by Alex Nicol
He was somewhere in his mid-30s. He’d been an abalone diver ‘over east’, but this was the real thing. He was in Broome to make money, a lot of money, and he was investing every penny he made in the finest jade he could buy.
‘Why jade?’ I had to ask.
He treated me to an explanation of the different types and how you had to be careful that you were getting the real thing, but above all he was collecting pieces that were ‘beautiful—there’s nothing like a beautiful piece of jade’.
We got down to work. He explained that he was the diver who harvested the shell into which would be placed the tiny beads, from which the cultured pearls would grow. Cultured pearls or blister pearls, they both needed the shell that he would harvest. There was a strict quota on that harvest, and it was his job to collect it as quickly as possible.
‘When the sun comes up, I go down. When the sun goes down, I come up.’
That was the way he described his working day. There was a crew on the boat, he explained, each with a job to do, and each was paid according to the amount of shell he, the diver, collected. He was at the apex of the work.
‘Someone puts my diving suit on, someone takes my diving suit off,’ was how he explained it. At the end of each day he was exhausted.
And now it was seven o’clock, and people would depend on him again tomorrow. ‘Goodnight.’
I thought back to those graves in the cemetery and the stories they told about lives lost to ‘the bends’ and to cyclones. I thought of the young men who’d died so far away from home, and the magical pearls they’d collected—and of the mundane pearl shell buttons that were the real backbone of the industry.
I’d been expecting the ‘romance’ of an exotic industry. But instead I came face to face with business.
MAREEBA RODEO
The Mareeba Rodeo was something special. The committee when to a good deal of trouble to get me to a place I confessed I’d never heard of. They flew me to Cairns, arranged accommodation for me in Mareeba and promised to give me ‘a good time’.
They delivered in spades on all counts. I got a close-up and eyeopening view of what’s become a very controversial sporting event, I collected without doubt the most extraordinary interview of my career, and I was overwhelmed by the generosity of my hosts.
With free rein to ‘do what I liked’, I wandered through the stockyards watching the men and the cattle at work as they got ready for the ‘entertainment’, and I was surprised.
All stock shift about in a yard when there are people around, but these yards were unusually quiet. Men and cattle seemed to know what to expect—they’d done all this before. Even when the bulls made their last move up into the chute, most just went quietly into position. The riders weren’t the only professionals here.
The young men who were about to lower themselves down onto those broad backs were much less sure of themselves. No young prima donna ever fiddled more with her gloves. I heard all sorts of muttered invocations as they settled down and first felt the bull shift under them; I watched as they practised again and again to ensure that, at the critical moment, they could get that hand free from the bull rope, the rope around the bull’s withers.
For eight seconds they’d have to use that hand, and nothing else, to keep themselves on that bull. Then it and the rope had to come free.
The call of ‘ready’ from the chute boss would be greeted by the merest nod. Then the chute would open, and bull and rider were released for brief mayhem. After that, it was: ‘Next, please!’
I thought to myself that this must have been what it was like to shuffle up from the tumbrel and onto the guillotine.
All this was ‘play’ to the two blokes I’d met earlier in a pub. They ran scrub bulls for a living.
One had a terrible raw, partially healed wound down the left side of his face. Whatever had caused that trauma had either taken his eye or left it so badly damaged that it had to be removed. I learned that this was the result of an occupational hazard.
Scrub bulls, they explained, were a nuisance. Missed at the mustering when the latest ‘drop’ of calves had been branded and the bull calves castrated, they would run with the mob as young bulls. Left to themselves, they’d breed—and if enough of them were allowed to breed, the quality of the herd would decline. They had to be got rid of.
The traditional way had been to shoot them and leave the carcass to rot, but this was the 1970s. Beef was worth money, and so these men were being paid to run down and capture these bulls by hand. The pay? A staggering $20 a bull. ‘That’s good money, mate—but don’t you tell the taxman.’
My friends explained the action like this. ‘You come up on a mob with a scrub bull in it, and you cut him out. The trick is to get up alongside of him and push him, hard. He’ll run for half a mile or so, and then he’ll want to fight you. He’ll start moving his head about, so you step off your horse and you grab him by the tail. He’ll turn to have you, and as he’s turning, you pull back and away and he’s off-balance, so he’ll go arse over tit. Then you jump on him and tie his legs together with micky straps. You wire his nose to his brisket, and there he is—all trussed up and waiting to be winched into the truck for the meatworks.’
There was so much to take in. ‘What’s a micky strap? I asked.
‘Oh, just a leather strap. You wear ’em around your waist.’
The obvious question, of course, was: ‘What happened to your face?’ How would he react to that?
As it turned out, he was quite cheerful about relating his ‘bit of bad luck’. ‘I grabbed hold of this bull’s tail, and the brush come away in me hand. I’ve got a handful of hair and a cranky bull lookin’ at me. He tossed me in the air—that’s how I got this.’ He made the briefest gesture to the terrible gash on his face. ‘Me hat comes down and he killed it. Then it’s my turn, ’cept me dog got ’im.’
Dogs hadn’t been mentioned up to this point, and I wondered where they came from?
‘Oh, you gotta have a dog, mate, a noser—they grab the bull by the nose and hang on. But me dog missed and the bull killed him. I was a bit lucky, ’cause by then me mate here turned up, took the bull off me and got me back to town.’
I was pretty much dumbfounded, but they went on to explain the ‘perks’ of the job. They had a ‘good boss’: he brought them a bottle of OP rum and a flagon of ‘Invalid’ port every morning, to help ‘get ’em going’.
As it turned out, they were going back to work the next morning, and I had an invitation to ‘come and have a look … You could even have a go yourself, if you like.’
Now, I can ride and I have worked stock but somehow or other I wasn’t tempted.
NEVER SAY NEVER …
I had no backup for All Ways on Sunday, but the thought never crossed anybody’s mind that I might ‘go sick’, break a leg or somehow be unable to front the program come Sunday morning.
In retrospect, if I hadn’t made it, my listeners would simply have had to listen to three and a half hours of classical music from the second network, or the program from the nearest capital city. No one is indispensable. But I never missed a show.
Mind you, I came close. There was the time when the lock on the front door of the Orange studio failed to open. Locksmiths aren’t readily available at five-thirty on a Sunday morning; access to the studio that day was via a long ladder and a second-storey window.
I nearly didn’t make it from the Mareeba Rodeo in time. I was depending on the rodeo committee to get me back to Cairns in time for the show. We were all having a great time when the president offered to ‘ring your boss and tell him you’re sick’.
Even when I was in the studio there was no guarantee I’d get to air. Often I’d have worked all night editing and had camped on the floor of the studio for an hour’s kip. I’d always sleep with my head up against the studio speaker with the sound turned up high. The techs broadcasted music ‘up the line’ as a test before programming started; a brass band at full volume is a great alarm clock.<
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But the nearest I came to missing completely was not on a trip but at home. I was living in Wagga and broadcasting from the Albury studios, and I’d leave home at about four o’clock on Sunday morning to drive to Albury and set up for the broadcast.
Of course, it’s dark at that time, and one very wet winter’s morning I was steaming down the road through the little town of Yerong Creek. I’d never seen the said creek, but guessed it must be around somewhere. This morning it was right across the road, and I went into it at a considerable rate of knots. I climbed out to survey the damage and found myself up over the knees in some very cold water. Fortunately, my old Holden was still grounded, and a guardian angel in the form of a truck turned up.
The driver gave me the choice; he’d pull me out Wagga side and home or Albury side and work. I prayed the car would start and chose the Albury side. The old girl kicked over and I arrived wet and shivering at the studio just in time to go to air.
I did that show in my underpants.
SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW
There are things you wish you’d never said. My caller was asking for help in promoting the Bendigo Easter Festival, and his name was Mr O’Hoy. We weren’t recording the interview—we didn’t have the technology. I was taking notes so I could script a piece to use in the program.
This was going to be a big festival, Mr O’Hoy assured me, and he was very keen to promote the Chinese contribution. He told me that among the attractions would be the Caledonian Band.
In a puerile attempt at humour, I put his name and the Caledonian Band together and said something like, ‘Hang on a minute. An O’Hoy as the secretary and a Caledonian Band—I think this is a bit of a leg-pull. Where are the Chinese?’
‘What do you know about Australian history?’ came the reply.
Smugly, I assured my caller that I was pretty well up in that department. So he asked what I knew about the Lambing Flat Massacre. Mr O’Hoy was giving me a gentle scolding for my cultural insensitivity.
I knew all about that particular incident. Lambing Flat—now the town of Young—wasn’t all that far from where I was broadcasting, and it was the scene of probably the most violent anti-Chinese demonstration in our goldfields’ history. In 1861, European miners on the field had attacked unprotected Chinese miners, destroying their tents, driving them from the field and killing a number of them. It took troops to put down the disturbance; the ringleaders were later arrested.
It was a bloody affair. Newspaper reports from the time talk of miners collecting Chinese pigtails—the long, braided queue of hair they wore—as trophies, some with the scalp attached. The country was on the cusp of introducing the White Australia policy.
‘A lot of those Australian miners had names like O’Neil, O’Malley. We bend with the wind,’ said my caller.
I was suitably chastened.
Mr O’Hoy went on to tell me about the dragon that would be dancing at the festival. He was very proud of that dragon, which had been around since the gold days.
To make sure that I was up on my knowledge of the Chinese in Bendigo, Mr O’Hoy told me the story of the joss house or temple there: it had been built in 1870 and was still very much in use. ‘There’s a piece of an earlier joss house in the Bendigo Joss House,’ he informed me. ‘Every new joss house is started with something from an older one.’
I liked that idea—one long continuation of a culture.
FILM STAR
Have you ever wondered what it might be like to be brought home dead over the back of a horse? You have? Well, I can tell you.
Radio stations are often the focus for all the odd and unusual things that happen in a town, so funny things tend to happen to you when you work at one. Back in the 1970s, when we were enjoying a spike in Australian-made television drama, the producers found Orange.
The town and the district had plenty going for them. There was a daily air service; it was within easy driving distance of Sydney; the country looked attractive; there were some fine old houses in town and in the surrounding country; and there were droves of locals who’d be happy to play as extras. It was a producer’s paradise, and one production company that found the place was making the Boney TV series, adaptations of the novels by Arthur Upfield centred on the doings of Aboriginal detective Napoleon Bonaparte.
Of course the casting director had to be one of my interview guests, and she told our audience that the company would be making at least two, possibly three, episodes of the forthcoming series in and around town. She’d need extras, and if volunteers would like to present themselves at such and such a hall between the hours of … You could already hear the scurry of interested footsteps on their way downtown.
My wife, Diana, is an actress, and she had a role in one of the episodes. As the casting director was leaving the studio, she casually asked me, ‘Would you fancy being a villain for a day or so?’
Apparently a tiny part in one episode was as yet uncast. There would be two days’ shooting involved, and I looked to be about the right size and shape. It’s well known that the devil has all the best lines, so I jumped at the chance. I was going to see how they made movies.
The plot of this episode was simple. Two families who’d been feuding for generations in Scotland emigrated to Australia and continued the feud down under. Two brothers, the baddies—that was me and a young actor from Sydney—have been stealing cattle from the goodies, and are caught in the act. By way of retribution, the goodies decide to firebomb the baddies, who are attempting to escape in their old mustering ute. It was exciting stuff.
The director, a very nice young man, briefed us baddies accordingly: ‘You’re escaping in your ute when the goodies find you. They’re flying a light aircraft, and they’ll drop petrol bombs on you. The ute catches fire and crashes, and you’—here he pointed ominously to me—‘get burned to death.’
I could do that.
‘Now, there are no lines for this scene,’ he continued, ‘but the camera will be on you for quite a while during the chase, so could you work up some dialogue between yourselves?’
Shakespeare, move over.
I was interested in how things worked technically. I mean, surely an actual firebomb wasn’t going to fall from heaven onto the ute?
‘No, no,’ the director explained. ‘There’s a petrol-soaked mattress in the back of the ute with a detonator hidden in it, and when you hit the mark, you’—and he again singled me out—‘will push a button, the detonator will explode, the mattress will go up and we’ll have a ute on fire.’
‘What happens then?’ seemed the obvious question.
‘You’—my brother in crime was singled out this time—‘get out of the ute, and you’—that was me again—‘are trapped in the ute and burned to death.’
I’m nothing if not practical. I looked at the ute in question. It was a battered old Holden, with both the driver’s and the passenger’s doors removed. It looked just the thing for scrub bashing, but I noticed a flaw. The director was keen to hear about it.
‘There’s no door, you see,’ I said. ‘I don’t care what happens, but if that ute’s on fire, I’ll get out of it. I mean, how can I be trapped?’
Sometimes it’s wise to keep your mouth shut.
The ute was carted to the top of a hill. The cameraman was strapped to the driver’s side so he could shoot the interior of the cab. We were almost ready to go.
‘Have you fellows worked out any lines?’ the director asked.
We prattled off the gems we’d rehearsed, and he was satisfied.
‘Now, remember,’ he pleaded, ‘we can only do this once, so please don’t stuff it up.’
Big Mouth again wanted to know whether the problem of the missing door had been addressed, and he told me not to worry—that had been fixed.
Action! And down the hill we rolled …
I leaned from the doorway, blazing away with a shotgun at an imaginary overhead plane; meanwhile, my brother and I babbled the lines we’d rehearsed.
/> We hit the mark. I pressed the button. There was a dull explosion, the ute leapt into the air, and a fireball belched through my door opening and into the cabin.
The crew had acted on my suggestion. They’d packed an area outside the door with fibre soaked in petrol—and it worked. There was no way I could get out that door. A slight change in lines followed.
‘Fuck!’ I screamed. I planted my foot in my brother’s ribs and pushed him past the cameraman and out his door. I followed hot on his tail. The cameraman was left to ride the burning wreck down the hill.
The director was excited. He said it looked tremendous, very real. Pity they wouldn’t be able to use all the interior shots. ‘You know—the … expletive.’
I was chastened.
There was more excitement to come. I, or rather my body, had yet to be discovered, smouldering beside the crashed ute. That would be after lunch.
Even though I was now dead, it seemed I still needed make-up—lots of make-up. My face would have been terribly burned, and they’d want a close-up of that. The young lady responsible was enthusiastic. She applied latex rubber all over my face and made that up; she then peeled great chunks of it away. I couldn’t see myself, but no one would eat lunch with me.
After lunch, my body was found smouldering beside the wreck of the ute. ‘Actually still burning?’ I had an interest in the answer to that question.
‘Well, there’ll be some flames,’ conceded the director.
Mr Curiosity again wanted to know how that might be done.
‘Well, you lie down and we sprinkle petrol on you and set fire to it.’
I expected him to laugh when he said this, but no—it seemed he was serious.
I was dressed in long johns and a woollen singlet that were soaked in alum as a fire retardant. My costume went on over all that, and then petrol was splashed about and I was invited to ‘lie down and keep very still’.
