Best Australian Yarns

by Haynes, Jim

  While recreational services were all well and good, commuters needed a faster service, so the company introduced hydrofoils in 1965.

  An opportunity to compete with the increasingly congested roadways of Sydney saw RiverCat vessels arrive in 1992; they provided services to Parramatta and added over one million passengers to the ferry service annually. Purists, of course, argued that these new vessels were not ‘real ferries’.

  Sadly, the last nine ships added to the ‘real’ ferry fleet are not double-ended. The nine First Fleet Class ferries are single-ended and double-hulled, which means they are catamarans. Introduced in 1985, they are much smaller than the grand old ferries we knew as kids, but more manoeuvrable, perfect for fast short runs around the harbour with fewer passengers. They are all named after ships of the First Fleet.

  JH

  SYDNEY-SIDE

  HENRY LAWSON

  Lawson wrote this poem about taking a berth back to Sydney from Western Australia.

  Where’s the steward?—Bar-room steward? Berth? Oh, any berth will do—

  I have left a three-pound billet just to come along with you.

  Brighter shines the Star of Rovers on a world that’s growing wide,

  But I think I’d give a kingdom for a glimpse of Sydney-Side.

  Run of rocky shelves at sunrise, with their base on ocean’s bed;

  Homes of Coogee, homes of Bondi, and the lighthouse on South Head;

  For in loneliness and hardship—and with just a touch of pride—

  Has my heart been taught to whisper, ‘You belong to Sydney-Side.’

  Oh, there never dawned a morning, in the long and lonely days,

  But I thought I saw the ferries streaming out across the bays—

  And as fresh and fair in fancy did the picture rise again

  As the sunrise flushed the city from Woollahra to Balmain:

  And the sunny water frothing round the liners black and red,

  And the coastal schooners working by the loom of Bradley’s Head;

  And the whistles and the sirens that re-echo far and wide—

  All the life and light and beauty that belong to Sydney-Side.

  And the dreary cloud line never veiled the end of one day more,

  But the city set in jewels rose before me from ‘The Shore’.

  Round the sea-world shine the beacons of a thousand ports o’ call,

  But the harbour-lights of Sydney are the grandest of them all!

  THE MELBOURNE CUP

  How Rivalry Created an Aussie Icon

  The Melbourne Cup was the brainchild of Captain Standish, Chief Commissioner of Police in Melbourne and Victoria Turf Club Chairman at the time.

  There was intense rivalry between Melbourne’s two racing clubs, the Victoria Turf Club and the Victoria Jockey Club. Up until the 1850s, the Melbourne races were run annually in the autumn but, with the gold rushes bringing money into the city and a booming economy, Melbourne became the largest and most prosperous city in Australia. Then the Victoria Turf Club decided to make its mark and hold a spring meeting—it was a masterstroke!

  The Cup was first run in November 1861 at Flemington. The new race attracted top colonial horses from the parent colony of New South Wales, including the winner, Archer. This established a great Cup tradition of interstate rivalry, or inter-colonial rivalry as it was back then.

  One of the main reasons for the Cup being established was to assert Melbourne’s superiority over Sydney both as a city and sporting capital. Victorians were keen to establish Melbourne as the sporting capital, as well as the financial capital, of all the colonies.

  So the Victoria Turf Club announced the running of a great new race. It was to be an egalitarian affair with the best horses carrying extra weight to make the race more equal. The trophy was a gold watch and the prize money of £710 was the most ever put up for a race in the colonies.

  A horse from parent colony New South Wales winning the great new race was exactly what was not supposed to happen. When the unthinkable did happen a wonderful tradition of myths, legends and larger-than-life history developed around the Cup right from the start.

  The story of Archer’s two victories in the first two Cups is the stuff of legend. He is supposed to have walked from his home near Nowra to Melbourne twice, but the truth is that Archer went by steamship from Sydney to Melbourne three times to compete in Victorian Spring races, in 1861, 1862 and 1863.

  Etienne de Mestre’s horses usually boarded the steamer at Adam’s Wharf near his property at Terara, on the Shoalhaven River. Floods in 1860 altered the course of the river channels and made navigation dangerous. So, from 1860 to 1863, horses were walked to the wharf at Greenwell Point 13 kilometres to the east. This may be the origin of the ‘walking to Melbourne’ myth. There is no doubt Archer went by steamship to Melbourne or Sydney or Newcastle to race; all racehorses did the same.

  Etienne de Mestre was to upset the Melbourne owners and bookmakers just as his horse upset the local champion and race favourite, Mormon.

  Archer won the first Cup convincingly by six lengths from Mormon. Seventeen horses started and a dreadful fall resulted in two being killed. A crowd of some 5000 saw the race and de Mestre, who had prepared his horse for the race away from prying eyes at St Kilda, backed Archer from ten to one into six to one and made a killing, taking untold amounts of Victorian ‘gold’ back to New South Wales.

  The irony of a New South Wales horse winning a race organised to display Victorian superiority was reinforced when Archer started favourite and won again the following year, this time defeating Mormon by eight lengths in spite of carrying 64.4 kilograms.

  A further irony, which modern race goers may not realise, is that there was no prize at all for running second back then.

  The story of how Archer missed running in a third Melbourne Cup is also part of the Cup legend. Although Archer was given the massive weight of 71.6 kilograms by the handicapper in 1863, de Mestre accepted by telegram on the due date. While that particular day was a normal working day in New South Wales, however, it was a holiday in the colony of Victoria and the telegram was not delivered until the following day and the entry was not accepted. All the interstate entrants pulled out in protest and only seven local horses ran.

  It is another delightful irony that the public holiday that enabled this act of unbridled inter-colonial perfidy to be perpetrated was Separation Day, the day that Victoria celebrated its official separation from New South Wales in 1851.

  The debacle of the third Melbourne Cup had positive results. The two Melbourne racing clubs, realising that parochialism was not the best policy, merged to form the Victorian Racing Club and the Cup recovered its prestige and went on to become our number one sporting event.

  JH

  THE MELBOURNE CUP

  LESBIA HARFORD

  I like the riders

  Clad in rose and blue;

  Their colours glitter

  And their horses, too.

  Swift go the riders

  On incarnate speed.

  My thought can scarcely

  Follow where they lead.

  Delicate, strong, long

  Lines of colour flow,

  And all the people

  Tremble as they go.

  BLIND FREDDY

  There are two main theories about the derivation of the Aussie term ‘Blind Freddy’.

  In Aussie slang, Blind Freddy is someone who is rather stupid and simple-minded. When a thing is glaringly obvious to one and all, we say, ‘Even Blind Freddy could see that!’ The ‘blindness’ implied by the phrase is more the metaphorical kind, about understanding rather than physical blindness.

  One story is that Blind Freddy was a blind street hawker in Sydney in the 1920s—but there is absolutely no documented evidence of that being true.

  Blind Freddy was, in fact, an upper class, titled Englishman, just the kind of bloke that Aussies like to sneer at and use as the butt of jokes. He was the archetypal Pommy twit w
hose incompetence was so famous that bushrangers and members of the public named him Blind Freddy.

  Sir Frederick William Pottinger was born in 1831 in India, second son of Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Pottinger of the East India Co. Educated privately and at Eton, Pottinger purchased a commission in the Grenadier Guards in 1850 and served in England until 1854. He lost much of his adoring mother’s wealth on the racecourse, succeeded his father as second baronet in 1856 and soon squandered his inheritance.

  Forced by debt to leave England, he migrated to Sydney. After failing on the goldfields, he joined the New South Wales police force as a mounted trooper. A superb horseman, he spent the next few years on the gold escort between Gundagai and Goulburn.

  Pottinger kept his title secret, but in 1860 it was discovered by the inspector-general of police and promotion came rapidly to clerk of petty sessions at Dubbo and then assistant superintendent of the Southern Mounted Patrol. Under the 1862 Police Regulation Act, Pottinger was appointed an inspector of police for the Western District. In April 1862, he arrested Ben Hall on a charge of highway robbery, but Hall was acquitted.

  Soon afterwards, Hall and Frank Gardiner and their gang robbed the Lachlan escort of some £14,000. Pottinger remained on the trail for a month and arrested two of the bushrangers, but they escaped several days later in a gun battle. In August, Pottinger and a party of police surrounded the house of Gardiner’s mistress, Kate Brown, but the bushranger escaped when Pottinger’s pistol misfired.

  Pottinger arrested a young boy on suspicion of being an accomplice and allowed him to remain in the lockup without food and water. He died in custody in March 1863 from gaol fever. Pottinger and Constable Hollister also burned down Ben Hall’s homestead.

  Ben Hall blamed Pottinger for turning him into a criminal through his sheer incompetence and failure to catch the bushranger Frank Gardiner.

  Hall said,

  Pottinger arrested me on Forbes racecourse last year and I was held for a month in gaol, an innocent man . . . Then I was arrested for the mail coach robbery and held another month before I was let out on bail. When I came home, I found my house burned down and cattle perished of thirst, left locked in yards. Pottinger has threatened and bullied everybody in this district just because he can’t catch Gardiner.

  Early in January 1865, hoping to lure Ben Hall and John Dunn into the open, Pottinger rode in the Wowingragong races in breach of police regulations and was dismissed from the police force on 16 February 1865. On 5 March 1865, at Wascoe’s Inn in the Blue Mountains on his way to Sydney to seek redress through official channels, Pottinger accidentally shot himself in the upper abdomen while boarding a moving coach. He died on 9 April 1865. He was buried at St Jude’s Anglican Church, Randwick.

  So there is the true derivation of the term ‘Blind Freddy’, it was Sir Frederick William Pottinger—Blind Freddy could see that!

  JH

  BURKE AND WILLS

  The ‘Dig’ Saga

  On 20 August 1860, Robert O’Hara Burke led an expedition of sixteen men out of Melbourne in an attempt to be first to cross the continent from south to north.

  The idea was to open up a route by which the new-fangled invention of the telegraph line could be connected via Java to Europe, to explore the possibility that there was an inland sea, and to discover a possible route for a railway.

  An added incentive was a £2000 reward for being the first to survey a route north; Charles Sturt and John Stuart were already planning similar journeys from Adelaide.

  Burke was to lead the expedition with George James Landells, who had brought the camels and drivers to Australia from India, as second in command and William John Wills as surveyor. They took a two-year supply of food, as well as beds, hats, buckets and eighty pairs of shoes.

  Landells quit the expedition at Menindee and Wills became second in command. Menindee became the headquarters for the expedition.

  At the Darling River, William Wright and Charles Gray joined the crew and led them to Coopers Creek where, on 11 November, they set up base camp. It was at this point things began to go wrong.

  After a long wait at the base camp for the others to reach them with additional supplies, an impatient Burke decided to leave with Wills, King and Gray anyway and worry about the additional supplies when they returned.

  They finally reached the mangroves and could hear the ocean in the distance, so they turned back.

  Arduous conditions, intense summer heat, and problems with dysentery and health delayed their return from the Gulf, which they reached in February 1861, and the party waiting at the base camp left just nine hours before they arrived back, leaving buried supplies under a tree beside the creek after carving ‘DIG’ into it.

  The tree at Coopers Creek with its inscription is now a national monument.

  Gray had died of dysentery on the return journey from the Gulf and Burke, Wills and King survived for two months at the site before deciding to attempt to reach Mount Hopeless Station 250 kilometres to the west.

  They left a note explaining what they were doing in the hole where the supplies had been, but didn’t alter the message carved on the tree.

  When the relief party came back no one thought to look and see if the supplies were gone and the note was not found. Burke and Wills died in the desert and King was finally found and helped by Aborigines. He was later found by a search party and returned to Melbourne where he died in January 1872 aged thirty-one. His grave is in the Melbourne Cemetery.

  There is a monument to Burke at Castlemaine in the goldfields area of Victoria where he was a superintendent of police up until the time he led the expedition.

  There is also a large monument to the explorers in Melbourne.

  Robert O’Hara Burke was born in 1821 and educated in Galway, Ireland; he served as a captain in the Austrian Army until 1848 when he joined the Irish Police Force. He came to Tasmania in 1853 and later worked in Beechworth and Castlemaine in Victoria as a policeman and superintendent until the 1860 expedition. He was forty when he died.

  William John Wills was a doctor and surveyor. Born in Devon, England, he and his brother Thomas left for Australia in 1852, arriving in Melbourne on 3 January 1853. He began work as a surveyor with the Surveyor of Crown Lands. He accompanied Burke as the official surveyor for the ill-fated expedition, which cost him his life, aged twenty-seven.

  JH

  NED KELLY

  Villain or Hero?

  There are two versions of the Ned Kelly story.

  While at school, Ned saved a seven-year-old boy from drowning and received a silk sash for his courage. At the age of twelve, he was forced to quit school to become the family breadwinner after the death of his father, but despite this he educated himself and was known for his good use of language and fine sense of humour. He was a great horseman and won the unofficial boxing championship of Northern Victoria by defeating Isaiah ‘Wild’ Wright in twenty rounds at Beechworth.

  Ned claimed the law was unfair and picked on the poor; he and his relatives began to pay back the local wealthy landowners by rustling their cattle. Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick sexually assaulted Kate Kelly and was wounded by a gunshot to the wrist. Fitzpatrick swore he’d pay the Kelly family back and his false report about the incident led to Kelly’s mother being jailed for three years. Ned wrote his famous Jerilderie letter to make known his side of the story.

  Historian Malcolm Ellis, however, described Ned Kelly as ‘one of the most cold-blooded, egotistical, and utterly self-centred criminals who ever decorated the end of a rope’.

  In 1869, Ned was arrested for an alleged assault on a Chinese pig and fowl trader, with the delightful name of Ah Fook, and held for ten days on remand. The next year, he was arrested and held in custody for seven weeks as a suspected accomplice of Harry Power, the bushranger.

  In 1870, Kelly was convicted of summary offences and imprisoned for six months. Soon after release, he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for receiving a mare knowing it t
o have been stolen. In 1874, he was discharged from prison. His mother married George King and Ned joined his stepfather in stealing horses.

  The Kellys were rarely out of trouble with the law. Ned’s younger brother, James, was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for cattle stealing in 1873; released in 1877, he went to Wagga Wagga where he was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for stealing horses. The third brother, Dan, had been sentenced to three months’ imprisonment in 1877 for damaging property and, soon after his release in 1878, a warrant was issued for his arrest for stealing horses.

  Sergeant Kennedy and Constables Lonigan, Scanlon and McIntyre set out to capture Ned and Dan. They camped at Stringybark Creek where Ned saw them. The Kelly Gang surprised the camp and, when Lonigan drew his revolver, Ned shot him dead. McIntyre surrendered. When Kennedy and Scanlon returned, they did not surrender when called on, and, in an exchange of shots, Ned killed Scanlon and mortally wounded Kennedy. Ned later shot him in the heart, claiming it was an act of mercy. McIntyre escaped to Mansfield and reported the killings.

  There are also two ways of seeing the Jerilderie letter.

  The letter was written before the Kellys’ raid on the Riverina town of Jerilderie in February 1879, and one reason for the raid was to deliver the letter to the newspapers. After robbing the bank, Kelly sought out the town’s newspaper editor, who was nowhere to be found. The bank’s accountant, Edwin Living, offered to accept the letter and pass it on. Kelly gave it to him saying, ‘Mind you get it printed, or you’ll have me to reckon with next time we meet.’

  Undeterred, Living ignored the order and the letter was sent to Melbourne. It was returned to Edwin Living after Kelly’s execution. The letter remained in private hands until it was donated to the Victorian State Library in 2000.

  Approximately 8000 words long, the letter is Ned Kelly’s ‘manifesto’ and passionately articulates his pleas of innocence and desire for justice for the poor Irish selectors of Victoria’s north-east. The letter outlines Ned Kelly’s troubled relations with the police and offers his version of the events at Stringybark Creek, where three policemen were killed in October 1878.