Old Days, Old Ways

by Alex Nicol

  Ah, but was it really like that? More probable was Tiny’s yarn about the measures he was forced to take to ‘hang on another year’. He was a bachelor and enormously popular in the district. He was under no illusions as to the source of that popularity: he owned a piano. As a consequence, his house was the centre of social activity.

  ‘When the fire broke out,’ Tiny recalled, ‘people came from everywhere to help, and everyone wanted to get the piano out. At one stage there’s a couple of blokes pulling and I’m pushing for all I’m worth, and we’re getting nowhere. We were all getting a bit singed before they gave it away and left the old goanna to its fate. Funny thing—those blokes never did work out that while they were pulling, I was hanging on for dear life. The insurance on that goanna got the next crop in.’

  The brutal side of the soldier settlement schemes was summed up by an old employee of the now defunct NSW Rural Bank. It was his job, he explained, to drive from failed farm to failed farm and get the farmer to see sense and to sign the land back over to the bank.

  ‘The signs were always the same,’ he said. ‘You’d see horses standing there that were too poor to work anymore, and if the horses were gone, there was no hope.’ He described children clothed in garments made from flour bags, and confided in hushed tones that ‘it was not unusual to see rickets’.

  Remember who he was dealing with. These were the men who fought and survived on the Western Front. These were tough men with a fearsome reputation. They didn’t give up. First, there was the shame of failure, and that would be compounded by the knowledge that if you gave up and walked away, you walked away with nothing. There was no compensation: you had the clothes you stood up in, and nothing else.

  But the bank employee had a technique he’d use when ‘Dad was being difficult’. He always took a paper bag of oranges with him on these missions, he told me. ‘If Dad was proving stubborn, I’d offer the kids an orange. That always did it. They’d sign.’

  THE GLOUCESTER TREE

  I’d always wanted to see these karri trees people talk about. These giants—could they be as special as all that? After all, a tree is a tree.

  I found them in the Valley of the Giants in Western Australia, and the granddaddy of them was the Gloucester Tree. I knew about this giant, reputedly the tallest living fire tower in the world, and named for the Duke of Gloucester, who was supposed to have stood and watched while blokes on their springboards cut the top out of it so they could make an observation platform. Why the fellow on the ground got the honour and not the one up the tree is beyond me.

  When I got to the base of this magnificent tree, I found that you could climb it (at your own risk) for a view unlike anything else in the world—a view across the karri forest.

  I slung my tape recorder around my neck and started up. ‘Up’ meant climbing the sort of steel pegs you used to see driven into telegraph posts. I notice from tourist brochures that now those pegs seem to be a couple of feet long, and that there’s some sort of a safety wire netting in place on the climb. Not then. So far as I knew, I was alone in the world.

  Alone, that is, until I got about halfway up and met a bloke coming down. I remember he was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, and he’d chosen thongs as his climbing boots. He’d now decided that caution was the better part of valour and wanted to head back down. We debated for a while whether he’d step out and around me or vice versa.

  The climb up was just a climb like that until it took me through the forest canopy. Then I was up above the trees. Yes, the view was spectacular, but every upward step from there on felt like a trespass into the territory of eagles. I was scared.

  The sight of the wooden fire platform above was sweet relief—all I had to do now was push the flap up and climb onto the safety of that lovely floor. I stood there to catch my breath, wondering at the bravery of the men who’d stood on springboards up here to make this platform.

  The tape recorder was useless. I picked up the mic but couldn’t think of anything to say that would give listeners any idea of what I felt.

  And then it hit me: I still had to go down.

  The first step, they say, is the worst, and I’d have to lower myself through that hole in the floor, support myself on my elbows and find that first rung with a searching foot.

  Next morning I had ‘jelly legs’ and walking was a real problem.

  I’ve climbed the Gloucester Tree. I see now you can pay a fee and collect a certificate to prove it. I don’t need anything to remind me I’ve been up there—or that I failed to bring my listeners even the faintest idea of what that experience was like.

  The Gloucester Tree in the 1960s, up there with the eagles.

  THE BREWER’S TALE

  Where was Mark Twain when we needed him?

  Here we were, a new country, with no roads worth speaking of and certainly no trains. But there were two great rivers—well, one and a half. And we had riverboats. Why no Mark Twain? Charles Dickens’ sons had migrated here, for goodness sake! Couldn’t they have done something?

  Our riverboat era didn’t last long—about fifty years—but it must have thrown up characters and stories we didn’t get to hear about, probably because the places that were the centre of river traffic fell quickly into neglect or turned their backs on their previous blue-collar history.

  Wilcannia was like that. In the 1970s it was not a happy town. Abandoned by its grazier community, who preferred to do their shopping in Broken Hill, its streets were full of boarded-up shopfronts. The few substantial buildings that spoke of better times were in need of repair.

  The golf club, however, offered cold beer and food, even if there was something odd about the layout of the place. When I raised this with the barman, he told me that the wall I was looking at used to be part of the brewery.

  I was surprised. A brewery in Wilcannia?

  ‘Mate, this is where Resch’s started.’

  And there was an old bloke in the club who could and would tell me all about it.

  Oh yes, my informant stated, he knew the story well. He was part of the story. Old man Resch pushed a barrow into Wilcannia with all his gear and his boots in it. He didn’t have enough money to buy a new pair.

  ‘And he started a brewery? Why in Wilcannia?’

  ‘The river, mate.’

  Wilcannia, he told me, was the gateway to Queensland, and there were a lot of thirsty people in Queensland. There were a lot of thirsty people in Wilcannia too. It was a big place, a big port.

  At that stage of my life, I’d been visiting the Darling for five or six years, and I failed to see how anyone could get much more than a rowboat up the river. But the old bloke assured me that they once traded as far upriver as Bourke, sometimes even to ‘Bre’ (Brewarrina).

  He admitted that occasionally they’d get stuck upriver and would have to wait for a decent rain in Queensland to get them moving again, but they shipped the wool from all the big stations up the river too. Some of those old captains, he assured me, could take a boat cross-country on a heavy dew. Hmm.

  But about this brewery: it was lucky I was talking to him, he told me, because he had all the inside information. He was a friend of the family—well, more like a member of the family after one particularly heroic act.

  The Resches had two sons. They were having a swim in the river one day, and one of them got into trouble. The old bloke had fished him out, and old man Resch, as a thank-you, put him on the payroll for life. He not only worked for the firm, he ultimately became the head brewer.

  I was beginning to learn a lot about Wilcannia. We were talking about a big town, a big river port. There must have been ten pubs in town at that time, and another brewery.

  Two breweries?

  Oh, yes. Resch’s was called the Red Lion, and the rival was the Black Horse. Of course, the Black Horse had suffered an accident. My newfound friend had been taking the two Resch boys out for a picnic. They were a fair way out of town when one of the youngsters noticed smoke rising from a fire bac
k in town. ‘Looks like the Black Horse is on fire. Tch. Tch.’

  This story was getting better and better, but I was beginning to have considerable qualms about ever being able to broadcast any of it. Shame, Australian history untold.

  It’s not too difficult to check on the name Resch, and my mate had some of the story straight. Yes, Edmund did start the Red Lion in Wilcannia, and he and his brother had another two or three breweries. But since they’d already been successful miners and businessmen, and had the capital to start the brewery, they probably hadn’t pushed a barrow into town, even with their boots on.

  And the Black Horse? There was a Black Horse Brewery in old Wilcannia, but it hadn’t operated for years—and it had been owned by the Resch brothers. Pity.

  The bit about Wilcannia being a big river port was accurate, though, and they did trade as far up as Brewarrina. But I’m still not sure about getting a boat across country on a big dew.

  I could have been sitting across the table from Australia’s answer to Mark Twain. He just needed a publisher.

  THE HILL

  Broken Hill crouched behind its mullock heap like some medieval town walled against the inroads of invaders. Here, it said, we do things differently.

  They certainly did. Women gave up their jobs when they walked down the aisle—‘to make sure we keep young girls in town’. Everybody got the local paper, everybody. The town was governed from Sydney but regarded Adelaide as its capital, and the union kept an avuncular eye on the workers’ paradise.

  I was in town to present All Ways on Sunday, and to cover the celebration of the St Patrick’s Day races—which weren’t on St Pat’s Day, and the ‘day’ lasted three days. Different. The race meeting was only three years old, but it had already developed a reputation. ‘You’ve never seen anything like the St Pat’s Day races,’ they said. I couldn’t wait.

  ABC Broken Hill was a little different too. John Pickup was in charge. Instead of local presenters’ photos in the foyer, pride of place was given to works by five local artists with very different ways of imagining the world they lived in. They weren’t yet known as ‘the Brushmen of the Bush’, but at least one had already developed a reputation.

  Pro Hart had already been known to cut one of his iconic insects from a painting to sell as a stand-alone work. Jack Absalom was yet to become a celebrity TV presenter, and John, my host for the next couple of days, proved to be a modest, gentle man who couldn’t do enough to show off what his town had to offer. For me, one of his recently completed works was a standout.

  The End of the Tar said the title. It was a departure from John’s signature theme of Quixote wandering the western landscape. It depicted a family car alone in a huge landscape at the exact moment the ribbon of tar reaching out from the Hill ran out, and the hard yards of the dirt beyond the city began. It was a happy painting. It spoke volumes about the Hill, and I really wanted it. I looked at the price and immediately began calculating whether I could manage it with a series of payments.

  The idea of the race meeting as a fundraiser for the work of the Catholic Church in the area had emerged a couple of years earlier—but how to make it different? How to attract the out-of-town money?

  The celebrations were centred on the racecourse, but there was only one day of racing. The night before the big event was a warm-up, an orgy of anything goes—this was uncontrolled gambling if you listened to the enthusiasts, or the usual crown-and-anchor charity night done Hill-style if you preferred the more sober version. Races the next day, and the final day was one of entertainment at the racecourse, ‘where everything is free’. A sort of give-something-back day.

  All that was a couple of days in the future, and I needed to get on with the job of finding material for a program about the Hill.

  The Hill, Broken Hill, the whole reason for the place, with its great holes in the ground, the mothers of that great mullock heap—naturally that was the place to start.

  I couldn’t go underground, but a shop in town had been converted to give you a feel of what it might be like down there. Yes, well …

  ‘That’s the old mosque,’ said my host as we drove past what, as far as I could tell, was a corrugated-iron shed badly in need of repair. Mosque? Oh, of course, the ‘Afghan’ camel drivers who had once carted the wool in this part of the country. Strange—I knew how important they were to the development of inland Australia, but I’d never thought of them as being religious. But why wouldn’t they have a place of worship?

  ‘And you know about the Battle of Broken Hill?’

  I was about to get chapter and verse on the tragedy that, depending on how you looked at it, either saw the Hill suffer the first Australian casualties of the First World War or experience Australia’s first terrorist attack.

  New Year’s Day in 1915 was celebrated in the Hill with a picnic, and it was all aboard the train for Silverton. Just out of town the partygoers came under fire from, of all things, an ice-cream cart. Fluttering above it was the crescent flag of the Ottoman Empire, and beside it stood a local butcher and an ice-cream seller. Their sultan had declared war. It was their duty as loyal subjects to wage that war.

  ‘So it was a sort of symbolic gesture?’

  ‘No, no. They killed four people and, of course, were killed themselves.’

  The police were called in and the local rifle club volunteered its services. The battle didn’t take long. The protesters/sultan’s soldiers/terrorists had no chance, and must have known they had no chance. They were shot and wounded several times, but they fired to the end.

  The butcher had a score to settle with a local official, but the ice-cream seller had been a mild man thousands of miles from his homeland, driven by what he saw as his duty.

  The attack brought the expected reprisals. The German Club in town was burned, and when the firefighters turned up to fight the flames, their hoses were cut by a mob. Foreigners in town were rounded up and sent away to the newly established internment camps in the east. Amazingly, the mosque was untouched. Perhaps corrugated iron doesn’t offer much of a threat.

  Ticket prices on the picnic train were refunded.

  *

  Isolation, it seemed, didn’t guarantee safety. The Hill had a more serious scare during the Second World War.

  ‘The story goes they picked up a bloke out at the dam. They reckoned he was planning to blow it up or poison the water,’ my host said.

  For an industrial city stranded in the middle of a great arid plain, that was a sobering thought. Still, there were all those pubs.

  ‘Why Broken Hill?’ I asked.

  ‘We were using a fair bit of lead back then.’

  The visit to the dam meant I got to see the Mundi Mundi Plains. It’s a tourist feature now, but then it was just a plain on the outskirts of town. Sitting in my guide’s car and being told that what I could see in the distance were South Australia’s Flinders Ranges, I suddenly thought that I was looking at more of Australia than I had ever seen in my life.

  ‘And the regen—you’ve got to see the regen,’ my host urged.

  Forgive me. The fenced-off area of regenerating scrub wasn’t impressive. A scraggly fence line with the rabbit-proof wire netting pushed almost to the ground in a couple of places.

  ‘You’re not supposed to go wandering about in it, but bottle collectors mine it all the time.’

  The ‘regen’ was, however, further proof that they did things differently in the Hill, which was plagued by shifting sandhills and cursed with some terrible dust storms; there are photographs of some of the worst prominently displayed in town. The Hill was in real danger of being swallowed by its landscape when, back in the 1930s, they did something about it. Horticultural enthusiast Albert Morris convinced the locals and some of the mine managers that if they could keep the rabbits and stock away, the country could come back to life. The ‘regen’ was born.

  It worked, and now forms another barrier between the Hill and ‘Out There’.

  I was beginning to not
ice something. When the locals talked about going anywhere, there were only three possible destinations: you either went ‘up the river’, ‘down the river’ or ‘away’. Up the river from Broken Hill or down the river from Broken Hill—these were places that you knew about and visited. Anywhere else was simply ‘away’.

  Came the night before the races, and there I stood in the hotel foyer, my recorder primed and ready, waiting along with all those other walking cash points for the bus to take us to the racecourse. I didn’t expect to collect any interviews—people would have other things on their mind—but a croupier’s call from a roulette table or, better yet, a ‘Come in, spinner!’ would be great background for the colour picture I’d paint for broadcast on Sunday morning.

  He was a very big man and very friendly, but when he told me that there was a man who wanted to talk to me over at the bar, it was pretty obvious that he expected me to go immediately to see the man at the bar. The gentleman in question wasn’t wearing his working clothes (they would have sported a fair bit of silver lace) and it turned out that he too was very friendly and concerned for my wellbeing. Obviously, he thought that my recorder was weighing me down and would prevent my having fun, because he took it from my shoulder, handed it to his companion and said, ‘You go and have a nice time. We’ll mind this for you.’

  They look after their own in the Hill.

  The races were great. The oysters cooled on beds of green ice. The Guinness flowed, and everyone had an Irish ancestor. Civilised picnics were the order of the day—yes, with crystal glasses—and if you looked a little lost, an immediate invitation to join someone for lunch was on offer. You had no chance of winning fashions on the field without a touch of green about you, and if the winner of the cup wasn’t called Shillelagh, it should have been. St Pat would have approved.