Old Days, Old Ways

by Alex Nicol

  He tried the trick that had worked so well with the state authorities. ‘I told them,’ he said, ‘that I hadn’t moved anything so, if it belonged to them, they must know where it was. Go and get it.’

  That didn’t work. His visitors told him that if he had a look inside his house, he’d see that his wife and children were missing; when they got their gold, he’d get his wife and children back. They got their gold.

  How much of all this is plausible?

  If you go to the Palmer River field these days, you’ll find plenty of large mining machinery rusting away. How they got that equipment there is nothing short of miraculous, and there’s plenty of evidence of Chinese occupation.

  There’s no doubt that on this field, as with most others in Australia, a relatively small number of Europeans were able to bar the Chinese from working quartz gold. The Chinese concentrated, as was their custom, on working and reworking alluvial deposits. The tongs were certainly very active in the area. Now, tongs are not criminal organisations—they are business and cultural associations—so it’s probable that they collected and branded gold the association had mined. My small ingots were proof of that at least. But the Chinese were never forced from the field. Would a well-organised tong simply walk away and forget that it had left a quantity of gold behind?

  Did Mr Zarb ever find anything more than some curios and a handful of gold? I can’t answer that question. I never met the man. I don’t even know if that’s his real name, but it would be a very strange individual who would enter into the complicated charade that our search for Chinese gold became, if he knew that he’d have nothing to present at the end.

  The story died, but my conversation with Mr Zarb continued, now by letter. He wrote to me claiming that Prouds had cheated him. They’d taken the news of his discovery to Hong Kong, seeking a buyer, and that had never been his intention. This, he claimed, was how the tong came to know about his discovery.

  The prospect of A Big Country documentary had obviously pricked his interest. This story, he thought, could make a good film—I agreed—and perhaps there was money to be made from a film? He had a fairly inflated idea of what the person who provided the ‘idea’ for a script might be entitled to, and no idea at all how to go about writing a script. Perhaps I could help?

  I know my limitations. I was not the writer he was looking for, and that was the end of the conversation.

  I have no idea what happened to Mr Zarb, but I hold dear a little colour photograph of two Chinese gold ingots marked ‘Black dog. Say nothing.’

  HARBOURMASTER

  She was the harbourmaster. True, she was self-appointed, and her port no longer boasted even a jetty, and the boats that had once claimed it as their home port were at best rotting hulks dotted along the banks miles down the river. But the ghosts lingered, and she was tending to them.

  The building was so out of place that it had to have a story to tell.

  Moama in the 1970s was a tiny town on the New South Wales side of the Murray. Its past was behind it, but this building showed that something important had happened here. I climbed out of my car to have a look and was just starting to wonder whether a rummage through the interior would count as trespass, when the old lady cried, ‘Are you looking at the warehouse, dear?’

  I wondered later whether she spent her days looking through her front window, hoping someone would stop so she could claim her harbour dues—which was the chance for her to talk.

  ‘Is that what it was?’ I asked.

  A silly question. The answer was obvious, but it got the conversation started.

  ‘It’s cold,’ she said. ‘Come inside and have some soup.’

  It was cold, and the soup was ready and hot. I felt sure I wasn’t the first to walk into that parlour.

  ‘It used to be bigger and busier than the Port of Melbourne,’ she said. Her pride was infectious; it was stoked just a little by the impact of the interstate rivalry that had very much driven things when her port was abustle.

  She launched into stories of men and boats long gone, and of the fierce competition for cargo that drove reckless behaviour. These days cars stream across the bridge at Corowa, linking the two former colonies, without so much as a glance at the little customs shed building standing sentinel on the southern side. But, yes, things were very different when there was a battle for trade between the Port of Moama and the Port of Echuca, which faced each other from opposite sides of the river.

  ‘There were terrible accidents,’ she remembered. She once saw a body hanging in a tree high above the river. ‘Blown there, he was, when the boiler exploded. His belt caught on a branch and he just hung there.’

  ‘How many boats would have called at Moama?’ It was the obvious question.

  ‘Oh, hundreds.’

  ‘Hundreds? That’s a lot of boats …’

  ‘Yes, hundreds. Come next door to the warehouse and I’ll show you.’

  As we walked across, she told me with great pride that her port had seen the first boat, the Mary Ann, come up the river. Hundreds—yes, hundreds—of boats had followed her. She told of barges piled high with wool going down the river, and ‘just about everything you needed coming back up the river’.

  It all seemed a little topsy-turvy to me. Here we were, about halfway along the river border between New South Wales and Victoria, and she seemed to be turning her back on Melbourne and Sydney as sources of supplies.

  She was patient. ‘There wasn’t any railway.’

  Oh, of course. I should have thought of that.

  ‘So everything had to go down to, or come up from, the Port of Goolwa, in South Australia. Until they put the railway into Echuca.’

  I sensed that conversations about Echuca and railways on the other side of the river might not be welcome, and anyhow we were now at the door of the warehouse. She had a key and we went inside.

  I’m not sure what I expected—stand-up desks sporting inkpots and steel-nibbed pens? But there was nothing, just a huge barren waste and pigeon shit, which pocked the dozen or so old ledgers that were scattered about on the floor.

  ‘It’s a shame.’

  That’s all she said, but I got the sense that she was talking about more than just an abandoned warehouse. She was talking about the life that had been on the river—her early life, which was now all gone. I bent down to pick up one of the old ledgers for a look.

  ‘Take it,’ she said. ‘Take it.’ She wanted someone else to hold onto the memory.

  There was nothing of great importance in the ledger. What did I expect? It was just a list of goods received and prices, all very neat and obviously written with one of those steel nibs.

  I handed her the ledger and suggested that it should be preserved in a museum or a library. It was part of the building. It wouldn’t mean anything if you took it away.

  She locked the door. I got back in my car and the old lady returned to her soup and her vigil.

  BUSH PILOTS

  Bush Pilots Airways doesn’t fly anymore, which is a pity. The airline was so Australian, so relaxed and it flew into those places we automatically think of when we say Australia. They flew me to Cooktown twenty years before the company went out of business.

  Before we took off for the return flight, I watched the hostess as she walked down the centre aisle of the old DC-3. She was numbering us off like sheep in a pen. Something distracted her, and with a shake of her head she went back and started again.

  I asked whether she’d ever left anyone behind. She confessed that she’d once completed her third passenger count without getting the correct number and had begun to doubt her capacity to count. The plane was warming up for take-off when a frantic hammering at the door alerted her to the fact that, yes, she was one short.

  As I said, relaxed.

  I had a mate on the flight back to Cairns. He was an Aboriginal stockman dressed in his finest. Everything from his satin shirt to his boots was new. He shone, and he was looking forward to a great week in Cairns. He
had the window seat and the view out over the reef, which was stunning. I don’t know how high the pilot was flying, but he was certainly doing his best to give us a view.

  My mate and I were chatting as the hostess paraded down the aisle clutching an armful of stubbies in stubby holders with the query: ‘Do you reckon you could keep one down?’

  We both thought that could be a possibility.

  As I remember it, he finished his stubby just before me and pulled it from the stubby holder. He looked about for a second or two, perhaps for a replacement, and then, with a sharp tap of his elbow, he knocked the window of the old DC-3 open and dropped the empty stubby out. An empty stubby is the most useless thing in the world, right?

  I was a touch concerned at the sudden access to fresh air, and so was the hostess. She came and had a look and scampered forward at a rate of knots. The pilot or co-pilot came back, roared into my crestfallen mate and moved us to other seats.

  I kept thinking about that reef down there and the things swimming around it, and I worried that we might join them if that window fell off and hit something vital. I carried a ‘bunny’ knife with me then (try that on an airline now). Since the window was flapping, I tried to jam it with the knife. That brought me a rocket from the hostess, and a firm message: ‘Get back to your seat!’

  Of course, those old ‘Biscuit Bombers’ were close to indestructible and we landed at Cairns without any problem. The wallopers were waiting for my mate there, and they carted him away, still resplendent in those holiday clothes.

  BROKEN BLADE

  Jack Bennett was on a mission. He was a local farmer involved in local politics, but I’d never seen him before he walked into the ABC’s Orange studio. In the months ahead, I’d come to know that I’d met a truly good man.

  Jack wanted to do something for his mates. He wanted us to remember them. Not that there was much chance that we’d forget them, but over time memories fade, and these men deserved to be remembered. His mates were members of Australia’s 8th Division, Japan’s prisoners of war.

  Jack’s generation and his children’s still remembered the pictures of walking skeletons and the stories of barbarity. But the war was over; we’d moved on. Japan was now a trading partner, a tourist destination. And Jack reckoned that was the way it should be—forgive, but not forget. That was why he wanted to do something.

  All those years ago, his mates had been brought together from around the country to train in the middle of a Bathurst winter to go to war in the tropics. As an officer and a local, he remembered being sent to pick up a mob of Queenslanders who’d been ordered on a route march clad in tropical gear—Bombay Bloomers (those terrible Army-issue shorts) and short-sleeved shirts—in temperatures guaranteed to neuter the proverbial brass monkey. They’d become bushed and were in a bad way.

  ‘The Army nearly finished them before it shipped them off,’ he remembered. ‘Planning wasn’t a strong suit.’

  If you go down to the Bathurst Showground, you’ll find, at the entrance to the sheep pavilion, plaques commemorating the units that trained there during the Second World War. From 1940 all the way through, a steady stream of young Australians did their time at Bathurst before going off to war. The men of the 8th Division should have their memorial in Bathurst.

  Jack had very definite ideas about what sort of memorial that should be. Not some flamboyant bronze ‘never forget’ type of memorial. He wanted something simple, something to honour the dignity of the soldiers who’d fought the enemy’s attempt to strip them of their dignity. But first he needed to raise the money, and that was where I came in.

  They’d set up a national committee to organise the memorial, and Jack was its president, but the hard part was coordinating things on a national scale. Members of the 8th who’d made it home were scattered far and wide, so Jack couldn’t believe his luck when a national radio program finished up in his front yard. Here was his conduit. Jack used the program to appeal and to raise funds. All Ways on Sunday was a gift, and he used it to keep his mates up to date with the progress of the memorial.

  Off-air, he talked to me of his experiences at the Changi prisoner-of-war camp. He told me of escape attempts, and the futility of the escapes—escape to where? The retributions and the work of Major General ‘Black Jack’ Galleghan to stand between the Japanese and his men. But he wouldn’t put any of this to air. It wasn’t his style.

  He told me of the time he had been summoned before the Japanese colonel, never a good thing. Jack couldn’t think what he might be in for, but it wasn’t going to be pleasant. And then he was handed a letter.

  It was the Emperor’s birthday, the colonel explained, and by way of celebration mail would be issued to the prisoners. Jack had been chosen as the one to receive this piece of Japanese largesse, and here was his mail. A glance told him that this wasn’t a letter from home; it was an official missive of some sort. But why was the Australian government writing to a Japanese prisoner of war? A promotion?

  He took his mail and saluted, and when he was back in his hut he opened his message of comfort. It was his income tax assessment.

  Jack was excited when he received the design for the memorial. It was exactly what he was hoping for. It would be carved from local pink granite. It represented, he told me, a bayonet tested in battle, with its tip broken off—but it would still show the armourer’s mark, a figure eight broken across the top and a sword cross. Bowed but not beaten. It said symbolically all that needed to be said about his mates.

  The Broken Blade Memorial would be erected at the entrance of the Bathurst Entertainment Centre, and of course there would be a celebratory dinner to mark the event. His mates would be getting together, and he wanted me there alongside him.

  Now, lots of people befriend you when you’re producing a national radio program and can be of use to them, and most immediately forget you when you’ve served your purpose. But not Jack. I was part of the organising committee, he told me. I deserved to be there when his mates saw how they’d be remembered. Jack took a good deal of convincing that this was their day, his day, and that I deserved no part of it.

  He tried again later, insisting I should be there when a special dinner was held for the survivors of the Sandakan Death Marches. Only six of more than 2000 British and Australian prisoners of war survived a deliberate march to the death towards the end of the war. They were members of the 8th. They should see how they’d be remembered. Again I had to politely tell Jack that I had no right to even a tiny share of that terrible story. He truly was a generous man.

  The Broken Blade Memorial to the 8th Division was unveiled on 15 August 1970, twenty-five years after the surrender of Japan in the Second World War. Time was already getting on.

  Time had passed, too, when a Japanese trade delegation was due to make a visit to Jack’s shire. He inspected the room where a formal lunch to welcome the guests was laid out, and noticed that the Japanese flag was displayed wrongly. He had the error corrected. When one of his fellow councillors suggested that Jack should be the last to be concerned about the Japanese suffering a minor slight, he told him what he told me on many occasions: never forget, but forgive.

  The Broken Blade Memorial is gone. In 2008 a young bloke who’d had too many swung on that broken tip as a skylark. It could be that the frosts of 38 winters had weakened the blade’s connection to its plinth, but in any event it crashed to the ground and was smashed beyond repair.

  I was terribly upset when I heard the news, and I thought of Jack, gone by then, I guessed. How would he feel? How would his mates feel?

  They replaced the memorial, of course. But, as they said at the rededication ceremony, ‘It’s a replacement. The original’s gone forever.’

  OUR HENLEY

  I’d never been to Alice Springs, and so I was excited when I was invited to present All Ways on Sunday there in the early 1970s during the Henley-on-Todd Regatta. I wanted to see the country and I wanted to meet the larger-than-life characters who I was sure peopled the
place.

  But I found I wasn’t ready for the Alice.

  I’d been delivered to a modern hotel and my welcoming guide was taking me for a quick tour of the centre of town. He stopped in front of an imposing, obviously colonial building to remark, ‘That’s Flynn’s hospital. We nearly pulled that down.’

  John Flynn. Flynn of the Inland, with his vision of providing the ‘mantle of safety’. I’d learned all this by rote at school. The flying doctor—a national hero on his pedal radio.

  ‘We suddenly realised that it was about all of the old Alice that was left,’ my guide continued. ‘Just as well, eh?’

  Alice was booming. The country was prosperous, and we were at the beginning of a great new industry, the tourist industry. Tourists need things to be neat and organised. They want to be comfortable and they’ve got a limited amount of time. It’s a case of ‘show me quick’ and Alice was being set up to deliver.

  We drove out of town for a quick look at Heavitree Gap, and here was another shock. My only reference to this country had been Albert Namatjira’s paintings. With the arrival of the Western Desert dot paintings on the art scene, Albert’s traditional landscapes have been pushed into the background, but they’d been standard fare on Christmas gift calendars for years. I saw them as attractive, of course, but obviously an interpretation. The country couldn’t be that colour. It couldn’t look like that.

  It did. It does.

  I asked why the place had been called Heavitree, and my host wasn’t sure. We speculated that the ‘heavy tree’ might have had something to do with the gallows, and struggled to make a connection. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered that this stunning landscape had been named for a school, Heavitree School, in Devon, England. Connect those dots if you will. Alice was refusing to match my expectations.