I can’t recall which of the furiously racing monsters made it over the fragile bridge first, but surprisingly both brothers lived until a reasonably advanced age.
Of course, not everyone on the track played so hazardously. There were drovers through each year who rarely took a drink when they had the responsibility of cattle in hand, but it was a rare transport driver who couldn’t be inveigled into a night around the campfire if good company was gathered and a bottle of rum was passed around.
Anyway, what is there to report on the commendably proper and hard-working? Is it not the wild and the rebellious who stand in one’s memory?
The staff situation hadn’t improved all that much. My mother applied for a permit to employ an Aboriginal yardman, which was grudgingly granted, though the law didn’t allow him to put even a foot on the licensed premises. Prentice was a big, good-natured man who kept the grounds tidy and did all kinds of odd jobs.
When Prentice cleared the huge piles of empties after drinkers departed, he covertly drank the dregs. He also wheeled the big grog-loaded barrow across the road to where revellers were in full celebration. Given that full-blood Aboriginals weren’t permitted liquor of any kind, there would have been reservations about the legality of this close proximity to alcohol if anyone had thought about it, or if there’d been a closer police presence.
Prentice had leprosy and dreaded being sent away from his people for treatment; he kept well out of sight if a government motor vehicle came into town. Eventually, though, he had to go and be treated at Darwin’s leprosarium.
Another staff member was Cookie, a part-Aboriginal woman who lived locally and reigned over the kitchen. She was a good bush cook, but unreliable, for she had a fondness for a drink or two.
Part-Aboriginals had to be officially exempted from the prohibition order before being allowed into a bar. Publicans were issued with a list of those exempted, which had to be regularly brought up-to-date. Known colloquially as the ‘Dog Act’ list, it was tacked up behind the office door for quick reference.
Exemption could be rescinded if a person was found drunk and unacceptably disorderly. For those unable to enter a bar, there were always mates to supply a drink off the premises—but even if supplying liquor in complete innocence of the restriction, one faced the mandatory six months’ gaol term.
When a part-Aboriginal man entered the bar, you asked his name if he was unknown to you, then checked the list to save the embarrassment of a direct: ‘Are you exempt?’
After the grime of years had been scrubbed and polished into an unusual cleanliness, and my mother’s law laid down, the lads generally resigned themselves to the new order.
Mother put aside her plan of early departure—she was not one to turn her back on a lucrative business—and remained behind her bar and in her store for the next seven years. But she still needed more staff.
One day I received a rather desperate telegram, begging my help. Though I wasn’t sure what Mother expected of me, I decided to go anyway.
CHAPTER 24
Anyone Can Do Anything
On the day I returned to Newcastle Waters, my old nursemaid Polly came down from the camp with a group of elderly lubras from my mother’s household years before. It had been twenty years since I’d last seen Polly and she boasted to all who cared to listen, ‘Him my piccaninn that un, I bin grow im up little bit—longest time now.’
Amid those remarks and the noisy greeting, ‘Ay-na-yah,’ I was hugged, hands were pressed gently on my head as of old, and I was much congratulated for the skill I’d shown in managing to grow up without Polly’s supervision.
Polly invited all the lubras to pinch my breasts. They admired the changes that had taken place in me since childhood and gave one another serious nods. There was some laughter when they jointly offered to rectify any sagging the future might bring by inflicting the thick-ridged cicatrix or tribal scars, which they assured me would restore everything to its upright position. Polly and her tribeswomen had a solution for these problems that preceded silicon.
Polly considered herself family and settled down outside my mother’s store, observing all who came and went, and what they did between times—all good gossip for the camp, with embellishments, of course; she relished her position as chief reporter of Ridge happenings. Sitting cross-legged at her observation post, wannoo bulging her cheek, occasionally spitting a stream of tobacco juice, Polly received, and expected to receive, a generous supply of handouts.
Soon after my arrival at the pub, I discovered with some uneasiness that I was to be the cook! There had been no mention of this until now. The cook? I was 22 years old and had not so much as made a cup of tea; boiling an egg would have been advanced cuisine of Cordon Bleu standard. Who was going to teach me how to cook?
Certainly not my mother, who presented me with an old, grease-stained Country Women’s Association Cookbook she’d come across in a drawer. ‘Just follow the recipes, nothing to it,’ she said breezily as she departed the kitchen, giving the strong impression she didn’t intend to return—it wasn’t her scene—though she expected everything to be well cooked and presented on time.
What a baptism of fire this was! The hotel kitchen was big and had no sink—the washing up was done by two lubras in a dish on the table with water heated on the stove. There were a couple of ancient kerosene refrigerators and—‘Heaven forbid!’—an enormous two-door, wood-fired cooking range: the very sight of it, with its interior aflame, terrified me. The cookbook was full of terms like broiled, braised and moderate heat, but there was no thermostat on the pub’s oven—how could that enormous iron monster be moderate in anything? Luckily Cookie could stay on and teach me some basics.
At that early stage of our occupation, there was no vegetable garden, hence produce other than potatoes and onions was all canned. There were also no kitchen scales, so Cookie used a Capstan tobacco tin to measure things out—two tins of rendered beef fat to so many of flour; the same with sugar; for cakes and brownies, a handful of dried fruit was thrown in, always referred to as plums whatever size, shape or origin.
Corned beef was boiled in a 20-litre bucket, and I faced the frightening prospect of 10-kilogram roasts to be rolled up and stabbed with wooden skewers that could have stood in for fence posts, then manhandled into fat and placed inside that scorching monster. Steak was cooked without a pan: coarse salt scattered like chicken feed over the wide stovetop, then the meat cast willy-nilly on top. The kitchen was hot, very hot—no fan ever fluttered there.
An old Aboriginal man, Peterson, who’d once been on the road with teamsters, came early every morning to light the stove. After stacking wood and leaving water for the kitchen, he departed with his billy-can of tea. All the time I was there, I don’t recall one morning without Peterson.
I muddled along with Cookie, who endeavoured to give me some training. Then came my big test. On their way through to Darwin, a group of English entertainers—The Tommy Trinder Show—decided to venture off the beaten track. Seven kilometres from the bitumen road, they felt they’d adventurously ‘gone bush’. They demanded lunch, all 29 of them.
Where was Cookie? Too bad for me, Cookie had tired of any further kitchen duties that day and succumbed to the need for a little drink. She was stretched out dead drunk on the kitchen floor, wearing nothing more than a benign smile, entirely naked, one leg cast with happy abandon over the big breadbox.
My heart did a slow sink, about as low as it could go. I felt utterly abandoned. I dared not tell my mother, or Cookie would cop it later, when she would probably be in a fragile recovering state and not up to a verbal lashing. Anyway, Mother was busy in the bar with the show folk.
What to do? Should I roll Cookie into a corner and throw a couple of tea-towels over her? No! Complete removal was the best way to go. It wasn’t hard to do: she was small, very slight, and quite easily dragged to Peterson’s wood stacks outside the kitchen, safely within the environs of the ‘no entry’ zone.
Then out came
cans of everything—vegetables, cream, fruit. I tried the steak cooked on the salt-strewn stovetop. There were no complaints; everyone seemed satisfied. It was quite good, actually. I could cook, I could cook!
Soon after, Cookie departed, happy with the thought that she’d taught me to cook and glad to escape from Mother’s new regime with its uncompromising rules. My frenzied entreaties to Cookie’s departing back—‘Tell me again about the casserole, and the custard too!’—were ignored. She left with the kindly words, ‘You good cook now, Jack-a-leen,’ which couldn’t have been further from the truth.
Then she was gone. I was on my own.
Ringers passing the wide, gauzed-in kitchen windows were well aware of the novice cook within, and of the rules of non-entry that applied. They would stop and, with noses pressed against the gauze, ask, ‘How ya handlin’ it, mate?’ and offer snippets of advice on the finer points of bread-baking and damper-cooking, at which they were all skilled.
Through that window I learned how to prepare a yeast bottle for bread, how to render huge boilers of beef fat into dripping, and the trick of adding some sugar and a dash of vinegar to the water if the salted beef was old and dry. When I advanced to the heady level of cake-making and baked one I wasn’t too ashamed of, I would hold it up to the window and be encouraged with a ‘Good on yer mate, you’re doin’ good.’
We bought our beef from the cattle station just up the road. There was also a herd of perhaps a hundred hardy goats, which grazed out and about, unhindered by fences, and prospered however lean the pickings. A goat from the herd was regularly butchered, and no one in the dining room denied it when asked if it was New Zealand lamb. Chickens roosted in trees in the backyard, their eggs fossicked out of the big woodpile and other ingenious places.
Every bush establishment had their goat herd, station, pub and store, sometimes with an Aboriginal goat shepherd. On cattle stations the shepherds were usually a couple of old lubras. After milking early in the morning, they’d leave to wander with the herd, collecting any newborn kids along the way and directing their charges back each evening to be yarded.
Our pub goats wandered the ridges without a shepherd, usually straggling back to their yard in the evening. However, when the south-east wind blew hard in the cold months, they nosed right into it and were gone at a fast clip, with no return in mind. After they spent a night away at the mercy of dingoes, someone was sent out on horseback to turn them back; their tracks were followed for about 30 kilometres, and they were found still doggedly trudging into the wind.
My father returned for a while to help with repairs and restoration. He built a new store, and his initials are still clearly etched into its cement floor. In a vintage Bedford truck he carried prodigious quantities of wood from the bush; a huge pile of neatly chopped wood was soon available to feed the iron monster in the kitchen. The chickens were removed from trees and housed in a new pen, and a big vegetable garden took shape.
No washing machine graced bush laundries in those days. Two regular laundry lubras spent wash days with tubs, copper boiler and ribbed washboards. Clothes were hung out to dry on lines stretched across the yard, and had to be cleared before the goats returned to munch on anything they could reach. Hunger had nothing to do with it: this was just what goats did, for everyone knows that they have an appetite for inedible things.
A small Lister generator provided the power for lights from sunset until closing time. We had no electrical appliances; refrigerators were all kerosene-fuelled. There were other inconveniences too numerous to mention, but pub life on the old stock route continued without too much complaint from anyone.
I learned to cope with the casserole, the custard, bread-making and much more; I learned that anyone can do anything—and the bush, with its scarcity of conveniences, was the best place to learn.
CHAPTER 25
Go Bush, Young Man!
Late in 1948 a man just 21 years old stepped off the small plane that landed each week at Brunette Downs Station on the Barkly Tableland. With swag in hand, Giltrow Poley saddle on shoulder, Ken Hammar came as a horse breaker to Brunette.
He had come, he had seen and was totally conquered; he vowed he was there to stay. It was to be many years before he set foot outside the Territory again. In that time he travelled some long, hard roads into the furthermost outback country he could ever have imagined, and would pass off as incidents bush experiences that others might retell with the drama of high adventure.
To the Aboriginal people with whom he had close association for all his years in the bush, Ken was known as Kenhamer, Malbo, Maluka, Boss, Olman.
Ken was born in 1927, almost exactly between the two great wars. He spent his childhood in Brisbane, attending a private boys school. There were no horses, dogs or cattle mustering; his family lived in a stone mansion by the Brisbane River, built in 1852 with convict labour and long heritage listed.
In 1943 Ken started at Gatton Agricultural College, and graduated in 1945. Considering his all-consuming interest in country activities, his father expected he would study veterinary medicine, but any patience he may have possessed for prolonged study soon evaporated on receiving his Diploma of Animal Husbandry.
He’d always had great empathy for the Outback, and believed—as the Territory ringer did—that cattle- and horse-work was the only thing for a real man to do.
Already a natural and excellent horseman, with success in various rodeos and bullock-riding competitions, Ken was honoured with an invitation to ride at the Brisbane Exhibition. As a rough rider, he had great strength and balance, and was rarely thrown.
When breaking in horses on cattle stations, riding the newly broken horses was a popular bush entertainment, with spectacular spills and skilful horse-work. Often lubras came down to the yards to be part of the excitement, compare the riders and, of course, give loud-voiced opinions of them. ‘That Kenhamer,’ they called out, ‘him proper, no more little bit.’ From a bush Aboriginal, ‘proper’ was used to describe something admirable or astonishing.
In 1948 Brunette Downs covered about 5,600 square miles—quite a sizeable cattle property. It takes good cattlemen to manage properties of this size, and Brunette flourished under the management of Eric Barnes, a cattleman of the old school.
The cattle brand was BDT and the symbol brand ‘Axe Head’, the old 505 brand having gone with the years past.
In 1884 Brunette had run 2000 head of shorthorn cattle; by 1948 the herd had swelled to 54,000, with 600 working horses. Of these, 130 were taken out into the stock camp for the first round of mustering, which took about six weeks. Around 18,000 calves were branded each year, while five or six mobs of bullocks and spayed cows in mobs of 1500 were taken off to distant markets by drovers.
Twenty-five men worked the stock camp. Four or five were white men, including the cook, who killed a beast every second day to feed the camp, and every day baked eight or nine loaves of bread in long trenches of hot coals. The remaining stockmen were Aboriginal.
The weekly wage for a white stockman was 5 guineas; he supplied his own clothes and tobacco. The Aboriginal stockman received £1, as well as his clothes, tobacco and the complete upkeep of his entire family, from grandmas on down to numerous aunts and piccaninnies. They were all housed, fed and clothed, and received regular medical care.
Some Aboriginal women worked in the homestead, wore a uniform, waited on table and carried out general household duties, usually under the eagle eye of an older lubra with years of experience and a strong awareness of her authority.
Bindi, a small wizened Aboriginal man, bore the grand title of head gardener, although a good part of his day was spent curled up asleep in the wheelbarrow. He had seen the white man come into the country, emerging like debil-men out of the distant haze on the great vacant plain; he was always eager to tell of the fear, strangeness and curiosity of such a sight.
This is the environment in which Ken landed after leaving Brisbane. During his years on Brunette, Ken handled large herds of
cattle and learned to contend with drought, fire and flood, death, disaster, and the eccentric men with whom the Outback was liberally supplied.
In 1952 the Barkly Tableland missed out on the annual monsoon rains that soak the country, and the stations lost large numbers of cattle. Brunette’s losses were close to 30,000 head that year, and hundreds of dead cattle were dragged from around the water troughs on bores.
That was the year of a great bushfire; it started in bush near Mount Isa, then roared through stations on the Barkly and across the grass plains of the tablelands, where it was fought with graded fire-breaks, back burning and station trucks loaded with water tanks. It raged for weeks, on through Newcastle Waters, westward through the Murranji Track, with the dry season winds behind it, taking it into Western Australia.
In its wake it left some Tableland stations completely burned out. Cresswell Downs, with only three bores, was without stock feed for the season.
Out with the stock camp, Ken had the unique opportunity of holding 10,000 head of cattle on open country, something few Australian cattlemen would experience.
This came about in Brunette’s 5000-square kilometre Lake Paddock, which held around 30,000 head. As the musterers regrouped, uniting their cattle into one mob, they found that due to the poor judgement of the head stockman they had gone too deep into the herd. Now they had in hand this enormous, almost unmanageable mob of around 10,000 head.
Thirty men watched the cattle through the night on the plain, the huge herd moving constantly like a giant amoeba. When the horses were exhausted, the men advanced on foot, rattling billycans filled with stones and drumming on tin cans to keep the mob under some control.
The next day, branding and castrating began as usual, but the sight of 10,000 head stretched across the open plain in one mobile mob was a sight to remember.
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