Best Australian Yarns

by Haynes, Jim

  And turned the electric light on so all was bright and clear.

  He was gazing out the window, now awakened from his sleep,

  And down there on the footpath lay his missus in a heap!

  He said, ‘Blimey, I’ve had nightmares after boozin’ up a treat,

  And I’ve walked without me trousers to the pub across the street,

  But this sure takes some beatin’, and it’s one I’ll have to keep.

  I dare not tell me mates I shore the missus in me sleep!’

  THE LOADED CROC

  PAUL B. KIDD

  Although this story may be a few years old now, it is Sydney eastern suburbs folklore, and while the variations of it are many, this is the ‘ fair dinkum’ version. Though conspicuous by their absence in recent years, the main characters are real and the story never came to light until long after the incident—one day they had a monumental altercation at the Royal Oak Hotel and one blurted out just how stupid his mate was and gave this story as an example.

  We christened him Haemorrhoids because he hung out in dark places. We broke it down to Piles for short. One of those dark places he hung out in was the old front bar of the Royal Oak Hotel in Double Bay in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, where he was a member of the legendary Royal Oak Fishing Club.

  He was a bald, short, unshaven revoltingly fat heap with a Charles Bronson drooping moustache who wore stubbies and a football jumper every day, guzzled vast quantities of beer and wore out two pairs of thongs a month. The locals reckoned that one day when he was lying on Bondi Beach, the Greenpeace truck came to a halt and six guys rushed out and tried to force him back into the water.

  The only person who could cop him was a bloke we’d nicknamed Morphine on account of the fact that he was a slow working dope. Morph was as long and lean as Piles was short and rotund, wore a Sydney Swans beanie, checked long-sleeved flannelette shirts, flared trousers and ugg boots all year round. Standing at the bar they looked like Abbott and Costello who had been outfitted by Saint Vincent de Paul.

  Piles and Morph were inseparable; quaffing down schooners night after night over the pool table at the Oak. And when they weren’t playing pool or figuring out how to get away with more sickies from their jobs as road workers on the local council, they filled out their weekly Lotto coupon, methodically double and triple checking to make sure that they got their lucky numbers—which, incidentally, were the same every week—exactly right.

  They figured they had the winning combination by using the numbers that meant the most to them. Their birth dates: 16 and 24; their ages: 37 and 39; their IQs from the council’s aptitude test: 28 and 28; their past lovers: 0 and 0; and their friends: 1 and 1, being each other.

  So that was the combination: 16, 24, 37, 39, 28, 0 and 1 as the supplementary. Week in and week out, they took the same numbers and every Monday night at half past eight, the Oak would come to a standstill as the beautiful Alex Wileman called the numbers with the three lotteries officials looking on.

  But they never won a crumpet. In fact, the best they ever got was two numbers. But their faith in their system was unfailing.

  This particular Monday, Morph had taken a sickie off work, got on the turps and was horribly flyblown when he took it upon himself to fill in the Lotto numbers before having a dozen or so more schooners at the Oak while waiting for his mate to come in after work.

  When Morph produced their ticket at Lotto time, Piles nearly had a stroke.

  ‘You idiot,’ he exploded. ‘You’ve written out the wrong numbers. I couldn’t trust you to take a piss by yourself. You can bet your life that they’ll go off tonight and we won’t be on ’em.’

  With that he grabbed a snooker cue in one hand and Morph by the throat with the other and was just about to fracture his dopey mate’s skull with it when Alex Wileman called out the first number—17.

  ‘Hey, that’s one of your bodgie numbers,’ Piles noted, lowering the cue and taking interest. ‘Number 4,’ the sensational Alex Wileman gushed as Piles noted that that number was also on the ticket.

  And so was the next one, and the next one after that and the one after that. They had the first five numbers in and the Oak was hushed in anticipation and then went berserk as Alex called the sixth number and it matched the ticket.

  The Dickbrain Brothers had won Lotto by default, but Morph wasn’t letting on that it was a fluke.

  ‘It’s me new scientific system of gettin’ the numbers,’ he told anyone stupid enough to listen. ‘I’d had seventeen schooners when I bought the ticket; me nephew’s four next birthday . . .’ etc, etc. Of course no one with an eighth of a brain took any notice.

  There turned out to be three other winners, and by the time the four split the $1.5 million Lotto first prize, Piles and Morph had enough to buy the best Toyota 4WD, camping gear and a trailerable boat that money could buy and they decided to go on an extended fishing vacation into northern Australia, much to our eternal gratitude.

  ‘That’ll teach youse pricks to take the piss out of us,’ Piles announced down at the Oak on the eve of their departure when they begrudgingly threw a lousy $20 on the bar for their final and only shout. ‘Me and me genius mate ’ere, Morph, is gunna shoot through to the Northern Territory and get stuck into the barramundis and none of youse billygoats is welcome.’

  And thank Christ for that. Peace from the boneheads at last. Even if it was only temporary.

  It took Piles and Morphine six days to reach Darwin, where they loaded up with cases of beer and supplies and headed for the Mary River. They found a great big barra-filled lagoon and set up camp.

  What a treat. No bastard for miles, stacks of ice in the freezer for the beer, no sheilas to drive ’em mad and a hole full of fish. Heaven on earth. Well, not quite.

  There was just one minor problem—the old croc who’d made the huge billabong his home for the past thirty years. The cranky old bastard was far from impressed with his new neighbours and expressed his disapproval by nicking every decent-sized fish they hooked.

  ‘There’s that rotten mobile suitcase at it again,’ Morphine would blubber to his mate as the croc sat waiting for a jumping barra to land in its giant, foul-smelling gob hole.

  ‘I wish he’d piss off and leave us alone,’ moaned Piles as he lost yet another barra, a $15 lure and lots of line to the croc.

  But they were reluctant to move on, because the fishing—minus the croc—was about as good as it gets. Besides, there would most likely be a resident croc wherever they wound up. One or the other had to go and sooner or later something had to give. It did.

  ‘Have you noticed how he shoots through every night around six,’ noted Piles, his skills of observation working overtime. ‘I reckon he goes back to the missus in the lair, chunders up some of the fish he’s pinched from us all day and feeds ’em to ’er ’cos he’s on a promise and then packs it in for the night.’

  ‘The dirty bastard—I’d like to blow him and his ugly missus up while they’re right in the middle of dinner.’

  They laughed hilariously at the thought of two crocodiles sitting down to a candlelit dinner, and wondered how they got along romantically what with the putrid breath and all those teeth.

  Neither of them was renowned for his powers of deduction, so while the thought of a prehistoric animal living to a timetable would be absurd to most of us, it certainly wasn’t to Piles and his dopey mate. Instead, it gave one of them an idea.

  ‘Speakin’ of blowin’ the bastard and his missus up, you’ve given me a real good idea,’ Piles chuckled to his mate. ‘Let’s go into town tomorrow and I’ll get somethin’ that might just sort our problem right out. He’ll be a caveless croc come dusk.’

  In town the following morning, they loaded up with supplies, then ducked into the hardware store. They bought a case of dynamite and all of the other ingredients which they needed to blow up fish-stealing, prehistoric reptiles.

  ‘Do you really think it’ll work?’ Morph asked his mate, plainly in awe of the b
rilliant scheme.

  ‘ ’Course it will,’ said Piles. ‘We wait until the bastard comes up for his last fish of the arvo and we’ll chuck him a couple of nicely iced-off barra out of the big Esky under the 4WD.

  ‘Only this time, they’ll have enough dynamite attached to blow up Ayers Rock. Once the greedy bastard’s swallowed the lot, we’ll let him swim off with the fuse wire trailing out of his gob and when he stops we’ll wait till we reckon he’s on the job and then we’ll light it, and give his missus the biggest bang she’s ever had.’

  They laughed outrageously at their scheme and went about fishing from the bank well down the river from their camp site and preparing themselves for the afternoon’s events. And, as if on cue, the croc did his bit by turning up and pinching their fish all day long.

  ‘Go on, make the most of it, ya turd of a thing,’ Morph abused the old croc from the bank. ‘Ya might as well, seein’ as today’s ya last day on this planet. In a coupla hours your head’s gunna be in Darwin and ya tail’s gunna be in Alice Springs.’

  Mid-afternoon they returned to the camp, grabbed a couple of nice cold barramundi from the Esky under the Land Cruiser and taped four sticks of dynamite to them with electrician’s tape.

  Just on six, they hooked a beaut fish that brought the crocodile within feeding range, and, as it gulped the leaping barra down, Piles threw the dynamited fish at him and he gulped those down, too.

  ‘The silly prick’s fallen for it,’ laughed Morphine. ‘You’re a bloody genius, Piles. Now, let’s wait for a while and we’ll teach the bastard to pinch our fish.’

  So they sat on the bank and watched as the waterproofed fuse wire steadily disappeared from the giant coil into the water as the croc headed off upstream.

  They’d brought plenty of beer and it was only a five-minute trip by boat back to the camp. They yarned the time away as the croc kept on the move.

  ‘It’ll be interestin’ just to see where the explosion goes off,’ said Piles. ‘Christ, he must have 1000 metres of fuse wire out by now. One thing’s for certain—the big bang won’t be close to us.’

  Then the croc stopped. They waited for a couple of minutes, then lit the fuse and watched the smoke snake down the bank and into the water.

  ‘I hope he’s on the job when it goes off,’ roared Piles. ‘That’ll make the earth move for Mrs Croc in a manner she wasn’t counting on!’

  Then it happened. The bank shook as a huge explosion rocked the earth all around and a mushroom-shaped ball of smoke belched high into the sky from downriver—in the direction of the camp.

  They took off in the boat at breakneck speed amid falling debris, mostly flesh and blood.

  ‘Jesus, that was a big bit,’ Piles gulped at a huge splash near them. ‘And it didn’t look like a blown-up croc or stump to me. It looked more like a gearbox. A Toyota gearbox.’

  Morphine ducked just in time to miss decapitation by a flying steering wheel. And as they raced toward camp they realised that their worst nightmare had come to pass.

  ‘You idiot!’ screamed Morph at Piles.

  ‘You gave that croc the taste for cold barramundi and the bastard’s crawled up to the Esky for more and you’ve blown our bloody truck into the Kimberley. Now how are we gunna get home?’

  As it turned out, it was the least of their worries. That evening they were arrested for violations of the Protection of Crocodiles Act and their return to Double Bay was interrupted by a stay in the Darwin Gaol.

  Morphine and Haemorrhoids are barred from the Northern Territory for life.

  SCOTTY’S WILD STUFF STEW

  FRANCIS HUMPHRIS-BROWN

  Yarns about shearers’ cooks are legendary—and, naturally, they are all true. This one, from the 1890s, is a favourite of mine.

  The cause of all the trouble

  Was McCabe, the jackaroo,

  Who had ordered what, facetiously,

  He’d christened ‘Wild Stuff Stoo’.

  He had shot a brace of pigeons

  And had brought them home unplucked;

  It was not the first occasion,

  And no wonder Scotty bucked

  As aside he threw the pigeons

  And addressed the jackaroo:

  ‘Ye’ll pluck those blinded pigeons,

  Or ye’ll get no blinded stoo.’

  But the jackaroo objected,

  And objected strongly, too.

  Said he, ‘I’m not a slushy;

  You can keep your blinded stoo.’

  But Scotty didn’t argue much,

  He winked across at Blue

  And, turning to the slushy, said,

  ‘I’ll give him “Wild Stuff Stoo”.’

  The next day it was Sunday, and,

  Not having much to do,

  We all assisted Scotty

  In the making of a stoo

  We raked along the woolsheds,

  In the pens and round about—

  It was marvellous, all the wild things

  That us rousies fossicked out;

  There was Ginger found a lizard,

  Which they reckoned was a Jew—

  It was rather rough to handle,

  But it softened in the stew.

  Then Snowy found some hairy things

  Inside a musterer’s tent;

  And Splinter found a lady frog—

  And in the lady went.

  From McGregor, who’d been foxing,

  We obtained a skin or two,

  It should have gone to bootlace

  But it went into the stoo.

  Then someone found a ‘Kelly’

  That the boundary-rider shot—

  It was more or less fermented,

  Still, it went inside the pot;

  And Scotty found some insects

  With an overpowering scent,

  And the slushy trapped a mother mouse—

  And in poor mother went.

  There was some hesitation

  ’Bout a spider in a tin:

  We didn’t like the small red spot,

  But Scotty dumped it in.

  There were a host of other things—

  I can’t recall the lot—

  That were cast into eternity

  Per medium of the pot.

  And when the jackaroo arrived

  A happy man was he

  To find that Scotty, after all,

  Had cooked a stoo for tea.

  He rolled his eyes, and snuffed the fumes,

  ’Twas dinkum stuff he swore;

  He complimented Scotty, and

  He passed his plate for more.

  And when we’d let him have his fill,

  We took him round to view

  A list of what had left this world

  To enter Scotty’s stew.

  I grant you there were wild things

  Connected with that stoo,

  But there was nothing wilder

  Than McCabe the jackaroo.

  He got the dries and then the shakes,

  And we felt shaky, too;

  We were thinking of the spider

  With the red spot in the stoo.

  We rushed him to the homestead,

  They told him there ’twas flu,

  But us rousies, we knew better—

  It was Scotty’s ‘Wild Stuff Stoo’.

  But Scotty isn’t cooking now,

  For Scotty long is dead;

  They say he turned it in through booze

  At Thurlagoona shed;

  And away across the border

  There’s a certain jackaroo,

  Who for years has never tasted

  What he christened ‘Wild Stuff Stoo’.

  ’ARD TAC

  ANONYMOUS

  This yarn could be in the Drinking Yarns section. It’s a very typical example of ‘old style’ Aussie humour. When you consider that a small mob of two hundred sheep can be shorn in a day by some shearers (and Jackie Howe managed 321 in a day and 1437 in a week!) it makes the phrase
‘and so six weeks went by’ very amusing—to me anyway. I also love the vernacular style of this yarn in verse.

  I’m a shearer, yes I am, and I’ve shorn ’em sheep and lamb,

  From the Wimmera to the Darling Downs and back,

  And I’ve rung a shed or two when the fleece was tough as glue,

  But I’ll tell you where I struck the ’ardest tac.

  I was down round Yenda way killin’ time from day to day,

  Till the big sheds started movin’ further out;

  When I struck a bloke by chance that I summed up in a glance

  As a cocky from a vineyard round about.

  Now it seems he picked me, too; well, it wasn’t ’ard to do,

  ’Cos I had some shears, a-hangin’ at the hip.

  ‘I got a mob,’ he said, ‘about two hundred head,

  And I’d give a ten pound note to get the clip.’

  I says: ‘Right—I’ll take the stand’; it meant gettin’ in me hand;

  And by nine o’clock we’d rounded up the mob

  In a shed sunk in the ground—yeah, with wine casks all around.

  And that was where I started on me job.

  I goes easy for a bit while me hand was gettin’ fit,

  And by dinner time I’d done some half a score,

  With the cocky pickin’ up, and handing me a cup,

  Of vino after every sheep I shore.

  The cocky had to go away—about the seventh day,

  After showin’ me the kind of casks to use;

  Then I’d do the pickin’ up, and manipulate the cup,

  Strollin’ round them casks to pick and choose.

  Then I’d stagger to the pen, grab a sheep and start again,

  With a noise between a hiccup and a sob,

  And sometimes I’d fall asleep with me arms around the sheep,

  Worn and weary from me over-arduous job.

  And so, six weeks went by, until one day with a sigh,

  I pushed the two hundredth through the door,

  Gathered in the cocky’s pay, then staggered on me way,

  From the hardest bloody shed I ever shore!

  WHAT ARE THEIR NAMES?

  A yarn in a similar vein to the previous one concerns the hobby farmer, a retired accountant who has moved to a small country town in the central west and keeps a small flock of sheep on his ten acre block.