Old Days, Old Ways

by Alex Nicol

  I can’t tell you about the recovery—I was too busy presenting the program. But before I left the Hill, I had to have John’s picture.

  ‘You don’t want that.’

  ‘I do, John. I do. I want it very much. Could we come to an arrangement about paying it off?’

  ‘Everyone can paint,’ my host insisted. ‘You’ll like it much more if you paint your own memory of Broken Hill. Go away and paint.’

  This really sounds silly: I did try to paint that mullock heap. But John was wrong: not everyone can paint. It’s almost fifty years ago, but I still remember The End of the Tar.

  THE LITHGOW FLASH

  It was supposed to be a straight-up-and-down-the-middle sports story. I was interviewing this nice old bloke in Lithgow. He had a stable of young professional runners, and that was the story.

  We were sitting on one of those wooden-planks-on-tree-stump seats they have around old sporting fields and showgrounds. This one was at the Lithgow Showground, where he was training his ‘stable’. We’d just about finished the interview when he casually mentioned that he’d trained Marjorie Jackson.

  Marjorie Jackson? The Lithgow Flash? I once had pretensions to being a runner, but I had neither the talent nor the work ethic. Marjorie was my hero. ‘Here? You trained her here, at the showground?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  ‘Nice girl.’

  It turned out that her parents were a bit doubtful about letting her, a young girl, train with the men—but train she did. In fact, that competition with the men may have stood her in good stead.

  ‘Didn’t understand pain, Marjorie,’ the old bloke confided.

  He told me that he’d thrown everything he could think of at her in one training session, and at the end she’d sat slumped, exhausted, on a seat just like the one we were sitting on. ‘Don’t sit there, girlie,’ he told her. ‘You’ve got to run up that hill before you finish.’

  ‘That hill’ is a small mountain that runs up from the back of the showground. Without a word, Marjorie shrugged off the Army greatcoat she was wearing—no tracksuits in those days—and headed off.

  Many years later I met the lady herself, and we sat down for an interview. In true fan fashion, I told her that I’d seen her beat the then world champion, Fanny Blankers-Koen, at a meeting in Sydney in 1949, and I could even tell her what she was wearing: a blue singlet with a dark-blue sash. She was impressed.

  Then she told me about the trip home afterwards, back to Lithgow.

  It was a trip by steam train in those days, and the famous Zig Zag Railway was still in operation. The driver knew who he was carrying home, and as he hit the Zig Zag he started to blow the train’s whistle. By the time they pulled up at the station, half of Lithgow was there at the railway to meet her.

  ‘Only half?’ I asked.

  ‘The other half was on the train with me.’ She was cheeky.

  Marjorie was named for Lithgow. Everyone knew her as ‘the Lithgow Flash’, and in many ways the town owned her. They had a mile of pennies in the main street to fund her trips away; even the kids laid down their pocket money.

  The fastest tracks in the world then were cinder tracks. The town didn’t have one. Australia didn’t have one. The people of Lithgow built their Marjorie her track.

  It’s history now, of course, but she won gold for us at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, not once but twice—our first track victories since 1896. Small wonder we loved her.

  Gold, gold for Australia? Well, perhaps not.

  She recalled waiting to be called to the start in the 100 metres final. The runners were marshalled in a bare concrete room under a grandstand. There was a washbasin against the wall and Marjorie was terribly nervous; she was dry-retching into the basin.

  The Lithgow Flash, Marjorie Jackson. A gold medal for Mummy and Daddy and Lithgow.

  She remembered the start and she remembered the finish.

  ‘When I crossed the line and knew that I’d won, I looked up and said, “Thank you, God. That’s for Mummy and Daddy and Lithgow.”’

  She wasn’t nearly so nervous before the final of the 200 metres, and when she crossed the line victorious on that occasion, she looked up and said, ‘Thank you, God. That’s for Marjorie.’

  THE POSSUM

  This country took everything from him, and yet he lived off this country.

  You might call ‘the Possum’ a hermit, but there was much more to this New Zealand shearer stranded in a hostile country than mere hermit.

  Griffith, New South Wales, had a hermit for years. He lived in a cave overlooking the town. He had a little garden and people used to visit him. Not the Possum.

  Every town or district has one—the loner who doesn’t quite fit in. They’re the old bloke or woman you see tramping the road in an overcoat. They’re the character who turns up once a month at a small shop to cash their cheque from the government and buy some stores. These days it’s fashionable to describe them as ‘suffering a mental illness’—not the Possum. In Australian bush lore, he is unique.

  Jon Lamb sent me the story from Renmark, South Australia. He had the story from Max Jones, the local detective sergeant, who knew more about the Possum than anyone.

  People had seen this little old bloke wandering the river and hadn’t been too worried about him. He’d been seen up and down the river, from Renmark to Wentworth, and he’d never caused any trouble. People had gone out to fix a fence they’d known was down, but found that someone had been there before them: a rotted post had been ‘dummied’ up and the wires tightened. It wasn’t the fairies: it was the Possum.

  That wasn’t good enough for Max Jones. He didn’t want anyone wandering his patch who might have questions to answer, and he made it his business to find out who this stranger might be.

  Max’s diligence paid off. He and the Possum shared a surname: the Possum was New Zealand citizen, David Jones, born in 1901. But what was he doing wandering the South Australian bush almost 70 years later?

  David Jones had come to Australia in the late 1920s to work as a shearer, and he had been a good one. But came the Depression and things got tight, work was scarce and David was out of work. That was a disaster. He didn’t have the money for his union dues; he didn’t have a ‘ticket’. No union was tighter than the shearers’: no ticket, no work. He couldn’t ply his trade.

  He wasn’t the only one, and there was a remedy of sorts. You could go ‘on the track’—wander the bush looking for casual work, supported by track rations, a voucher that you’d pick up at the police station that would get you enough basic food to get you to the next town. You could do that, but not David Jones. He wasn’t an Aussie, no track rations for him. So David Jones turned his back on Australia and became the Possum.

  When Jon sent me the story, the Possum hadn’t tasted bread for almost forty years. He lived in the bush and survived on what the bush could provide. Fish from the Murray of course, and rabbits, feral cats and foxes for meat; for greens, bush tucker he’d learned to collect. And honey—he had a taste for honey and knew how to get it. But there was one thing he needed from society: salt.

  People would report the sound of wood being chopped. Investigation would reveal the Possum at work at the family wood pile. He’d finish with a pile of split and stacked firewood, and in the tradition of the bush, he’d get a food parcel. Tea, flour, sugar, salt, bread, some meat, tinned food. Next morning the parcel, minus the salt, would be back beside the pile. The Possum didn’t accept charity.

  The legend of the Possum grew. People had seen him dressed in a suit coming back from a trip to Adelaide. Police up the river had picked him up, but Max had put the word out that they were to ‘leave the Possum alone’. He’d been seen as far down south as the mouth of the river, as far upstream as the Darling in New South Wales. The lock master had seen him in the middle of winter, an oil drum under his arm for support, crossing the Murray with the mist rising off the water. The whole time, in his own qu
iet way, the Possum was working—he never gave up his responsibilities as a stockman.

  In the middle of a drought, people would go out to cut scrub for the sheep, only to find that the Possum had been there before them, breaking down boughs so the sheep could get at them. They’d muster a mob to check for flies and find that a struck sheep had already been cleaned up.

  They saw the Possum from time to time. He was a little man, but fit and strong. He was clean, his hair was cut, after a fashion, and he’d shaved somehow or other. He picked up his clothes from the sheds after the shearers had gone—there was always something left behind. He left little caches of ‘usefuls’—an axe head, clean clothes—stashed up and down the river.

  People might accidentally bump into the Possum out in the bush, but he wasn’t interested in conversation. He’d hurry away.

  The Possum was an old man when Max Jones uncovered all his story, and Max made it his business to get close to the old man. The thought of him dying alone out there in the bush—or, worse, being trapped, caught by an arm in a tree as he robbed a hive—nagged at Max. He would get him into town. He’d get the Possum a quiet end.

  The two men did strike up some sort of relationship. Max even managed to record a conversation he had with the Possum. The old bloke covered his mouth when he spoke, and it was difficult to hear him. He told Max that he regretted losing touch with his family, and worried about his mother.

  Max explained that by now he could surely get a pension. Perhaps he should come into town and be checked over by a doctor?

  I couldn’t understand much of what the Possum had been saying, but his answer to this suggestion came through clearly: ‘I’ll be alright when I get me ticket. I’ll be alright then.’

  Max didn’t get him into town, and the Possum died as he’d lived some sixty years of his life, alone in the bush. They found his body beside the river in 1982. They’ve got a statue of him now at Wentworth, where the Darling meets the Murray.

  THE DEDICATED WHARFIE

  A wharfie, from the days when men valued their ability to work hard and competed with each other in feats of endurance, was prodigiously strong and loved to show off. These were the days when we exported our wheat in bags, and his favourite trick was to carry five at a time.

  Yes, I know that a bag of wheat weighs 180 pounds—around 80 kilograms—but this is a bush yarn, so work with me.

  His trick was to put one across his shoulders, behind his neck, and pick up two under each arm. Loaded like this, he’d trot up and down the gangplank all day.

  Came the day when he slipped and plunged into the harbour. His horrified mates watched as he sank below the oily water, and then fought his way to the surface, only to sink once more. Gamely he struggled back to the surface for the second time, but as we all know, there’s no third chance.

  Just as it seemed inevitable that he’d sink to his doom, he shouted to his mates: ‘If someone doesn’t chuck me a rope, I’ll have to let go of one of these bags!’

  TWO SPLENDID FISH

  ‘You’ve got a fan. Someone left these for you.’

  ‘These’ proved to be two of the most magnificent fish I’d ever seen. They weren’t stuffed and mounted, nor were they alive and swimming in a plastic bag filled with water. They were ready for the pan—and it would need to be a big pan.

  The staff of ABC Townsville was gathered around my catch. They explained that I was looking at a red emperor and a coral trout, the finest reef fish you could eat. With them was a note welcoming me to Townsville and wishing me a good program. Already I liked the place. North Queenslanders are a touch paranoid. They think that the rest of us don’t give them their dues, and they could be right. Townsville, the unofficial capital of the north—and, as the locals are quick to tell you, the largest city in tropical Australia—was about to put that right.

  It was 1970. I was in town for the first Townsville Pacific Festival. Performers were coming from Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and Malaysia. There would be music, theatre, dancing and the Queensland Symphony Orchestra would perform. This festival would mark the city as the cultural capital of the Pacific.

  We Australians wouldn’t buy Blue Poles for another three years, and the Australia Council for the Arts wouldn’t be fully funded for another five years. Townsville was really putting it out there. But what to do with two fish?

  I met the commander of a patrol boat the Navy had sent as its contribution to the festivities. He seemed to have no one to shake hands with, so I asked him if he could use a fish, and instantly we were friends and I had an invitation for a meal aboard his boat. That accounted for the red emperor.

  In the end, I decided to freeze my coral trout. I was told that this was sacrilege—but how else was I going to get it back to Orange? I’d done a careful check of the timetables, and if it came straight out of the freezer and onto the plane and all the flights were on time, my family would be dining on thawed coral trout that night.

  This was a big fish, and by the time I’d wrapped it in several layers of insulating newspaper and then bundled the lot in brown paper, I had quite a parcel.

  The lady in front of me at the airport was not happy. She was carrying a very young baby, and she was hung about with all the paraphernalia that an infant needs on a plane trip. The inspector was unhelpful. He wanted everything, and I mean everything, out of that bag on her shoulder.

  Why mince words? He was an officious bastard who seemed to enjoy being difficult. I mean, how was the woman supposed to nurse a baby and empty everything out of her bag? I made a half-hearted offer to help.

  No, I couldn’t take the articles out of the bag for her, and she certainly wasn’t going to let me nurse her baby.

  ‘What’s in the parcel?’ the inspector asked.

  My turn. It was hopeless. I knew that, but you’ve got to give it a go. ‘Ha, you’ll never believe it. Someone gave me this fish. It’s a beautiful fish. They tell me it’s a coral trout. It’s frozen, and I’ve got it wrapped up like this to keep it frozen till I get home.’

  Not a flicker of interest. ‘Unwrap it.’

  With four or five layers peeled away, I reckoned the outline of a fish was unmistakable, and I looked up hopefully—to be met with a basilisk stare. ‘More?’ I asked.

  He didn’t even reply. I kept unwrapping till there it was, in all its naked splendour. He didn’t say a thing, but just watched while I wrapped it up again.

  The people behind me in the queue, meanwhile, considered whether they really needed to fly that day.

  GIFT COLLECTION

  There are legions of stories about people sending birthday cards, wedding gifts and the like to their favourite characters in TV soapies, and after you’ve been ‘on air’ for a while, some people do think they know you. Of course, all they really know is the persona you project on air. Hopefully that will be something like the real you—but who knows?

  People sent or gave me things, and I hope I had the good grace to be embarrassed. I always wanted to say to the sender that I wasn’t the important one in this equation—after all, I wouldn’t exist except for the people and the stories that gave All Ways on Sunday its character. They were the important ones.

  It’s not unusual, when you visit a winemaker and do a story, to depart with a bottle of produce. But what if your interviewee mines opals or gemstones? Some of the gifts I received were valuable; on other occasions—which was more embarrassing—they were obviously very valuable to the sender.

  Waiting for me at the studio in Launceston on a visit was a brick—a house brick. Its significance was the fact that it was a convict brick from one of the earliest buildings in the state. The thumbprint of the man who’d made it was there, preserved in the brick for as long as it continued to be a brick—but shouldn’t it have stayed where it belonged?

  In Alice Springs I got a gift that confused me. It was obviously Aboriginal and very old. It looked something like an out-of-shape boomerang, and the note with it told me that it was a ‘killing b
oomerang’. I imagined that it could have been used as a club. It might have been used in hand-to-hand fighting. To me it was a curio, until I decided on a little research.

  My gift was a curved kylie. It was old, it was real and someone had once depended on it for food. I held it in my hand and wondered who’d held it for real. Who had made it, and depended on it for hunting? And what gave me the right to ‘own’ it?

  The best I could do was present it in turn to the high school my children were attending. It had a collection of artefacts it used as teaching materials. What else could I do?

  THEY’RE OFF!

  The Lightning Ridge racetrack was one of those places where the shout ‘They’re off!’ was a signal for a cloud of red dust to rise. Somewhere in that cloud, sundry horses and jockeys were doing their bit to make the bookies rich—but punters had little idea where their fancy sat in the mob until the last couple of hundred yards, when you’d catch a glimpse of the colours through the dust.

  The Ridge also had a small group of trees growing on the far side of the track, and I swear that the hoops could have changed horses in that clump of trees and we spectators would have been none the wiser.

  I was there, discussing the state of the crops and other important matters with a local, when my twelve-year-old daughter ‘tapped’ me for two dollars for a bet.

  That was paper money at the time. She had her grandfather’s blood in her alright. She had a hot tip. She was backing Bogan Jewel.