Larrikins, Bush Tales and Other Great Australian Stories

by Graham Seal

  This make-do approach was also in evidence when the Anzacs departed Gallipoli in December 1915. Normal rifles were often set up with water-dripping or candle-burning arrangements so that they would fire automatically, giving the Turks the impression that the Anzacs were still in their positions.

  Another fertile ground for spontaneous wizardry has been the backyard. Various forms of clothes line were developed to dry the washing of Australia’s families, ranging f rom a handy tree limb or bush to lengths of twine held up by forked poles or similar supports. A rotary clothes hoist was first developed in the 1920s but it was the Hills Hoist that became the iconic backyard feature. In 1945, returned digger Lance Hill’s wife was unhappy about the way the traditional pole and rope line interfered with the garden plan. Lance went off and improvised the first of his hoists out of some metal tubing and bits of wire, then invented a cast aluminium winding mechanism to wind the hoist up and down. Adopted enthusiastically, the Hills Hoist was known as the ‘gut buster’ because of the tendency of its early versions to suddenly wind down without warning, giving the luckless clothes hanger an unwelcome thump in the stomach.

  That other essential of the backyard, the Victa lawnmower, also attained a folk name early on: developed in the 1950s by Mervin Victor Richardson, it was known as the ‘toe-cutter’, for obviously painful reasons. Later models greatly improved the safety of the machine. It was not the first rotary blade mower, but it was lighter and more powerful than its predecessors, and ideal for the tough backyards of the fibro frontier springing up across the country as the post-World War II baby boom encouraged people to throw up suburban houses in the hundreds of thousands. Mervyn knocked out the early models in his garage and sold them locally; people soon heard about them, and the rest is history.

  Sugar bag nation

  The sugar bag or chaff bag was used for carrying all sorts of loose dry goods in colonial Australia, and for long after. Made of hessian or burlap, they were cheap and could simply be thrown away after use, then becoming handy carrying bags for those who could not afford better, such as swagmen and battlers. During the Great Depression the sugar bag could be seen all over the country as people did it tough and made do to get by as best they could. The humble sugar bag was used for carrying feed for livestock, as mats, as blankets often in the form of the ‘Wagga rug’, as curtains, beds, hammocks and whatever else human need could contrive for them.

  The Great Depression is usually said to have started with the Wall Street stock market crash of 1929. British and American bankers called in the loans they had made to the rest of the world, including Australia, and began the long, grinding process of unemployment and despair that, for many, lasted throughout the 1930s. For many working Australians and their families, life became a constant struggle to survive, as Isy Wyner recalled in 1999:

  … you’d line up there and walk past these cubicles with your sugar bag, and they’d throw a hunk of meat at you and stick it in the bag—and a couple of loaves of bread and a pound of tea, and you’d figure, well, you’d then have to hump that home.

  Many Australians felt that the Depression did not really end for them until the outbreak of World War II in 1939. By then the nation had endured a decade of misery, deprivation and social dislocation so profound that the folk memory of the time was transmitted down the generations.

  In New South Wales, the Labor government of Premier Jack Lang repudiated the state’s debts to the British banks and defied Canberra’s economic strictures derived from the prescriptions of a visiting banker, Sir Otto Niemeyer. Niemeyer insisted that the Australian government cut spending, exactly the wrong response to the drying up of money and credit and one that made the Depression harder and longer than it needed to be. In the streets, they sang to the tune of ‘Titwillow’:

  What Rot-o

  Sir Otto

  Niemeyer

  In the crisis that followed, the Governor, Sir Phillip Game, dissolved the New South Wales Parliament, effectively ending Lang’s government. While these events played out in the maelstrom of political and financial power, many lost their livelihoods, their homes and their families.

  The Great Depression polarised political points of view and strong parties emerged at both ends of the political spectrum, the proto-fascist New Guard on the right, and various socialist and workers’ groups on the left, most notably the Australian Communist Party. In 1999, the 90-year-old Jock Burns, still an active member of the Communist Party, rendered a Depression ditty to the tune of a popular song of the era, ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’:

  I’m forever striking trouble,

  Striking trouble everywhere,

  The landlord came, the landlord went,

  I said I’ve no work, no rent,

  The butcher wants his money,

  Baker, grocer too,

  I sent all the bills to Jack Lang,

  ’Cause he said he’d pull us through.

  Jock added: ‘Which he never!’

  Jack Lang, demonised as a dangerous radical, attracted both support and censure. To the tune of ‘Advance Australia Fair’ his supporters sang:

  Now Premier Lang for us will fight

  We’ve got to see it through

  His motto clear is ‘Lang is right’

  We’ve got to see it through

  He’s blotting out our enemies

  His courage never fails

  So give three cheers for Premier Lang and good old New South Wales

  So sing and let your voices ring for Lang and New South Wales.

  His opponents had their own song to the tune of an Irish song known as ‘The Stone Outside Dan Murphy’s Door’, an indication of the ethnic background of many working-class people of the time:

  The songs that we sang were about old Jack Lang

  On the steps of the dole-office door

  He closed up the banks, it was one of his pranks

  And he sent us to the dole-office door

  We molested the police, ‘till they gave us relief

  On the steps of the dole-office door

  Yes, the songs that we sang were about old Jack Lang

  On the steps of the dole-office door

  Many returned soldiers from World War I could not get work during the 1920s, a period when Australian society and politics were fragmented and conflicted. It was not uncommon to see men dressed in the remains of their uniforms, sometimes maimed, begging in the street or selling self-penned and -published collections of verse and yarns door to door. For such people, and for many in the country, the onset of the Depression in the 1930s was hardly noticed, so impoverished had their lives become. As a bush worker remembered:

  Depression! There’s always been a depression in Australia as far back as I can remember. I was walking the country looking for work from the end of the First World War until the start of the Second, till 1939!

  On a similar theme, but with more direct bitterness at the way in which returned soldiers had been treated, was ‘Soup’, to the tune of ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’:

  We’re spending our nights in the doss-house

  We’re spending our days on the streets

  We’re looking for work but we find none

  Won’t someone give us something to eat?

  Soup, soup, soup, soup,

  They gave us a big plate of loop-the-loop.

  Soup, soup, soup, soup,

  They gave us a big plate of soup.

  We went and we fought for our country

  We went out to bleed and to die

  We thought that our country would help us

  But this was our country’s reply:

  Soup, soup, soup, soup…

  While governments—state and federal as well as local—were considering what to do, people simply had to get on with living as best they could. They coped, as always, by laughing at their circumstances. They parodied popular songs to make light of their lot:

  When your hair has turned to silver we will still be on the dole
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  We’ll live in Happy Valley where the Reds have got control

  We’ll draw the weekly ration and the child endowment too

  And when we get the old age pension I will leave the rest to you.

  As unemployment increased, those affected found it difficult to keep up with mortgage or rent payments. Many landlords decided to evict families who could no longer pay, an action that caused a number of violent eviction riots. Among the most notorious were those in Newtown and Bankstown in 1931:

  For we met them at the door,

  And we knocked them on the floor,

  At Bankstown and Newtown,

  We made the cops feel sore,

  They outnumbered us ten to one,

  And were armed with stick and gun,

  But we fought well, we gave them hell,

  When we met them at the door.

  The Great Depression didn’t so much end as fade into World War II. After a decade of hard times things had started to improve and with the need for soldiers, industry and other war supplies, the unemployed were soaked up. Soon there would not be enough people to do the work and even women would have to be drafted as factory workers, transport drivers and food producers.

  Happy Valley

  One of the darkest years of the Depression was 1933. It had been going for years and for many, poverty had become a way of life. All over the country shantytowns known as ‘Happy Valley’ grew up on wasteland. Those in Sydney were typical of hundreds more ‘unemployed camps’ in other states.

  On the left of the tramline at La Perouse two of these colonies can be seen. They are easily distinguishable. Made for the most part of scraps, usually galvanised iron, they are not a pleasant sight. The roofs are all of iron, old and rusty. A few lengths of stove or some other piping may serve for a chimney. Doors may be real or a piece of sacking hung from the frame. Stones may keep the roof on. There may be an open square for a window, or it may have glass. The hut may be of one room, or it may consist of three or four. It may be ugly and have canvas walls. Still, home—home for somebody.

  A few have a show of making an ‘appearance’—really comfortable little homes built in house style, but small. One or two are weatherboard; perhaps there is a tiny verandah. Fences of odd sticks, bits of wire, brushwood, and other materials are around the garden plots, and the vegetable growth in the sand is astonishing. Occasionally one comes on a bed of bright, cheerful flowers. Apparently a man erects a hut at a place which suits his ideas, puts some plants or seeds in the ground, and fences the plots. They are in no way regularised allotments. The settlements are on a haphazard plan, facing every and any way. But from the outside the general appearance is one of dilapidation and squat ugliness, the low roofs and the rusty iron dominating the landscape. Water at the settlement at Long Bay is obtained from ‘soaks’—spots to which the moisture seeps down the hillsides, filtering through the white sand. There are about 50 or 60 camp dwellings in the settlement near Long Bay on the Commonwealth ground, on which are the rifle ranges.

  Near the tram terminus at La Perouse the line skirts a gully in the sandhills lying to the left. The verdure is profuse, and the huts are scattered in it, about the hillsides, and along the ravine towards the ocean. Several of them have taken on the air of permanent dwellings, with an occasional coat of paint. There are glass windows with curtains, and some brick chimneys. Most have their tiny gardens. Children are everywhere. Dogs abound—happy dogs and happy children, un-touched by the cares of a distressing economic situation. There are no hard paths, no lighted roadways, no electric supply. There is no rent to pay, no municipal rates, no income returns to bother about. Clothes do not matter. Nobody wears boots. The beaches are close. Down the gully is the ocean. Over the hill is the bay. Trams pass every quarter of an hour. A water pipe runs through the settlement, with taps at intervals. This is what has been dubbed Happy Valley, and it looks as though life might be happy enough if it was not for the curse of idleness.

  ‘I’ve been here three years,’ said a young man with a snug-looking shanty behind a small garden. ‘Three wasted years of life!’ The bachelor abode can be distinguished from the one sheltering a family. It needs only one room. The real stringency of circumstances is to be detected in the ragged tent, or the hessian-sided hut, where the late-comers are establishing themselves.

  ‘How do you like living this way?’ a reporter asked a woman with three lusty, bare-footed youngsters playing about. She said it was ‘Good-o’. The children probably never think it anything else. Even the dogs—well fed, somehow or other—seemed to find it the same. There is work now and again. The relief work gives a little cash, and child endowment will also provide some income. About 150 dwellings are in the gully and on the hillsides.

  Over on the other side of the neck of land, which ends at Bare Island, and between La Perouse and the Bunnerong Powerhouse, are probably some hundreds of huts on the sandhills. They have in general the rusty scrap iron appearance, but a few have an air of substantiality. There is more space available and no crowding. In several a wireless mast and lead-in wire indicate some degree of comfort, and generally there is evidence that one must not altogether judge by exteriors, as quite good furniture is in some of the dwellings. At Yarra Bay, which is in Botany Bay, the hills on which they stand slope gently, and the windows or open doors look out over the shimmering blue water. Rockdale has about 150 scattered along the foreshores at Brighton-le-sands, all of the same character as the others. An occasional business sign is to be seen where an artisan is ready for customers. After the manner of human proclivities in the gathering together of people with a common interest, there is an ‘Unemployed Campers Association’. At Clontarf, in the Manly Municipality, there are about 40 or 60 camps on a pleasant area close to the silvery sands and the crystal clear water of Middle Harbour.

  The municipalities are perturbed about the growth of a new class of citizenry—these new suburbanites, who pay no rent, ask for no leases, and put up my kind of a habitation. The hitherto inviolate rules that have pressed a little hardly in requirements on the residents are broken. Ejection seems impossible, for if deprived of their shelter the campers must be provided for in some way. They are treated sympathetically. Rockdale sends them fruit, vegetables, firewood, and other things, attends to the sanitary necessities, and provides water. A tram guard on the La Perouse line deposits daily a can of milk by the wayside. It is given by a company. And so on. It is the cheapest way of living for those who would otherwise be thrown on the hands of the authorities. They are on Crown lands, and not encroaching on private property, but the householders in the vicinity, who have undergone considerable expenditure and pay heavily towards the peace, order, and good government systems under which they live, look perplexedly at the deteriorative effects of the invasion of shanties, and wonder what is to be the end of it.

  The Rockdale Council gave notice to a number of campers some time ago that they would have to move to make way for a relief work, about 20 being affected. The Manly Council, alarmed at the growth of the claim to permanence on the Clontarf reserve, gave notice that the camps would have to be vacated and demolished by the end of December, but representations were made, and delay has been granted until a further investigation is made.

  The matter of these camps having become so important, it was put before the Government some time ago, and consideration is being given to it.

  Sergeant Small

  A notorious figure during the Great Depression was a burly Queensland policeman known to every bagman as ‘Sergeant Small’. The sergeant seemingly took it upon himself to make the lives of those hopping freight trains in search of usually non-existent work even more desperate than they needed to be. His favourite trick was to disguise himself as a swaggie and clamber aboard a rail truck carrying an illegal fare. When he was close enough to collar his prey, the sergeant dropped his fake swag and arrested the unfortunate. The victim would suffer a pummelling from the Sergeant’s fists, then spend the night or even longer in
the local gaol on a vagrancy charge. Sergeant Small was, not surprisingly, a deeply unpopular man whose name became a byword for ill-treatment of this kind.

  Country singer Tex Morton, himself no stranger to the travelling life and the odd brush with the law, wrote a song about the Sergeant. The song told the story of a bagman or ‘hobo’, as Morton sang, riding on a timber train and being hoodwinked by the Sergeant who ‘dropped his billy and his roll and socked me on the chin’. The prisoner was taken to the police station where five policemen beat him up. Morton wished he was ‘fourteen stone and I was six feet six feet tall’ so he could take the train back north again just ‘to beat up Sergeant Small’.

  Morton recorded the song in 1938 but it was allegedly banned from the airwaves of the then fledgling Australian radio because it was considered to be potentially subversive with its strong anti-police theme. This did not stop it being a popular item in Morton’s famous travelling shows and, in a reworked version, the song remains popular today, having been recorded by numerous folk and country artists.

  What of the sergeant? Well, despite research by a number of people, there does not seem to have been a Sergeant Small working for the Queensland Police at the relevant time and place. He may well be a figure of folklore—the surname ‘Small’ for such a big bloke is perhaps a hint. But even if he is a myth, the uniformed authority figure wielding power in an excessive way is a common feature of Australian tradition. In this case, the story and characters are set in the Great Depression and represent an unpleasant experience suffered by many travellers searching for work during what were, for many, if not all, ‘the hungry years’.

  The farmer’s will

  Life on the land has always been tough, but dying on it can be even harder, as the maker of this will suggests: