The Best Australian Bush Stories

by Jim Haynes

  ‘And you’ll be having a small wee taste of schnapps, Joe, before we go, won’t you now? There’s just a drop left in the bottle.’

  The schnapps was an institution. Joe drank only schnapps or brandy, and very particular he was in such things.

  ‘Well, Curly, only a taste then.’

  Curly would pour about a half a tumbler. ‘It’s about a taste and a half, maybe, Joe.’

  Joe would drink half of it slowly, stop, suck his moustache and say, ‘I’m glad they all had a good time.’ Then he would drink the second half at a gulp.

  ‘Oh, by the way, Joe, the boys asked me to make you a little presentation.’

  ‘What is it, Curly?’

  ‘A little mark of appreciation, Joe. Only this.’ Curly held out a sovereign or pound note, ‘Just a quid, Joe.’

  ‘No, Curly, I couldn’t take that.’

  ‘That’s what I thought, Joe. But it’s not as simple as that. You see, if you don’t take it the boys will think you’re offended or that you don’t think it’s enough or you don’t really want to play anymore, and they’ll be afraid to ask you.’

  ‘It’s jolly good of them, Curly, I’m sure. But I don’t play for money.’

  ‘And don’t we all know it!’

  ‘But the way you put it, Curly, it’s different. And I’ll take it. Just this time, mind.’

  Then Curly would put half a taste more of the schnapps in the tumbler. Or perhaps a shade more than a half. And what with the schnapps and a night of fiddling, and everyone having such a good time, and the boys thinking so much of him, and the fresh, clean smell of morning, and his fat moke having a head too many and twice as many legs as usual, Joe found it a kind and gracious world.

  Curly would say, ‘Give me the fiddle, Joe,’ and lead Joe carefully along. ‘Look, Joe, Alec Sims says he wants to ride your horse so that you can go along with the Ritchies in their sociable. Tom Ritchie wants to have a yarn with you.’

  It was a palpable subterfuge that always worked. And so Joe went to sleep in the Ritchies’ sociable, and played the fiddle, no doubt, in his dreams.

  It is not to be supposed that Joe was a brilliant musician. No doubt, really, he wasn’t. He couldn’t read music if he had tried to. He played by ear, as all the true fiddlers did, and he was, if he had known it, about the last of the fiddlers. Like the minstrels of old, the fiddlers are all gone now. A new world doesn’t want fiddlers, and is perhaps by that much the poorer. A new age was dawning, and the good, old, easy world was going to pieces. In every way, that was, and not merely as far as a fiddler was concerned: the motor car was being heard of in distant places—fantastical, of course—but ‘They’re doing such wonderful things these days!’

  Into this planned and ordered world came pianos. Many of the old bush homes got pianos, and the girls, and even the boys sometimes, went into town to learn music at the convent. A violin teacher appeared in Summerlea, ‘Professor Karl’, who taught his pupils to play stuff that no one could properly understand or appreciate.

  A sleek-looking fellow was the ‘Professor’, and with long smooth black hair that glistened behind his white forehead, with great side-levers to make him look foreign and distinguished; and a big mouth, and paper-thin lips, that moved easily into a grin to show rows of regular white teeth in great numbers, and smooth-shaved all the time, and smelling of toothpaste and hair oil and scented soap; and dressed up with long swallowtails and all, as if he was ready for a wedding or a funeral. Blast him, and his long white fingers and his thin contempt for fiddlers and such as played by ear!

  But pupils went to him in great numbers, and he said so often, ‘Ah, but I must unlearn you then.’ And he made a refined clicking noise, ‘tch, tch!’, which meant that Joe and all his race of fiddlers were condemned.

  Of course, the professor could play, but the dancing feet of all the ages were not in any of his smart playing. And he banished the word ‘fiddle’ as something uncouth, if not indecent. ‘Feedle! Feedle! You call it the feedle! To me!’

  The fiddler was doomed, and along with him, among others, the old midwife. Trained nurses and private hospitals appeared. The nurses were efficient, uniformed, and intolerant. Said one of them, ‘We will put an end to all the “Sairy Gamps”,’ and she specially mentioned Mrs Want, the midwife.

  ‘Fancy that old Mother Want carrying on so long, driving around, spring cart, umbrella, black gloves and little white coffin!’

  And Mother Want did go. She wasn’t required anymore, so she died.

  There came, too, the ‘qualified’ vets. They ‘set up’ just like doctors and charged big fees, so that horses and cows and famous rams and infamous bulls could die a lot more expensively. So Joe wasn’t alone in being pushed from the stage.

  What Joe thought of it all he didn’t say. But fewer and fewer were the calls to ‘Bring your fiddle, Joe!’ He saw, too, the waning of all the old-time dances, the varsovienne (always pronounced ‘vasuvienna’) with its ‘one, two, three, stop!’; the mazurka, the polka (‘my mother said that I never should . . .’); the schottische; the waltz, and the ‘squares’ like the Alberts and the Lancers, with the M.C. chanting, ‘Ladies catch hold of the gentlemen—deedle-dum, deedle-dum, deedle-dum-dee.’

  The old dances were pushed back to the rude ages where they belonged. The new dances, hoydenish and hugging, were as indecent to Joe as the too-obvious blandishments of a prostitute.

  At the Round Swamp School of Arts the committee installed a piano, and ran a welter of dances to pay for it. Some of the local girls, pronounced brilliant by the town teachers of music, now played for the dances, and were burning jealous of each other, and hated each other with an intensity that only genius knows. They were wonderful players, but yet, there was something missing.

  ‘We are holding a dance in the School of Arts on Tuesday, Joe.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ rather wistfully.

  ‘You will be along, won’t you, Joe?’

  There was still some feeling that Joe’s presence was a benediction in itself.

  ‘I’m not so sure. I might be.’

  ‘Aw, do come. And bring your violin, Joe.’ This was an afterthought.

  Violin! So that was it, was it? Violin! And be asked perhaps to play an ‘extra’ or two! Joe sucked his moustache, and his blue eyes looked farther than the farthest distance. It was young Bill Ritchie talking to him. One of the Ritchies of all people!

  ‘It will give you a kind of spell, Joe, and give you a chance to have a hop yourself.’

  ‘Yes, Bill, that’s very thoughtful of you. And I might, too.’

  Joe’s eyes looked still farther into the distance. He didn’t wish to offend young Bill. But he didn’t go on Tuesday night.

  The Masons were having big dances all the winter in their ‘barn’. They were helping to pay off the church debt, a swollen affair being attacked with great vigour just now. The Masons enjoyed the church debt, for it gave the younger Masons a chance to ‘perform’. They supplied wonderful music, with two of the girls learning the piano and one of the boys learning the violin. They didn’t even bother to send word to Joe anymore. Just as well, perhaps. The Masons, at least she and the young folk, had big ideas. They didn’t, like other people, have a ‘shed’—they had a ‘barn’. They always got in the ‘harvest’, too, while other people had ‘crops’. Small things these to notice, maybe, but they went to show, just the same.

  No, Joe wasn’t wanted anymore. And fancy Joe dancing, even if they did the old-time dances anymore! Joe never had danced. He had been the grand celibate, the very high priest of dancing. Lesser musicians had danced, of course: there had once been an accordion player at Tipperary, a flash fellow he was, who played and danced at the same time; the girl hung onto him, and he played over her shoulder and behind her back. And sometimes he acted as M.C. as well. That was the lowest debasing of art. A true fiddler, Joe felt, danced all the time in his own heart, and he took his joy from the rhythmic swaying couples that translated his music to
motion.

  So Joe stayed at home mostly on his ‘farm’. He didn’t do so much carpentry either. Contractors from town did nearly all the jobs now, skilled tradesmen, and very expensive. But they did put a ‘finish’ to a job. In any case, people were putting up brick houses (the Masons, of course, set the fashion there) if they could afford it, and very often when they couldn’t afford it at all.

  There was once a vague sort of theory that Joe might marry and ‘settle down’. It was thought that he ‘had his eye’ on one of the Hayes girls, the oldest one, Mary. Nothing came of it. True, Joe went over to the Hayes’ house on Sunday afternoons for years and years, and sometimes on week nights, and he built a shed for the Hayeses, and put a verandah on their house, and played his fiddle by the fire at night, tapping out the time with his foot, and though Mary made better honey cakes and plum cakes and scones than she had ever done, before or since, there was really nothing in it. It is hard to know what Mary herself thought of it. Anyway, she never married anyone in the end.

  There were certain ‘impediments’, though it is doubtful that Mary would have been ‘minding them now’ over much. The first of these was the stark fact that Joe was a ‘Prodestan’, and ‘eats meat on Friday and all that’. Mrs Hayes was very strict and proper in the matter of religion. She had said to Mary once, ‘Do you think he would “turn” at all?’ And Mary had said, ‘I think he would now, for me.’

  There was really not much for Joe to turn from, the Wilmots never having been strong on formal religion, and even their special brand of it was a matter for conjecture; part, as Mrs Hayes wisely pointed out, ‘Them wid no convictions at all are always the most contrary in the very convictions they haven’t got at all.’

  She had even once or twice sounded out Joe in her own way in this important matter, and found him ‘deep as the sea, but wid no depth at all neither’, which meant probably that Joe had looked mildly at her with his big blue eyes, said nothing, and sucked his moustache in his absent-minded sort of way. Once she had mentioned that there ‘would be a grand mission next week in Summerlea’, and ‘worth anyone’s while, so it was’.

  But Joe didn’t go to the mission. And Mrs Hayes sighed, and said that even if the religion part of it were right now there were other things nearly as bad, and even a lot worse; which meant Joe’s family.

  Mrs Hayes, with old Daniel concurring, of course, considered the Hayeses were a cut above the Wilmots, and a pretty big cut too. Not that Joe could help what his mother had been, and him as decent a fellow as you like. It seems that Mrs Wilmot had a ‘reputation’ that stretched right back to the digging days, and she had only improved ‘in that’ when she had attained her seventieth birthday or thereabouts, even though she still had a ‘dirty tongue’ and indulged in ‘rough talk’ that betokened no contrition for what she had been, but only regrets that her age was against her. And when the factory began in Summerlea, she took milk to it, and continued to do so right up till she died, with the manager so often complaining of the bullfrogs in her cans.

  All this was bred in the bone, as it were, and a big bar to any close association with such a family, Mrs Hayes felt. The Hayeses might have had their own little misfortunes, but these could easily happen anywhere, and were not a matter of family at all.

  One of the Hayes boys, because he was a trifle wild, had got into trouble over a horse, outback somewhere it was; and another had trouble at Crisp’s store; and the girl Anna had trouble, too, being ‘strayed’ by a young fellow in town, who cleared out. But all such things did not detract from the deep and solid quality and respectability of the Hayes family. So, if Joe had been inclined at all, he would have found himself up against a pretty solid impediment. At least, Mrs Hayes often said so.

  But Joe hadn’t been inclined at all.

  Joe started to ‘ail’ in a gradual and uncomplaining way. He got thin, and his brown leathery skin started to turn a nasty tone of yellow, and his cheekbones began to stand out quite prominently.

  ‘I’m all right, just a bit off colour, that’s all,’ he would answer to enquiries.

  But the general verdict was that ‘poor old Joe is pretty crook’, and a more discriminating verdict was, ‘He’s got a growth on his liver, you see if he hasn’t.’

  Joe got worse, and thinner, and yellower, but he stuck it out on his ‘farm’, and no one could discover if he suffered much or not. People went to see him, and ‘took him a few things’ for which he was always grateful, and mostly didn’t use. His fiddle, long unused, was in its old green baize bag on the table. It was as much an anachronism as Joe.

  At last, Joe had to go to hospital in Summerlea. It was the end really, and he didn’t last long there, and his passing didn’t matter much either, except perhaps as a sort of satisfaction to the wise ones who had correctly diagnosed the state of his liver.

  But somewhere, wherever old fiddlers happen to go, someone of proper understanding and a real memory of things gone forever would surely have asked, ‘You’ve brought your fiddle, Joe?’

  GOING BLIND

  HENRY LAWSON

  I MET HIM IN the Full-and-Plenty Dining Rooms.

  It was a cheap place in the city, with good beds upstairs let at one shilling per night. ‘Board and residence for respectable single men, fifteen shillings per week.’

  I was a respectable single man then.

  I boarded and resided there.

  I boarded at a greasy little table in the greasy little corner under the fluffy little staircase in the hot and greasy little dining room or restaurant downstairs.

  They called it dining rooms, but it was only one room, and there wasn’t half enough room in it to work your elbows when the seven little tables and forty-nine chairs were occupied.

  There was not room for an ordinary-sized steward to pass up and down between the tables; but our waiter was not an ordinary-sized man, he was a living skeleton in miniature.

  We handed the soup, and the ‘roast beef one’, and ‘roast lamb one’, ‘corn beef and cabbage one’, ‘veal and stuffing one’, and the ‘veal and pickled pork’, one . . . or two, or three, as the case might be . . . and the tea and coffee, and the various kinds of puddings . . . we handed them over each other, and dodged the drops as well as we could.

  The very hot and very greasy little kitchen was adjacent, and it contained the bathroom and other conveniences, behind screens of whitewashed boards. I resided upstairs in a room where there were five beds and one wash-stand; one candlestick, with a very short bit of soft yellow candle in it; the back of a hairbrush, with about a dozen bristles in it; and half a comb, the big-tooth end, with nine-and-a-half teeth at irregular distances apart.

  He was a typical bushman, not one of those tall, straight, wiry, brown men of the West, but from the old Selection Districts, where many drovers came from, and of the old bush school; one of those slight active little fellows whom we used to see in cabbage-tree hats, Crimean shirts, strapped trousers, and elastic-sided boots, ‘larstins’ they called them.

  They could dance well; sing the old bush songs indifferently, and mostly through their noses; play the concertina horribly; and ride like . . . like . . . well, they could ride.

  He seemed as if he had forgotten to grow old and die out with this old colonial school to which he belonged.

  They had careless and forgetful ways about them.

  His name was Jack Gunther, he said, and he’d come to Sydney to try to get something done to his eyes. He had a portmanteau, a carpetbag, some things in a three-bushel bag, and a tin box. I sat beside him on his bed, and struck up an acquaintance, and he told me all about it.

  First he asked me would I mind shifting round to the other side, as he was rather deaf in that ear.

  He’d been kicked by a horse, he said, and had been a little dull o’ hearing on that side ever since.

  He was as good as blind.

  ‘I can see the people near me,’ he said, ‘but I can’t make out their faces. I can just make out the pavement and the hou
ses close at hand, and all the rest is a sort of white blur.’

  He looked up: ‘That ceiling is a kind of white, ain’t it? And this,’ tapping the wall and putting his nose close to it, ‘is a sort of green, ain’t it?’

  The ceiling might have been whiter.

  The prevalent tints of the wallpaper had originally been blue and red, but it was mostly green enough now, a damp, rotten green; but I was ready to swear that the ceiling was snow and that the walls were as green as grass if it would have made him feel more comfortable.

  His sight began to get bad about six years before, he said; he didn’t take much notice of it at first, and then he saw a quack, who made his eyes worse.

  He had already the manner of the blind, the touch of every finger, and even the gentleness in his speech. He had a boy down with him, a ‘sorter cousin of his’, and the boy saw him round.

  ‘I’ll have to be sending that youngster back,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll send him home next week. He’ll be picking up and learning too much down here.’

  I happened to know the district he came from, and we would sit by the hour and talk about the country, and chaps by the name of this and chaps by the name of that, drovers mostly, whom we had met or had heard of.

  He asked me if I’d ever heard of a chap by the name of Joe Scott, a big sandy-complexioned chap, who might be droving; he was his brother, or, at least, his half-brother, but he hadn’t heard of him for years; he’d last heard of him at Blackall, in Queensland; he might have gone overland to Western Australia with Tyson’s cattle to the new country.

  We talked about grubbing and fencing and digging and droving and shearing, all about the bush, and it all came back to me as we talked.