Best Australian Yarns

by Haynes, Jim

  One viewer wanted to know how he could convert his newly purchased digital clock to metric time.

  JH

  POOR OL’GRANDAD

  GRAHAME WATT

  Toilet humour is very popular in Australia. This poem by my good mate Grahame Watt is one of the best examples. Long-drop dunnies were once very common in rural areas. You dug a hole and moved the dunny over it. The dunny was built on sleepers and could be moved with a certain amount of effort every decade or so.

  Poor ol’ Grandad’s passed away, cut off in his prime.

  He never had a day off crook—gone before his time.

  We found him in the dunny, collapsed there on the seat,

  A startled look upon his face, his trousers round his feet.

  The doctor said his heart was good—fit as any trout.

  The constable, he had his say, foul play was not ruled out.

  There were theories at the inquest of snake bite without trace,

  Of redbacks quietly creeping and death from outer space.

  No one had a clue at all—the judge was in some doubt,

  When Dad was called to have his say as to how it came about.

  ‘I reckon I can clear it up,’ said Dad with trembling breath,

  ‘You see it’s quite a story—but it could explain his death.

  ‘This here exploration mob had been looking at our soil,

  And they reckoned that our farm was just the place for oil.

  So they came and put a bore down and said they’d make some trials,

  Drilled a hole as deep as Hell, they said about three miles!

  ‘Well, they never found a trace of oil and off they went, post haste,

  And I couldn’t see a hole like that go to flamin’ waste!

  So I moved the dunny over it—real smart move I thought,

  I’d never have to dig again—I’d never be caught short.

  ‘That day I moved the dunny it looked a proper sight,

  But I didn’t dream poor Grandad would pass away that night!

  Now I reckon what has happened—poor Grandad didn’t know,

  The dunny was re-located when that night he had to go.

  ‘And you’ll probably be wondering how poor Grandad did his dash—

  Well, he always used to hold his breath—until he heard the splash!’

  A TALL TALE OF TAGGED TROUT

  PAUL B. KIDD

  This tale was told to me by a local down the Snowy Mountains way and he believed it to be true. But for all of my enquiries I couldn’t find anyone who knew anything about a four-day fish festival in the district, either still running or in the past, with tagged trout. Could I have been deceived? You decide for yourself.

  The annual four-day fish festival was shaping up to be a beauty. The big cash prizes on offer were attracting anglers from all over the country and although there were some notorious cheats among them, the organisers didn’t seem to care. With around 5000 anglers at $10 a pop, they stood to make a killing, so a little fudging here and there wouldn’t hurt. In fact, the rules almost encouraged it. The boundaries were anywhere within 30 kilometres of the starting point and they weren’t policed. The area included four dams and several rivers.

  The big prizes were for the capture of Terry, the Tagged Trout. There were four Terrys—one for each dam. They were trout of about a kilo, imported from a trout farm and branded with an identifying tag stapled to the tail.

  Amid much fuss and press coverage, each year the Terrys were released into their new homes the day before the event. The release spots were kept secret so as not to give anyone an advantage.

  The four Terrys were worth $50,000 each and even the village idiot could tell you that the organisers were in deep trouble if they were all captured. For that matter, only one had to be taken to prove embarrassing. Plus there were prizes of $10,000 each for the biggest Murray cod and yellowbelly.

  You didn’t need a degree in mathematics to work out that the difference in prize money on offer and the entry fees collected was minus $170,000—and that was without running costs. There had to be some skullduggery afoot.

  The organisers maintained that the prize money for a Terry was underwritten by a big insurance company. But it wasn’t because they knew that a tagged trout would never be caught.

  In the five years of the Fish Fest, no one had ever caught a Terry and the organisers had walked away with a bundle. To ensure that no one came up with the goods, the Terrys were all orally fed a slow-acting poison before release. While they looked healthy enough when photographed being thrown into the dam, they were as stiff as a board in a matter of hours.

  What the organisers did not count on was one of their own being more corrupt than them. He was known as The Moth because he was attracted to the light. He would get legless at the fishing club or the local and stagger home. If he saw a light on, he would invite himself in for a drink and there was no getting rid of him. He was a dreadful pest drunk, but sober he wasn’t a bad bloke at all.

  Being an official assistant-organiser and Terry-releaser, The Moth had been entrusted with the secrets of the villainy that went on. For his silence, he picked up a small share of the returns. But The Moth had got into big trouble on the punt and, with the heavies breathing down his neck for the money, he decided to out-cheat the cheats.

  The only bloke he could trust with his life was an old mate of his in Sydney called Bill ‘The Dago’ Oliver. They called him The Dago because he never stopped whingeing about the fact that his missus spent her entire life in front of the TV watching the soapies. It had been going on for years and his constant grizzle was, ‘There’s not a day goes by without her watching that crap. There’s not a day goes by when she does anythin’ around the house. There’s not a day goes by when I get a meal at home. Fair dinkum, there’s not a day goes by . . .’ That was The Dago.

  Rocket scientists they were not. But between them, The Moth and The Dago devised a scheme that would scoop the pool . . .

  Admittedly the rules of the tournament were loose, but a couple were hard and fast. There was absolutely no berleying allowed before the event and all fish had to be weighed by six o’clock sharp. Apart from that, it was open slather.

  ‘We’ll wrap up the cod and yellowbelly sections,’ The Moth had told The Dago on the phone. ‘I know an old cod hole about 50 kilometres out of town. When you arrive a day before the comp, I’ll have ’em boilin’ on the surface. Oh! And don’t forget to bring your snorkel and flippers. You’ll need them to catch Terry.’

  The Moth drove out to the cod hole that was on a big corner in a bend in the river and hung six sheep heads from the branch of an overhanging tree. He made sure to keep them hidden well within the leaves.

  He returned a week later to find his self-berleying device working a treat. The sheeps’ heads were well and truly flyblown and the maggots were dropping into the water at a steady pace.

  A week later, every fish within a hundred kilometres was waiting underneath with its head sticking out of the water and mouth open. The Moth knew that the smaller fish like the redfin and silver perch would attract the bigger cod and yellowbellies, which would eat them all, and then The Dago could catch them the first day of the comp at his leisure.

  Snookering Terry the Tagged Trout wasn’t so simple. It wasn’t until four days before the comp that The Moth and The Dago devised a plan. And even then it was by a stroke of luck.

  To add some authenticity to their shonky contest, the organisers announced that, due to being hounded by cheating anglers with binoculars, they would now secretly release the four Terrys without any press in attendance. The media spewed. ‘How do we know that you will release any fish at all?’ they barked.

  Amid cries of deception and fraud, the organisers agreed to let the media photograph the four boats leaving with the Terrys on board and also arranged for a trusted observer to go out with each fish releaser.

  The observers were selected from the town’s most prominent and honest citizens�
��the police chief, the headmistress, the head of the Chamber of Commerce and the mayor. The Moth couldn’t believe his luck. He drew his old mate the mayor, alderman Clarrie ‘Carbuncle’ Carr.

  The mayor was as bald as Kojak and the locals called him Carbuncle because they reckoned he was shiny on the outside and inside he was full of shit.

  Carbuncle loved nothing more than a bottle of Scotch and a friendly ear. The Moth had such an ear. It would be no trouble to get Carbuncle well and truly under the weather and carry out his deception.

  At the releasing of the Terrys on the eve of the comp, the cameras flashed as Carbuncle and The Moth held Terry up in his plastic bag full of water for all to see. ‘Take your time’, the organisers had told The Moth. ‘Don’t make it obvious where you’re heading to let the trout go. And don’t let Carbuncle see you give it the poison. Otherwise we’ll be paying him blackmail forever.’

  The Moth putt-putted a couple of kilometres around the lake before he pulled in at Knot’s Pier for the couple of bottles of Scotch he had hidden there the previous day. He primed Carbuncle with one and it wasn’t long before the mayor was dribbling and showing off about all the bribes he’d taken over the years.

  The Moth then loaded a block of concrete with a wire handle on board, explaining to his drunken friend that it was ballast in case a breeze came up. And off they went, straight to Mackenzie’s Flats, the shallowest and sandiest part of the dam where no one had caught a fish in years. Here the Moth tied a hundred metres of sash cord to the concrete block and lowered it over the side.

  When it hit the bottom a few metres down, he removed Terry from its bag, tied the other end of the sash cord through its gills, stuffed the poison capsule up its backside and threw it overboard for The Dago to find in the morning.

  Carbuncle was oblivious to all of this because he was out cold on the bottom of the boat. The Moth got stuck into the other bottle of scotch and, by the time Carbuncle woke from his drunken stupor, The Moth was skiting about the exact location of the maggot-berleyed cod hole, the tethered trout and how clever he and The Dago were. The cunning old mayor, now sober, listened intently.

  When the cops hauled The Moth in the following day and questioned him about the body they had found that had apparently drowned when it got tangled up in a length of sash cord at Mackenzie’s Flats, he denied any knowledge of it.

  Apparently the victim, complete with flippers and snorkel, had been diving towards the bottom and had become entangled in the cord because whoever had tied the fish to the end of it had jammed something up its backside causing it to blow up with air and float to the top.

  ‘That explains why they told me ten times to shove the poison capsule down its gob,’ The Moth thought to himself as he examined the trout the police had found attached to the sash cord. ‘But that’s funny’, he thought to himself, ‘where’s the tag?’

  The Moth was puzzled and upset. His partner in crime was dead and the tag was missing. What was going on?

  ‘Had they seen anything that night,’ the cops asked? After all, he and Carbuncle had headed out in that direction.

  ‘No, sir,’ The Moth replied and Carbuncle backed him up.

  The cops didn’t connect The Moth with the drowned Dago Oliver and Carbuncle wasn’t saying anything. By a strange coincidence, the brother of the guy who found Dago’s body, who by an even stranger coincidence happened to be Carbuncle’s nephew, turned in a Terry that very afternoon and claimed the fifty grand.

  Seeing as the tag was only just stuck to the tail and not stapled on like the originals and the trout was only about a half a kilo instead of a kilo like the original Terrys, the organisers smelt a giant rat, but couldn’t do a thing about it. They had to mortgage their houses and come up with the money.

  And by an even more extraordinary coincidence, Carbuncle’s son weighed in a huge cod and a yellowbelly that same day and picked up a cool twenty grand. No one could figure out why maggots kept dropping out of the fishes’ mouths at the weigh-in.

  The organisers were out of pocket and the cops had an unexplained corpse. Carbuncle came into a lot of money all of a sudden and The Moth left town. They say he’s been sighted around Bondi these days where the lights are on twenty-four hours a day.

  ONE WISH

  FRANK DANIEL

  We had fished with little luck out on Lake Burrinjuck,

  And Jack, me mate, said, ‘Hell, we’re out of grog.’

  We hadn’t had much fun, just sittin’ in the sun,

  And now we had to row ashore, a tidy slog.

  We each reeled in our line, there was a jug attached to mine,

  While my cobber only had a wormless hook.

  As the sun continued glaring, we both just sat there staring

  At the only catch we’d made we couldn’t cook.

  When I gave the thing a rub, so help me, from the jug,

  A spook appeared before us in a cloud.

  And both us fishin’ blokes yelled, ‘Holy flamin’ smokes,

  We’ll have three wishes now if we’re allowed.’

  But the genie said, ‘Oh, no, you only get one go.

  I’m just a learner, I can’t grant you three.

  But with one I’ll do my best, it’ll be a little test,

  And with one wish you’ll surely have a spree.’

  But me mate, perhaps remissful, was a little over-wishful,

  And he said, ‘I wish this lake was full of beer.’

  In a flash, to our surprise, the lake turned amber ’fore our eyes,

  And we watched that novice genie disappear.

  I was cranky with old Jack; I wished the genie would come back,

  Though my mate, now in his element, did gloat.

  But I reckon Jack disgraced us, ’cos the problem now that faced us,

  Was that we’d both have to pee inside the boat!

  A GRAVE MISTAKE

  Graveyard humour is popular in most countries; it’s a way of relieving the terror of our own mortality and lessening the depth of grief and fear we associate with graveyards. When I was a kid, I heard the yarn about the bloke who gets drunk and takes the short cut home through Botany Cemetery and falls into a freshly dug grave and can’t get out.

  He rests for a while and dozes a bit and wakes to hear footsteps. Someone else is coming along the short cut.

  ‘Hey, mate,’ he calls, ‘can you help me get out of here?’

  A terrified scream is followed by the sound of the other bloke running for his life back to the main road.

  This example of graveyard humour is nicely understated in the true laconic Aussie style.

  A bloke of Scottish descent is the local bagpipe player and is always asked to play on Anzac Day and at other community events.

  One day he gets a call from a women living in one of the new estates on the edge of town. Her father, who migrated from Scotland decades ago, has passed away and she wants bagpipes played at the funeral.

  The piper says he’d be proud to do it for his usual nominal fee and the woman tells him how to find the cemetery.

  ‘It’s a new lawn cemetery that is just being developed and its a bit hard to find up here in the new section of town,’ she tells him. ‘There are a lot of new estates and cul-de-sacs, are you sure you will find it okay?’

  He assures her he will find it and they discuss the tunes he will play and the time of the burial and the order of the service.

  On the day, the bloke has a phone call as he is about to leave and that makes him a little late, but he has enough time to make it and heads off into the new area of town and gets completely bushed.

  He drives around and up and down and discovers he is way off track. He starts again in a different direction, but all the streets and parks look the same and he eventually realises he has missed the ceremony.

  Filled with guilt and shame, he is trying to find his way back to the part of town he knows when he sees two blokes filling in a hole in an area of lawn and landscaped ornamental trees.
r />   ‘There it is!’ he says to himself, ‘And I’ve missed the service as I feared.’

  He drives over to the fence near where the blokes are shovelling and grabs his pipes and strides over.

  ‘Sorry, fellas,’ he says, ‘but I have to do this, it’s very important.’

  He plays ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Scotland the Brave’ and stands head bowed for two or three minutes before walking solemnly back to his car.

  The two blokes digging stand silently and watch and listen.

  As he walks off, one says to the other, ‘Well, Nugget, I’ve been putting in septic tanks for years, and that’s the strangest thing that ever happened to me while on the job!’

  JH

  MILES FROM SYDNEY

  Two swaggies camp in the bush, just off the road near a cemetery. After getting stuck into the rum they take a walk through the gravestones and look at the epitaphs and discuss the lives they see depicted—carved on the headstones.

  They are swigging away at the rum and getting drunker and drunker and they drift apart as they meander among the graves.

  ’Struth, Harry,’ one of the now drunk swaggies calls to his mate, ‘there’s a bloke here called Thompson who lived to be 102!’

  His mate, who has wandered off towards the road, yells back, ‘Thash nothin’, there’s a bloke here who was 155!’

  ‘Blimey!’ the other yells, ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Some bloke called Miles,’ comes the reply, ‘from Sydney.’

  JH

  TALE OF A TOOTH

  HENRY E. HORNE

  I love this tall tale of a dental procedure in the days when the local blacksmith was also the town dentist. It should be in the ‘Bush Yarns and Tall Tales’ section, but the way the verse rhymes gives it a unique feeling of fun. It is slapstick comedy, but also has a touch of that very Aussie, understated humour.