Larrikins, Bush Tales and Other Great Australian Stories

by Graham Seal

  Hoo hoo boo! ha ha ha!

  And the Snake, sneaking sly

  With his sharp glittering eye,

  As he searches and pries;

  And the Lizard with frill,

  Like a soldier at drill,

  That fights till he dies.

  And the saucy Tom Tit,

  With his pretty ‘twit twit,’

  And his tail in the air;

  And the wary quick Snipe,

  With a bill like a pipe,

  Hopping hither and there.

  O wicked Mawpawk!

  We’ll have you caught,

  For the deed you have done;

  We’ll slyly creep

  When you’re fast asleep,

  And break your bones ev’ry one.

  ‘Yes, Yes,’ said the Hawk,

  And the bird that can talk,

  ‘We’ll strike off his head.’

  ‘Ah, Ah,’ said the Owl,

  ‘By fish, flesh and fowl,

  ‘We’ll bang! shoot him dead.’

  So they all flew away,

  And still fly to this day,

  O’er hill and o’er plain;

  But he dives in the rushes,

  And hides under bushes,

  And they search but in vain.

  Written in 1870, Cawthorne’s verses reflect the Victorian fascination with death, though it reads rather morbidly today. By contrast, most of the forgotten nursery rhymes of Australia were just for fun:

  Billy had a gum-boil

  Which made poor Billy grumboil.

  The doctor said: ‘That’s some boil!

  And does your tummy rumboil?

  It seems to me abnormoil;

  You’d better try some warm oil.’

  So Billy got some hot oil,

  And boiled it in a bottoil,

  And on his gum did rub oil—

  Which ended Billy’s trouboil!

  And, perhaps an authentic children’s ditty:

  Captain Cook

  Broke his hook

  Fishing for Australia,

  Captain Cook wrote a book

  All about Australia.

  The lost boys of Daylesford

  One of Frederick McCubbin’s many admired paintings is simply titled ‘Lost’. Completed in 1907, it shows a young boy crying and alone in the bush. Lost children were one of settlers’ great fears, which were frequently realised as children wandered off into unknown and near-impenetrable terrain, especially in wooded country. A sombre gravestone in Daylesford cemetery commemorates the sad tale of William Graham, aged six, his brother Thomas, aged four, and their friend, five-year-old Alfred Burman.

  The three were out looking for lost goats along the Wombat Creek on 30 June 1867. When they did not come home, a search was mounted but had to be abandoned at darkness. The worst frost of the year fell overnight. The search resumed the next morning, and over the next two days, more than 100 searchers found nothing but two small footprints. Word spread and soon there were more than 100 mounted searchers and over 500 on foot. Next day all shops were closed and a public meeting raised over 70 pounds for a reward. The police officer in charge was Inspector Smith.

  … he had telegraphed to every place where there were black trackers to have them sent on; and Mr. Joseph Parker said that he, so soon as the meeting was over, would start for [home] and bring with him in the morning two young men who in following up a trail were equal to any black trackers. These statements were received with much applause, as was one made by Captain O’Connell, that the Volunteer Fire Brigade had, prior to the public meeting, resolved on turning out on the morrow to a man and making a search.

  Mr. Inspector Smith suggested that all who intended to join in the search should meet at the Specimen Hill works, the manager of which had, in case anyone might lose his way, offered to keep the engine whistle, which could be heard two miles, continually sounding for their guidance after nightfall. He also impressed on every volunteer the necessity of taking a little bread and wine with him, in case of discovering the lost ones, and cautioned those who found them against bringing them too suddenly into a heated room, and gave instructions for their treatment.

  By 4 July the numbers hunting for the children swelled further, including 200 dogs. But heavy winter rain set in and made it impossible to find any trace of the boys. The local paper published a letter of thanks to the local community from the fathers of the boys.

  Now that the public excitement has partially subsided with regard to the ‘Three Lost Boys’, we beg to return our sincere and heartfelt thanks to the inhabitants of Daylesford and surrounding districts, for the great and praiseworthy search they have made for the recovery of the children.

  None have been more astonished than we have been at the mighty phalanx of human aid, aye, and brute aid too, that have been engaged in this search, and although all efforts have been unsuccessful, the public sympathy evinced has been a source of great consolation to ourselves and the distressed mothers.

  When we have returned home night after night to tell the same sad tale of our want of success; when we have recounted to them the deeds of endurance and energy, and the great sacrifice of time and money, this community have suffered, their tears have been dried, and we have all been satisfied with the assurance that all that human aid can do, has been done on this occasion.

  We still trust and hope that with Divine aid the bodies of the children may yet be found ere long, not forgetting ‘There is a Divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew then how we will’.

  In conclusion, we beg again to tender our heartfelt thanks to the public for the zeal and energy evinced to restore us our lost children. Our prayer is that, no parents will ever have to mourn for the loss and death of their children in the wild bush of Australia.

  Later in the month an inquest was held, finding that the children probably died of exposure on the first night. Almost two months later a settler’s dog came home carrying a child’s boot still clinging to the remains of a foot. The dog later found a human skull. They found the bodies next day. The younger children were inside a tree cavity and the older boy nearby.

  The party named then formed themselves into a search party, going abreast at a certain distance from each other. Proceeding in this way for a short distance, David Bryan, in jumping a log forming part of a fence, discovered some bones and clothes lying about, and exclaimed, ‘Here they are!’ His brother Ninian was next to him, but on the opposite side of the log. Starting to join his brother, he went round a large tree standing and forming a corner to two fences. On rounding it he found it hollow, and a glance disclosed to him the bodies of two of the children. He started back, and said to his brother, ‘Oh, Mike, here they are.’ The others were speedily attracted to the spot, and watch kept over the remains till the police, who were sent for, arrived, and took them in charge. The remains too surely evidenced that they had been gnawed by dogs.

  A witness favoured the local newspaper with a description of the scene with the kind of grisly details beloved of the era:

  The locality where the remains of the children who were lost from Table-hill on Sunday, the 30th June last, were found, in situate about a mile and a half from Wheeler’s sawmills on the Musk Creek. The bodies of the two children which were found in the hollow tree were when discovered in a state of fair preservation, considering the length of time which had elapsed since they were lost; but the remains of the third consisted only of a few bones and the skull. The two bodies in the hollow tree when found were lying closely cuddled together, as if the children had by the warmth afforded by each other endeavoured to ward off the bitter wintry cold. The younger child had been placed inside, and the elder and stronger one had lain down beside him on the outer side. The backs of both were turned to the entrance of the cavity.

  Here they must have lain and perished of cold and starvation. The elder boy had his legs completely under the body of the younger, and his cap lay on the floor of the cavity; the younger boy had his cap placed before
his face. It is probable that the body of the third boy was also in the tree, but had been dragged thence by dogs. There are marks of hair outside on the roots of the tree. The elder boy had boots on, the younger had none, but a laceup boot broken at the heel was lying in the interstice of the tree just over his head. In the cavity were two sticks which they had evidently used in their wanderings. When the body of the elder boy was placed in the coffin, as the corpse sank into the narrow shell, his right arm was pushed forward, and his hand fell over upon his breast, and his face became uppermost. This hand was white, plump, and apparently undecomposed, but the whole of his features were gone, and nothing remained but a ghastly skeleton outline, with the lower jaw detached and fallen. The face of the younger child was, however, in a state of preservation, but perfectly black. The members of both bodies were much attenuated.

  As so often happened in these cases, the lost children were within reach of help. But the density of the bush and difficulty of the terrain meant that even 200 yards was too far:

  The position of the tree is at the corner of an old cultivation paddock in which potatoes are now planted. It is melancholy to reflect that these unfortunate children should have reached so near help and succour and failed to find it. Had they proceeded 200 yards farther up the fence, they would have come upon the hut of M’Kay. It would seem they had reached this place at night, and finding their passage impeded by the brush fence, turned into the hollow tree, not wishing to lose sight of it, thinking that the dawn of morning would set them right. Thus they must have lain down to sleep their last sleep.

  Daylesford closed for the funeral. The streets were lined with mourners paying their last respects to the children and their families. Over 800 people attended the burial. The three boys were laid in their grave as they had been found, with the elder boy lying over the two younger ones in a forlorn attempt to keep them warm.

  The town raised a fine monument above the graves of William and Thomas Graham and their friend Alfred Burman. The families founded a scholarship at the Daylesford Primary School as a mark of appreciation for the help they had received from the local people; known as the Graham Dux, it has been awarded every year since 1889. In 2013 the Daylesford and District Historical Society had the monument refurbished, including regilding the more than 400 characters that tell one of Australia’s saddest lost child tragedies.

  Fairies in the paddock

  The flower fairy of European literary tradition is not a natural fit with the strongly realistic traditions of the Australian bush. Nevertheless, from around the middle of the nineteenth century writers began to adapt the fragile flower fairy to the local environment. Some also borrowed stories and ideas from Aboriginal tradition, a practice that eventually produced some of the darker elements of Australian children’s stories in the form of the ‘Banksia Men’ in the Snugglepot and Cuddlepie stories by May Gibbs.

  Most writers of local fairy tales were women, one of them just sixteen when she published her Fairytales from the Land of Wattle in 1904. Olga Ernst (Waller) presented ‘What the Jackass Said’ (i.e. the Kookaburra), ‘The Opossum’s Jealousy’, ‘The Bunyip and the Wizard’ and ‘The Origin of the Wattle’ as tales told by herself as an older child to younger children.

  They are offered here as tales told by a child to younger children in the hope they will not only amuse the young, but will also win the approval of those to whom a loving study of tree and flower, bird and insect, and the association of familiar elements of old-world fairy love with Australian surroundings, commend themselves.

  Olga Ernst provided a heady mix of European river sprites, goblins, little red elves, ugly gnomes and mermaids swimming near the mouth of the Yarra, together with bunyips and giants thundering across mountain ranges. There are magic runes, charms and magic elixirs aplenty, along with the ‘Wizard of the Roper River’ and the ‘Mermaid of the Gulf of Carpentaria’. At the end of this story the mermaid is married to the Bunyip by a beautiful fairy and a witch turns the dust elves into the willy-willies or small dust storms.

  In later life, Olga turned to writing mainly philosophical fantasy works and nursery rhymes. Songs from the Dandenongs was published in 1939 under her married name of Waller. It brought together Aboriginal names for natural features with the rhythms of British nursery rhymes, with music by Jean M. Fraser. The notes accompanying the verses included Olga’s regret that many of the Aboriginal names had been lost or changed to banal English versions. In effect, this modest self-published collection was a pioneering attempt to familiarise children with Indigenous languages and appreciation of the landscape. ‘A Mountain Jingle’ began with the verse in the familiar rhythm of ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’:

  We stand on top of Mt Dandenong,

  Dandenong, Dandenong,

  We stand on top of Mt Dandenong

  And this is what we see:

  Old Beenak has his cloud-cap on,

  Cloud-cap on, cloud-cap on,

  Old Beenak has his cloud-cap on

  With a rainbow for a feather!

  And so the book continued with information about local Aboriginal legends and practices, animals, birds, geology, weather and so on. Olga even had a rhyme for the recently completed dam, which she referred to as ‘the Silvan Lake’, ‘only called a “dam” by the grossly unpoetic’.

  It seems unlikely that many parents would have taken up any of the heartfelt recreations to sing to their children in those days. Olga died in 1972 and is remembered today only by her descendants and a few literary scholars.

  Surviving Black Jack

  In August 1835, two emaciated English youths staggered into the tiny settlement at King George Sound. They were little more than skeletons and had almost lost the power of speech. But they were alive. When their health began to return they told their strange tale of shipwreck, piracy and bare survival.

  James Newell and James Manning sailed from Sydney aboard the schooner Defiance in August 1833. She was loaded with supplies destined to feed the ragtag bands of sealers, escaped convicts and deserters who haunted the islands around the southwest, near modern-day Albany. According to their own account they were cast away the next month when the Defiance was wrecked on Cape Howe Island. With the captain, another man and ‘a native woman’, they escaped aboard a whaleboat, eventually landing on Kangaroo Island. Here they built a house for the captain and his Aboriginal wife and planted a garden. The remainder of the schooner’s crew, another six men, sailed for Sydney in another of the wrecked schooner’s boats but were never heard of again.

  In September, two black men arrived at the island, one of them a man named Anderson, a notorious local ruffian who would come to be known as the pirate ‘Black Jack’. The young men took passage with Anderson to his stronghold on Long Island where they were compelled to work for their keep. A couple of months later, the captain of Defiance arrived and accused James Manning of stealing money from him. The captain, enthusiastically assisted by Anderson, took over 41 shillings from Manning at gunpoint.

  While the two James were being held captive and robbed on Long Island, another group of desperates resident on the island kidnapped five Aboriginal women, murdering two of their husbands in the process. Another Aboriginal man tried to swim to the island to rescue his wife but was drowned.

  Not surprisingly, the two youths continually asked Anderson to put them ashore on the mainland, but he always refused. In January 1834 another small boat arrived under the command of a man named Evanson Janson. James Manning, apparently still with means, paid Janson for a passage on his boat to King George Sound. Instead, he was landed on Middle Island where Anderson again stole money from him, 50 shillings in English coins and Spanish dollars.

  Eventually, in June, Manning and Newell convinced Anderson to land them. He did so but provided them with no gunpowder for hunting their food. They started walking, living on shellfish and grass roots. More than two months later they arrived at King George Sound, where they were cared for by local Aborigines of the White Co
ckatoo, Murray and Willmen groups who:

  … nursed, fed, and almost carried them at times, when, from weakness, they were sinking under their sufferings. This is a return which could scarcely have been expected from savages, who have no doubt been exposed to repeated atrocities, such as we have related in a previous narrative. Indeed, to the acts of these white barbarians, we may now trace the loss of some valuable lives among the Europeans, and more especially that of Captain Barker, which took place within a short distance of the scene of these atrocities.

  The Aboriginal people were rewarded with gifts of rice and flour, and the sway of law and order in that wild part of the coast was lamented by the journalist who wrote up the story:

  The habits of the men left on the islands to the southward, by whaling, or sealing vessels, have long borne the character given them by Manning and Newell; it appears, therefore, deserving of some consideration by what means their practices can be checked, as future settlers in the neighbourhood of Port Lincoln will be made to expiate the crimes and outrages of these lawless assassins.

  It would be quite a few years before the law did rule the waves in this part of the country. But, as elsewhere, settlement eventually tamed the vast plains, mountain ranges and savage coasts.

  11

  Larger than life

  They’re a weird mob.

  Nino Culotta (John O’Grady), 1957

  FOR A COUNTRY that tends to pull down tall poppies, we seem to have an awful lot of them. The varied and often surprising stories of these lives are colourful cameos of the past. While some of the lives mentioned here have been mostly forgotten, in some cases the things they did have lived on in everyday Australian life.

  The famous book They’re a Weird Mob, later a film, picked up humorously on this aspect of the national character and is recognised as a classic. Tossed off, it is said, as the result of a ten-pound bet, John O’Grady was himself something of a character. He died in 1981, but his casual classic has become part of the national biographical tradition that includes all sorts and all comers.