Larrikins, Bush Tales and Other Great Australian Stories

by Graham Seal

  The Meredith theory revolves around the Breaker’s relationship with Ogilvie and correspondence between them, as well as with several other bush nomads of the period. Like Morant and many others, the Scots Ogilvie was drifting around the backblocks doing whatever work there was and writing verse and journalism whenever possible. They were all wild boys—womanisers, drinkers, gamblers and mostly exceptional horsemen. Some, especially the Breaker, were already bush legends. Meredith argues that despite his skills and image, Morant was effectively a kind of split personality. When sober he was charming, witty and even urbane. But after one too many he could turn into a very ugly and intimidating animal. Men who were not generally frightened by very much at all were known to fear and hate Morant.

  The Breaker also lived a dissolute life, habitually out of funds, scrounging on his mates and not being too fussy where he obtained his mount. Despite all this, Ogilvie maintained contact with Morant until a few months before the Gatton murders. Morant simply disappeared and was not seen again by those who knew him until around February 1899, when he appeared at the Paringa Station on the South Australian section of the Murray.

  Where had he been?

  According to Meredith, the Thomas Day initially suspected at Gatton was Breaker Morant. Day turned up in Gatton at the same time Morant vanished from his mates further south. He took a job with a local butcher, an occupation in which he was skilled, and in just a few days developed a local reputation as a taciturn loner. He frightened his workmate so much that he asked their boss to get rid of Morant, and he was often seen loitering near the spot where the murders were committed.

  The locals had Day—only in town ten days—pegged as the murderer, though the detectives f rom Brisbane concentrated their investigations on another suspect. Meanwhile, Day became increasingly abusive to his employer and family and he was paid off in lieu of notice. The police cleared Day to leave town, and he took the train to Toowomba, then travelled to Brisbane via Gatton a few days later. Then he disappeared.

  According to Meredith, he joined the militia under another name but deserted a few weeks later and was never heard of again. This was around five or six weeks after the murders. About a month later Morant turned up at Paringa Station while a mob of cattle was being swum across the Murray. He did not stay for long. On the outbreak of the South African war he left to enlist, probably in hope of returning eventually to England.

  While Breaker Morant’s story had some years to run until his ignominious end, there is more to tell of Thomas Day. Before Day had arrived in Gatton, fifteen-year-old Alfred Hill and the pony he rode were lured into the bush and shot dead. The bullet was a .380 calibre. Police arrested and charged a man on suspicion but he was later released. No further action took place but in the course of the Royal Commission into the Gatton murders, it was established that the man charged with Hill’s murder was Thomas Day. Morant was known to carry a pistol, and the bullet found in the brain of Michael Murphy was .380 calibre.

  The evidence is circumstantial, but no more so than the many other theories put forward over the years. The Gatton tragedy remains one of Australia’s most gruesome and enigmatic murders.

  Vanishing vessels

  Australia’s history of maritime exploration and disaster has produced many legends of lost ships and vanishing wrecks. The well-known story of the Mahogany Ship, said to lie somewhere beneath the sands of Armstrong Bay near Warrnambool, goes back to at least the earliest newspaper account in 1847. However, the area was barely settled at that time, though it was visited by whalers and sealers. It also lay on an overland droving route, so Europeans were in at least some contact with the place. It has also been suggested that the story of the Mahogany Ship derived originally from earlier wrecks—probably of whalers or sealers—in the Hopkins River area.

  In 1876, a local man, John Mason, wrote a letter to the Melbourne Argus detailing what he saw while riding along the beach from Port Fairy to Warrnambool during the summer of 1846:

  My attention was attracted to the hull of a vessel embedded high and dry in the Hummocks, far above the reach of any tide. It appeared to have been that of a vessel about 100 tons burden, and from its bleached and weather-beaten appearance, must have remained there many years. The spars and deck were gone, and the hull was full of drift sand. The timber of which she was built had the appearance of cedar or mahogany. The fact of the vessel being in that position was well known to the whalers in 1846, when the first whaling station was formed in that neighbourhood, and the oldest natives, when questioned, stated their knowledge of it extended from their earliest recollection. My attention was again directed to this wreck during a conversation with Mr M’Gowan, the superintendent of the Post-office, in 1869, who, on making inquiries as to the exact locality, informed me that it was supposed to be one of a fleet of Portuguese or Spanish discovery ships, one of them having parted from the others during a storm, and was never again heard of. He referred me to a notice of a wreck having appeared in the novel Geoffrey Hamlyn, written by Henry Kingsley, in which it is set down as a Dutch or Spanish vessel, and forms the subject of a remark from one of the characters, a doctor, who said that the English should never sneer at those two nations—they were before you everywhere. The wreck lies about midway between Belfast and Warrnambool, and is probably by this time entirely covered with drift sand, as during a search made for it within the last few months it was not to be seen.

  Whatever the origins of the tale, it has attracted extensive investigation by historians, archaeologists, treasure hunters and history enthusiasts. One of the consistent, if controversial, themes in the story has it that the ship is a Portuguese—sometimes Spanish—caravelle wrecked in the area some considerable time before documented European occupation. It has also been claimed that the Mahogany Ship is of Chinese origin and that there is a local Aboriginal legend of ‘yellow men’ coming ashore. The few relatively reliable eyewitness accounts of the wreck before it disappeared beneath the shifting sand dunes suggest that the ship was of an unusual design. This could mean many things but has led to a suggestion that it might have been a roughly made craft from a documented Tasmanian convict escape attempt. Until the Mahogany Ship is rediscovered, or an authenticated document indicating contact found, speculation will continue.

  A similar tradition exists on Queensland’s Stradbroke Island, where the remains of a Spanish galleon are said to be disintegrating in coastal swamplands. The first documented sighting of the high-prowed timber ship dates from the 1860s. A local pilot and light keeper found the wreck at the southern end of the island and removed its anchor to use as an ornament in his home. His Aboriginal wife then told him of the local Indigenous knowledge of the wreck. There were further sightings in the 1880s, when the supposition that the mysterious vessel was of Spanish origin began to gain traction. This rapidly became a lost treasure tale and serious searches for the galleon began; one group in 1894 claimed to have found the wreck and removed a substantial load of copper fittings from it. When they tried to find the wreck again, the intriguing structure had disappeared.

  Subsequent sightings have been either due to Aboriginal people taking settlers to the site, or after bushfires have revealed the smoking timbers through burnt-out vegetation. No sightings have been reported since the 1970s, though there are persistent suggestions that the locals hold secret knowledge of the galleon’s treasure, fuelling continued searches for the site. A 2007 expedition unearthed a rusting coin that is said to date between the late 1590s and the 1690s.

  Yet another intriguing mystery concerns the ‘Deadwater Wreck’. In 1846, the surveyor and explorer Frank Gregory reported the ‘remains of a vessel of considerable tonnage … in a shallow estuary near the Vasse Inlet… which, from its appearance I should judge to have been wrecked two hundred years ago…’ The next recorded sighting of the wreck in the section of the Wonnerup Inlet known as ‘the Deadwater’ was in 1856, though the account stated that it had been visible ‘for years past’. There is a credible line of d
ocumentation back to the earliest years of European occupation in this area in the 1840s, and there is also the usual folklore surrounding this mystery. Unverified local tradition claims that early settlers massacred local Aboriginal people to obtain the gold ornaments that they possessed from some unknown source.

  The decomposing ship was plundered in the 1860s, though almost certainly not by Aborigines, but there have been no credible sightings of it since. That has not quashed speculation and investigation about the ship’s identity. Serious research and fieldwork into the wreck has been carried out, and based on estimates of the length of the Deadwater Wreck, it is suggested that the ship is a VOC hoeker named the Zeelt. This class of ship was around 30 metres in length and built in the high-stern style of many early East Indiamen, in accordance with some descriptions of the wreck before its disappearance beneath the sand and mud. The small 90-ton Zeelt went missing as early as 1672 on only her second voyage. This work may yet reveal the remains of the Deadwater Wreck, but there is also research suggesting Zeelt actually went down in southern Madagascar.

  Yearning for yowies

  What are we going to do about all these yowies? They’re turning up everywhere around the nation in almost plague proportions. At least that is the impression given by the various websites dedicated to hunting the wild yowie.

  Great Australian Stories included a solid section on yowies, as well as other mythical creatures of the bush, including the yarama, the bunyip and several other mysterious and usually unpleasant beings. Since then, the big, hairy creatures, reported from the time of the early colonial period, have been regularly sighted in the bush, and even in the suburbs: in 2010 a Canberra bloke met a hairy, apelike creature in his garage. Apparently, it wanted to communicate—but who knows what?

  Canberra, Queanbeyan and surrounding areas have long been yowie hotspots. They became such a nuisance in the 1970s that a $200,000 reward was offered by the Queanbeyan Festival Board to anyone who could capture one of the elusive creatures. The money has never been claimed but that has had no effect on yowie sightings.

  In 1903, Graham Webb of Uriarra recalled an encounter with ‘some strange animal’ that had taken place many years earlier:

  We were out in Pearce’s Creek (a small stream between the Tidbinbilla Mountains and the Cotter River) in search of cattle. In the early part of the day we came upon the remains of a cow of ours. We recognised this beast by the head, as the blacks would only take the tongues out. That the blacks had speared and roasted it was evidenced by their stone oven which was close by. We searched the creek during the day, and having seen no indications of cattle being there, we decided to return to where the cow had been killed, and camp there for the night, as it was a good place for the safe keeping of our horses. The weather was very hot and dry; it was in the month of March, there was no moon, none of us had a match. We had supper as usual, and lay down.

  Some time during the night, I think it must have been late, I awoke (the others were asleep) and I heard a noise similar to what an entire horse makes. I heard it again and awoke the others. We heard it some four or five times, and the noise ceased, but we could hear it walking along on the opposite side of the range, and when in a line with our camp, we could hear it coming down in our direction. As it came along we could hear its heavy breathing. About this time the dogs became terrified and crouched against us for protection. On account of a fallen tree being on the side the thing was coming, it had to come on one side or the other to get to where we were. My brother Joseph was on the lower side of this tree, I was on the upper side and my brother William in the centre. Not many seconds passed before Joseph sang out, ‘Here the thing is,’ and fired a small pistol he carried at it. Neither William nor myself, coming to the scrub got a sight of it. Joe says it was like a blackfellow with a blanket on him.

  We did not hear it going away. We then tried to set our dogs after it, thinking they might find out where the thing went, but we could not get them to move. Had this thing been a little later in coming we could have seen what it was, as the day began to dawn in less than a quarter of an hour after Joe fired at it.

  Webb also mentioned another incident in which Aboriginal people had killed a creature like the one that had terrified him and his brothers:

  The locality where the blacks killed it was below the junction of the Yass River with the Murrumbidgee. The animal got into some cliffs of rocks, and the blacks got torches to find out where it was hidden and then killed it with their nullah nullahs. There was a great many blacks at the killing, and he saw two dragging it down the hill by its legs. It was like a black man, but covered with grey hair.

  Many consider the yowie to be related to the yeti or ‘abominable snowman’ of the Himalayas. In 2013, an Oxford University geneticist claimed to have matched DNA from alleged yeti hair samples showing that they matched those of a polar bear. This claim raised enormous interest around the world, though it has been challenged on the basis that polar bears are not likely to have ever existed in Nepal. Probably not in Australia, either.

  Other speculations about the yowie include the possibility that the creature is a remnant of an earlier species. Aboriginal legends are often put forward as evidence for this.

  Meanwhile, the hunt for our very own long-armed and hairy monster goes on. Sightings are regularly reported, especially from hotspots in Queensland but also in many other places. In the Queensland farming town of Kilcoy, they are so enthusiastic about their venerable yowie legends that they have erected a yowie statue in the local park, now called Yowie Park. In another sighting hotspot, the town of Mulgowie, the locals speak enthusiastically of sightings and speculations on the nature of their mysterious monster, the poetic Mulgowie Yowie. They have yowies in Woodenbong, New South Wales; they’re in the Blue Mountains, near Taree, throughout Queensland, as well as the ACT infestations. We love a good yowie yarn almost as much as newspapers, radio and television do, in which even the sniff of a yowie is elevated to a major event. It seems that we really don’t want to let our yowies go. If only someone could actually produce one. Perhaps we could grasp it by the leg?

  8

  Romancing the swag

  North, west, and south—south, west, and north—

  They lead and follow Fate—

  The stoutest hearts that venture forth—

  The swagman and his mate.

  Henry Lawson, ‘The Swagman and his Mate’

  THE SWAGMAN—ALSO KNOWN as a ‘bagman’—is one of Australia’s most colourful characters. We first hear the word around the mid-nineteenth century, but the itinerant way of life was established long before. The need to travel long distances between settlements and properties meant that the ability to live on the road was vital for many people, and as the frontier expanded it became even more important for those without horses to ‘go on the wallaby’. The essential equipment included something to sleep on, a billy for cooking and whatever other personal items were needed to survive what were usually long, hot and dusty journeys, mostly in search of work but sometimes avoiding it.

  As early as the 1860s, landowners were complaining about men ‘on the tramp’ and the

  … reckless system of life assumed by the generality of the men who back [sic] their beds, and shift from one part of the colony to another, during the intervals between sheep shearing and harvest, harvest and sheep shearing. Six months’ work, six months’ idleness—such is the year’s programme of this gaberlunzie fraternity.

  (A ‘gaberlunzie’ is an old Scots term for a beggar.) The writer went on to complain about the swaggies who ‘knock down their entire earnings in the two great drinking bouts with which the two periods of industry are wound up.’

  And there were plenty of others with the same view. Despite this, the nomadic labourer and bush worker was so necessary to the survival of the agricultural economy, especially the wool industry, that the swagman’s way of life was followed by many.

  Lore of the track

  An extensive body of folkl
ore grew up around the ‘swaggie’ who ‘humped his drum’ along the ‘tucker track’. One of the many classic yarns highlights the legendary reluctance of swagmen to indulge in more conversation than was necessary.

  A couple of swaggies are tramping along together in the usual silence. Around mid-afternoon they come across the bloated carcass of a large animal on the side of the road. That night as they settle down in their camp one says to the other, ‘Did you notice that dead horse we saw this afternoon?’

  It wasn’t until lunchtime the following day that the other swaggie answered: ‘It wasn’t a horse, it was a bullock.’ The next morning he woke up but his mate was nowhere to be seen. But he’d left a note. It read: ‘I’m off, there’s too much bloody argument for me.’

  The swaggie’s dry sense of humour features in more than a few yarns:

  One day out on the track out the back of Bourke, a swaggie runs out of food. Somewhere along the Darling River he comes across a ramshackle selection. He knocks on the door of the tumbledown shack and asks the farmer’s wife for some food for his dog, thinking perhaps that this would encourage her sympathy. But the wife refuses, saying she can’t be handing out food to lazy tramps and flea-bitten mongrels.

  ‘Alright then, Missus’, say the swaggie, ‘but can yer lend me a bucket?’

  ‘What do you want that for?’, she ask suspiciously.

  ‘To cook me dog in.’