Best Australian Yarns

by Haynes, Jim

  Much of the letter is an articulate and reasonable refutation of the police evidence against Ned—but it also has a ring of Irish ‘terrorist’ about it and an illogical hatred of any authority:

  A Policeman is a disgrace to his country, not alone to the mother that suckled him . . . he is a rogue in his heart, but too cowardly to follow it up without having the Force to disguise it. Next, he is a traitor to his country, ancestors and religion, as they were all Catholics before the Saxons. Since then they were persecuted, massacred, thrown into martyrdom and tortured beyond the ideas of the present generation.

  There are even two versions of Ned’s last words. Some claim he said ‘So, it has come to this.’ Most of us prefer the other reported last words, the more poignant and philosophical ‘Such is life.’

  Ned Kelly’s bones were positively identified in 2012 using DNA from his sister’s great grandson. The skull claimed to be his proved to be someone else’s. He was buried privately by his family in 2013 after the bones were returned to them.

  JH

  NED KELLY

  ANONYMOUS

  Ned Kelly was born in a ramshackle hut,

  He’d battled since he was a kid:

  He grew up with bad men and duffers and thieves,

  And learnt all the bad things they did.

  Now down at Glenrowan they held up the pub,

  And were having a drink and a song,

  When the troopers rolled up and surrounded the place:

  The Kellys had waited too long.

  Some say he’s a hero and gave to the poor.

  While others, ‘A killer,’ they say;

  But to me it just proves the old saying is true,

  The saying that crime doesn’t pay.

  Yet, when I look round at some people I know.

  And the prices of things that we buy;

  I just think to myself, well perhaps, after all,

  Old Ned wasn’t such a bad guy.

  THE ASHES

  The first test was played in 1877 between the touring Englishmen and a Combined Australian XI . . . what is significant about that?

  Well, there was no ‘Australia’ in 1877. Cricket gave us an Aussie identity twenty-four years before we were a nation and it had a huge effect on national spirit, even though only three states were represented in the team: New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania.

  British teams had toured here from the 1850s, but had always played against teams of seventeen or fifteen players from each separate colony; in 1866, an Aboriginal team toured the UK, and did quite well.

  New South Welshman Charles Bannerman set two records in the first test ever played and one will never be beaten, although the other might be. He scored the first run in test history and scored sixty-seven per cent of the runs in an innings—he made 165, retired hurt.

  There was controversy right from the beginning. Due to the bitter inter-colonial rivalry that existed at the time, the two best bowlers in the country refused to play. Victorian Frank Allen decided to go to the Warrnambool Show instead and New South Wales bowler Fred Spofforth would not bowl to the Victorian wicketkeeper Jack Blackham and refused to play.

  There’s also an irony in our first test team’s make up—seven of the Australian team were born in Britain, including Bannerman!

  The next year, a combined team, including Spofforth, paid their own way to the UK and destroyed W.G. Grace’s MCC side at Lords, bowling them out for 33 and 19. In this match, Spofforth gained his nickname, the Demon Bowler.

  Sadly, this match was not given ‘Test’ status.

  A total of eight tests were played before 1882—seven in Australia and one in the UK. Australia won four tests, England two and two were drawn.

  In 1882, England lost at home for the first time and Spofforth won the test for Australia, taking 7 for 44. He bowled his last eleven overs for two runs and four wickets and Australia won by eight runs.

  After the match the following poem was published in Punch:

  Well done, Cornstalks! Whipt us fair and square,

  Was it luck that tript us? Was it scare?

  Kangaroo Land’s ‘Demon’, or our own

  Want of ‘devil’, coolness, nerve, backbone?

  Also, a mock obituary was famously inserted in the Sporting Times, which read:

  In Affectionate Remembrance of ENGLISH CRICKET, which died at the Oval on 29th AUGUST, 1882, Deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowing friends and acquaintances R.I.P. N.B.—The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.

  This was the beginning of the Ashes legend.

  When the 8th Earl of Darnley, Ivo Bligh, led the English team to Australia in the following English winter, the English press joked that he was going to ‘bring back the ashes’.

  When his team won two of the three official tests, a group of Melbourne ladies, including Bligh’s future wife, Florence Morphy of Beechworth in Victoria, and Lady Clarke, who had, along with her husband, entertained the English team in Melbourne, made a presentation to him of a terracotta scent bottle, which contained some ashes.

  In 1998, Darnley’s eighty-two-year-old daughter-in-law said they were the remains of one of her mother-in-law’s veils, probably from a hat. MCC officials still claim, however, that it is ‘ninety-five per cent certain’ that the urn contains the ashes of a cricket bail, most likely one used in a social game between the English team and one chosen by Sir W.J. Clarke.

  While ‘bail’ and ‘veil’ are very close in sound, and a misunderstanding is plausible, anyone understanding the nature of the joke presentation (and how hard it is to actually cremate a cricket bail and recover the ashes) will realise that the ashes are, in all likelihood, derived from something much easier to incinerate than a wooden bail. At least, that’s my opinion.

  The Countess of Darnley presented the urn to the MCC after her husband’s death. She died in August 1944. Replicas of the urn are often used as trophies for the Ashes Series but the original remains with the MCC in London.

  JH

  SACKCLOTH AND—

  C.J. DENNIS

  Ashes? What ashes? Please don’t talk; I’m busy.

  Strange how the work piles up to worry you.

  Don’t turn that wireless on! It makes me dizzy—

  I never listen when there’s work to do . . .

  What’s that? Heard I’d been listening all the week?

  Who said so? Lot of rot some people speak.

  What ashes are you harping on so sadly?

  You had a fire? . . . Oh, cricket? Yes. A game.

  When I was young I played it not so badly;

  But now—well, watching it is rather lame.

  Besides, there’s work to do; and life is short.

  Australians give far too much time to sport.

  Far too much time—what ashes? Oh, we’ve lost ’em.

  Well, fancy that. But does it matter much?

  A few old ashes? Think how much it cost ’em

  In energy and nervous strain and such,

  While serious things—what’s that? I didn’t get—

  Oh! So you heard I’d lost a heavy bet?

  Well—yes; I did. I mean I—had forgotten.

  And listened-in? Well—yes; for quite a while.

  Excited? Me? Aw, well; I did feel rotten.

  The ashes?—Oh, good lord, man! Raise a smile!

  Why that was yesterday. So brighten up.

  Ashes!—What’s doing in the Davis Cup?

  NELLIE MELBA

  Nellie Melba was a Melbourne girl. Born Helen Porter Mitchell in 1861, she was the eldest of ten children. Her dad was a builder and actually built Scots Church Melbourne where she sang as a child in the 1870s, and where her state funeral was held, in 1931.

  When she was twenty, the family moved to Mackay where her dad bought a sugar mill and she married a baronet’s son, Charles Armstrong. They had a son, but then she became bored and left for Melbourne to be a professional singer. The rest is history.

 
; Melba helped the careers of many younger singers. She taught for many years at the Conservatorium in Melbourne, which is named after her, and mentored and promoted some promising young opera singers, including Florence Austral, Gertrude Johnson and Louise Homer.

  Yet she was, in the words of the late John Cargher, ‘the true traditional prima donna with all the temperament, backbiting, social climbing and spontaneous generosity expected of a diva.’

  Melba was a ruthless networker who used adultery, business connections and powerful friends to get ahead and destroy the careers of her rivals. When her husband threatened divorce action, naming the Duke of Orleans as co-respondent in 1890, he was ‘talked out of it’. The Duke went on a two-year safari in darkest Africa, but his influence had already helped Melba to attain stardom in the major opera houses of Europe.

  Peter Dawson once remarked that, as far as singing at Covent Garden was concerned, any talented young soprano who seemed a threat to Melba ‘hadn’t a chance of getting in with a tin-opener.’

  Blanche Marchesi, the daughter of Mathilde Marchesi, the woman who ‘discovered’ Melba in Paris, said of Melba,

  She was the worst woman I ever knew . . . Melba’s jealousy ruined many lives . . . Some powerful, invisible spirits were hard at work to eliminate artists who might easily have settled in the hearts of the public . . . It is no exaggeration to say that Melba ruled the Edwardian musical and social world with a will of iron.

  Oddly, Melba often sang secondary roles to other female singers in major operas, like Carmen. But it was always when she knew she could either upstage the lead or when the other singers were no threat to her style of singing.

  If she wanted to unsettle a young singer singing a secondary role to her, she would stand in the wings and sing over them so they could hear but the audience could not.

  The Polish soprano Janina Korolewicz-Wayda said Melba was, ‘by nature unpleasant, off-handed and brutal, very sure of herself, conceited and spoilt.’

  All her help and support and mentoring of others came after she had finished her endless farewell tours and no longer felt threatened by young talent.

  Sadly, she died, in St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney, of septicaemia caused by a botched face lift in Europe when she was sixty-nine. She was attempting to get back to her beloved Melbourne but was too ill to travel the last leg of the journey.

  Melba is remembered by a highway, a suburb, two desserts and a conservatorium. She released over one hundred records and helped to establish the popularity of the gramophone.

  JH

  WHEN ENRICO SLIPPED NELLIE THE SAUSAGE

  One of the few people who ever got the better of Melba was the great tenor, Enrico Caruso, a man she despised as ‘common, coarse and uncultivated’ although she realised his importance to her as a partner on stage.

  Performing with her in La Bohème one night, Caruso, as a joke, took a hot sausage from the backstage buffet and slipped it into her hand as he took it to sing the famous words ‘Che gelida manina, se la lasci riscaldar’ (Your tiny hand is frozen, let me warm it).

  Melba never spoke a friendly word to the ‘vulgar Italian’ again.

  Legend has it that as Melba, disgusted, threw the offering aside as surreptitiously as possible and began to sing, Caruso whispered, ‘You English women don’t like the sausage?’

  Perhaps he should have asked the Duke of Orleans.

  JH

  MELBA

  C.J. DENNIS

  Written 6 February 1931, the day after Melba’s death.

  Born to the sun and smiling skies,

  And bird-songs to the morning flung,

  To joyousness that never dies

  In hearts that stay for ever young—

  ’Twas here, beneath the shining trees,

  She paused to learn the magic rune

  Of those unlaboured ecstasies

  That keep a weary world in tune.

  The grey thrush fluting by the nest,

  The golden whistler trilling high—

  Their gifts she captured and expressed

  In magic notes that may not die.

  Then to the old, grey world she gave,

  Exultingly, at Art’s command,

  In songs that live beyond the grave,

  Her message from a bright, young land.

  With sheer exuberance of Art,

  Won from that happy, feathered throng,

  She poured our sunshine from her heart,

  Translated into magic song.

  And tho’, alas, the singer dies,

  Who bade old continents rejoice,

  Not ever from our sunlit skies

  Departs the memory of her voice.

  A.B. (BANJO) PATERSON

  We all know ‘The Banjo’ as the man who wrote two famous poems and a song. But there are so many other elements to Andrew Barton Paterson’s life apart from being the author of ‘Clancy’, ‘Snowy River’ and ‘Waltzing Matilda’. He was a remarkable man.

  I guess most people think Paterson was born and raised in the bush, but he lived there on the family property for just the first decade of his life and left home in 1874, at the age of ten, to live with his literary-minded grandmother in Sydney and attend Sydney Grammar School.

  After leaving school, he trained to become a solicitor, and started writing poetry about current affairs, sporting events and tragic bush tales and sending them to The Bulletin. His first published poems were about the Sudan War, the Melbourne Cup and a lost child dying in the bush.

  He was a very ‘sporty’ type and a very good rider. He always said the broken arm he suffered as a child was his secret; his shortened arm gave him a light touch on the reins. His ‘nurse’ was an Aboriginal girl who was too scared to tell the family she’d dropped the baby and the arm had to be treated in several painful operations years later.

  Banjo was known as Barty to family and friends; he used the name of a station racehorse as his nom de plume, The Banjo.

  Even after ‘The Man From Snowy River’ caused a stir in The Bulletin, no one knew who The Banjo was until his first book was released. Later he was so famous that the pen name The Banjo was shortened to Banjo and added to his name.

  He played in the first New South Wales polo team ever assembled and they defeated Victoria 2–0. He won the Polo Challenge Cup, a race for polo ponies, at Rosehill racetrack in 1892. He was a member of the Sydney Hunt Club and rode at Randwick and Rosehill as an amateur jockey.

  Paterson was a solicitor by trade and helped Henry Lawson and Breaker Morant with legal matters at times. For six years he was engaged to the daughter of the head of the law firm he worked for, but the marriage never happened and it was many years before he married someone else. He became bored as a solicitor and later worked as a journalist, editor and broadcaster.

  He travelled to distant parts of Australia and the Pacific and wrote articles on pearl fishing, hunting, new colonies, racing and many other things.

  As a war correspondent at the Boer War, Paterson developed sympathy for the Boers and became opposed to the war.

  In 1914, Paterson enlisted, at the age of fifty-one, to fight in World War I and was disappointed when he was made an ambulance driver on the Western Front. He asked to do something more useful and was put in charge of the 2nd Remount Division, in charge of bringing horses from Australia via India to the war. He became a major, saw service in the Middle East and became quite ill, but continued serving until the end of the war.

  Paterson travelled to Britain and China and kept writing and broadcasting until his death in 1941.

  He was never a part of the bohemian group of writers at The Bulletin, but he met Conan Doyle, was friendly with Rudyard Kipling and developed a friendship with artist Norman Lindsay—they went for weekend rides ‘through the bushland’—at Cremorne, which is now an inner suburb of Sydney!

  JH

  BANJO

  TED HARRINGTON

  Don’t tell me that The Banjo’s dead—oh, yes, I’ve heard the tale—


  But Banjo isn’t dead at all, he’s caught the Western Mail.

  He has a lot of friends you know, among the western men,

  He wants to look into their eyes and clasp their hands again;

  He longs to spend some quiet nights beneath the western stars

  And hear the evening wind again among the green belars.

  So if they tell you Banjo’s dead just say that it’s a lie:

  He comes from where they breed ’em tough and Banjo will not die.

  They say that Clancy sent him word, he’s at the Overflow,

  With many more old mates of his who knew him long ago.

  The man from Snowy River’s there, from Kosciuszko’s side,

  Who brought the wild mob in alone and taught them how to ride.

  He’s got his mountain pony, too, as tough and wiry yet

  As when he chased the brumby mob and colt from old Regret.

  Another chap, now what’s his name? He comes from Ironbark,

  He thought the barber cut his throat and didn’t like the lark.

  All these old mates of his are there, with others on the way,

  And when he got a call from them, well, how could Banjo stay?

  There’s Gundagai and Saltbush Bill, a rough and rugged pair,

  I bet that there will be some fun when Banjo meets them there.

  Old Trooper Scott is coming, too, to represent the force,

  And Andy Regan (or his ghost) on Father Riley’s horse.

  They’re making for the Overflow, and when they all arrive,

  You’ll see that Banjo isn’t dead, he’s very much alive.

  Then glasses clink, and healths are drunk, and many a tale is told

  Of roving days and droving days that never will grow old.

  The seasons come, the seasons go, and little here abides,