Best Australian Yarns

by Haynes, Jim

  Then swimming through the water, the men all followed me,

  And in the darkness of the night, we climbed aboard the Rodney.

  The Captain could not believe his eyes, to see us standing there,

  With raddle painted faces, and mud smeared into our hair,

  The crew we did not harm at all, but let them row away,

  The scabs we left on an island, a small price they did have to pay.

  Then we soaked the decks with kerosene, from stem to stern,

  Then all us lads went ashore, and cheered as the Rodney burned,

  No-one recognised us, they knew not who to blame,

  So young man, you must tell no-one, Joe Cummins is my name.

  THE ‘FAILURE’ THAT SUCCEEDED

  Mildura Irrigation Colony

  Mildura, on the Murray River in the Sunraysia District, is an area with a fascinating and unique history.

  In the early 1880s, the Victorian government began examining the idea of irrigation colonies on the Murray River. In 1884, Victorian Premier Alfred Deakin led a delegation to the USA and met the Canadian brothers George and Ben Chaffey, who had established irrigation colonies in Ontario and California.

  George Chaffey visited Victoria in 1886 and, having decided on the Mildura Run as a suitable location for an irrigation colony, the Chaffeys sold their Californian interests at a loss in order to invest in this new venture.

  The Mildura Run was in liquidation. It had a river frontage of 64 kilometres and reached 32 kilometres back with flats subject to frequent flooding. One squatter called it ‘the most wretched and hopeless of all the Mallee regions’ and another ‘a Sahara of blasting hot winds and red driving sands, a howling, carrion-polluted wilderness’.

  In 1886, after months of negotiations, the Chaffey brothers signed an agreement, which was rejected by the Victorian parliament. The property was put up for public tender, but the Chaffeys decided not to tender. Instead, they negotiated with the South Australian government and, on 14 February 1887, they signed an agreement securing 250,000 acres at Bookmark Plains which went on to become the town Renmark.

  The Victorian government received no suitable tenders and finally ‘The Chaffey Brothers Agreement’ was passed in May 1887. An indenture was signed for 250,000 acres of the old Mildura Run, which the Chaffeys took possession of in August. 50,000 of them were at £5 per acre to be subdivided into cleared 10-acre blocks between irrigation channels and a further 200,000 acres at £1 plus water rights to the equivalent of a 24-inch rainfall.

  This amounted to 1699 cubic metres per minute, approximately one third of the Murray’s lowest rate of discharge in drought.

  Prospective settlers or investors could purchase irrigated blocks for £20 per acre (0.4 hectares) and Chaffey Brothers Ltd managed blocks for absentee owners for a fee of £5 per annum. George Chaffey, who was an engineer, had pumps capable of delivering up to 40,000 gallons per minute to main channels built and installed and the Chaffeys invested in brickworks, an engineering company, a timber mill and, in 1888, the River Murray Navigation Company.

  In the early years, favourable conditions meant Mildura could rely mostly on river transport with freight and passengers going downstream for a railway connection to Adelaide, and upstream to Swan Hill and Echuca for connections to Melbourne.

  Pests such as locusts damaged crops and there were continual problems with the irrigation. When water rates of fifteen shillings per acre (0.4 hectare) were introduced in 1891, settlers who had suffered three years of failed crops could not afford to pay and the Chaffeys shut down the pumps, labourers struck for better wages and conditions and were sacked and many men working for blockholders were never paid.

  When Alfred Deakin and members of a Royal Commission arrived at the Company Wharf aboard the Pearl, so many settlers with complaints rushed on board that the vessel almost capsized. They were ordered to make their complaints in writing.

  The problem of getting produce to markets in good condition remained until the arrival of the railway in 1903.

  Added to the technical difficulties encountered in getting water to the crops, was the inter-colonial bickering over the rights to the Murray’s water. New South Wales Premier, Sir Henry Parkes, called the Chaffeys ‘trespassers’, as the New South Wales Constitution Act of 1855 stated ‘that the whole of the watercourse of the River Murray is and shall be in the territory of New South Wales’.

  After one flood, the mayor of the Victorian town of Echuca telegraphed the then premier of New South Wales requesting that the New South Wales water be removed from his town!

  On allotments that were owned or managed by the Chaffeys, plantings were generally successful. They employed 500 men and 500 horses and, with intensive labour, good horticultural practices and an adequate supply of water, crops would thrive, if variable seasonal conditions—frosts, hail, pests and diseases—were allowed for.

  But, in December 1895, the company went into liquidation and, in 1896, the Victorian government held a Royal Commission into its affairs.

  Block holders were given tenure over their land with a five-year period to meet their dues and the Mildura Irrigation Trust was created to ‘conduct and control the supply of water for irrigation purposes’. Six commissioners elected by the growers ran it.

  George Chaffey returned to the USA after the enquiry, but his brother Ben remained in Mildura as a fruit grower until his death in 1926.

  Today Mildura is a thriving and prosperous city—one of the nicest towns in inland Australia!

  JH

  THE GROG COMES TO MILDURA

  MONTY GROVER

  The Chaffeys were teetotallers and the Mildura Colony was initially a ‘temperance colony’, modelled on their Canadian and Californian ones, devoid of any liquor outlets. There was a sly grog trade I am sure, but working men had nowhere to legally drink.

  The good side of the lack of alcohol in the irrigation colony was that the colony’s crime rate was so low there was only one policeman for the 2300 population.

  In 1895, the famous Working Man’s Club was established. It went on to become one of the largest liquor outlets in Australia and boasted the ‘longest bar in the Southern Hemisphere’. The first shipment of alcohol for the club arrived on the paddle-steamer Nile, which was reported to be carrying 40 tons of liquor.

  The following verse was printed in The Argus, a Melbourne newspaper, on the day the club opened; it was written by Monty Grover, a great newspaperman, character and poet who has sadly been almost forgotten today. (Note: The most popular beer back then was Hennessy’s Three Star.)

  The sky burned like brass above, and the land was fevered with drought,

  As we wandered with blistering gullets, and tongues that were hanging out.

  With the water of the Murray to tempt us, at the edge of the sun-dry flat.

  But no, we were men of Mildura—we hadn’t come down to that.

  In a moment of human weakness, I stepped to the river’s brink,

  It was flowing before me, water, would I be condemned to drink!?

  Then we heard the beat of paddles, the rescuing steamboat Nile.

  Louder and ever louder, coming nearer all the while.

  ‘Courage!’ the skipper shouted, as he moored to the blighted scrub,

  ‘There’s forty tons of liquor aboard, consigned to the local club.’

  And the band burst into music, while the temperance banners waved,

  And we saw Three Stars in the evening sky, and we knew Mildura was saved.

  HOW SYDNEY WAS REMODELLED BY THE PLAGUE

  Many people think that the plague ended way back in the sixteenth or seventeenth century—not so.

  On 19 January 1900, Arthur Paine, a thirty-three-year-old deliveryman who carted goods from the Sydney wharves, suddenly fell ill. Dr Sinclair Gillies, honorary physician at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, saw him and realised that the bubonic plague had hit Sydney.

  It had appeared in Adelaide four days earlier.

 
In Sydney, which was much worse hit than the City of Churches, 303 cases were reported and 103 people died.

  There were twelve major plague outbreaks in Australia between 1900 and 1925.

  Government health archives record 1371 cases diagnosed and 535 deaths, nationwide. Sydney was hit hardest, but also hit were North Queensland, Melbourne, Adelaide and Fremantle.

  The Chief Government Medical Officer, John Ashburton Thompson, put bacteriologist Frank Tidswell in charge of research and appointed William Armstrong and Robert Dick as ‘Medical Officers to the City of Sydney’. Thompson, Dick and Tidswell went on to produce outstanding research on plague and are credited with developing twentieth-century scientific understandings of the disease.

  Quarantine areas were established in the Rocks and at East Sydney, Glebe, Woolloomooloo, Redfern and Manly. Around 2000 people were forced from their homes in Sydney and quarantined at North Head. Many homes and outbuildings were demolished, whole streets and parts of suburbs disappeared. Some districts of Sydney were cordoned off by sanitary inspectors and invaded by an army of ‘cleansing teams’.

  Cleansing and disinfecting operations in the quarantine areas lasted from 24 March to 17 July 1900 and included the demolition of ‘slum’ buildings. Wharves and docks were cleared of silt and sewage. Chloride of lime, carbolic and sulphuric acid were used. Rat catchers were employed and the rats burned in a special rat incinerator. Over 44,000 rats were officially killed.

  One of the sadder results of the ‘cleansing’ was that many picturesque parts of The Rocks were completely lost.

  Whole streets leading down to the harbour were demolished and artist Sidney Long spent the brief time before they were destroyed painting and recording the steep winding lanes and quaint streets. His paintings are a nostalgic record of a bygone age of Sydney’s oldest suburb, much more of which was also later demolished to build the approaches to the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

  As a direct result of the plague, an attempt was made to rethink housing for Sydney’s poorer population and schemes like the suburbs of Daceyville and Pagewood were established to provide public housing and cheaper housing for Sydney’s working class residents.

  JH

  ROSS SMITH AND THE GREAT RACE

  Captain Ross MacPherson Smith, Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, Air Force Cross (twice), Military Cross (twice), Distinguished Flying Cross (three times), was born in Adelaide, in 1892.

  A gifted athlete and horseman, he enlisted as a trooper in the 3rd Australian Light Horse at the outbreak of war in 1914. All eleven members of the school cricket team, which Smith had captained, enlisted. Five were killed, including his younger brother Colin, and another five were wounded.

  Smith’s elder brother, Keith, was rejected by the AIF because he had varicose veins, so he had them surgically removed, made his way to Britain and joined the Royal Flying Corps.

  Ross Smith served at Gallipoli. He was promoted to Regimental Sergeant Major in August 1915 and commissioned as a second lieutenant in September, just as he was evacuated from Gallipoli with enteric fever.

  He spent six months recovering, then was given command of a machine-gun section in Egypt in early 1916, fought at the decisive Battle of Romani, and decided to join the Australian Flying Corps.

  He began training in Cairo in October 1916, received his observer’s wings in January 1917 and his pilot’s wings in July 1917.

  Despite starting so late and spending most of his time with No 1 Squadron, which was a bomber and reconnaissance unit, he finished the war as Australia’s tenth top pilot for confirmed ‘kills’ in air combat and was decorated for gallantry five times between January 1917 and November 1918.

  Smith flew Lawrence of Arabia on secret missions into the desert and gained expertise with all kinds of aircraft including Bristol Fighters, various prototypes called ‘British Experimentals’ (christened ‘Bloody Emergencies’ because of their unreliability), and the lumbering HP100 heavy bomber, made by Handley Page. His experience with the HP100, which could carry a ton of bombs over long distances, was to change his life and turn him into a legend.

  After the Armistice, Ross Smith made the first ever flight from Cairo to Calcutta in the HP100, with Brigadier Borton and Sergeants Wally Shiers and Jim Bennett. They intended to fly on to Australia and travelled as far as Timor by ship to check for landing places and talk to the Dutch colonial authorities. Meanwhile their HP100 was flown to the north-west frontier to deal with an Afghan uprising and crashed in a storm.

  They had abandoned the idea of flying to Australia when a chance acquaintance showed them the first Australian newspaper they had seen in five years. On the front page was an offer from Prime Minister Billy Hughes of £10,000 to the first Australian air crew to fly a British aircraft from England to Australia in less than thirty days.

  Hundreds of Australians attempted to enter the race and the Australian government recruited the Royal Aero Club as arbiters and organisers. The rules were strict in order to avoid the government being criticised for putting lives in danger.

  The aircraft entered had to be airworthy. This meant, in effect, that only an aircraft entered by a manufacturer was acceptable. Most would-be entrants could not afford new machines.

  Each crew had to have a navigator, which eliminated the entry put up by Charles Kingsford-Smith, and solo entries were forbidden by the regulations, so Lieutenant Bert Hinkler’s entry in a Sopwith Dove was also eliminated.

  Ross Smith knew somebody who really could navigate and who could also share the burden of flying the machine—his own brother, Keith, an RFC and RAF flying instructor who was still based in Britain and available to take part in the venture.

  Altogether, six Australian crews, five of them backed by the cream of the British aircraft industry—Sopwith, Vickers, Blackburn, Alliance and Martinsyde—took part in the race. The sixth crew, Lieutenants Ray Parer and John McIntosh, after months of setbacks and failed schemes, were backed by Scottish whisky magnate Peter Dawson and entered a war surplus De Havilland DH.9.

  There was also an unofficial ‘seventh’ entry. French flyer, Etienne Poulet and his mechanic, Jean Benoist, flying a tiny Caudron biplane, set off from Paris on 14 October 1919. Not being Australian, they were ineligible for the cash prize, but they were determined to win the race, and the glory, for France. They were to lead the race for over half the distance.

  Of the seven entrants, only two would reach Australia.

  The two Smith brothers, with Sergeants Shiers and Bennett acting as mechanics, took off in their Vickers Vimy from Hounslow Heath at 9.05 a.m. on 12 November 1919. They flew up to ten hours each day, then Shiers and Bennett would work on the Rolls-Royce engines while Ross and Keith refueled, straining petrol through a chamois leather filter. They followed this routine for twenty-seven days.

  Of the other entrants, two crashed fatally: the Alliance Endeavour, flown by Roger Douglas and Leslie Ross , just after taking off from Hounslow, and the Martinsyde, flown by fighter ace Cedric Howell and George Fraser, when it ditched off Corfu in the Adriatic Sea after a navigation error during the night.

  The Blackburn Kangaroo of Captain Sir Hubert Wilkins was forced to turn back to Crete with engine trouble and crashed on landing, while George Matthews and Tom Kay in the Sopwith Wallaby nearly made it but crashed in a banana plantation in Bali.

  Etienne Poulet in his tiny Caudron G4 biplane just kept plugging away and led the field as far as Rangoon before he too was eliminated with engine trouble.

  The astonishingly determined Ray Parer and John McIntosh limped from one near-disaster to another in their single-engined DH.9, eventually arriving in Darwin eight months after leaving London. Their flight was the first to Australia in a single-engined plane.

  The biggest problem for the competitors was that there were no landing grounds between India and Darwin. There wasn’t even a landing ground at Darwin.

  The Dutch had set up a couple of flying schools in Indonesia and constructed rudimentary airs
trips during 1919, but elsewhere most ‘airfields’ consisted of racecourses like those at Rangoon and Singapore, or clearings in the jungle with a stockpile of fuel.

  The Vickers Vimy touched down on the specially built Fanny Bay airstrip near Darwin at 3.40 p.m. on 10 December. Her tanks were almost empty. ‘We almost fell into Darwin,’ Wally Shiers recalled many years later. The journey had taken twenty-seven days and twenty hours.

  Waiting to greet them were a customs officer and quarantine official and Ross Smith’s old friend from the 1st Squadron Australian Flying Corps, Hudson Fysh, who had built the airfield at Darwin and surveyed the air route from Darwin to Brisbane in case anyone got that far. It was this survey that convinced Fysh that air travel was the answer to Australia’s vast distances and led directly to the formation of Qantas.

  Brigadier Borton called the flight ‘the most magnificent pioneer undertaking of the age’ and I think he was right!

  JH

  RADIO 2UE

  2UE is the oldest surviving commercial radio station in Australia.

  The first radio ‘broadcast’ in Australia was organised by George Fisk of Amalgamated Wirelesss Australia (AWA) on 19 August 1919. The national anthem was broadcast from one building to another as part of a lecture he’d given on the new technology to the Royal Society.

  AWA continued to give demonstration broadcasts privately each week from 1921. Fisk’s idea was to sell customers a radio set that only received from the station owned by the company that sold you the set.

  Licences along these lines, called ‘A’ licences, were issued to several stations in capital cities to be financed by listeners’ licence fees imposed and collected by the government. In January 1924, 2FC and 2SB (later 2BL), in Sydney, and 3AR and 3LO, in Melbourne, began broadcasting.

  Only 1400 people took out licences for the ‘fixed station’ system in the initial phase and, if you could build a radio receiver, you could avoid paying. The system wasn’t a success and these stations were later taken over to become the beginnings of the ABC in 1932.