9

  LEAVING

  Play on your golden trumpets, boys, and sound your cheerful notes.

  The Cyprus Brig’s on the ocean, boys, by justice does she float.

  Van Diemen’s Land convict ballad, 1830

  BY JUSTICE DOES SHE FLOAT

  In August 1829 the overcrowded brig Cyprus, carrying 33 Van Diemen’s Land convicts in iron chains to the dreaded Macquarie Harbour penal station, lay at anchor in Recherche Bay. Altogether there were 64 people aboard the 24-by-6 metre craft, including a group of 63rd Regiment soldiers under Lieutenant Carew. The Cyprus had been storm-bound in the bay for a week during which time the convicts had plotted a mutiny. Carew seemed to have let security slip and four convicts used the opportunity to seize the ship. They unchained their fellow convicts and sent any who did not want to sail with them ashore along with the soldiers, sailors and civilian passengers. Forty-four were cast away on the beach.