Wool Away, Boy!

by Alan Blunt

  My own contact with the man had been indirect. A young part-Aboriginal woman who worked at a pub as a housemaid had gone to the movies with me a few times the previous year. She had surprised me by ending the brief affair with a cool kiss. ‘My boyfriend will be back from holidays on Monday,’ she said calmly. ‘He thinks he owns me. He’ll bash me when he hears I’ve been out with you.’

  ‘Strewth, Lily! Are you fair dinkum?’ I had exclaimed in genuine shock. I was angry because she was dropping me cold and wondered why she had come out with me at all if her penalty would be so severe. ‘Well, don’t tell him,’ I spluttered. ‘Where the hell’s he sprung from, anyway?’

  She looked at me as if I were stupid. ‘Somebody will tell him; they always do. Don’t you know that?’ Seeing the look of hurt and puzzlement on my face, she smiled and softened her tone. ‘I guess I wanted to go out with you. It’s been nice.’

  ‘Well, why the hell don’t you leave him?’

  ‘I live in the quarters at the pub,’ she said with some impatience. ‘He comes in whenever he wants to. That’s why I wouldn’t allow you in my room.’

  ‘Gees!’ I said, sounding a little incredulous. ‘If you really want him out, tell him to go. It’s your room. If he bails up, see the boss. I don’t know him well, but he seems to be a decent bloke. He’ll give the bludger the shove.’

  ‘Will he?’ she replied sardonically. ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’

  ‘I get it,’ I said sharply. ‘Maybe you don’t. It’s a free country.’

  ‘Sometimes I think you’re bloody stupid,’ she said. ‘He’s a cop! And the boss isn’t silly enough to get offside with the law. Do I have to spell it out? They wouldn’t get off his back. I mean SP betting and after-hours grog …’

  ‘Well, your boss is bloody weak!’

  ‘He’s not the only one,’ she snapped, her dark eyes flashing anger. ‘Have a look at me.’ She was standing straight, presenting herself, arms down, palms out, her shoulders back, an attractive young woman with pride in her appearance. Her glossy black hair had been waved and styled and a tasteful necklace of imitation pearls contrasted her flawless brown skin.

  ‘Have a good look. Well, what do you see? You haven’t got the guts to say it: “She’s just another gin.” You’re no braver than the rest.’

  She strode away, and I called, ‘But I took you to the pictures. You know I care about you, and I’m not ashamed to be seen with you.’ My inept words followed the fading sound of her sandals.

  Now, here before me was the man Lily was so scared of. The noise and motion of the party had instantly ceased with the introduction of the gun.

  ‘Stay where you are and nobody will get hurt,’ the gunman commanded, breaking the paralysis by waving the weapon above his head.

  A dimly lit figure sitting on the outskirts called calmly, ‘Put the gun away, Gary, and we’ll leave quietly.’

  ‘Shut up, Sandy! Don’t speak unless you’re addressed,’ he warned.

  ‘You’re a bloody lunatic,’ said a girl under the cover of darkness – and another whispered urgently, ‘Shush! Don’t stir him.’

  Gary (not his real name) waved the gun again then put it in his trouser pocket. He displayed his empty palms, giggled a crazy hyena laugh, and declared, ‘Magic! Now you see it now you don’t.’

  With the gun out of sight people on the edge of the clearing took a chance on flight. They ran as one, while I, slightly behind the gunman’s line of sight, took two cautious backward steps before the gunman aimed his weapon at the runners and mouthed loud gunshot noises. They kept running. The people closer to the fire had seized the opportunity to move cautiously. They were on the point of making a dash when the barrel swung back and covered them. ‘Halt. I gave you no permission to move.’

  Annette called softly, ‘Let us go, Gary. We haven’t hurt you. I’m your friend.’

  ‘You stay, Annette. You’re a slut.’

  I was afraid that Wallace would make a reckless charge and relieved to note Annette had a double-handed grip on my mate’s right arm.

  The runners had reached their cars and were already accelerating away. Still covering the group by the fire, the gunman backed up half a dozen paces, while I slipped away to shelter in the moon shadow cast by a lofty river gum. A dozen paces away Gary stopped and called calmly, ‘You can all go, except Annette. Walk, don’t run!’ He covered those on his left until he realised that Annette and Wallace were quietly escaping to his right. Supporting his right wrist with his left grip, he aimed carefully at them and called, ‘I’m a dead shot. Stop or I’ll drop you like sitting ducks.’

  I was pretty sure the hammer had clicked twice on empty chambers while the gunman was mouthing shots. Assuming the gun hadn’t been loaded and the copper’s caper was no more than a boozed megalomaniac’s grandstanding, I moved quietly to the edge of the shadow, readying for a rush and a flying tackle.

  Annette and Wallace kept walking. ‘You wouldn’t shoot me, Gary,’ Annette called, still holding Wallace’s right arm in a two-handed vice, forcing him to her offside and shielding him. ‘You’re my friend. And when you’re not drinking you’re a good person. I like you, Gary.’ She kept walking and talking in a similar vein until the sobering Wallace suddenly shook her grip and they ran for it, his arm about her.

  ‘Run, rabbit, run! Only two bullets left,’ Gary called as the gun panned them. They sprinted into the trees and vanished, expecting gunshots, but hearing only a triumphant hyena cackle and a wild shout ringing through the scrub. ‘Fools! My pistol isn’t loaded. I fooled you, I fooled you.’

  A few seconds of silence dominated before I heard Gary snigger, ‘Maybe it was loaded?’ He gazed upwards and sang boisterously to the moon:

  I didn’t know the gun was loaded,

  And I’m so sorreee, my friend.

  Taking aim at the moon, he yelled ‘Bang, Bang’ as the hammer struck vacant chambers. ‘Nope! She sure ain’t loaded,’ he muttered and dropped the gun in his pocket. Giggling crazily and singing, he swaggered a few steps towards his car before suddenly gazing all around. ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ he exclaimed, as though amazed at the sudden quiet beauty of night on the river. I waited, then as his head came into range I dropped him with a straight right, tight-knuckled on a steeled arm. I put so much body heft behind the blow that the follow through stumbled me over my victim.

  Later, I wondered why I had stayed when I could have retreated. Perhaps it was curiosity, maybe mock heroics – or for Lily. Yet, the punch was hardly planned. I was grinning as I raced for the car, but as I got behind the wheel it hit me that I had ‘jobbed a copper’. It was generally accepted that the best you could expect if you hit a copper was arrest on any pretext and a severe bashing.

  Wallace and Annette thought I had revved off with the rest until they ran past my car, parked close by with Gary’s. They couldn’t have been certain Gary’s weapon was not loaded, yet they waited to see if I was alright, and then Annette’s VW took off just ahead of mine when my lights came on. She braked hard half a mile down the road; we tumbled out and Wallace chuckled, ‘You whacked him?’ I was hoping the night had covered my folly, and that there were no witnesses. I hesitated and stammered, ‘N-n-no. No way in the world, mate. Job a copper! Cripes, I’m not that bloody silly!’

  Wallace said, ‘We couldn’t see anything, but it sounded like a knuckle sandwich to me. And I heard you laugh.’

  ‘’Course I laughed. You can’t help an Act of God. The mad bastard tripped and fell. And don’t you forget it, Wallace. For God’s sake, don’t put that bullshit around – the bastards would kill me!’

  ‘Settle down,’ Wallace said. ‘We don’t know nothin’ about it.’

  Annette’s compassion and training were roused. ‘Alan, did you see if he was okay, or did you just leave him lying there? He could have concussion or a fractured skull if he fell and hit his head on a rock.’

  ‘Like hell! All I did was laugh and leg it!’

  ‘He’ll live
– worse luck,’ was Wallace’s heartfelt opinion.

  Gary’s lights flared, and his car began to turn around. ‘Let’s hoof it!’ Wallace urged.

  Annette declared angrily, ‘First thing in the morning I’m going to report him; and I want you both to be witnesses. I know the girls will.’

  ‘Sure thing, love,’ Wallace said. ‘Count me in.’ She glanced at me. ‘You too, Alan. Ten o’clock at the police station.’

  My reply lacked enthusiasm. ‘Yeah, I’ll be there in the morning, Annette.’

  Wallace chuckled. ‘Typical woman: wants to save the idiot’s life one minute, and the next she wants to put him in jail.’

  Annette snapped, ‘Into care – not jail. He needs treatment.’

  Around the first corner other cars were parked. Bronco and the nurses and a few others were grouped on the side of the road. Annette’s Beetle slowed down to allow Wallace to shout, ‘Hit the toe – the mad fella is on his way.’

  ‘Never job a cop!’ rang in my head. The lights were out at the house and my hosts were asleep. I quietly rolled my swag on the front verandah stretcher I’d been allotted, collected Zulu from the backyard, and left a note: Change of mind. I’m heading for Brisbane. Thanks for everything, Les and May. See you next week.

  11

  A SHEARER WHO WATCHED EAGLES

  In the small hours I passed through Wyandra. Feeling like a wanted man, I drove another twenty miles before camping out of sight off the road for a few hours. I arrived at Kahmoo station, a few miles from town, about 10am on Sunday. As the team wouldn’t be expected on the property till Tuesday, I reported my presence at the adjacent homestead, where a confident, articulate woman who I assumed to be the boss’s wife, greeted me with an amused smile as she quizzed my early arrival. I tightened up, suspecting that the law had already warned her to be on the lookout for a violent criminal, but when she heard my hesitant explanation about wanting a quiet few days out of town to read and write she widened her smile and said, ‘There are no stores at the quarters. I’ll find you some chops, potatoes, bread – whatever you need.’

  I thanked her and got permission to light the stove and the kerosene refrigerator, and to hunt pigs on the property. The fresh meat and tucker was a welcome boost to my emergency tucker box: tinned corned beef and peas, baked beans and Sao biscuits, Carnation milk, tea, sugar, rice, condiments and flour.

  Certain I was alone in the quarters, I wandered along the verandah, wondering if the sound of my boots – echoing in the hollow rooms – might awaken the psycho metric imprints of thousands of hardy toilers; men who had briefly called these huts home, and laughed and yarned their worries away after each day of back-aching, grimy, sweating hardship. No doubt most of them were solid workmates, who were bound by class, cultural birthright and a few fickle gestures of Lady Luck’s wand, to a life of manual toil in the eternal quest for the elusive quid.

  I was startled from my pondering by a shout from the end room. ‘Hey! Who goes there?’

  A man was sitting on a stretcher. He licked a Tally-Ho cigarette paper and used it to bookmark a Penguin volume of The Grapes of Wrath. He was an inch and a half short of six feet, and his short grey hair and corpulence on a broad frame advertised an age of about forty. He didn’t look or speak like your usual bush itinerant battler, and at first I reckoned he might be an overweight, educated chap, perhaps a ‘black sheep’ banished to the backblocks by a vengeful ex-wife or bad luck with cards and horses.

  We shook hands and he introduced himself as Terry. I took a seat on the opposite bunk, and eyed four paperback titles stacked neatly on the bedside table: Confessions of Felix Krull, Poor Man’s Orange, A Farewell to Arms and Rights of Man. Terry looked over the top of his reading specs and said with a measure of self-consciousness, ‘I … er … guess you don’t go for this stuff. I picked them up secondhand in Sydney.’

  Well pleased, I grinned. ‘Would you believe, I actually do read a lot. I like to keep a few on the go at the same time. Just now it’s Memoirs of a Midget, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes and HG Wells’ short stories. All great stuff. I’ll tell you this, though: I don’t agree with the critics who put Hemingway above Steinbeck. For me Steinbeck has a sort of in-the-belly sense of humour, which puts him up a class – like in Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. And he’s a great dramatic storyteller. What do you reckon?’

  ‘I haven’t read those two, but there’s not much to laugh about in this one. It’s a good example of fiction being truer than fact: the ruthless hand of fate, the rich administering authority while bullying and robbing the poor, the cruel exploitation of the unlucky; and the empathy that shared hardship breeds. A great story – but how about For Whom the Bell Tolls? That’s the strongest novel I’ve read. Perhaps facing death is the core of the story, but it exemplifies the courage of the human spirit in ordinary folk under pressure, regardless of creed or colour.’

  I said, ‘I’ve read that empathetic courage is the sustaining principle of humanity. It arises when called upon by shared tragedy and adversity, when pride and greed have fallen. There’s any amount of evidence: Hemingway’s Spanish war, Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, prisoners of war in Changi Prison …’

  ‘Yeah,’ Terry agreed, passively rolling a smoke. ‘But some argue faith in God is even more powerful. However, in the trenches and POW prisons our diggers discovered real mateship – and it was based on courage and empathy. But in any situation a few cunning traitors and informers and weak scabs always surface.’

  I was impressed by the shearer’s knowledge and delivery. My second guess was that Terry might be a member of the Communist Party as a handful of ‘comrades’ on the shearing boards still believed in outright Marxism. If he was it wouldn’t take long for a dobber to report his presence and for his job opportunities to be restricted. The big shearing companies would fit him with the red-ragger stamp, and his ‘picture would be turned to the wall’, to quote a popular song by Charles Graham. Our Union, a conservative organisation which fought against communism in unions – and members rights, many claimed – would be of little help. To their democratic credit, a couple of office managers for UNGRA and GRAZCOS and many private contractors and graziers had ‘fair go, mate’ bred in their bones as surely as Tom Brown in his school days; and they would make a principle of employing a productive shearer regardless of his outspoken political persuasion.

  Steamy weather had been building up mountains of cloud for days, and early on Monday afternoon a huge storm broke, dropping a four-inch gully-raker in under two hours. The plains were awash, the mustering was abandoned and the sign-on postponed till the following Monday. Terry and I read and yarned and played cards. I found him to be introspective, even sombre; he kept to himself a lot, spoke correctly and rarely swore. He said he was ‘giving the grog a break’ and taking blood pressure tablets, but he sweated profusely.

  When the ground dried out enough to pick a track without bogging ankle deep, I went pig hunting with Zulu and my .243 rifle. The retribution of the law was never far from my mind, and the excitement of running an angry tusker was a hell of a lot better than sitting around the huts waiting for the inevitable approach of a paddy wagon.

  A bore-head located in the shearing-shed wool room bubbled 40,000 gallons a day of sparkling hot artesian water. As at Elmina, the bore drain ran by the huts. I stripped to my underpants, submerged slowly in hot water and bathed leisurely. Then I sat to cool and drip dry on a camp stool while enjoying a beer as much as a man destined for a bashing in the lock-up can. I yarned with the dog and watched a pair of wedge-tailed eagles circling each evening against a cloudy multicoloured sky. Terry selected a four-gallon drum for a seat. He cushioned it with a corn bag and sat silently watching the eagles, lost in thought or reading while absorbing the mood of the closing day.

  On the Friday evening I was solemnly drinking a bottle when suddenly I broke into chuckles and boisterous laughter. ‘Strike a light!’ Terry exclaimed. ‘No doubt, it’s a glorious evening and Wordsworth or Keats
might wax poetical, but I doubt they would laugh like a couple of loons. Why the devil are you cackling? Are you drunk?’

  ‘They say the coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man dies but once,’ I said, still giggling.

  ‘That’s rubbish! Hemingway had some experience with front-line fire. He says the brave man suffers two thousand deaths if he’s intelligent; he just doesn’t mention it.’

  ‘That could be so! But I’ll crack another bottle and celebrate. I’m free! Free as an eagle.’

  Terry fixed me with a solicitous stare. ‘You’ve had something on your mind, cobber. I didn’t like to comment, but – like my gran used to say – “You’re as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”’

  I was aware I’d been keeping an eye on the road for approaching police cars, but was confident I had masked my apprehension. Apparently, my anxiety had been obvious, but it didn’t matter: only minutes ago, while entranced by distant eagles, it had struck me that I had been worrying foolishly. Be thoughtful was one of my mantras, so I was surprised to realise that my rationality had been frozen by fear. If the cops really wanted me they wouldn’t need Sherlock Holmes to direct their inquiry to Provo Bob’s office – and I’d have been in the slammer and copped a biffing days ago.

  Maybe Gary never realised that he’d been bush whacked; that he assumed a drunken stumble and tumble had knocked him cold as a cucumber. And if he had guessed he’d been king-hit he probably wouldn’t have a clue who had hit him: most of the hardy young bush workers could and would punch up if called upon, and wouldn’t miss a chance to get square on a standover copper who had pulled a gun. Besides, once the girls had reported him to his seniors Gary would have to tread carefully; and on sobering up he would surely have the nous to know that his part in the affair would come out if he falsified a report. The story might well make headlines in the Sunday Truth news paper. If so it would cause a hell of a stir; and it might well finish his career. Time and the Fitzgerald Royal Commission were to prove that Queensland harboured a significant minority of bent and vicious policemen, but they had the cunning to distract from their dark side with propaganda illuminating their heroic dedication. Lowly constables won no awards for foolishly terrorising citizens at barbecues.