The Best Australian Bush Stories

by Jim Haynes

  ‘I can see it all now,’ he said once, in an abstracted tone, seeming to fix his helpless eyes on the wall opposite. But he didn’t see the dirty blind wall, nor the dingy window, nor the skimpy little bed, nor the greasy wash-stand; he saw the dark blue ridges in the sunlight, the grassy sidings and flats, the creek with clumps of she-oak here and there, the course of the willow-fringed river below, the distant peaks and ranges fading away into a lighter azure, the granite ridge in the middle distance, and the rocky rises, the stringybark and the apple-tree flats, the scrubs, and the sunlit plains . . . and all.

  I could see it, too, plainer than ever I did.

  He had done a bit of fencing in his time, and we got talking about timber.

  He didn’t believe in having fencing posts with big butts; he reckoned it was a mistake.

  ‘You see,’ he said, ‘the top of the butt catches the rain water and makes the post rot quicker. I’d back posts without any butt at all to last as long or longer than posts with ’em, that’s if the fence is well put up and well rammed.’

  He had supplied fencing stuff, and fenced by contract, and, well, you can get more posts without butts out of a tree than posts with them. He also objected to charring the butts.

  He said it only made more work, and wasted time, the butts lasted longer without being charred.

  I asked him if he’d ever got stringybark palings or shingles out of mountain ash, and he smiled a smile that did my heart good to see, and said he had.

  He had also got them out of various other kinds of trees.

  We talked about soil and grass, and gold-digging, and many other things which came back to one like a revelation as we yarned.

  He had been to the hospital several times.

  ‘The doctors don’t say they can cure me,’ he said, ‘they say they might be able to improve my sight and hearing, but it would take a long time, anyway, the treatment would improve my general health. They know what’s the matter with my eyes,’ and he explained it as well as he could.

  ‘I wish I’d seen a good doctor when my eyes first began to get weak; but young chaps are always careless over things. It’s harder to get cured of anything when you’re done growing.’

  He was always hopeful and cheerful.

  ‘If the worst comes to the worst,’ he said, ‘there’s things I can do where I come from. I might do a bit o’ wool-sorting, for instance. I’m a pretty fair expert. Or else when they’re weeding out I could help. I’d just have to sit down and they’d bring the sheep to me, and I’d feel the wool and tell them what it was, being blind improves the feeling, you know.’

  He had a packet of portraits, but he couldn’t make them out very well now. They were sort of blurred to him, but I described them and he told me who they were.

  ‘That’s a girl o’ mine,’ he said, with reference to one, a jolly, good-looking bush girl.

  ‘I got a letter from her yesterday. I managed to scribble something, but I’ll get you, if you don’t mind, to write something more I want to put in on another piece of paper, and address an envelope for me.’

  Darkness fell quickly upon him now, or, rather, the ‘sort of white blur’ increased and closed in. But his hearing was better, he said, and he was glad of that and still cheerful.

  I thought it natural that his hearing should improve as he went blind.

  One day he said that he did not think he would bother going to the hospital anymore. He reckoned he’d get back to where he was known. He’d stayed down too long already, and the ‘stuff’ wouldn’t stand it. He was expecting a letter that didn’t come.

  I was away for a couple of days, and when I came back he had been shifted out of the room and had a bed in an angle of the landing on top of the staircase, with the people brushing against him and stumbling over his things all day on their way up and down.

  I felt indignant, thinking that, the house being full, the boss had taken advantage of the bushman’s helplessness and good nature to put him there. But he said that he was quite comfortable.

  ‘I can get a whiff of air here,’ he said.

  Going in next day I thought for a moment that I had dropped suddenly back into the past and into a bush dance, for there was a concertina going upstairs.

  He was sitting on the bed, with his legs crossed, and a new cheap concertina on his knee, and his eyes turned to the patch of ceiling as if it were a piece of music and he could read it.

  ‘I’m trying to knock a few tunes into my head,’ he said, with a brave smile, ‘in case the worst comes to the worst.’

  He tried to be cheerful, but seemed worried and anxious.

  The letter hadn’t come.

  I thought of the many blind musicians in Sydney, and I thought of the bushman’s chance, standing at a corner swanking a cheap concertina, and I felt sorry for him.

  I went out with a vague idea of seeing someone about the matter, and getting something done for the bushman, of bringing a little influence to his assistance; but I suddenly remembered that my clothes were worn out, my hat in a shocking state, my boots burst, and that I owed for a week’s board and lodging, and was likely to be thrown out at any moment myself; and so I was not in a position to go where there was influence.

  When I went back to the restaurant there was a long, gaunt, sandy-complexioned bushman sitting by Jack’s side.

  Jack introduced him as his brother, who had returned unexpectedly to his native district, and had followed him to Sydney.

  The brother was rather short with me at first, and seemed to regard the restaurant people, all of us, in fact, in the light of spielers who wouldn’t hesitate to take advantage of Jack’s blindness if he left him a moment; and he looked ready to knock down the first man who stumbled against Jack, or over his luggage, but that soon wore off.

  Jack was going to stay with Joe at the Coffee Palace for a few weeks, and then go back up-country, he told me.

  He was excited and happy. His brother’s manner towards him was as if Jack had just lost his wife, or boy or someone very dear to him. He would not allow him to do anything for himself, nor try to, not even lace up his boot.

  He seemed to think that he was thoroughly helpless, and when I saw him pack up Jack’s things, and help him at the table and fix his tie and collar with his great brown hands, which trembled all the time with grief and gentleness, and make Jack sit down on the bed whilst he got a cab and carried the trap down to it, and take him downstairs as if he were made of thin glass, and settle with the landlord—then I knew that Jack was all right.

  We had a drink together, Joe, Jack, the cabman, and I.

  Joe was very careful to hand Jack the glass, and Jack made a joke about it for Joe’s benefit. He swore he could see a glass yet, and Joe laughed, but looked extra troubled the next moment.

  I felt their grips on my hand for five minutes after we parted.

  A LETTER FROM COLLEEN

  FRANK DALBY DAVISON

  OLD MCSHANE’S SELECTION, WHERE he lived quite alone, was in the middle of the Big Scrub, twelve hundred acres of belah and brigalow, forty feet high and as thick as the hair on a heeler’s back, fair in the middle of ten thousand acres of the same class of country. ‘He’ll have a fine place some day—if ever he gets the land cleared.’ That’s what people said of him, practical people who had selected in open forest country, or, at most, had selections that were part forest and part scrub.

  You reached Mac’s selection by a foot track the old boy had hacked for himself; seven miles and never a house once our bit of a township was left behind; just the still twilight of the scrub, with the branches meeting overhead and the wind whispering in them.

  I never saw his place, but a lot of talk went around from those who had come on his camp when looking for strayed cattle; and from what I knew of scrub land I could imagine it well enough. He had felled and burnt off four or five acres, and there, in that rich absorbent soil, sheltered from drying winds by the walls of scrub around the clearing, he had raised crops of pumpkins, swe
et potatoes, corn, sorghum, cotton, and he was experimenting with tobacco. I gathered that his plot was as neat as a Chinese garden and twice as lush; this in the middle of a dryish summer.

  People accepted his dramatic if rather unpractical achievement as a bolster to their own hopes. ‘It just shows you what the land will do,’ they said. Most likely Old Mac would be able to make some sort of a living for himself, what with growing his own vegetables, keeping some fowls and a pig, potting a scrub turkey now and again, and perhaps doing a little wallaby-scalping in the season; but of the vision that must have taken him into the heart of the Big Scrub, a vision of twelve hundred acres felled and sown to grass, there seemed small likelihood of fulfilment; it would have called for twenty years of a strong young life, and a man would need his feet planted in open country while he tackled the thick stuff.

  I met Old Mac first when he came to my place for water. He looked like a scarecrow coming through the bush; a gangling figure, youthful in proportions but moving with the rusty agility of spry old age, his flannel and dungarees faded and patched, the dungarees bagged at the knees and showing an inch of bare shank above the top of his blucher boots. Two seven-pound syrup tins dangled from a big brown hand at the end of a skinny brown arm. Hair like silver fluff stood out below the rim of his shapeless old hat. His face, when he came close, was as kind as I have ever seen, features big and bony, but fine in their massive way, and blue-grey eyes that were startlingly clear and liquid for a man of his years; a dreamy Celt, gentle—as I came later to know—with the gentleness of an old horse.

  The weather was dry and the little gilgai on which he had been depending for water had failed; could he take what he needed from my tank until rain fell? It wasn’t much to ask; my tank was brim-full, two thousand cubic yards. With his two empty syrup tins, his gaunt physique, his comical get-up, his years, his gentle diffidence, he made me feel ashamedly rich.

  The reason he hadn’t brought larger vessels, kerosene tins, for instance, was that he wouldn’t be able to carry them the four miles across bush to his camp. While the dry spell lasted he came every second day, eking out the water for cooking and washing, a syrup tin each twenty-four hours.

  If he saw me about he would turn in my direction to exchange civilities and perhaps have a short yarn before going to the tank to dip his water. Sometimes he would bring a scrub turkey that he had shot, pleased, I could see, to have hit on a way to return a kindness for a kindness.

  He had been to America in his youth, and back to Ireland, before coming to Australia, and since then had wandered over a good deal of the Commonwealth. He liked to tell me about Ireland, particularly as he recalled it after that voyage to America, when he had seen it with fresh eyes. I gather—squatting there in the scant shade of a box tree—that Ireland was really the Ireland of picture-book and story.

  His was a tale of poor living and high spirits. He told me how, at mealtimes, on the farm where he had worked, the potatoes, with their jackets on, would be dumped straight from the pot, in a heap along the centre of the bare board table; then all would seat themselves, men, women and children, each with a little heap of salt and a pot of buttermilk; and that was the meal. They had to work long hours for it, but holidays were strictly observed, fox hunts and fair days, and there would be nights when the scrape of a fiddle would bring all around to jig and dance. When he told me of these things Old Mac laughed in a tenderly reminiscent way. ‘I was happy then,’ he said. I don’t think he meant that there had not been other times when he was happy; only that his return trip to Ireland was bright among the jewels of recollection.

  In Australia, where most of his manhood years had been spent, he had followed a number of occupations, all laborious; farm hand, navvy, mill hand, miner. I couldn’t help but feel that his gentle manner and dreamily thoughtful eyes sorted badly with the heavy callings he had followed; callings, it seemed, that had been stages in a laborious journey in search of the foot of the rainbow.

  He had tried wheat farming in Western Australia, but with insufficient capital to win in the race against the mortgagee, the implement-maker and the storekeeper. He had ventured once into business, a fuel and produce store in a Sydney suburb, but there wasn’t the money in it he had thought, not with motorcars coming in and people turning to gas and electricity. He had tried gold prospecting in north Queensland, but had only made tucker, although—he seemed disinterestedly pleased to report—fellows lower down the creek had struck it rich; an event, I dare say, that served to confirm his belief in the pot of gold at rainbow’s end. I understood how he came to follow a vision into the middle of the Big Scrub.

  ‘You never married, Mac?’

  Yes, he had married, but his wife had died years ago, while their only child was still an infant. The child had been brought up by friends. Colleen was her name. It was not a right name, Mac told me, but—with a smile—his wife thought it pretty, along with McShane. Colleen was married now, and living in Melbourne. Her man was doing quite well. That their lives had, in the main, been spent apart didn’t prevent Colleen’s behaving as a daughter to her father.

  ‘She writes to me every week,’ Mac said. He said it half to himself, as if he scarcely expected it to interest me, but found it a nice thought to have in his mind and to speak aloud.

  Old Mac’s daughter, married and living in Melbourne, was certainly very remote from my range of interests, and I might never have thought of her again but for an incident that gave her some imaginative reality.

  It was on a Saturday afternoon, when Mac, who had tramped in from his selection for no other purpose, failed to receive from the stationmaster the expected letter. I had driven to the railhead to pick up mail and also a couple of rolls of wire netting I knew to be waiting for me in the goods shed. The up-train from Wilgatown had arrived, discharged mail and passengers, and the engine was fussing about, pushing trucks up to the shed and carriages over onto the shunting tracks. We, the settlers—thirty or forty of us—were grouped around the open door of the station office, where Grimwade, the stationmaster, was calling names as he delved in the mail bag and brought letters and packages to light.

  He was a mean customer, this Grimwade, a petty bureaucrat, and a smooger, to boot. When business brought any of the scrub aristocracy to the station he was more than a model of willingness and eagerness to oblige. ‘You’ve an hour until the train goes, Mrs Brigalow Downs. If you come across to the house, Mrs Grimwade will give you a cup of tea.’ ‘Would you care to have lunch before starting home, Mr Hereford Bullock?’ He was fishing for invitations to the cattle stations beyond the settlement. At the same time, I’ve seen a settler’s wife sitting in the boiling sun in a cart outside the goods shed for half an hour waiting for Grimwade to make his leisurely appearance. You’d think it would be easy to catch him out over something like that; plenty of us were just waiting a chance; but he could always produce the Regulations, and the Regulations, it appeared, could always be interpreted to the inconvenience of the public.

  When Grimwade was calling the mail you’d think he had written the letters himself and was now regretting his good nature.

  He reached the bottom of the bag. Nearly everyone had withdrawn from about the door except young Harry Marchant, who was squatting near the step, his back to the wall; I, who was waiting for Grimwade to go with me to the goods shed; and Old Mac, who was looking in the door of the office like a dog who had seen dinner disappear without being flung so much as a crust. He was still in hope.

  ‘Nothing for you, Mr McShane,’ said Grimwade crisply and, it seemed, not without relish.

  ‘No letters,’ said Old Mac brightly, evidently playing the part of a man who wasn’t really expecting a letter, but had just happened along, in case there should be one; and he turned away briskly.

  It was rather pitiful. I wouldn’t have thought a man could have been taken aback so hard, or been so self-conscious about a disappointment that only one or two had noticed. He was like a child that has been publicly slapped but is
determined not to cry. He went off with a false jauntiness, streaking straight for home, as if something especially pleasurable awaited him there.

  When Grimwade was ready he came from the office, glanced down at the top of young Marchant’s head, locked the door with a brisk click, and started with me for the goods shed, ostentatiously jingling the keys from the ring. No doubt he was being rightly obedient to the Regulations in locking the door, but he needn’t have been so pointed about it.

  He was giving Harry Marchant a jolt. The Marchants were reckoned a bad lot. They weren’t settlers, but lived in a big straggling camp on the reserve, a couple of hundred yards from the edge of the township. Beside the parents there were the two sons, two daughters and a couple of children who were claimed by the old lady but were said to be the fatherless offspring of the daughters. They lived by scalping—in season and out—thievery, trickery at bush races, sly grog, and a rare spasm of hard work when all else failed. They owned no cattle and bought no meat, yet always had a full beef cask and a plentiful pot. They were the human raw material of another Kelly episode, and were only saved from social ostracism among us by the entertainment of their daring.

  Young Harry flaunted a horse with a faked brand right under the noses of the police, knowing he had been a shade too clever for them; and he had fought Douggie Duncan, one of the biggest men on the settlement, with bare fists for half an hour in the railway trucking yards on a Sunday morning for an old grudge and a purse of five pounds, with the sergeant of police present from an official sense of caution to see that one didn’t kill the other outright.

  When I returned from the goods shed with Grimwade to sign off for my netting everyone had gone but Harry, who was still squatting with his back to the office wall, staring moodily across the plain. He was in one of his friend-of-no-man moods, a mood in which he was contrarily impelled to seek the company—or at least the presence—of others. Now they had drifted homewards and left him.