by Haynes, Jim
To the Dingo Club at Squatter’s, and another friendly game
Will eventuate at this end, on the flat below the claim.
COURT DAY AT BILLYBILLY
ANONYMOUS
This yarn, printed in The Bulletin in 1896, is supposedly a court report from a country town which exposes the hypocrisy of the judicial system and the endemic nature of alcoholism in the colonies, common themes in Aussie yarns about booze. The Irish immigrants are often singled out as the biggest and worst boozers.
The old joke about seeing double has been around for centuries, it first occurs in Ancient Greek and Roman stories.
The court house interior was almost bare of furniture, the walls were unlined and the weatherboards gaped here and there, so that the grasshoppers jumped in and out at their pleasure. Their worships the magistrates (two of them) sat on a small form behind a pine table, the prisoner hung over a deal railing about eighteen inches from the wall, and Constable O’Toole stood near, reciting the villainies of the accused in a thick, monotonous, unintelligible brogue.
The shrill, ringing whirr of the locusts filled the air for miles around, a bird chipped its beak sharply on the iron roof, and a tall, attenuated goat stood in the doorway, supinely observing the proceedings of the court, and emitting an occasional contemptuous ‘bah’.
But the court seemed oblivious to everything but the dreadful heat and its own sorrows. One magistrate, open-mouthed, followed the meanderings of a lame bull ant on the table, between intervals of sleep, and occasionally stirred the insect up with a straw to add to the excitement. The other, with his head thrown back and his occiput resting on the chair rail, gazed meditatively at the roof, daydreaming of strong drinks and occasionally relapsing into a gurgling snore suggestive of a frog croaking in a ship’s hold, and then pulling himself together with an effort and trying to look wise.
And all the time Constable O’Toole droned along about ‘this yere mahn’ who had been discovered the night previous, howling on the road ‘afore widder Johnson’s’, with nothing on, ‘barrin’ th’ dust, yer worships, which he’d buried hisself in’.
Prisoner was charged with drunkenness and disorderly conduct, and was a woebegone object, the Sahara incarnate. His tongue could be heard grating against his palate and he looked piteously thirsty. When the policeman had done, he put in a word or two in extenuation of his weakness, reminding their worships of the weather they had been having, and concluding with a touching and wholly ineffectual effort to expectorate.
The court felt itself called upon, and one magistrate arose, and, steadying himself by leaning over the table, assumed a look of inhuman gravity, and said: ‘Prisoner, such conducksh wholly indefenshible—disgrash tyer manhood. Your are fined sheven daysh or twenty-four hoursh.’
Then he sat down, with the air of a man who has done his duty by his country, and the other arose, and, after blinking for a few moments at the prisoner, with an assumption of owl-like wisdom, added: ‘Sheven daysh ’r twenty-foursh hoursh, both of you!’
‘Yesh,’ corroborated the first, rising again, ‘both of you!’
Then the court adjourned.
DIPSO AND THE TWINS
JIM HAYNES
Here’s my version of the old joke, featuring Dipso Dan, the town drunk of my home town, Weelabarabak, which is on the border of New South Wales and Western Australia if you’re looking for it on the map.
Dipso Dan has made us suffer
For his alcoholic sins,
But strike me pink he made us laugh
The day he met the twins!
They were college mates of Dougie’s son
Stayin’ over for some function,
The B and S Ball perhaps it was,
Or the game against Cooper’s Junction.
And ’struth were they identical,
Talk about Bib and Bub—
So we thought we’d have a bit of fun
With Dipso down the pub.
The twins of course were in on it.
We made ’em dress the same
And practise identical movements,
And answering to one name.
All the regulars were in on it.
We waited till late in the night—
The plan was we’d ignore the twins
And give Dipso Dan a real fright.
And when we gave the nod to Dougie
He says, ‘Dipso, you’ve had enough,
You’ll be bloody seeing double
If you drink any more of the stuff.’
That’s the cue for the twins to enter,
Perfectly synchronised,
They walked right up beside Dan and stopped
And you should have seen his eyes.
And when they ordered a beer in unison
His hair began to stand,
And when they lifted their glasses and drained ’em as one,
His glass slipped from his hand.
‘Thanks,’ said the twins together,
And then they left the bar.
Dipso Dan was as white as a ghost,
We thought we’d gone too far.
‘Are you alright, Dan?’ asked Nugget,
‘D-D-D- . . . Did you see that?’ says Dan,
‘It’s enough to make me quit the grog.
It’s enough to reform a man!’
Well, Doug can’t stand it any more,
He wants no damage done.
‘Calm down Dan—it was just a joke,
They’re identical mates of me son.
‘We were having you on—c’mon, relax,
You won’t see any more of ’em.’
‘Well, ya had me fooled,’ said Dipso Dan,
‘Identical, eh, all bloody four of ’em!’
ANZAC NIGHT IN THE GARDENS
LENNIE LOWER
Lennie Lower was one of the most inventive wordsmiths and yarn spinners Australia ever produced. His cleverness at telling a story and turning a phrase still takes my breath away. He deserted twice from the armed forces but was still more than willing to keep up the Anzac Day tradition of drinking to excess. Here he is talking to the statues in the Botanic Gardens, with no real idea how he got there!
Lost in the wilds of the Botanic Gardens! Heavens, shall we ever forget it! The last human face we saw was that of Matthew Flinders, the great explorer.
We got in with a few Anzacs last night, and we forget how we got into the Gardens, but believe us, it’s terrible. Instructive, but terrible.
Nothing to drink but goldfish.
Bottle-trees dotted about the place, and we had no opener. Naked men and women standing on square whitewashed rocks. All dumb!
We wandered up to a signboard, thinking to read, ‘Ten miles to . . . ,’ and saw there, ‘Please do not walk on the grass borders.’
Starving, practically, we climbed a coconut tree for food and found it was a date tree without any dates on it.
We came to a tree marked ‘Dysoxolum’. We thought, we knew how sox were dyed, but what shall it profit a man if he lose himself in the Gardens?
We came to where the tortoise slept, and knocked on his shell. Like all the rest of our friends, he was in, but he didn’t answer.
Dawn found us clawing at the front of the Herbarium, shrieking hysterically for just a little thyme.
The keeper who found us said that everything was all right and this was the way out. We don’t know what became of the others.
Probably their bodies will be found in the bandstand and identified by their pawn tickets. The Anzacs certainly were, and still are, a tough crowd. We will never go into the Gardens again without wearing all our medals and two identification discs. It’s always best to carry a spare on Anzac night.
DRINKS WITH A KICK IN THEM
LENNIE LOWER
The President of the Housewives’ Association says that she does not believe in cocktail drinking and could, if necessary, produce a drink with a ‘kick’ in it, from fruit.
Anticipating, we have evolve
d a few recipes to suit all tastes.
Banana Flutter: Take one banana, slice, and put into glass. Take half a coconut and beat it into a stiff froth. Mix briskly and serve. The ‘kick’ is obtained by standing on one foot on the skin of the banana and leaning forward while pouring the drink down the back of the neck.
Then we have the Flying Mule: Take half a dozen raspberries, being careful to remove the seeds, also the sound. Mash lightly with hammer. Mix with a little ice-water, and add seeds slowly, one at a time, until you are so thirsty that you’d drink anything. Now take a red-hot nail, and dip it smartly into the mixture, removing it almost immediately. Drink nail.
The Watermelon Whoopee: Take one large watermelon, cut in half. Hollow out one half and place contents in washbasin. Save seeds from other half. Place in washbasin one small cup of gramophone needles, half-pint of sulphuric acid. Drink before bottom falls out of washbasin.
A similar mixture is the Hangover Blues: The watermelon is put into the washbasin as before, but covered with crushed ice. The hollowed-out portion is then quarter-filled with crushed ice and placed over the head, taking care to pull it well down over the forehead. The face is then laid gently in the washbasin.
It will be seen from the above recipes that the uses of fruit as a drink are practically unlimited. Furthermore, most fruit is full of vitamins. These need not worry the hostess, however, as they can easily be detected by the small holes in the outside of the skin, and this part can be cut out.
And don’t forget, all these drinks have a kick.
The careful hostess should warn her guests of this danger.
HOW SEXY REX CLEARED THE BAR
Sexy Rex was a shearers’ cook, or had been . . . or said he had been.
When I knew him he spent most of his time telling people about being a shearers’ cook—from a corner of the bar at the Tatts, or the Royal—or at odd times when his liver was having a bad day, from a table near the window in the Paragon Café. Maybe he’d never been a shearers’ cook at all. I never met anyone who remembered him being one. There were plenty of people, however, who remembered him telling them about being one.
Being a shearers’ cook doesn’t seem much to boast about, or spend most of your time reminiscing about. Most blokes I know who had been shearers’ cooks kept pretty quiet about it and found other things to talk about. They certainly found other things to boast about. But Sexy Rex liked to boast about being a shearers’ cook.
He was probably called ‘Sexy Rex’ because he was the least sexy person imaginable, or simply because it was the first rhyme that sprang to mind—or perhaps a bit of both.
Anyway, Sexy Rex walked with a pronounced limp, when he walked at all. He didn’t walk much, for two reasons. Firstly because of his pronounced limp and secondly because his main claim to fame, his real skill in life, was cadging lifts from one pub to the other, because he walked with a pronounced limp.
No one ever questioned that Rex’s limp was a result of ‘the war’. But the funny thing was that he never talked about ‘the war’ or claimed to have fought in World War II. He’d arrived in the district after the war, complete with his pronounced limp, so I guess everyone just assumed that he acquired the limp in the war.
He didn’t wear an RSL badge and he didn’t march in the Anzac Day parade because of his limp. He did do his share of ‘anzacing’ at the pub after the march, but his reminiscences, even on Anzac Day, were invariably about being a shearers’ cook.
It was actually Spanner Toole who cleared the bar at the Royal, and that was because he was fed up with Boof Simpson and Billy O’Shea reminding him about the belting they’d given him the night before outside the town’s other pub, the Tatts.
Now the hiding Spanner had copped the night before outside the Tatts was pretty much Spanner’s fault. He could be fairly annoying when he tied one on and he had this bad habit of digging up a little ‘local history’ and broadcasting it around the bar, airing other people’s dirty laundry in public.
Let’s be honest, Spanner was a nasty piece of work when he’d had a few. There weren’t many drinkers at the Tatts who had any time for him when he was in that condition. On Friday night at the Tatts, he was getting no encouragement from the other drinkers, but he expounded his theories nonetheless and anyone who was in the bar couldn’t help but hear them.
On this particular occasion, his theory concerned the alleged results of an alleged relationship between his own father, now deceased, and Nola Simpson.
Nola Simpson was not deceased but very much alive and kicking. What’s more, she was Boof’s mother and Billy’s aunt. Boof and Billy were quite willing to do the kicking necessary to defend her honour, especially when the person getting kicked was Spanner Toole.
By all accounts, Nola’s son and nephew had done a pretty good job of defending her honour in her absence outside the Tatts that night.
The resulting fight outside the Tatts had, by all accounts, not been a pretty sight and Spanner was an even less pretty sight than usual when he arrived at the Royal for a recuperative drink the next day.
Boof and Billy were already drinking at the Royal when Spanner arrived; they had naturally been barred from the Tatts for giving Spanner a hiding.
Boof and Billy held no particular grudge against Dougie, the Tatts’ publican, about being barred from the Tatts by Dougie, even though they had not started the fight. They pretty much accepted that, if you got involved in a Friday night ‘incident’ and then gave someone a hiding outside a pub, you would be barred from that pub for a time. So Boof and Billy were drinking at ‘the other pub’ and having a few bets with Fancy Youngman, the SP bookie, when Spanner arrived.
In charge of the bar that day was Harold Davis, known as Happy Harold to the desperate drinkers who frequented the Royal, because he never smiled. He lived alone in a bit of a shanty on the edge of town, in a bend of the river known to locals as Happy Valley.
Happy Harold was a ‘Jimmy Woodser’, a solitary drinker who was always sober when he was at work behind the bar at the Royal, and never sober any other time. He had a dry wit, told a good story and got drunk as soon as he finished a shift.
It wasn’t Spanner Toole alone who cleared the bar at the Royal that Saturday afternoon, it was a combination of Spanner and the old side-by-side double-barrelled shotgun he got out from under the seat of his ute and carried back into the bar. He did this because he was fed up with Boof Simpson and Billy O’Shea insulting him and reminding him about the belting they had given him the night before outside the Tatts.
‘When Spanner and the shotgun entered the bar,’ Harold said later, ‘the bar cleared pretty quickly.’
A lot of blokes disappeared into the toilets at the end of the bar. Gender was suddenly not an issue according to Harold, the Ladies being just as popular as the Gents at that particular moment. A lot of the bar cleared into the lounge and taproom at the further end. The bar did not, oddly enough, clear into the street, perhaps because the area in the general vicinity of that door was more or less occupied by Spanner and the shotgun.
Harold was left alone in the relative safety of the area behind the bar, with the glasses piled high along it. He had simply to duck down to remove the immediate threat of being in the firing line of Spanner and his shotgun.
Which brings us to the crux of the story really. It was at that point, as he ducked down, that Harold realised he was no longer alone behind the bar. He had been joined there by Sexy Rex.
Harold says that Sexy Rex, in spite of his limp and alleged bad leg must have cleared the bar and the glasses stacked on it to join him in relative safety behind it.
Were we to believe Happy Harold would tell lies? Or did we choose to believe that our local crippled ex-serviceman could clear a four-foot bar, stacked with glasses, in a split second with no apparent side effects?
It was a dilemma which would concern the town longer than the current crisis. Because Spanner stopped yelling abuse at the whole town in general, and Boof and Billy in par
ticular, when the sergeant arrived a few minutes later to relieve him of the shotgun.
While Spanner climbed quietly into the paddy wagon to be taken to the lockup, the sergeant did something quite uncharacteristic. He had Spanner’s collar in one hand and the shotgun in the other and, knowing Spanner as well as he did, he assumed that Spanner would never actually load a shotgun and take it into the bar of the Royal. So he pointed the gun, which was cocked, at the outside brick wall of the pub, and pulled the trigger.
The marks of the pellets are still there in the brickwork today. They serve as a constant and historic reminder of Harold’s amazing claim that Sexy Rex cleared the bar the day that Spanner Toole cleared the bar with the loaded shotgun.
But even Harold was forced to admit he didn’t actually see Sexy Rex clear the bar. Perhaps Sexy Rex got behind the bar another way. None of us can imagine how, but we prefer to leave the episode in the unsolved file rather than believe that Sexy Rex was not the genuine article.
JH
YARNS FROM
OUR PAST
The best bits of history are always the personal stories and those quirky, coincidental and seemingly unlikely occurrences.
As the ‘Australiana Guy’ on the long running Radio 2UE weekend program, George and Paul on the Weekend, it’s my job to find a fascinating story from the past every week in order to get listeners calling in with their own reminiscences and answering the questions we ask about some of the lesser known aspects of our past.
Of course, the things I talk about need to be interesting enough to keep people listening.
Doing this for over ten years has helped confirm what I always thought about our history. It was always the odd coincidences and human stories that I found fascinating, rather than the momentous military and political events.
As a teacher of history, among other subjects, for almost twenty years, it seemed to me that most kids, especially those who were not really the top students or big fans of formal learning, reacted more positively if I made history lessons into yarns and stories about interesting characters. I was accused of taking this too far by one department head who said, ‘Jim, I don’t mind you telling the kids in that Year Nine class about the Punic Wars as if it was an adventure serial at the Saturday movie matinee, but it’s a bit rich when they can tell me the names of all Hannibal’s elephants!’
