The Best Australian Bush Stories

by Jim Haynes

  ‘He’s very drunk,’ I said. ‘I don’t know whether he’s been bitten or not.’ I was beginning to doubt it. I didn’t think people came out of snake poison comas quite so abruptly. If he was out of a coma.

  ‘Blackie,’ I said, ‘are you awake? Has a snake bitten you?’

  Blackie focused on me and said disdainfully, ‘Snakes don’t bite me.’

  ‘I think he’s just drunk,’ I said quietly to Alan, and then to Blackie, ‘Better come up to my campervan and lie down for a while, Blackie.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Blackie, ‘just lie down in here.’ And he turned and tried to get in with the snakes again. Alan and I grabbed him.

  ‘Come on, Blackie, come up to the van and have a sleep.’

  But Blackie had looked through the plate glass and seen his beloved snakes rushing backwards and forwards or coiled and waving and hissing.

  ‘Something’s wrong with my snakes!’ he roared, and began to struggle with us to get free.

  ‘Blackie, Blackie,’ said Alan, ‘take it easy. You’ve had a few drinks . . .’

  ‘’Course I’ve had a few drinks,’ said Blackie. ‘Can’t a man have a few drinks?’

  ‘Of course you can, Blackie,’ I said soothingly, ‘but you were passed out with snakes all over you. We just hauled you out.’

  Blackie looked at me closely. ‘So that’s why my snakes are all upset,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right, Blackie.’

  Blackie thought about that. ‘Ah well,’ he said after a while, ‘I suppose you meant no harm. Don’t do it again, though.’

  And the wretched man pulled away and tried to get in the door again. Alan and I could hold him easily, but we weren’t prepared to do it indefinitely.

  ‘Now listen, Blackie,’ I said firmly, ‘just come over to my van and have a few hours’ sleep and you can come back to your snakes.’

  ‘I’m going back to my snakes now,’ said Blackie. ‘Get your hands off me.’

  We let him go, but Alan slipped between him and the door. Blackie considered this new problem.

  ‘I’m going in there,’ he said quietly and threateningly.

  ‘Calm down, Blackie,’ said Alan reasonably.

  Blackie took a wild and ineffectual swipe at him. Alan and I looked at each other helplessly. I mouthed the word ‘Police?’ behind Blackie’s back and Alan nodded regretfully.

  ‘Can you keep him out of there?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Alan confidently. I thought he could, too; Blackie was far too drunk to put up much of a fight.

  The trouble was I didn’t know where the nearest telephone was. As far as I knew I might have to go into Mackay, eighty kilometres away.

  I drove at incredible speed down to the highway and was delighted to see a police patrol car go past at the junction of the roads. I sped after it with my hand on the horn and it stopped. I leaped out of my van and ran to the police car. Two solemn Queensland policemen, both fat, red-faced, without humour, eternally middle-aged, looked at me expressionlessly.

  ‘I wonder, would you follow me?’ I said breathlessly. ‘I’ve got a friend who’s very drunk and who wants to sleep with his snakes.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘What?’ said the two policemen eventually, simultaneously.

  ‘I’ve got a friend who’s very drunk who wants to sleep with his snakes,’ I said again, but this time I could hear my own words.

  There was another long pause.

  ‘Could you explain a bit more, sir?’ said the driver policeman. Even then I could wonder at the talent of policemen for using the word ‘sir’ as an insult.

  ‘Oh the hell with it, it’s too difficult to explain. Just follow me, will you? It’s urgent.’

  I thought they probably would follow me, if not necessarily for the reason I wanted them to. I was right. They did and we arrived back at Macka’s Mistake to find Blackie pinned to the ground with Alan Roberts kneeling on his shoulders. The snake house was still a whirl of activity. Blackie was shouting obscenities with considerable eloquence. I don’t say the policemen put their hands on their guns, but they looked as though they might any minute. It was all too difficult to explain, so I just gestured at the strange tableau of Blackie and Alan in front of the snake house. ‘What seems to be the problem?’ said one of the policemen. Blackie stopped shouting when he saw the uniforms. Alan let him go and he stood up, stared for a moment, then looked reproachfully and unbelievingly at me. ‘You called the cops,’ he accused.

  ‘What is all this?’ said the policeman.

  Blackie saved the necessity for an explanation by feebly trying to punch the policeman’s nose. They took him off to Mackay and charged him with being drunk and disorderly.

  Alan and I waited through the day until we felt he must be reasonably sober and then went down and bailed him out. Blackie was silent until halfway through the journey back when he suddenly and tearfully asked, ‘How could you do this to me?’

  Alan and I explained the sequence of events to him. ‘Is that true?’ he said.

  ‘Perfectly true, Blackie. We had to do it.’

  ‘I can see that. Funny, I don’t remember any of it.’

  I tactfully made no reference to the two empty bottles of whisky.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ Blackie said. ‘Just goes to show, though, snakes and alcohol don’t mix.’

  THERE’S A PATRON

  SAINT OF DRUNKS

  JIM HAYNES

  THERE’S A PATRON SAINT of drunks. Someone looks after them. It’s almost impossible for a drunk to hurt himself and it’s very difficult to get the better of a drunk.

  I’m not really talking here about part-time drunks or weekend drunks. I’m talking about genuine drunks, those who make a vocation of being drunks, whose character is defined by the fact that they’re drunks. We had a few like that in Weelabarabak, but the most memorable of them all was the ‘town drunk’ for many years, Dipso Dan.

  His real name was, I believe, Daniel Harvey. The whole town, however, referred to him as ‘Dipso Dan’, and to his face he was called either just ‘Dan’ or ‘Dipso’.

  Dipso Dan wasn’t born in Weelabarabak. Like most town drunks I’ve known he drifted into town from somewhere else, found a place to camp, did a bit of casual work now and again and got on with the job of being the town drunk.

  It was rumoured that he had grown up in Melbourne and come to the bush as a sideshow worker. He’d even fought in boxing tent shows many years ago and was ‘pretty handy’ according to some of the older blokes around town. Old Nugget reckoned he remembered him going a few rounds with some of locals many years ago at the Weelabarabak Show, when he was a regular member of King Riley’s Travelling Boxing Show.

  As the grog slowly got to Dipso he had slipped down the carnival pecking order, becoming a rigger and a ‘rousie’ and eventually, when he couldn’t perform any regular productive work, he had been left behind in Weelabarabak to become our town drunk.

  Dipso wore old woollen army pants tied with rope in place of a belt, a flannel shirt of an indeterminate shade and shoes that varied in type and colour depending on charity. I remember that he never wore socks and his old army pants ended about six inches above his shoes, revealing a fair bit of bony shank. He was always accompanied by his dog, Digger.

  Dipso was a fairly happy drunk, though he could be an absolute pain in the neck if you were trying to have a couple of quiet ones and a bet at the Tatts on Saturday. He always tried to tell you yarns about his illustrious punting career and wanted to know if you had ‘a good thing in the next’. But there was no malice in Dipso; he wasn’t a ‘fighting drunk’ in spite of his reputed past career in the ring.

  He was painfully thin and seemed incredibly uncoordinated for an ex-boxer. He moved with a strange, jerky dancing motion that I found fascinating when I was a kid. Perhaps it was a combination of his boxing days, dancing around the ring, and the effect of years of booze.

  One year the famous Tintookies Marionette Theatre
came to Weelabarabak and put on a show. The whole school was marched down to the CWA hall and sat on mats at the front, near the stage, while the adults who weren’t working sat in chairs behind us. The show was a ripper too, although I don’t remember the plot or the characters very well. What everyone in town does remember is what happened when the curtain opened. The first marionette, a swaggie character, appeared on stage. The strings that operated the puppet gave it that jerky walking action that marionettes have. Half the kids on the infants and junior school mats called out in unison, ‘It’s Dipso Dan!’ It almost brought the show to a standstill.

  The poor puppeteers must have wondered what these kids were yelling about.

  They no doubt also wondered why the adult audience was in stitches before the action had even begun. I bet they thought we were a very odd lot and were pleased to move on to the relative civilisation of Coopers’ Junction for their evening performance.

  Us kids used to imitate Dipso quite a bit, especially after we saw the marionette theatre performance. Kids can be pretty insensitive and cruel and, although Mum warned us that it was wicked to make fun of drunks like old Dan, my cousin Gerald and I used to pretend to be Dipso whenever we had creaming soda, a soft drink that developed a creamy head like beer if you shook it up before pouring it.

  Dipso was always getting barred from the Tatts. He had even been barred from the Royal a couple of times, which was pretty rare. He didn’t mind that too much; publicans changed fairly regularly at the Royal and they were always desperate for customers, so Dan wasn’t usually barred for long.

  What did terrify Dipso was the thought of being barred from the Royal by Dot the barmaid while he was still barred from the Tatts by Dougie.

  Dipso lived in mortal fear of Dot, who worked most of the evening shifts at the Royal. If he was barred by Dot he had to rely on getting a sneaky drink from Happy Harold at the Royal before Dot came to work. This meant his evenings would be very dry and lonely affairs. It was rumoured that, under these circumstances, Dipso drank metho down in his camp near the river.

  I know for a fact that this was more than a rumour because of a conversation I had with Dipso one Friday afternoon at the Tatts. I must have caught him at the very start of a bender because he was quite articulate.

  ‘How’s a boy?’ he asked.

  Dipso always slurred his words slightly and his head, arms and shoulders were never completely still when he spoke. You got used to it after a while but it could be very disconcerting at first. He also spoke with a constant slight hesitation that never quite became a stammer.

  ‘Got a winner for t . . . termorrer?’

  ‘No, Dan, haven’t even had a look at the form yet,’ I answered.

  The trick was to be polite, not make eye contact, and hope he’d move on. It worked maybe one time in every three, but not that afternoon.

  ‘Well, you t . . . tell me when you’ve p . . . picked one,’ he said, patting me on the shoulder. ‘And how about making an old digger happy and buying me a drink?’

  ‘You’re not an old digger, Dan,’ I replied, trying to keep my head in the paper.

  ‘I know that,’ Dipso chuckled, ‘but I got a d . . . dog called D . . . Digger and he’d be happy if you bought me one.’

  He could be quite funny sometimes.

  So I bought him a seven-ounce glass of beer and he told me about his recent troubles with Dot and Dougie.

  ‘Trouble was I think I p . . . peed me pants on the carpet and Dougie hates that,’ he confided to me. ‘I’m glad he’s let me back in anyhow, a man could end up drinkin’ metho!’

  ‘Well Dan, things aren’t that crook yet,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I don’t know how anyone could actually drink metho.’

  ‘Well it’s not easy,’ he replied, ‘you need a t . . . terbacca tin and you pour it in real shallow and mix it with condensed milk or s . . . soft drink cordial mix, or boot polish if that’s all you’ve got, then you can usually get it down.’

  I was stunned by the matter-of-fact nature of his reply. ‘Strewth, that sounds bloody awful Dan!’ I said.

  ‘Well it t . . . tastes worse than it sounds too,’ he assured me, ‘but it’s even worse if you’ve got nothing to go with it, then you have to light the fumes and drink it out from under them—straight from the t . . . terbacca tin.’

  Dipso went on to tell me all the names metho had when mixed in different ways. It was ‘white lady’ when mixed with condensed milk, ‘red’ was the boot polish mix—and there was a lot more that I’ve forgotten and thankfully never needed to remember!

  That conversation changed my attitude to Dipso Dan. I didn’t mind buying him the occasional beer once I knew something about the alternatives. I even offered him a lift home once or twice, but he told me he was ‘orright’ and said the sergeant usually got him ‘back to camp’ if he couldn’t manage it himself.

  Dipso’s camp was an old shack down on the river just out of town. Between ‘benders’ in town he lived there with Digger. Dipso told me dogs were great to talk to when you were drunk and ‘no other bastard would talk to you’.

  He had his dog Digger from when I was a teenager until long after I left town. Digger was a little brown kelpie that Old Nugget had given him as a pup. He was out of Nugget’s good working bitch but was born a runt with a deformed back leg, so Nugget gave him to Dipso for two reasons.

  Firstly, Dipso had just lost his previous dog to a brown snake down at their camp. Secondly, it meant Nugget didn’t have to ‘hit the poor little bugger on the head’—Nugget was very soft-hearted for an old bushman.

  Digger followed Dipso everywhere and always waited for him outside the pub. Digger was much more popular around town than his master. All the kids would pat him as they passed the pub and my Uncle Lennie used to feed him regularly at the back of the fish and chip shop.

  At least Digger ate regularly. Dipso wouldn’t eat at all when he was on a bender. Sometimes he didn’t get home for days at a time. He’d sleep in Anzac Park or at the back of whichever pub he got thrown out of at closing time, with Digger to keep him warm.

  If someone caught him up and about before the pub opened Dipso might be offered something to eat; I think Uncle Lennie fed him occasionally at the back of the fish and chip shop, as well as Digger. Mostly, though, he’d drink for days at a time and then he had two ‘plans of action’.

  Sometimes he’d get some provisions at the general store (a few loaves of bread and tins of camp pie which he’d share with Digger) and go home to dry out for a while. On other occasions he’d put himself in the lock-up, if the sergeant hadn’t already put him in there for being drunk and disorderly.

  Often Mrs Sayer, the sergeant’s wife, would discover Dipso in the unlocked cell when she went to clean up in the morning. ‘Did Bill put you in there or did you put yourself in, Dan?’ she would ask.

  ‘I put meself in, missus,’ Dipso would reply. ‘I’m real crook too.’

  ‘Well you can have some lunch now and a proper meal tonight, but you’re out in the morning,’ she’d reply, matter-of-factly.

  ‘Orright, Missus Sayer, thanks,’ Dan would say politely. ‘Can you give Digger a feed too, please?’

  It was mostly observing Dipso Dan that led me to believe there’s a patron saint of drunks. He was indestructible. I’ve seen him fall down on the concrete outside the cafe and not even drop his shopping. I’ve seen him fall over the pub verandah at the Royal without breaking the two bottles of beer he had wrapped in brown paper. He would stagger erect in one jerky movement and continue on his wobbly pilgrimage as if nothing had happened.

  The other amazing thing was that you could never get the better of him. I remember Dougie calling the sergeant to remove him from the Tatts one night when he’d been particularly obnoxious. Big Bill Sayer appeared within minutes and, filling the door of the pub in his police uniform, said, ‘C’mon Dan, you’re coming with me. You drink too much!’

  Dipso didn’t miss a beat. ‘Don’t be s . . . silly, sergeant,’ he s
lurred, swaying on the spot, ‘you can’t!’

  My favourite Dipso Dan story concerns the time he supposedly backed a winner with the SP bookie and made a real nuisance of himself until Dougie threw him out of the Tatts. Eddy Pierce’s cab was parked outside and Dipso jumped straight in. With his mind totally befuddled by booze he told Eddy he wanted to go to the Tatts for a drink.

  ‘We’re at the Tatts now,’ replied Eddy.

  ‘Strewth, so we are!’ yelled Dipso, fumbling in his pocket and staggering out of the cab. ‘Here’s your money and you shouldn’t drive so bloody fast!’

  As I wasn’t there when that happened, I can only assume it’s true. I’ve seen Dipso do some pretty funny things. I can see him now, in my mind’s eye—weaving and bouncing jerkily along the main street of Weelabarabak, talking non-stop to Digger as he goes.

  And the more I think about him and that crazy dancing motion of his, the more convinced I am that there’s a patron saint of drunks. Perhaps it’s St Vitus.

  THE EVENIN’ BEFORE

  LEAVIN’ HOME

  STEELE RUDD

  IT WAS DRAWING CLOSE to New Year when Sam Condle sent me word to get ready to go shearin’ down the rivers with him an’ some other chaps.

  I was ready to go anywhere with anyone, not because there weren’t plenty work about Vinegar Hill, but because Connie told me straight out one evenin’ that she didn’t want me comin’ to see her any longer. An’ after all th’ conversation-lollies I bought her, an’ all th’ wood I chopped for her too! By cripes, it made me furious.

  ‘I’m off in th’ mornin’,’ I sez to th’ old lady. ‘An’ might never come back to these parts again.’

  ‘Frankie, if I was you I wouldn’t,’ she sez, with a terrible sad look on her.

  Ah, an’ when I think of how she coaxed an’ coaxed me to stay, brings the tears to me eyes!

  ‘Me boy, you are not strong enough to shear beside men as old as your father,’ she would say, ‘so wait till you get set an’ have more practice.’

  Of course I didn’t tell her about Connie, but I quoted Jack Howe shearin’ his three hundred a day to her, an’ reckoned if I couldn’t hack me way through a couple o’ hundred I’d eat me hat.