Wool Away, Boy!

by Alan Blunt

  The week is past Friday at last, has come to ease the battle;

  We’ll get aboard the big blue Ford, and into town we’ll rattle.

  Our girls you bet will cease to fret, when they know we’re handy.

  We’ll douse the light and hold ’em tight, and let ’em know we’re randy.

  Alec said testily, ‘I’ve heard it a dozen times, Presser. Dry up! With the missus a thousand miles away there’s no use in me being randy. But count me in for a weekend in town. I don’t fancy strutting around the mulga like a stunned bloody plover over the weekend.’

  There were grins and nods of agreement all around: a long weekend was always welcome. All the shearers had families in Longreach they wanted to get home to, save Alec and Hickey. Hickey only worked for the necessities: a pub room and punting money.

  We were on our feet and eager to pack up and hit the road when the overseer hung up the phone and called out, ‘Hold it, you fellas! Jack, the owner, is flying The Brolga out. He’ll be here by eleven to put dinner on.’

  Reluctantly, the efficient little factory in the bush was soon back in swing to the regular thump of the Lister diesel and the rhythmic clack of the Koertz wool press, while the penner-upper bellowed, ‘Pen-up, you bastards,’ and ‘Get over and speak up! Speak up!’ to his kelpie, while the dog bounced over the backs of the woollies, barking commands.

  Before eleven o’clock I saw the Cessna land and park near the huts. The pilot and passenger alighted. An hour later I stacked my last bale of the morning and glanced through the big open doorway of the wool room; an unfamiliar figure was approaching from the kitchen, walking as if having difficulty holding a straight line. This must be the famous Brolga, I mused – but he can’t be half-shot: this bloke is supposed to be a card-carrying member of Alcoholics Anonymous and a pain-in-yer-arse campaigner against the demon drink.

  I greeted The Brolga at the door with a handshake extended. ‘G’day! They call me Presser, or Bluntie or Alan – take yer pick.’

  The Brolga ignored the extended hand and said gruffly, ‘I’m The Brolga.’

  Dismissing the snub, I smiled and continued, ‘Pleased to meetcha, Brolga. I saw yer coming in on the wing, and right away I reckoned you were some breed of bird.’

  I chuckled at my joke, but The Brolga didn’t join in. He stepped close and snapped into my face: ‘A bloody smart alec! I won’t cook for smart alecs.’ He turned stiffly and headed for the door, calling, ‘You’re nothing but a bloody idiot.’

  Joining me, the classer saw The Brolga halfway to the kitchen in full stride. ‘Is that the new cook?’ he inquired. I was glad he hadn’t heard our exchange.

  ‘What did he say?’ he queried.

  ‘He said his name is The Brolga – and then he shot through like a Bondi tram,’ I replied.

  We watched as The Brolga carried his port and swag to the plane and boarded.

  ‘It looks like he wants to go back to town,’ the classer observed.

  Within seconds Jack approached. He opened the cabin door and appeared to be tongue-lashing The Brolga, ordering him to get out. The Brolga stayed put. Exasperated and angry but making the best of a losing hand, Jack strode swiftly to the shed to confer briefly with the shed overseer, before climbing into the pilot’s seat. The Cessna taxied into the wind, hurried down the runway and took off.

  The team shore till dinner time, and walked to the mess. ‘There’s no cook!’ Hickey crowed. ‘We can’t work without a cook.’

  ‘Yer can’t help good luck,’ Fred declared. There was no disagreement – and I didn’t mention my altercation with The Brolga. As we ate the cold meat and salad meal The Brolga had knocked together, Tassie drawled, ‘I told you fellas The Brolga was a champion babbler. This is the best feed to tantalise our taste buds in six weeks.’

  We ate swiftly, showered, packed and put the hammer down on the road to town.

  After dropping me at home, Thommo and Tassie had pulled into the Palace Hotel for a couple of beers. The Brolga came in and claimed them. He was ‘flying high, powered by Johnnie Walker,’ as Tassie told it. ‘Cheerio, boys,’ he gloated. ‘I’m on the Viscount in the morning. I’ll be backing winners at Eagle Farm tomorrow afternoon while you mugs are still here swatting flies. Then I’m off to Randwick for a few meetings; and then the Spring Carnival and the Melbourne Cup. Did I ever tell you I won ten grand the year Comic Court won the Cup? Quids in those days, my friends, not dollars. I was a professional punter for two years – Professional Turf Advice, my card read.’

  ‘We need a cook, mate, not a professional bloody punter,’ Tassie drawled.

  The Brolga didn’t heed. Confidentially close, he was giving Thommo the inside info for the next day’s races at Randwick. Thommo said, ‘I’ll buy you a drink, Brolga, if you’ll piss off!’

  The drink came but The Brolga, convinced of his omniscience and feeling like a million dollars on Johnnie Walker Black Label, was already on his way, spouting expert advice along the bar.

  ‘Let’s leg it before he comes back,’ Tassie said.

  Thommo grinned. ‘Do madmen go cooking for shearers or does cooking for shearers drive men mad?’

  ‘I’m buggered if I know,’ Tassie replied. ‘I thought I’d seen ’em all; then we cop the waltzing wog trying to poison us for five or six weeks, and the famous Brolga, the champion of Alcoholics Anonymous, who turns up drunk as a skunk.’

  Thommo said, ‘I wonder who Promising Percy will find to grace our kitchen on Monday morning. I won’t be surprised if Screwy’s back – on the wagon, spick and span and full of bullshit.’

  ‘You’ve gotta be jokin’, Thommo,’ said Tassie.

  It was my turn to take my Peugeot ute to the shed. We pulled up at a quarter to seven on Monday morning. Observing smoke drifting from the kitchen chimney, Tassie said, ‘Well, at least it’s not Screwy; his old bomb isn’t here.’

  ‘Don’t bet on it,’ Thommo said. ‘The powers that be would have ferried him out early yesterday – so he couldn’t bring any grog.’

  Screwjack, clad in ironed khaki trousers and shirt and clean white apron, presided over a spotless kitchen filled with the aroma of grilled chops and bacon. It was a challenging vision.

  ‘Goot morning, boys! Thommo! I haf your favourite Uncle Toby’s Oats and varm milk.’

  Thommo didn’t reply, and Screwjack continued, ‘Doctor Murphy say, “Doug, you vera sick. No grog vile a you take da antibiotics.” No flu now! Da King of Da Valtz is happy days! My goot vife vash and iron all my clothes.’ He pirouetted while he whistled tunefully a few bars of a Strauss waltz, then wheeled and halted dramatically to address them all.

  ‘Okay, boys! Listen now! Dis business is serious. Some bastard-shithead tell Percy I haf been on da grog. Is bullshit! Is der flu I haf. I find out I bust da bastard on da nose.’ He swung a wild punch for emphasis, and we couldn’t help grinning: the idea of Screwjack busting anything more substantial than a paper bag was ludicrous.

  20

  THE TIMES THEY ARE A’CHANGING

  Through the early years of marriage I counted my blessings. Michelle, Helen and Jennifer arrived, all bright and healthy beloved babies. In September 1969, I took up an employment offer from the AWU to work as an Organiser, checking that Award conditions were being met and enlisting members. I was passionate about the work, but the job kept me on the road ten days of fourteen, the work followed me home, and the wage was ordinary. Three years later I quit, believing the job was putting stress on our marriage and that my immediate boss wasn’t always doing the best for the Union’s membership.

  For a couple of years I returned to wool pressing before, in January 1974, we bought a dairy and milk delivery, paying top prices for cows. The cattle market soon collapsed and we couldn’t afford wages, so I set about working seven days a week, rising at 1.30am, while Isabel returned to nursing. Marital relations deteriorated, we parted, and my wife began divorce proceedings. Our differences might have been many, but fortunately we agreed that the welfare of
our girls was our mutual priority.

  Six years on the authorities were putting pressure on fresh milkos to upgrade all equipment. The council demanded that I move the dairy outside the town limits and offered lease-hold land. That would mean more debt and self-imposed slavery. I cashed the cattle, paid the debts and returned to the wool press to finance myself and assist with the support of our three daughters. With some free time available the writing bug nagged again. I published magazine pieces and poems, and laboured on a historical novel, which was never finished.

  Now, away from the industry from the early 1970s to the early 1980s, I found the comforting familiar woolly smell and the pungent stench of the sheep yards remained, but the clickety song of the manual wool press had given way to the noisy, fume-spewing mini-motors powering hydraulic presses. The contract rate of pay was less but the work was considerably easier. I resented the cut in earnings but appreciated the lighter work load, as my muscles and joints were apt to remind me that I was getting a bit long in the tooth for really heavy yakka.

  Ten years had seen dramatic social change. While most sheds were still fully unionised, I regretted that workers’ solidarity and team spirit were dissipating. In the 1970s, Gough Whitlam, a progressive Prime Minister, had gone to bat for the workers, dramatically increasing wages. As a result there was a lot more ready cash about, and more shed workers had cars with radios and tapes blasting rock’n’roll at full volume on the roads Slim Dusty used to own.

  ‘Mary J’ had also come to stay. And in some sheds hostility ensued between young dope-heads, who claimed the right to blast the shearing board with head-banging sound, and older men who found the cacophony stressful and disrupting to their traditional quiet work rhythm.

  Most young woolshed workers had abandoned the restful, money-saving weekends in the bush – spent reading, yarning, letter writing to Mum or a girlfriend, listening to the races, playing cards, fishing and hunting wild pigs and roos – for the thrills of getting boozed and stoned and the prospects of a weekend’s shagging. The ACTU, led by Bob Hawke, had won ‘equal pay for work of equal value’, which was funding female independence, and the advent of the Pill had decreased the fear of casual pregnancy and increased sexual adventurism. Some men now ‘shacked up’ in town – short- or long-term – and it could be said that the hit song, ‘I won’t go hunting with you, Jake, but I’ll go chasin’ women’, had become the theme song of a generation of young bush workers.

  Although cars, telephones, electricity, diesel engines, radio and air-services had already modernised outback living, it wasn’t until the 1970s that the work practice, mateship, ideals and traditional way of life of the shearing shed intrinsically changed. While female shearers and Kiwi shearers and their women rousies were yet to become a significant part of the industry, I realised mournfully that during my absence most of the elders had been marched to death or retirement by the remorseless drum of the old enemy – Father Time. The traditional shearers’ campfire yarning, joking, chiacking and debating over politics, general news, women, sport and family were morphing from culture to folklore.

  My heart was with some old-school shed overseers and shearers who battled to hang on to the quiet values of the way of life they felt comfortable with. Men of my own generation – hardy professional shearers of middle years who might come from as far away as Sydney’s western suburbs or rural Victoria to support and educate a family – could find themselves shearing alongside tattooed, ear-ringed long-haired youths who often only shore enough to pay for their indulgences. Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, backed by the relentless blast of tape recorders, was becoming the mantra of the shearing boards.

  21

  DICK, THE EAGLE AND RITZY

  One Sunday after lunch I threw my swag and port on the back of my Tojo and called to pick up Lance. After the shearer hugged his wife and four kids we bought a couple of cartons of Fourex longnecks at the Midlander Hotel, crossed the Thomson River and headed north along the rutted river-road. Billowing dust, the ute crossed Mitchell grass downs and stony gidyea ridges, and dipped through bone-dry gullies which would become brown torrents rushing towards the river when the summer rains came – if they came.

  Lance was a conservative, dry-witted bloke of about thirty. Six foot, lean and fair, he was as straight as a boree telephone pole in figure and character; and a fast, clean shearer. If not a big gun he was certainly quick and consistent enough to keep the would-be’s and tearaways honest from Monday to Friday.

  We passed through Muttaburra and followed the Hughenden road until we turned off at the station mail box. Five miles in we passed the homestead, a friendly old low-level Queenslander sitting among shady fig trees, bauhinias, poincianas, jacarandas and citrus trees.

  A wide, flowing bore drain, its banks bound with green wild couch-grass shaded by clumps of prickly acacias, emerged from the house yard and flowed for some 400 yards before it swung around the shearing shed, watered the sheep yards and holding paddocks, and followed the fall of the land through the property.

  ‘Great place to lay down a few beds,’ commented Lance, a keen gardener. ‘Beautiful pure bore water up this way, sweet to drink, and veggies love it. Longreach bore water is too acidic. Use it for a year or two and your soil is stuffed.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘Not much of a drink, either – unless yer as dry as a wooden god. Tastes like pig’s piss. I guess that’s why they call it boar water.’

  Lance ignored the worn-out pun. ‘Speaking of grunters,’ he said, and pointed to a big white sow with a young litter lying under an acacia. Close by half a dozen muscovy ducks were paddling while a couple of tail-swishing stock horses, a bunch of red roos, three emus, a Jersey cow and calf and a couple of nanny goats with kids watched their passing. ‘Strike a light!’ I exclaimed. ‘If it’s not Animal Farm or the Western Plains Zoo.’

  ‘Go for Animal Farm,’ Lance urged, pointing to a huge white boar standing in the middle of the bore drain. ‘If that’s not Snowball I’m the town drunk!’

  Smoke blowing from the kitchen chimney and a brown Ford wagon outside the overseer’s quarters were the only signs of occupation. ‘Dick Buchanan is boss-of-the-board,’ Lance said. ‘Looks like he brought the cook; there’s a few Hughenden blokes coming to make up the team.’

  We unloaded our gear and made up our shearers’ stretchers in a room on the eastern side of the huts – away from the afternoon November sun.

  I had met Dick twenty-odd years earlier when I’d been pressing for the United Grazier’s Longreach office, and Dick had been a cheerful stud rousie (learner classer/overseer). From the sunlit plains of Longreach he had gone to serve in the jungles of Vietnam. He returned a changed person, who spoke sparingly of his war experiences. After that I didn’t meet him for years, during which time he became a periodic heavy drinker and his marriage broke down. At times he was morose, but otherwise still witty and natural officer material. I saw him as a survivor from an earlier more romantic era, a latter-day Breaker Morant, who still now and then earned his daily bread as a contract musterer and horse-breaker.

  Dick was sipping over-proof rum diluted with water while preparing sign-on contracts when I walked in. After the mandatory ‘G’days’ and a handshake Dick offered me a drink. I avoided rum and it was too early in the day for beer, but we briefly caught up on old times before the overseer suggested he had immediate duties by picking up a pen.

  Before leaving I had one important question. ‘Who’s the babbler?’ I asked.

  His pen poised, Dick looked serious. He liked to quote verse and proverbs, and snippets of wisdom and humour; now he drew on shearers’ folklore:

  The greasy cook had a sore-eyed look;

  He was covered in dust and ashes.

  He stuffed our holes with his doughs and rolls

  And he’d poison a dog with his hashes.

  ‘A bait-layer!’ I recoiled, suddenly feeling dull. The prospect of three weeks in the mulga having my digestive system ruined was discouraging. ‘Y
er gotta be joking, Dick.’

  Dick replied with mock severity, ‘Bait-layers don’t last long with me. You ought to know that!’ He broke into a grin. ‘Cheer up! They call him The Bald Eagle. You must have heard of him? He’s an old digger – loves a bet. Affable old bugger, when he’s not whingeing or trying to stand over some rousie. He’s been with me since July. Bloody trimmer of a cook; I’ve never seen better.’

  I had found chucking a shovel full of complimentary bullshit into the kitchen usually made a fair start with cooks, who often felt deserted and unappreciated, so I pushed open the gauze door and called breezily, ‘G’day Eagle! Dick says yer still turning out some of the best tucker in the back country.’ The Eagle looked to have fined down a bit over twenty years, but he was over six foot and bulky, and clad in a chef’s cap and whites. Turning away from the meat mincer he had attached to the work table, he sluiced his hands in the sink and dried them before replying, ‘Dick wouldn’t know cordon bleu from an army kitchen!’

  ‘I haven’t run across you since the rabbits were bad,’ I said. ‘How are you, anyhow?’

  ‘How am I? How the bloody hell would I be – tucker-mustering for a mob of belly-achin’ greasies at my time of life?’ The grin on his face belied his aggrieved tone; maybe he had become affable.

  ‘Who the bloody hell are you, anyway?’ he demanded, reaching for a handshake.

  ‘I pressed for Alex Meekin around Quilpie first half of 1960. We did a shed or two together. You were the babbler – a bloody good’un, too. We haven’t crossed roads since then as far as I recollect.’

  ‘Gotcha now!’ the Eagle confirmed. ‘Green Volkswagen, blue dog … a mate of mine. What was his name – Zulu?’

  ‘You’ve got a memory like Sherlock, Eagle. A wise hound, that Zulu: first thing he did when he got to a shed was pal up with the cook.’ Like a good mate or a lost love, I still missed him.