by Graham Seal
The bagman’s gazette
The ‘bagman’s gazette’ was a term for the efficient word-of-mouth network on the track. News, rumour and gossip were carried along this unofficial route with amazing speed. Under the title ‘Bagman’s Gazette’, ‘The Organiser’ began his column for the Darwin Northern Standard in the Depression year of 1931 with a quotation from Lewis Carroll’s famous nonsense poem ‘The Walrus and The Carpenter’. The article was about wages and politics, suggesting that not much had changed since the strikes of forty years before:
‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,
‘To talk of many things;
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—’
Bagmen discussing politics at a recent session around the Camp fire touched on the so-called necessity for equal sacrifice taking it for granted that all sections would be required by this to dub up in proportion so as to save the country from financial chaos. After disposing of the theory that lower wages would increase employment and quoting their experiences in search of employment in the pastoral industry in Queensland, where wages are as low as 15/- a week, one bagman quoted the proposed British Budget as a sample of equal sacrifice. It is proposed to save Britain by reducing the unemployment dole by £66,500,000 and education grants, and teachers’ salaries by £13,000,000. This makes a total of £79,500,000 out of £96,500,000 it is proposed to save. The workers even contribute a big part of the remaining £17,000,000.
Now if this equal sacrifice were a real thing and if those who have no income can contribute £66,500,000 to the national income, how much can those who do not work, never have worked, never will work, and have huge incomes, contribute in this ‘equal sacrifice’ humbug? Then again in Australia if a worker on five quid a week can sacrifice 20 per cent of that for the national good, a judge or a politician or a bondholder should be able to sacrifice all the income he or she gets above five quid. They would then still be 20 per cent above the poor plugger that works for his bit and it is more questionable whether they are worth 20 per cent more.
The bagmen were unanimous that the only patriot expected (in war time or peace) to sacrifice everything for his Country is the toiler and they furthermore thought that it is time the Workers of Australia put up a fight against this ‘equal sacrifice’ humbug and wage reduction campaign of the super patriots, but they are only bagmen.
Homes of hope
As the Great Depression rolled over the lives and hopes of millions, an Anglican minister came up with a plan to house some of the families evicted from their homes, often with no means of financial support. Robert Hammond was archdeacon at St Barnabas’ Anglican church in Sydney’s Broadway. Wondering what he could do to alleviate the suffering he saw all around, he invited married men to a meeting in February 1932. His idea was what he called a ‘consolidated settlement’, a residential development on new land where the families of unemployed would help themselves and each other to build, rent and eventually purchase their own homes. Each would use their skills to help others and after around seven years would have paid sufficient rent to own their houses outright.
To qualify for the scheme a married couple needed to be unemployed, have at least three children and possess a skill useful to the community. They had to show that they had been recently evicted and make a commitment to joining the community in growing its own food. Rents were very reasonable and did not need to be paid by those who continued to be unemployed.
The ‘Pioneer Homes’ scheme, as it was originally known, received 800 applications and began with 13 acres near Liverpool. Although the initiative received little official support, donations from the public enabled it to expand and by the end of the next year 26 homes were completed. Another 40 homes were built the following year, and another 150 acres were purchased with a generous individual donation. By 1937, 110 homes were housing families. Hammondville, as it came to be called after its visionary founder, had a church, post office, general store and school by 1940. A senior citizens’ facility was developed in later years and Hammondville continued to thrive.
The community grew further during the war, and many of the men served in the armed forces. By the end of the war in 1945, most families had already paid off their properties and now owned them along with the acre of land on which they stood.
Hammondville tradition is full of stories about individuals who made great contributions to a unique community. They include Constance Jewell and her ‘Depression recipe’ cakes, so popular at dances and fundraisers. Shopkeeper Alf Morley was known as the ‘Mayor of Hammondville’ because of his popularity. Alf opened the town’s first shop with a 100-pound loan from the founder and provided generous terms of payment as well as free ice-creams for the kids.
Other notable people from the community include property developer Jim Masterson and politician John Hatton. Reverend Bernard Judd and his wife, Ida, had a long connection with Hammondville and were prime movers in establishing various local institutions, including the Girl Guides and the Senior Citizens’ Home.
Robert Hammond’s vision and energy were recognised in 1937 when he was awarded an OBE. He died in 1946, almost 76 years of age.
5
How we travel the land
With a ragged old swag on their shoulder,
And a billy quart-pot in their hands,
I tell you they’ll ’stonish the new chums,
When they see how we travel the land.
‘The Springtime it Brings on the Shearing’
MOVEMENT ACROSS THE vast distances of the continent is one of the deepest and most persistent themes of Australian tradition. Aboriginal creation myths speak of ancestral beings travelling far across the country to make the rivers, mountains and plains. Aboriginal peoples moved constantly around their countries, following the seasons and acknowledging the sacred sites that lay along their ‘songlines’, preserving this ancient knowledge in a rich culture of song, dance, art and story.
When Europeans arrived, they explored and opened up new lands for agriculture and the pastoral industries that largely made the nation in the nineteenth century. The lore of the bush is full of overlanders, bullockies and swagmen who rode or walked across the country. Even that enigmatic figure, the bushranger, ‘ranges’ the country in search of sustenance and plunder, trying to keep a few steps ahead of the mounted troopers close behind, often assisted by deadly efficient blacktrackers.
When horses began to give way to motor vehicles, it was still a common sight to see swagmen ‘humping their bluey’ along isolated bush tracks. Many had to take up this itinerant way of life during the Depression of the 1930s. Sometimes the railways might assist them, if they were clever enough to ‘hook a rattler’ and get off it again without being caught by the police. Spending a night or two in the cells for vagrancy—sometimes after a beating—was a topic sung about in the country ballads of that era.
Today, the familiar sight of ‘grey nomads’ on a campervan or caravan pilgrimage around the country is perhaps an updated expression of this ancient Australian need to travel the land.
Rangers and rouseabouts
The ballads of the bush began to describe and celebrate the roaming necessities from early times. The famous chorus of ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’ is all about movement and freedom:
So come along my hearties, we’ll roam the mountains high,
Together we will plunder, together we will die.
We’ll gallop across the mountains and scour across the plains
And scorn to live in slavery, bound down in iron chains.
The development of sheep and cattle production created new groups of travellers. This time they were either working or in search of work, rather than plunder. The ‘overlanders’ were a flamboyant group of men who carried out some legendary feats of droving across usually harsh terrain, celebrated in many ballads and in the popular literature of the time.
There’s a trade you all know well, it’s bringing cattle over<
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On every track to the Gulf and back, men know the Queensland drover.
So, pass the billy ’round, boys, don’t let the pint-pot stand there
For tonight we’ll drink the health of every overlander.
And so it went on, bragging about the deeds of the Queensland drovers. Another ballad on the same themes, ‘Brisbane Ladies’, told of their exploits.
We’ll rant and we’ll roar, like true Queensland drovers,
We’ll rant and we’ll roar as onward we push
Until we return to the Augathella station,
For it’s bloody dry going in the old Queensland bush.
The wool industry produced another swag of now-iconic songs about shearers and rouseabouts, all spreading out across the land to clip the fleeces that, for a long time, provided the backbone of the Australian economy. One of many was ‘The Springtime it Brings on the Shearing’:
Oh, the springtime it brings on the shearing,
And then you will see them in droves,
To the west country stations all steering,
Seeking a job off the coves.
With a ragged old swag on their shoulder,
And a billy quart-pot in their hands,
I tell you they’ll ’stonish the new chums,
When they see how we travel the land.
The ‘coves’ mentioned in ‘The Springtime it Brings on the Shearing’ were the bosses, the owners or managers of the sheep stations. There was strong tension between the shearers and their employers, a troubled relationship that was an important element in the formation of the trade union movement in the late nineteenth century. The tension was reflected in ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s poem ‘A Bushman’s Song’. The continual movement of the song’s main character to ‘the stations further out’ captures the necessity for, but also the freedom to be had from, the travelling life.
‘A Bushman’s Song’, usually known in its bush ballad form as ‘Travelling Down the Castlereagh’ or ‘The Old Jig-Jog’, hymns the freedom of the wandering life and tells the story of a station hand travelling down the Castlereagh River ‘handy with a roping pole and handy with a brand’. He is always moving further away from the settled regions further out:
So it was shift, boys, shift, there wasn’t the slightest doubt
I had to make a shift for the stations further out
Saddle up my horses and whistle up my dog
And it’s off across the country at the old jig-jog.
He gets a job with his brother on the Illawarra but finds that he has to ‘ask the landlord’s leave before he lifts his arm’, which doesn’t suit him at all. He then takes a job at shearing ‘along the Marthaguy’ but finds they shear non-union—‘I call it scab, says I’. Finally, the station hand decides to go ‘where they drink artesian water from a thousand foot below’. Here he meets the overlanders and their mobs, where they ‘work a while and make a pile, then have a spree in town’.
‘A Bushman’s Song’ captures the independence and dream of freedom that pioneering life promised for many men at that time. The hero of the song is fortunate enough to travel the land on horseback; many others went on foot, often called ‘swagmen’.
The swagman’s union
Folklore has it that there was such a thing as a ‘swagman’s union’, and according to this account there was such an organisation. Formed in the 1870s, this association had some interesting rules by which its members were allegedly regulated.
The old-time swagman is fast disappearing, but to-day my thoughts go back to some of the real old-time ‘whalers’ of the Murrumbidgee and other Southern watercourses (writes ‘Bill Bowyang’). The genuine ‘whaler’ in the halcyon days of yore was a feature of the Murrumbidgee tracks and along the routes fringing some of the Western Queensland rivers.
Those who carried the swag on the Lachlan were known as the ‘Lachlan Cruisers’ but there were also the ‘Darling Whisperers’, the ‘Murray Sundowners’ and the ‘Bogan Bummers’. Each member cherished an unbounding pride in his clan, and there were at times fierce fights under the big river gums when some favored fishing hole was usurped by an interloper from an alien band.
Scanning an old scrap book recently I came across an interesting record of an occurrence that at the time created a great stir in swagmen circles throughout the West. It tells of a meeting that was held to bring about a combination of the scattered units of swaggydom in a society known as the ‘Amalgamated Swagmen of Australia’. This first union was formed in a bend of the Lachlan, near Forbes, in 1877, and a conference of delegates from far and wide gathered for the occasion. They were a motley crew, frowsy dead beats, loony-hatters, and aggressive cadgers.
By the fitful flames of yarran and myall fires, officers were elected, branches formed, and rules drawn up. Sir William Wallaby was the first President, and Sir John Bluey, secretary; T. Billy Esq., is named as treasurer, and Dr. Johnny Cake medical adviser. The well-known firm of Walker and Tucker were solicitors. The rules were as follows:
1. No member to be over 100 years old.
2. Each member to pay one pannikin of flour entrance fee. Members who don’t care about paying will be admitted free.
3. No member to carry swags weighing over ten pounds.
4. Each member to possess three complete sets of tucker bags, each set to consist of nine bags.
5. No member to pass any station, farm, boundary rider’s hut, camp, or private house without ‘tapping’ and obtaining rations or hand-outs.
6. Each member to allow himself to be bitten by a sheep. If a sheep bites a member he must immediately turn it into mutton.
7. Members who defame a ‘good’ cook, or pay a fine when run in, shall not be allowed to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Amen.
8. No members allowed to hum baking powder, tea, flour, sugar, or tobacco from a fellow unionist.
9. Non-smoking members must ‘whisper’ for tobacco on every possible occasion, the same as smokers.
10. At general or branch meetings non-smoking hums must give up their whispered tobacco to be distributed amongst the officers of the society.
11. Any member found without at least two sets of bags filled with tucker will be fined.
12. No member to own more than one creek, river, or billabong bend. To sell bends for old boots or sinkers is prohibited.
13. No member to look for or accept work of any description. Members found willing will be at once expelled.
14. No member to walk more than five miles per day if rations can be hummed.
15. No member to tramp on Sundays at any price.
This union is many years defunct and its original members as widely scattered as the ashes of their long-dimmed camp-fires, yet the spirit and the rules are adhered to sacredly, even in these days, by those who hump the swag. Par chance these rules extend to Paradise, and the sturdy beggars still tramp through eternity with Matilda up.
Amongst the old time ‘whalers’ Scotty the Wrinkler was perhaps the most famous. A garrulous Scotch man of scholarly attainments, he had, perhaps, less need to cadge than any other. Scotty I always recognised as somewhat of a poseur. His habits were so settled that he dwelt most of the year in a huge hollow log on the banks of the Murrumbidgee, near Narrandera, and he even acquired his name from the original holder, who was a Darling River Whisperer.
The oozlum bird
The oozlum bird is an Australian version of a mythical creature also found in British and American traditions. ‘Ouzel’ is a name given to a variety of bird species in the British Isles, most commonly, it seems, the blackbird. In Ireland the water ouzel is associated with the danger of malignant disease, while the blackbird is the carrier of numerous superstitions, as in English folklore. The ouzel also appears in Welsh mythology and in that of the Ainu, the aboriginal inhabitants of what is now Japan. Intriguingly, in this belief system, the ouzel is associated with improved sight, perhaps echoed in the Australian version’s capabilities, or lack of them.
Our oozlum bir
d flies backwards, either because it wishes to gaze admiringly at its own tail feathers or to keep the dust out of its eyes. Or it could be because it likes to know where it has been because it does not know where it is going. It can be large enough for a human to ride upon. If startled, the oozlum bird may fly in smaller and smaller circles until it eventually disappears into its own fundamental orifice—sometimes in a puff of blue smoke.
Around 1897, the journalist and poet W.T. Goodge penned a few verses featuring the oozlum bird, also helpfully explaining how the town of Birdsville got its name. The poem begins by introducing ‘Ginger Joe’ of the Diamantina:
He was old and he was ugly,
He was dirty, he was low.
Joe was also a noted teller of tall tales, and the best anyone ever heard him tell was about Jock McPherson’s trip to Sydney on the famously speedy oozlum bird. According to Joe, this is just how it happened:
You can talk about yer racehorse
And the pace as he can go,
But it just amounts to crawlin’,
‘Nothink else!’ said Ginger Joe.
And these cycle blokes with pacers,
You can take my bloomin’ word,
They’re a funeral procession
To the blinded Oozlum Bird!
Do yez know Marengo station?
It’s away beyond the Peak,
Over sixty miles from Birdsville
As you go to Cooper’s Creek,
Which the blacks call Kallokoopah,
And they tell you that Lake Eyre
Was one time an inland ocean.
Well, the Oozlum Bird is there!
Bet yer boots it ain’t no chicken,
It’s as big and wide across
As the bird what beats the steamships,
What’s it called? The albatross!
That’s the bird! And old King Mulga