Wool Away, Boy!

by Alan Blunt

  ‘Now, take a gander at the presser here. He likes to dance around and big-note himself while some mug takes a swing and a miss and looks silly, so when a red-headed kid surprises us all and cuts him down to size we’re on his side. But it don’t mean the presser ain’t still our mate – just because we sling shit at him.’

  The big German looked more perplexed; and my grin broke into a chuckle. ‘That’s right, Darkie. Your elucidation has made it as clear as mud for the old mate.’

  ‘There he goes again,’ Darkie said. ‘Coughing up the dictionary and getting in the last word.’

  Clearly I was picking up a reputation for big-noting by dropping in words I had learnt from poems and short stories I loved. I had with me volumes of Blake and Keats, Rudyard Kipling, HG Wells and Katherine Mansfield, and a volume of Russian short stories. The jibes were all in fun: Karl would give me a brotherly clap on the back which nearly floored me, and comment, ‘You full of the bullshit. Politician you should be!’

  Saturday and Sunday morning smokos were later because breakfast was postponed till eight o’clock so that the cook could enjoy the luxury of a sleep-in – till 5.30am. Snowy Hales and a few of the old hands had the coppers smoking and their washing on the boil before sun-up. After breakfast had settled and the washing was hung to dry, Snowy kick-started a display of outdoor entertainment. He laid out a large railway tarp to show that at thirty-seven years he could still run on his hands and do backflips, tumbles and cartwheels. There were plenty of laughs when some of the young blokes went leg-up trying to duplicate him. Bluey volunteered to stand in front of him and place his hands on Snowy’s head, while Snowy crouched and grabbed the rousie by the ankles. ‘Stand stiff and straight as a gun barrel and hold yer nerve,’ he commanded, before easily raising Bluey’s ankles to shoulder height and walking twenty paces with the young man aloft.

  The old shearing shed sports of shot-putting with a brick, javelin-throwing with a broom and scratch-pulling were noisily contested before Snowy, swinging a pair of dumb-bells back and forth for momentum, soared thirteen feet in a standing broad jump – half a yard clear of the field. Then about fifteen of the younger blokes lined up for a hundred-yard sprint. Darkie fired a twenty-two rifle in the air, and they galloped over grass and gibbers. Barefooted, Snowy Hales rocketed away, while David, wearing sandshoes and still lengthening his stride, strode past Bluey to finish a closing second. Obviously surprised at his defeat, David eyed his shearing mentor and challenged, ‘How about you and I run a hundred yards for ten quid, Snow?’

  Snowy smiled and declined. ‘I’m not a betting man,’ he said. The pressure mounted – already bets were placed. Snowy reluctantly agreed. ‘Alright, but let’s make it over fifty yards.’ They compromised on a match race over seventy-five yards.

  David vanished into his room for a few minutes. He emerged bearing a ten-pound note and wearing running spikes – and interest intensified.

  ‘No bet, lad!’ Snowy said as seriously as a Jehovah’s Witness on a Saturday soul-saving mission. ‘Didn’t your mother tell you that gambling is a bad habit? Like smoking and drinking it leads to personal degradation.’

  David was wrong-footed; his practised aloofness rattled. ‘Well, er … ah, I don’t smoke – and I drink only in moderation.’

  This response drew a round of laughter and a gigging from the listeners. Dinny said, ‘I’ll bet the sheilas reckon you’re the life of the party. I’ll bet you a bottle of Bulimba beer to a packet of Craven A cigarettes that Snowy shows you his heels.’

  ‘You’re set – and doubled,’ David shot back.

  In fact, Snowy Hales was a betting man if he liked the odds, and he usually didn’t shy off backing himself in challenges of strength and sprinting. His failure to take a punt on himself indicated to the old hands that he didn’t believe he had the young challenger’s measure. Snowy’s backers had been laying odds; now, suddenly the odds on David dried up. ‘Give us the tenner, son,’ Snowy Robbins said, ‘and I’ll see if I can get yer set.’

  Waving twenty quid over his head he commanded with the flair of a showground spruiker, ‘C’mon, roll up, get on while yer can, fellas. Take a gander at the starters! Snowy Hales here has run ’em off their feet in match races from the Charters Towers to Bourke. He’s beat all the guns, and the would-be’s and the could-be’s, and it’s known that only the handicapper beat him in the Stawell Gift.’ At this claim Snowy grinned sheepishly and turned away.

  ‘Now turn your attention to the challenger,’ Snowy called. ‘He’s lanky and still growing and so awkward he’s got two left feet. Don’t let the flash running shoes fool yer! This rooster couldn’t run out of sight in a railway tunnel at midnight. He should be ten to one, but I’ll take twos, anyone give me twos – six to four?’

  After a rally of ribald and sarcastic comments went the rounds, a laughing Frankie Roberts called, ‘You’re a cagey old bugger, Snowy, but I’ll set twenty at even money.’

  Observing David’s flying finish in the first race, Old Snowy had backed him for a few quid before quietly opining, ‘One right out of the box, this fellow. Good hip drive, high knees, straightens up. He’s been coached by a pro.’ Now he said, ‘Twenty quid it is, Frankie! I’ll set the other ten.’

  It wasn’t a cinders track, but the twin wheel tracks made a hard, bouncy surface, the gibbers compressed by decades of iron and rubber-tyre traffic. At Darkie’s command of ‘On your marks, get set’ the contestants dropped as earnestly as Olympic finalists. With the crack of the twenty-two rifle Snowy’s short legs shot him off like a tin hare. He looked home-and-hosed at fifty yards, but David had straightened and thrown his head back and his long strides were gaining ground. Grunting, he strode alongside, threw his chest and broke the tape inches ahead of Snowy, while the watchers cheered and yahooed a din equal to five times their number.

  3

  FLYING PIGS, FLYING RAMS AND BUSTED OVENS

  The following Sunday, a dour shearer called Scotty produced a soccer ball and began booting it about. Pretty soon the lads joined in and Scotty organised a seven-a-side match on a field fifty yards by twenty-five, with four-gallon drums marking the boundaries and goal posts. Big Karl was the only other bloke who had played the game, so Scotty appointed him opposing captain and explained the strange rules to the rugby players. ‘No tackling and don’t handle the ball.’

  It didn’t sound like a lot of fun. ‘A game for pansies,’ Dinny declared. ‘Count me out!’

  Karl was goalie. Despite a couple of courageous diving saves into the gibber stones and the power of the German’s boot, Scotty’s speed and deceitful feet soon had his team three up. I was challenging for the ball, racing alongside Scotty, when I was caught in a shoulder and neck hold and slammed headfirst into the gibbers. Stunned, I sat up to see Scotty jerk his T-shirt over his head. Livid with rage, he snarled in his Scotts burr, ‘You elbowed me, you bastard. You bloody fouled.’

  Rising, I tried to shape up, but staggered sideways on a twisted ankle. Fists clenched, Scotty was coming in fast for the kill when Karl hit him like an express train. Grabbing his man in a bear hug he hurtled ten steps and smashed him against the wall of the boss’s hut. Again the big wool roller seized the Scotsman like a rag doll and threw him into the wall, before heaving him high above his head and hurling him to the ground. Thunderstruck, the onlookers stood rooted by the sudden raw violence of the action and Karl’s awesome strength. They heard him bellow, ‘What you do to my mate, huh? Why you hurt my mate, you bastard?’ Half-conscious, Scotty sat up, but made no reply. Karl took a few deep breaths, cooling his rage.

  The big German was as surprised as everyone else by his explosive reaction. Turning to the silent watchers, he spread his hands and explained, ‘He was a bad boy, a naughty boy.’ It sounded so ludicrous even Sour Jack, watching from his hut verandah, spared a grin as he turned away. Dinny said to Karl, ‘Crikey, mate! Remind me not to be a naughty boy, won’t yer, before yer do yer lolly.’

  The soccer game was over. Men
began to move again, and Tall Snowy and Dinny trotted over to check Scotty for life. Refusing an arm, he rose shakily and retreated to his room. Karl supported me to the hut verandah; somebody fetched the first-aid kit from the shearing shed, and Tall Snowy expertly splinted my ankle. Strapped each day like a race horse, I toiled painfully through the duration of the shed while Karl proved to be a fair-dinkum mate by carrying the lion’s share of work for half the pay. The weak ankle was to trouble me for years – always reminding me of the foul-tempered Scotsman.

  The rules were lights out and radios off by ten o’clock, but most of the rooms were dark and silent by eight o’clock, or nine o’clock at the latest, as the work-weary team slipped into slumber. The exception was a room shared by Bluey and Tall Snowy, where a game of poker thrived till eleven o’clock some nights. Despite being reprimanded for disturbing the sleep of the occupants of the neighbouring rooms, the games continued. Young Bluey was too weary to play poker; instead he grumbled and growled in the smoky room as he tried to sleep. ‘Say your prayers and cuddle your teddy, sonny’ and ‘Bysy-wysy, little man’, was all the sympathy he got. Next door, through the thin dividing wall, Karl and I would hear Dinny growl when he lost, ‘Shut up and hide yer head under the blankets, Bluey. Yer putting the mox on me; buggering my concentration!’ We got little sleep until the game finished.

  Bluey had an idea, and a quiet word with Karl and me. Next day, instead of knocking off early to be first to the showers, we waited for the rousie to finish his chores. We three conspirators then headed half a mile along a dry gully in search of wild pigs.

  We knew that each evening a large spotted sow led some twenty grunters of various colours and sizes from their cover in a lignum patch. Pig-chatting in grunts and squeals about the coming feast, they trotted along a well-worn path which led to where the yardman tipped the scraps from the kitchen bin, which was known as a tumbling-tommy.

  We hunters had no pig-dog, I was ankle strapped and limpy, and my companions knew sweet Fanny Adams about catching wild pigs. But we were fit, as keen as butcher’s blades and primed for vengeance on the poker players.

  Pigs have an ordinary sense of smell and vision, but they hear keenly, so Bluey and I crouched behind mimosa bushes a few yards on the down-wind side of the track, with Karl about fifteen yards forward of us. As soon as the pigs had jogged merrily past Bluey and me, Karl jumped into the boss sow’s path, threw his arms up and shouted, ‘Achtung, you bastards!’ Ambushed, the battalion of grunters halted and wheeled in one move. With a chorus of startled squeals, they split in all directions – but by then Bluey was among them. Sprinting and diving he took a young boar in a flying tackle, and they rolled in a cacophonic bundle of bad language and squeals and dust and gibbers until I grabbed a hind leg and hitched three legs together with a leather thong. Karl pulled a flour sack over the head, and the captive instantly quit snapping and squealing, allowing Karl to heft the 120-pound porker onto his shoulder and march for the woolshed.

  ‘Talk about a Clive-bloody-Churchill tackle, Bluey! You’re a little ripper!’ I exclaimed, referring to the legendary New South Wales rugby league fullback and Kangaroos captain. Still chuckling, we locked the boar in the bottom box of the wool press. Reluctantly, Bluey went to bed in his room beside the poker players after tea to allay suspicion. Karl carried the captive boar to the rear of the huts at nine o’clock, and I swiftly loosed the legs and raised the swing-out window so that Karl could jerk the flour sack free and hurl the porker through the open window.

  ‘Three ladies and I’ll look –’ said Dinny, announcing three queens and covering a bet as the flying pig hit the middle of the table. Simultaneously, the window slammed shut, the carbide light went out, and a hullabaloo of squeals and grunts and yells and foul language exploded as brave men heroically scrambled for a safe spot on the beds while the panicked porker charged and crashed about in the dark.

  A wild yell came with the classic Aussie query: ‘What the f––?’

  ‘Get a torch!’ and ‘Strike a bloody light!’ and ‘Where’s the effing door?’ echoed in the pitch black, smoky cell.

  Choking back laughter, we pranksters skeltered. We had joined the sleepy ‘What the bloody hell’s going on?’ mob gathering on the verandah, when Darkie flung the door open from outside. Seeing light, the pig and five men rushed for safety, bowling him over. The porker vanished into the night.

  Over the following days, the ‘flying pig’ incident raised plenty of laughs. Fingers were pointed, and on Saturday morning a mock trial was held on the verandah. Tall Snowy felt qualified to sit on the case – word was he’d had spells in Boggo Road Gaol for breaking and entering, so he knew about the legal system. He had twinkling blue eyes and was as friendly and innocent looking as the family Labrador.

  ‘I’ve fronted more beaks than you’d find on a cackle-nut farm,’ he declared, donning a stony visage and mop-head wig.

  Accusations flew thick and fast, but all suspects had an alibi – albeit some seemed as absurd as flying pigs. David pointed out that in medieval times pigs and dogs and cats had been put on trial, and even hung, drawn and quartered. He might have been only a learner shearer (a small cut above a rousie in the shed hierarchy) but the boys listened respectfully, for his defeat of Snowy had given his team status considerable weight – although what sprinting ability had to do with British legal history no one thought to inquire. Frankie’s younger brother, Peter, a fat, laughing learner shearer, was drafted to play the absent pig – accused of breaking and entering, disturbing the peace and flying without a licence.

  David, a natural straight-faced comic, insisted on representing the pig as interpreter and advocate. Peter the pig grunted and squealed his plea and David interpreted, while the boys laughed and whistled and chiacked, yelling ‘Hang the bastard – he’s as guilty as hell’ and ‘Draw and quarter him, too – whatever that means’.

  The judge’s claw-hammer gavel rapped, and David said solemnly, ‘My client pleads Not Guilty! Respectfully, your Worship, it is a scientific fact that the familia porcine is flightless; and although a common folklore saying is “and pigs might fly” this is merely sarcasm to admonish fools and liars.’

  The magistrate added to his authority by taking time, doodling with his pen and blowing smoke rings. At last, heeding calls of ‘Get on with it or we’ll hang you’, he called for silence and spoke of the gravity and importance of the case, before delivering the verdict. ‘I declare, by the authority vested in me by this kangaroo court, the accused pig is free to go. The caper of the flying pig was an Act of God. The accused lost his way and flew through the window by chance. “Pigs might fly!” people often say, but now you know – for witness has been sworn – that pigs do fly.

  ‘The fact is that a lot of things are right that folks say aren’t true. For instance, Old Snowy here has told us that when he was a boy he was known as George Washington because he could not tell a lie. We know him as a trustworthy gentleman who has seen more yowies and bunyips than you can poke a stick at; and he once ran down that mysterious min min light seen occasionally in outback Queensland and put it in a pickle jar. Who are we to doubt his word?

  ‘Darkie says that when he was a rousie here at Malboona in 1938 he shot a giant rock python. There was the skeleton of a rousie inside. The rousie had been lost six months earlier at crutching time, but they knew it was him because in one bony hand he held a tar-pot and a broom in the other. Recently, the stove had a few words to say – so a flying pig should come as no surprise. The case is dismissed.’ Flapping his ‘wings’ and grunting and squealing while urged on by the jury, Peter the pig celebrated his release by flying the length of the hut verandah.

  Knobby Clark was the Malboona cook (or babbler). Pretty well all shearers’ cooks wore nicknames, whether they tolerated them or not. His was ‘The Busted Oven’ – respectfully abbreviated to ‘B-O’ by the young rousies when out of earshot.

  Shearers’ cooks were outsiders whose work hours excluded them from the genera
l bonding of a shearing team. To satisfy hungry men with three meals and two smokos per day on working days, they had to rise at 4.30am and put breakfast on at 6.45am. They wouldn’t finish in the kitchen before 9.30pm. Come Saturdays and Sundays, however, they would enjoy a sleep-in till 5.30am, as breakfast wasn’t till 8am. Poor cooks had short careers, while good babblers, no matter how moody, were always sought, despite their idiosyncrasies.

  The talking stove incident had come about because Knobby rarely conversed with people, but often had a heart-to-heart yarn with his kitchen furnishings. Pushing in among the diners he would set to work with a dish-cloth, while scolding: ‘What’s the meaning of this, Table? Only this morning, I wiped you as clean as the soul of a newborn babe, and here you go again – covered in crumbs and tea slop. Won’t you ever learn?’ He would finish off by whacking the tabletop a couple of times with the cloth, and then proceed to admonish a kerosene fridge, which was issuing smoke through the flue because the wick needed trimming. ‘What’s this bloody smoking caper, Fridge? No smoking in my kitchen, Fridge! I’ll trim your wick quick bloody smart!’

  Knobby would deliver these reprimands without the shadow of a smile, oblivious of blokes who might be sitting or standing around. They would choke their chuckles and swallow smiles, for this babbler was known to have the verbal bite of a bailed-up bull terrier and they didn’t want to upset a good cook.

  One morning at 4.30 Knobby clumped into the kitchen and threw open the fire-box on the big range. Stirring the coals vigorously with a poker he grumbled, ‘Good morning, Stove! And what have you got to say for yourself? I stoked you at one o’clock and now, you lazy blighter, you’re half out. And what are we going to feed these thankless bastards this morning, Stove? Tell me that!’

  The stove replied instantly, ‘Give ’em the same shit you usually do, Knobby. And if you jab me with that poker again I’ll stuff it right up your ring.’ Knobby stumbled backwards. He wheeled about, bolted breakneck through the door and ran twenty yards into the frosty night before it struck him that stoves can’t talk. Meanwhile, Dinny slipped from behind the stove and rejoined Bluey and Tall Snowy, who were in on the joke.