Old Days, Old Ways

by Alex Nicol

  A listener would meet us at the airfield. After a brief introduction, we would be told that so-and-so has an important story 20 miles out of town. Who’s covering that? Decision made.

  Next stop a motel, where the other reporter would be ushered into a room where a crocodile was already forming outside the door.

  Enter a young (or old) man (or woman).

  ‘Yes? What’s the story?’ we would ask.

  ‘The debutante ball (or cricket club, or race meeting).’

  Then you’d get down to it. The first thing to establish would be when this event might take place. Let’s say it was on a Saturday sometime in the future. You’d explain to the interviewee that Pat would be putting the story to air on the Wednesday before the event. ‘So whenever you mention the ball, you say “next Saturday”—okay?’ It always was.

  One by one they’d come through the door, and little by little tins would fill with recorded tape, and in a month (or two months, or three months), they’d listen to themselves on air talking about the big event happening ‘next Saturday’.

  Looking at it like that, it was truly Alice in Wonderland stuff, but there was real affection for the listeners and from the listeners. Where else would you know so many of your listeners by name?

  I did stories on everything from a young man’s first attempt at directing (Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie at Walgett—not a bad way to make a debut), through to a celebration cricket match at the Keragundi Cricket Club. The club’s home ground was a claypan, and the story went that if you could hit the ball past a fielder it was a certain four—the ball actually picked up speed as it went.

  I assisted a bush nurse with a patient. A young Aboriginal kid presented with so many burrs in his feet that he could no longer walk. I restrained him as she picked them out one at a time. It’s still a vivid memory for me—and I bet for him.

  And we flew into a dust storm, where we couldn’t see the wing tips. We weren’t worried until, after we’d landed, the pilot had a little nervous ‘spit’ under the wing.

  Later, I got to see the Keragundi home ground. Russell Drysdale missed an opportunity – a wire-netting boundary fence with a bough-shed on a claypan. The claypan was much, much bigger than the ground, and with the sun in just the right position you could see little shadows all across it. Those shadows were cast by the remains of ancient fires. Often beside the fire was a hard-baked mud wasps’ nest – an after-dinner delicacy?

  They eventually set up volunteer video exchange systems in the Far West, and Around the West quietly died, but it was a lovely anachronism. Pat put his heart and soul into the show. There was real love and respect for the people he was talking to.

  BURRUMBUTTOCK BREKKIE

  I remember once having to report on a meeting in the little town of Burrumbuttock. Guessing that it would be a late night, I booked into the local pub.

  ‘I won’t get home before closing,’ I told the publican when I arrived. ‘Any chance of a key?’

  My host tossed me a bunch. I had the keys to the pub.

  He was feeding a poddy lamb when I poked my head out in the morning.

  ‘Bacon and eggs sound alright for breakfast,’ he asked.

  ‘Do me,’ I replied.

  ‘There’s some in the fridge,’ he said. ‘I’ll have my eggs fried. Make it a couple.’

  BLACK BEAUTY

  There was movement at the station—the country and the way it did business was changing. Grazing country was going under the plough at an alarming rate. Drought and flooding rains were slowly giving way to the ordered flow of irrigating water.

  Crops never before seen in this part of the country, and how to grow them, were now ‘the’ topic in pubs, saleyards and wherever stockmen-turned-farmers met. Our listeners were hungry for information, and the traditional sources of supply couldn’t keep up. There were no research results in this part of the world to form the basis of advice. We were all flying blind.

  Neil Inall was developing new means to meet the demand. An agronomist turned broadcaster, he had experience and contacts in the southern New South Wales farming districts. He organised a bus trip: novice irrigators would meet old hands, farmers would teach farmers one-to-one, with a radio station the conduit. Unheard-of stuff.

  We were playing with television too. We’d started showing ‘our country’ to city audiences by way of the cheekily titled weekly program A Big Country, which had started in 1968, the year after I joined the ABC. In its very early days it had no dedicated reporters; the original concept was for rural reporters to suggest a story and, if it was accepted, take on the role of reporter.

  I reckoned there was a great television story waiting to be told out in the Macquarie Marshes if—and it was a big if—we could tell it. And the Deputy Director of the Rural Department, John Treffry, was coming on an orientation tour. So much was happening so quickly; the department needed to get a handle on it.

  John arrived in a ‘Yank tank’, one of those Ford models that were all bonnet and boot. Straight out of the ABC’s garage in William Street, Sydney, it gleamed black above the crimson ‘C’ for Commonwealth on its numberplate. The locals would certainly know we’d arrived. John could get a look at the changing country and provide the transport, while I scouted for a possible TV story in the Marshes.

  The Marsh country drains the Macquarie and Talbragar rivers. When they flood, water spreads naturally through the Marsh and onto the properties around them, irrigating thousands of acres. It’s home to millions of waterbirds, snakes, roos and wild pigs, which thrive in the protection of the tangled lignum scrub that grows in the Marsh. And of course it’s home to some magnificent mobs of cattle.

  Over the generations, stockmen had developed a system of managing this wild and beautiful country. Once a year they’d gather from the surrounding stations and muster the Marsh, bringing the cattle out and dividing them station by station. This was a mirror image of the famous High Country musters—‘Man from Snowy River’ stuff—but with some important differences. Here the riders faced not mountain gorges but tangles of lignum tunnelled through by pigs. It was dangerous work, and with the way things were, they’d soon be doing it for the last time.

  The first of the allocated irrigation water from Burrendong Dam, specially built to tame those floods, had been released just a couple of years earlier. The Marsh was shrinking, and while new farmers were struggling to come to terms with grain sorghum as a crop, innovators were following the water and buying up country. The first white blossoms of cotton were pocking the country, and cotton is a thirsty crop. Each new paddock drained the Marsh a little more.

  On Sandy Camp, one of the big stations fringing the Marsh, Mrs Moxham was already seeing the changes. She rode with the best of them at the muster and knew that its days were numbered. She told me the story on tape.

  That made for good radio, but what chance did television have of covering it? I could see her on horseback bringing the stockman’s craft to life for the audiences of Sydney, but the big question was: could a camera follow her and the other riders into the Marsh?

  ‘How are you on a horse?’ she asked.

  My old boss, when I was a young jackeroo, was never very complimentary about my ability in that area. In his view, about the only place I was safe was ‘in a spring cart with a net over it’. I was better than that, but I couldn’t mix it with Marsh riders in country I’d never seen before, and we’d never get a film crew in there. We’d be a danger to ourselves—and to whoever had to nursemaid us. Regretfully, I acknowledged that this was not for television.

  While I’d been getting (not getting) the Marsh story, John had been taken in hand by some of the new irrigators. I’d taken longer than expected, and when I was delivered back to town, the Yank tank—aka Black Beauty—was at rest outside the Spider’s Web, Carinda’s great little pub. John was being entertained by his new friends, but we were due in Walgett that night.

  We’d been joined on the trip by a friend of his—a former AB
C rural reporter who was now an orchardist—so we were a party of three. Dusk wasn’t all that far away, and I wasn’t keen on driving the 50 or so miles at night. You never knew what you’d come across on that road … ‘Here be dragons,’ as the old maps would warn.

  ‘We could stay here,’ I offered.

  ‘What’s to eat?’ John demanded.

  There was no counter meal. ‘Ah, I could get some biscuits and cheese,’ I suggested.

  ‘Walgett,’ John decided.

  No bombing raid over Germany was ever more carefully briefed. ‘Now, there are all sorts of things out there,’ I explained. ‘Pigs are the worst. If we hit one, it’ll take the front end out and we’ll be spending the night on the road.’

  ‘Pigs,’ John sniffed.

  Everyone in the car wanted to talk at once. John was enthusing about the new cropping regime, and I was pleading for some miracle that would let us film the Marsh story. Suddenly, a black shadow that looked to be the size of a minibus almost got us.

  ‘That was a pig!’ John sounded incredulous.

  ‘Humnh.’ How do you say ‘I told you so’ politely?

  Black Beauty cruised on towards Walgett—now in watchful, strained silence.

  Incredibly, even around Walgett the talk was of cropping. Surely the country was too dry? Too unreliable? The optimists argued that one crop in three years would be a just reward if the price of the land was right, and already farming families from safe farming districts, where neighbours hemmed in any chance of expansion, were selling out and buying into country with space to burn.

  Black Beauty rolled the road from Walgett to Bourke, but she was no longer pristine. Now the odd nervous rattle marked her transition from city street to dirt road, but at least we hadn’t hit anything.

  Nothing much had changed in the Western Division since soldier settlement broke up the big runs. Old, established families were managing the encroachment of scrub, the legacy of the changed grazing practices forced by the breakup of the big stations, and there was talk that there ‘might be money in these wild goats’.

  John was anxious to see the country. I had a story I could pick up near Louth, so on we rolled.

  John had developed a theory. Roos were now the big risk at dusk, he concluded, but ‘they always jump from right to left’. He’d been studying their pattern and was convinced that, if only the driver kept a sharp lookout to the right, the risk of collision was minimal. Well, outback travel can be boring. You need something to occupy the mind.

  I don’t know if it happens now, but then, when the dirt road started to break up badly, the locals would drop down to the table drain at the side of the road for smoother passage, and it was a wise driver who followed the obvious run-off. ‘You learn something every day,’ John observed as we cruised along looking at the rutted potholed road beside us.

  Shindy Mitchell was holding court at his pub at Louth. John was thrilled; he could have a beer with a legend. Shindy was a great supporter of 2CR and was only too happy to play host.

  When I loaded John back into Black Beauty sometime in the midafternoon, he was disappointed. ‘Shindy drinks ponies,’ he confided, referring to five-ounce glasses. An idol with feet of clay.

  How to point out diplomatically that there might be a reason for that? Matching Shindy middy for pony was a dangerous game.

  We’d travelled perhaps 20 of the 50 miles from Louth to Bourke. John’s theory was holding water. Every roo we’d encountered jumped from right to left. He was delighted. But two is not a statistically accurate sample, John.

  It was sometime after five in the afternoon when the exception to prove the rule came in from the left. He was a very big red and he made a proper job of it. He came in through the grille, removing the radiator, and wrapped that great big bonnet around the windscreen. We were going nowhere.

  John scrambled from his seat in a flash. The big red was wedged in; fortunately (for us, not so for him), he was very dead so we could haul him out. John wanted an ear for a souvenir, while I contemplated a night on the Bourke Road.

  Salvation took the form of a shearer heading into town. He was driving a Holden ute with room for two passengers at a squeeze. He’d take John and our passenger into Bourke. I’d stay with Beauty and our gear, and they’d send a tow truck for me in the morning.

  John got to meet a great character. Our shearer had a Coca-Cola bottle opener welded to the dashboard of the ute at his right hand. At his left hand was an unending supply of stubbies. He could pluck a stubby with his left, flip it to his right, decapitate it and despatch it while maintaining an endless string of yarns and a heart-stopping 70 miles per hour.

  In Bourke they replaced Beauty’s radiator. They reattached the now very mangled crimson ‘C’ numberplate, and reconfigured her bonnet enough for it to be secured by a piece of number 8 fencing wire. Black Beauty had failed the country road test.

  The trip back to Orange was uneventful, but John’s trip back to William Street was a triumphal procession. Clad in the red dust of battle, her bonnet flapping against the restraint of a bit of wire, on her arrival Black Beauty shouldered aside her city cousins. She and John had been bush. She bore the scars, and he had a roo’s right ear to prove it.

  CARINDA CURRY

  One by one I introduced the Fabulous Four to our listeners. They read the market reports at half past six in the morning, and they practised interviewing each other and editing the results.

  We discussed such lofty subjects as what might be the best time of the day to broadcast farming material. Lahani was loath to join in the discussion. When I prompted him, he offered: ‘In my country everyone in a certain area is having a wireless, and when I am broadcasting they must listen.’

  That’s one way of boosting the ratings.

  When I introduced the subject of the long-running radio serial Blue Hills and its predecessor, The Lawsons, and explained how they’d been used to promote everything from the integration of ‘New Australians’ to the use of superphosphate as a fertiliser, he sparked up. Drama! This was something worthy of his talents. He would listen to this program and give me his opinion.

  In a very short period of time the four became part of the 2CR family. It seems silly to say it now, but two Nepalese men, a Sri Lankan woman and an Afghan woman were a novelty. Everyone wanted to meet them. They turned up at our children’s school fete. Nanda in her sari created a sensation, and she and Nuri even conducted some interviews there with the kids.

  Lahani had a truly beautiful voice and loved to sing. He told us it was his poetry, and he practised it at every possible occasion. Schools invited him, and he came and he sang. I looked at some old photos of them recently, and remembered with a shock that all the time Nuri was with us, she wore a hijab. No one had commented then. Wasn’t that her national costume?

  The time came for a field trip. I’d been stuck in the studio with them for too long. I needed to get out and collect some stories for my programs. With irrigation being the big talking point at this time, grain sorghum was the buzz crop, and small cooperatives everywhere were setting up their own irrigation schemes. I wanted to head out again to the Macquarie Marshes.

  A good central point was the town of Carinda. But this wasn’t going to be a get-there-and-back-in-a-day trip; we’d need a couple of days on the road. Could I get accommodation for five in town? Nuri and Nanda would need separate rooms, that much was certain. Lahani and Vimal could share, or I’d be happy to share with either of them; but we’d need at least four rooms.

  No trouble. They were going to get a taste of an Aussie country pub. I made contact with the people I wanted to interview, and we mentioned, on air, that we were headed for Carinda. Within minutes, the Fab Four had an invitation to visit the local school.

  Carinda wasn’t a big town. We’d recently broadcast news of what had to be the ultimate embarrassment. When a fire had broken out in town, the volunteer brigade reported for duty but couldn’t get the fire truck started. This hadn’t stopped them atten
ding the conflagration: they simply pushed the truck down the street to the job. Later they had the good sense to have a laugh at themselves. Carinda wasn’t a big town, but it had a big heart.

  We arrived to find that the local women had arranged what could only be described as a civic reception for their guests. Dressed in their best, the women packed the hall, and each had attempted to outdo her neighbours with the food she’d brought. The long table for the guests of honour looked as though it had come straight from the Best In Show line-up at the Sydney Royal. The Fab Four were going to try the best of what country cooks had to offer—with one tiny exception.

  The news was out that four ‘Indians’ were coming to town. It would be inhospitable not to offer them a curry. There, in front of Vimal and Lahani, was a large dish. Its contents were green and grievous. I swear that if the bowl had been lined with enamel, it would have been peeling. And their hosts were pressing them: ‘Eat! Eat!’

  Long afterwards, they’d recount their experience. ‘You’ve heard of vindaloo? Ha! Wait till you try Carinda Curry.’

  THE GRAZIER’S NEW WIFE

  It was a brand-new homestead that would not have been out of place in suburban Sydney or Melbourne. The young grazier’s wife, like the house, was new, a city girl determined to make her way in her new community. Around the house’s perimeter was a new lawn struggling to get a foothold.

  Her husband kept reminding her that she was now in the bush. Over and over, he drummed into her that ‘water is precious’. Yes, the lawn could be watered but not too much.

  She’d done the morning chores. He was up the paddock somewhere and she’d set the sprinkler up on the lawn. Now for a shower.

  It must have been the luxury of the shower that pricked her conscience—that sprinkler needed shifting. Clad in no more than a shower cap—well, she was miles from anywhere—she sprinted out to the lawn. She bent to retrieve the sprinkler and felt a sharp pain in her toe. A snake had been enjoying its own personal shower, and she’d been bitten.