Great Australian Stories

by Graham Seal

  ‘To whom shall I go?’ queried the collector.

  ‘Well, go to Jimmy Tyson,’ was the answer. ‘He has more than any of us.’(I might mention that up to that time ‘Jimmy’s’ name was never seen on any list for more than £1).

  ‘Well,’ said the collector, ‘as Tyson is a rich man I will go to him for a donation.’

  ‘Do,’ said the head of the firm, ‘and whatever he gives you we will guarantee you the same amount.’

  The collector, a few days after meeting Mr. Tyson, related to him what had taken place, and concluded by saying, ‘So, Mr. Tyson, I do not know what amount the firm is going to give until I have your name on my list.’ ‘Well,’ said Tyson in a gruff voice, ‘give me yer pen and ink and I’ll give yees a bob or two.’

  ‘Jimmy’ went into a private room and wrote out a cheque for £5000, and gave it to the astonished collector who in turn presented it to the more astonished merchant, who, however, could not ‘ante up’ more than a century.

  On another occasion the subject of this sketch sent a lady a cheque for £300 towards a ‘parsonage fund’. The lady, in a jocular manner, sent the cheque back, and asked Mr. Tyson if he bad not forgotten the other ‘0’ at the end of the figures. It is needless to say Mr. Tyson felt aggrieved, and immediately burnt the cheque—and did not subscribe one shilling.

  Meeting a friend on one occasion on the platform at the Orange railway station, the friend expressed surprise at seeing Mr. Tyson riding in a second-class carriage.

  ‘Do you know why I do ride in a second-class compartment?’ said Mr. Tyson.

  ‘No, I do not know why,’ said the acquaintance.

  ‘Well,’ said ‘Jimmy’, ‘it is because there is no third-class’, and with a broad smile he resumed his seat, and the friend looked crestfallen, and went and drowned his contempt for the ‘old fellow’ in a bottle of Bass’ ale.

  The writer of these lines was at one time engaged by Mr. Tyson for three days to do some clerical work, and when the work was completed, he (Mr. Tyson) reviewed the job, and asked me how much he had to pay me. ‘Half-a-guinea a day,’ was the reply.

  ‘I wish to goodness I could use the pen as well as you do,’ said Mr. Tyson. ‘If I could I would be a rich man in a few years.’ (He had banked the day before a total of £170,000.)

  ‘You are now a very rich man, Mr. Tyson, are you not?’ queried I.

  ‘No, I am not,’ said ‘Jimmy’. ‘No man is rich until he has as much as he wants, and I have not near that yet. However, as you have done your work to my satisfaction, kindly accept my cheque for £35.’

  It is not necessary for me to state here that I accepted.

  Many people are under the impression that Mr. Tyson is a man devoid of all sense of liberality, but they are, in my opinion, sadly mistaken, for although he has been known to refuse a swagman a match lest he was paid for it, he has, on the other hand, been known to help widows and orphans to the tune of thousands, and when he leaves the scene of his earthly struggles, and his life is recorded, I am sure that his liberality and generosity will overbalance the charge laid against him by a certain section of the community, viz.— parsimony.

  ‘Banjo’ Paterson wrote a poem about Tyson and he was said to have frequently dressed as a swagman on his own property, sleeping outside until the manager came back from his duties. In contrast to his miserly image, Tyson was also said to be an anonymous doer of good deeds, as Paterson suggests in his poem ‘T.Y.S.O.N.’

  Across the Queensland border line

  The mobs of cattle go;

  They travel down in sun and shine

  On dusty stage, and slow.

  The drovers, riding slowly on

  To let the cattle spread,

  Will say: ‘Here’s one old landmark gone,

  For old man Tyson’s dead’.

  What tales there’ll be in every camp

  By men that Tyson knew;

  The swagmen, meeting on the tramp,

  Will yarn the long day through,

  And tell of how he passed as ‘Brown’,

  And fooled the local men:

  ‘But not for me—I struck the town,

  And passed the message further down;

  That’s T.Y.S.O.N.!’

  There stands a little country town

  Beyond the border line,

  Where dusty roads go up and down,

  And banks with pubs combine.

  A stranger came to cash a cheque—

  Few were the words he said—

  A handkerchief about his neck,

  An old hat on his head.

  A long grey stranger, eagle-eyed—

  ‘Know me? Of course you do?’

  ‘It’s not my work,’ the boss replied,

  ‘To know such tramps as you’.

  ‘Well, look here, Mister, don’t be flash,’

  Replied the stranger then,

  ‘I never care to make a splash,

  I’m simple—but I’ve got the cash,

  I’m T.Y.S.O.N.!’

  But in that last great drafting-yard,

  Where Peter keeps the gate,

  And souls of sinners find it barred,

  And go to meet their fate,

  There’s one who ought to enter in,

  For good deeds done on earth;

  Such deeds as merit ought to win,

  Kind deeds of sterling worth.

  Not by the strait and narrow gate,

  Reserved for wealthy men,

  But through the big gate, opened wide,

  The grizzled figure, eagle-eyed,

  Will travel through—and then

  Old Peter’ll say: ‘We pass him through;

  There’s many a thing he used to do,

  Good-hearted things that no one knew;

  That’s T.Y.S.O.N.!’

  At his death, Tyson’s estate was worth two million pounds, a fact that gave further force to an apparently existing outback folk belief that the money was cursed, as a literary-minded contemporary wrote shortly after the pastoralist died:

  Tyson died alone in the night in his lonely bush station, with thousands of stock on it, but with no hand to give him even a drink of water, and no voice to soothe or to console him in his last struggle with death. He was hurriedly buried. No requiem was sung at his grave. He died, and was forgotten. Only his millions, which Bacon calls ‘muck’, and Shakespeare ‘rascally counters’, remained for his shoal of relatives to fight for through the law courts. Some of them were but struggling for an overdose of mortal poison, as the gold proved to be to some persons at least.

  There is a strange legend regarding this man’s money. The old hands out back will tell you that every coin of it is cursed, and if we follow the havoc some of the money has caused, there is much food for the superstitious mind.

  Tyson’s folktale image is similar to that of another wealthy pastoralist of a slightly later era, Sidney (later Sir) Kidman (1857–1935). Many of the tales of miserliness are told of both men.

  Ninety the Glutton

  Tasmania’s face-stuffing folk hero is said to have got his name when he was set to look after a mob of sheep. After grazing them for three months, he brought them in for shearing, but he was ninety sheep short. What happened? their owner wanted to know. ‘Well, I ate one a day for me rations,’ said Ninety.

  Ninety wandered all over Tasmania in search of work—and food. Smart farmers would give him one large feed and send him on his way. One, however, pointed to a crate of apples. ‘You can have some of these,’ he told Ninety. The apples were about to go bad, in any case. About an hour later, the owner came back to find Ninety sitting amid a pile of apple cores. ‘What time’s dinner, boss?’ he said.

  Queensland’s Ninety is Tom t
he Glutton, who can polish off a crate of bananas, sometimes including the skins, in just ten minutes.

  Galloping Jones

  Galloping Jones is thought to have lived in northern Queensland and died in 1960. Jones was a bush fighter, a drinker, and a thief, who was not above stealing stock, selling it, and stealing it back again the very same night.

  Once, Galloping Jones was arrested by a policeman and an Aboriginal tracker for illegally slaughtering a cow. The evidence was the cow’s hide, prominently marked with someone else’s brand. On the way back to town, Jones’s captors made camp for the night. Jones managed to get them both drunk, and when they fell asleep, he rode away. Instead of escaping, however, he returned a few hours later with a fresh cow hide, substituted it for the evidence, and went to sleep. The party continued to town, and Jones was duly tried. But when the evidence was pulled out, the hide bore his own brand: case dismissed.

  Jones was again captured by a young policeman who he fooled into letting him go behind a bush to relieve himself. Of course, Jones escaped and the policeman had to return to town without his captive. When he got to town to report his failure to the sergeant, who was in his usual ‘office’, the pub, there was Jones, washed and shaved and having a beer. The embarrassed policeman threatened to shoot Jones, but the trickster just said that he felt the need for a cleanup and a drink and that he would now be happy to stroll down to the lockup.

  The Eulo Queen

  Barmaids who may also be prostitutes are not the most likely of heroines, but such was the Eulo Queen or Eulo Belle. The original of the folk figure is thought to have been named Isabel Gray. She is variously said to have been born in England or Mauritius, probably in 1851, and to have been the illegitimate daughter of a British army captain. She apparently reached Australia in her late teens, when she married the first of three husbands. Some twenty years later, she turns up as the owner of the Eulo Hotel (among other establishments) in the small Queensland opal-mining town of that name, west of Cunnamulla. Eulo was on the legendary Paroo Track, a notoriously hot, dry and dusty way described in Henry Lawson’s poem ‘The Paroo’:

  It’s plagued with flies, and broiling hot,

  A curse is on it ever;

  I really think that God forgot.

  The country round that river.

  She is said to have got her name when, ejecting a drunken patron, she yelled: ‘I’m the Eulo queen—now get out!’ She was apparently a noted beauty; in any case, there was little competition in that part of the country, and she attracted many admirers, growing wealthy from their gifts. These enabled her to lead a flamboyant lifestyle and acquire another couple of husbands. Estranged from her third, she—and Eulo town—fell on hard times. She died in a Toowoomba psychiatric hospital in 1929, reputedly in her nineties and with only £30 to her name.

  Dopers

  The racetrack has long been a stamping ground for hard cases of all types. This yarn involves the practice of doping a horse in hopes of making it run faster:

  A trainer makes up some dope, soaks a sugar cube in it and slips it to his horse. Along comes the Chief Steward of the track, known as the stipe. ‘What are you feeding that horse?’ the stipe asks. ‘Just a little treat to calm him down,’ says the trainer. Seeing that the stipe is still suspicious, he picks up another cube and eats it. ‘Give me one,’ says the stipe. He apparently finds nothing wrong with it and continues on his way, leaving the trainer free to saddle his horse for the race. As the jockey mounts it, the trainer whispers to him to let the horse simply run the race: ‘Give him his head and don’t use the whip.’

  ‘But what if someone starts closing on me in the straight?’ asks the jockey.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ replies the trainer. ‘It will only be me or the bloody stipe.’

  Wheelbarrow Jack

  Also known as Russian Jack, Wheelbarrow Jack was a twenty-two-year-old Russian or Finn who arrived in Western Australia in the late 1880s and headed for the Kimberley gold rush. He was said to be tall, well built and extraordinarily strong. A popular mode of transport among the prospectors was the wooden wheelbarrow. Jack built one to carry his goods overland to the diggings. It was unusually large, matching his strength, and said to be able to carry loads of 50 kilograms or more. Jack and his barrow soon became legends. When a fellow would-be digger fell ill along the way, Jack loaded his goods and eventually the man himself onto the barrow and wheeled them far along the track until his ailing passenger died.

  The numerous stories about Jack focus on his generosity and unstinting mateship. Most are documented, but there are also less reliable tales; all, however, reflect the esteem in which Jack was held in the frontier country of the northwest.

  When a mate breaks his leg, while they are out hunting, Jack loads him onto his barrow and wheels him into town. The townsfolk gather round, and Jack tells them how many miles of hard country he’s covered. ‘And you hit every rock along the way,’ pipes up his invalid mate.

  At the Mount Morgan gold mine, Jack falls down a shaft and lies there for three days before he’s found. Badly injured, his first concern is that he’s missed his work shift.

  Once, while working for a station owner, he is sacked—a move that so angers him that he bends a crowbar with his bare hands. His only weakness is for grog. It’s said that a coach driver stopped near his lodgings and offered him a swig of whisky. ‘No, I’m off the grog,’ Jack said. Prevailed upon to have a small drink, he swallowed the half remaining bottle of whisky in one gulp. ‘If this is what you’re like when you’re not drinking,’ said the driver, ‘I’d hate to see you when you are.’

  Another time, Jack’s love of alcohol is almost the ruin of him. After a few beers too many, he loads up his barrow to make the trek back to his camp, a few miles out of town. On it he throws a box of firing caps for the dynamite he is also carrying. Seeing him weave down the street, the local policeman decides to escort Jack out of town—then spots the firing caps and decides to arrest him. Jack’s intoxication and strength make this something of a challenge. The imaginative policeman manages to steer Jack, merrily singing, towards the police tents, where other policemen offered him a cup of tea and repacked his wheelbarrow to make it safe.

  Jack dozes off, and the police handcuff him to a very large log. They then go off to attend to business. When they return, Jack has vanished—and so has the log. Tracks in the sand lead to the local pub, where the police find Jack drinking a beer with his unchained hand and the log propped up on the bar. Thirsty, he had simply thrown the log onto his shoulder and made for the pub. ‘Have a drink with me and I’ll go back to jail,’ says Jack. Rather than drink on duty, the men follow Jack, still shouldering the giant log, back to the police tents, where they share a billy of tea.

  Jack also attracted the interest of many journalists, including Mary Durack and Ernestine Hill. After his death, in 1904, a local newspaper published this obituary:

  An old identity, John Fredericks—but a hundred times better known as ‘Russian Jack’—died a few days ago. His death came as a surprise, for no one could imagine death in the prime of life to one of such Herculean strength. He was, so far as physical manhood is concerned, a picture, but he combined the strength of a lion with the tenderness of a woman. Though he had a loud-sounding sonorous voice that seemed to come out of his boots, there was no more harm in it than the chirp of a bird. Many instances are known of his uniform good nature, but his extraordinary kindness, some years ago, to a complete stranger—that he picked up on the track in the Kimberley gold rush—exemplified his mateship. The stranger had a wheelbarrow and some food, and the burly Russian picked the stranger up, placed him on his own large wheelbarrow, together with his meagre possessions, and wheeled him nearly 300 miles to a haven of refuge.

  It was Ernestine Hill who first suggested that a statue be raised to commemorate Russian Jack. Eventually in 1979, one was erected at Halls Creek. The statue depicts Russian Jack i
n his Good Samaritan role, carrying a sick digger in his wooden wheelbarrow.

  Russian Jack is a Western Australian version of a folktale type known as ‘German Charlie’ stories. While the heroes of such tales are not always called ‘German Charlie’, they are usually nicknamed that way because of their national or ethnic origins. These stories tell how some special, unusual or exaggerated skill or attribute is brought to an Australian community. Using that skill in helpful, often humorous, sometimes absurd ways, German Charlies become accepted members of their communities and feature in commonly told tales of their real and fancied exploits. Russian Jack’s wheelbarrow, his assistance to the needy, his strength and his prodigious boozing all combine to make him another example of a type of hard case found all around Australia.

  The jilted bride

  Eliza Donnithorne is perhaps the most unusual hard case of all, not only because she is a woman, but also because of the rumour that she was the model for the disappointed bride Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. Miss Havisham spends the rest of her life wearing her wedding dress and sitting among the mouldering ruins of her planned wedding feast.

  Eliza Donnithorne arrived in Sydney as a child in the mid-1830s. At the age of thirty, she accepted a proposal of marriage. On the appointed day the guests assembled in St Stephen’s Church, Newtown, and the bride in her fine wedding dress awaited the arrival of the groom. He never came. Shattered, she returned to the family home, Camperdown Lodge, put up the shutters and lived ever after in candlelight, attended only by two faithful servants and her pets. She died in 1886, not having set foot outside for thirty years.

  In some of the stories about Eliza, she is said to keep the front door permanently ajar on a chain in the hope that her groom would one day return. She orders that her wedding feast is to remain on the table, and refuses to take off her wedding dress. The various reasons given for the groom’s failure to arrive at the church include that he was of relatively low status and that her family paid him to disappear, he fell from his horse as he galloped to the wedding, or that he was a military man and suddenly shipped out to India. Yet another variant holds that Eliza was pregnant but the baby was stillborn.