Some of My Friends Have Tails

by Sara Henderson

  He readily agreed, and went happily back out to his seat in the sun for a beer and cigarette. I hurriedly emptied the glue out of the grouting bag, etc, just finishing as he returned to work.

  This was only one of hundreds of incidents. It finally got to the point where he could not be left alone. Franz found him one day up one of the steel power poles, only inches from the power line, trying to cut through a steel bracket on the pole. He was using the nine-inch cross-cut saw blade on the grinding machine, which was used for grinding rough edges off welding joins. Somehow he had managed to attach the cutting blade to the grinder; he had already burnt out the saw. It was dangerous enough using the grinder in this way, the saw blade could fly off at any minute; but he was up a steel ladder, against a steel pole, working with an open blade, inches from power lines. He constantly complained he was so dizzy after his accident that he had trouble walking, yet here he was fifteen feet up a ladder, in rubber thongs, balancing on a narrow ladder rung, trying to cut through a four-inch steel bracket with an open blade on a grinder!

  Franz pulled the power cord out of the power point. Max came down the ladder, foaming at the mouth, telling Franz he was only a boy, and had no right to interfere with what he was doing.

  Franz, six foot three inches, picked up Max, five foot two inches, by a handful of his shirt and with Max suspended in mid-air, said in a very quiet voice, ‘You will pack and be ready to leave in the morning.’ He put him back down on the ground and left, taking the grinder.

  I realised that if Max stayed any longer he would be sure to injure himself, or worse, kill himself or someone else. He was taken to town the next day, closing the door, finally, on the last of the group of dedicated drinkers of Bullo.

  16

  * * *

  FILLING IN TIME

  Not all the characters in my life were alcoholics, thank heavens. One very normal and sober character I am privileged to have had in my life for many, many years is my brother-in-law, Ralph Potts. ‘Potts’, as he is affectionately known to so many friends and acquaintances, is a person full of life and interested in every living thing. He will not tolerate some, but is kind and considerate to all reasonable humans and animals.

  Ralph’s sense of humour has always been a large part of his life. When he was courting my sister, way back in the 1950s, he would send letters to our house addressed to my mother and father, and the address on the envelope would read: Honest Ida and Aub (my mum’s name was Ida, and Dad’s was Aubrey), Draught Manor, Croydon Street.

  The postman knew everyone on his run, and he was a very curt and serious man who handed you your mail personally. He would hand these letters to Mum with a distinct curl of disapproval on his lips, saying, ‘I do believe this letter is for you, Mrs Barton.’

  Ralph called Mum and Dad ‘Honest Ida and Aub’ because he said they were the last of a breed that no longer existed. He called our house ‘Draught Manor’, because he said it was the coldest house in existence. We only had open fires, and all windows were kept open (Dad said it was healthy). Poppa had a thing about using too much firewood. Every time he left the fireside, everyone would rush to stack logs on the fire; Poppa would return and say, ‘Oh, joves’, and take them all off. In the winter, the wind howled and whistled through the house, rattling the sliding doors, almost blowing out Poppa’s miserable fire as it roared past up and out through the chimney. Poppa seemed to delight in using the least amount of wood possible in a night. The only time you could feel warm was if you stood inside the fire-grate and put your hands over the flames.

  To watch a night of television, Ralph would arrive with a pile of blankets and an armful of pillows. When he was finally in position and rugged up, all you could see were his eyes. If someone called on the phone to speak to him, you told them he had just gone out. He wouldn’t get out of his chair because it took too long to get back into all his blankets. He wasn’t the only one to be wrapped up to the eyes. Not as many rugs as Potts, but we all were rugged, even Mum had a rug over her legs. Poppa wouldn’t, on principle, but I am sure he, too, was cold. When he was away for the evening it was open season, and we would pile on the wood and have a roaring fire—even setting the chimney alight on one occasion.

  Poppa apparently had all the logs numbered, because he would remark, ‘Oh, joves, too many logs burned!’ and the next night we would really freeze, as Poppa barely used any wood to bring to log supply back into balance.

  When Mum and Dad went on holidays, we had a field day, with roaring fires all day and night, but we had to buy extra loads of firewood, and ask our firewood man not to tell Poppa. He would allocate so many logs per night, our quota to be used while he was away. This would be left in a separate pile away from the rest of the firewood.

  The first thing dad would do when he returned was check the woodpile to see that we had not exceeded our quota. With the extra wood we bought, we’d have six weeks of roaring fires but stay within the quota. Fortunately for us, they took their holidays in the coldest part of winter, so we only had to freeze for about half the winter.

  The many holidays the children and I took in Sydney after we started to live on Bullo were always with my Mum, or with Sue. One year when we were staying with Sue and Ralph, they were living in a lovely house right on the water at Yowie Bay. The house was built down a cliff face, and all glass windows faced the water view. The entrance, or front door, was down through the roof, and the clothes hoist was out in space on a platform reached by a bridging walkway. Of course, holidays were never really holidays when Charlie was around. He would give everyone jobs endlessly. He didn’t mind relaxing, but for some reason the girls and I had to keep busy. We fouled up his plans as much as possible, and Sue and Ralph were a great help in making our escapes possible. Sue would stand up and tell Charles what she thought of him, which didn’t affect Charles in the least, and Ralph would devise intricate plans to outmanoeuvre Charlie; both seemed to enjoy the game immensely, and of course Potts couldn’t resist a joke or a bit of fun now and then.

  One scheme to get us all out of Charlie’s work-plan failed for the girls; well, I suppose, for me also. I had to go to lunch with Charlie, but it was a business lunch, not what I considered a fun day. The girls were to stay home and man the phone. Charlie had put several ads in the weekend classifieds for a cook (again) and handyman for the house, and workers for the abattoir.

  We all told him two children aged fourteen and twelve could not interview people over the phone for jobs. He gave the girls a list of answers to likely questions, quite sure these would be the only questions asked. I worried at first, then thought, what the heck, if anyone was stupid enough to answer an ad for a job two thousand miles away, to be interviewed by a twelve-year-old with answers to only a limited number of questions, they would have to be insane, and they would fit in nicely with Charles!

  I left for the lunch telling my two very worried telephone operators just to do the best they could and not get upset. I gave them a pad each, and pencils, and told them to write down, at least, the person’s name and telephone number and I would call the people back.

  Luckily for the children, in the 1970s not too many people were interested in even going to the Outback, let alone working there. But they did receive a few genuine calls, spaced regularly among quite a few calls that were unusual, to say the least.

  Marlee answered the phone, and a very strange voice told her he wanted to ‘be cook on cattle station’. When Marlee asked was he a good cook, he said, ‘Oh, good cook; I cooka the goanna, I cooka the kookaburra, I cooka the snake. I cooka anything!’

  Marlee was signalling to Aunty Sue to come and help her, but she couldn’t catch her attention, so she went on speaking with her weird applicant. Tactfully as possible, she told him we only had limited accommodation, and we were looking for a female cook, because she had to share a room with another girl. The reply came back, ‘It O.K., I share with girl, no problem; I love-a the girls, is O.K. I come straightaway, I leave now, love-a the girls!’ />
  Poor Marlee put her hand over the mouthpiece and called, ‘Come quickly, Aunty Sue, I have a maniac on the phone and he wants to come here now. What will I do?’

  Sue took the phone and after a few questions, she said, ‘Is that you, Ralph?’

  Potts couldn’t contain himself any longer, and burst into laughter. He was downstairs on the phone in the billiard room, calling to the phone in the lounge room!

  After a few more calls, not from Potts, but verging on the same type of insanity, the girls told the rest of the people who called that the positions were taken, and settled down to watching movies.

  The absolute best of Ralph’s jokes was about six years later, when Marlee was twenty or thereabouts. She was going to Sydney for a holiday, but developed a swollen eye a day or so before she was due to leave. I didn’t like the look of the infection, and told her to go to the doctor in Darwin the moment she arrived. The eye was quite bad, and he put her on antibiotics straightaway, and told her if it didn’t improve in three days, to go to a specialist in Sydney. Marlee told me this on the phone before leaving for Sydney, so I called Sue to make sure Marlee didn’t forget after she arrived and got caught up in having fun on holidays.

  Sue told me Potts had an appointment with their eye specialist the morning after Marlee arrived and she could go along with him, and split the appointment, or she could take his appointment. When they arrived, the eye doctor said he would see them both.

  Ralph went first, and in his usual humorous way he told his doctor friend that Marlee was his niece, and that she had a slight mental problem, and was under therapy. He went on to tell him that she worked as a topless waitress in a restaurant, but all her life, her passion was horses, and all she ever wanted to do was be a jillaroo on an Outback cattle station. This dream had reached the stage where she now believed it to be true, and was having therapy to correct it. And could the doctor, when recording her history, if she started talking about the Outback, treat it carefully, and try and steer her back to reality …

  In went Marlee. The doctor greeted her with a smile, and said that indeed, her eye needed attention. He said the tablets were working, the swelling was on the decline, but he would also give her ointment to put in the eye, as it seemed irritated.

  Marlee replied that this was probably because she had been working in the dusty yards with cattle just before she left the station.

  The doctor carefully inquired, ‘Oh, where would that be?’

  ‘In the Outback, in the Northern Territory. I am down in Sydney on holidays, staying with my aunt and uncle.’

  ‘And you live in the Outback?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh-that-is-nice,’ the doctor said slowly, and continued, ‘Wouldn’t you like to live in the city? Then you wouldn’t get eye irritations.’

  ‘No! Besides, the pollution here would irritate anyone’s eyes all the time. I’m not in the yards every day. So it’s better living in the Outback.’

  ‘Maybe you don’t live in the Outback all the time. Maybe you visit, and live here most of the year?’ the doctor asked with an encouraging tone.

  ‘No. I live on a cattle station; it’s my home. I only visit the city.’ Marlee was starting to wonder if the man had a problem, but she remained patient and smiled, and waited for the next question.

  There was a pause, as he seemed to be struggling with a problem. ‘Maybe it would be better if you worked in the city, perhaps a restaurant. You could be a waitress,’ he said in cheerful tones.

  There were lots of things Marlee wanted to say at this point, but she refrained. ‘Doctor, you don’t seem to understand, I have lived on a cattle station since I was a small child. I don’t like the city, wouldn’t want to live or work here, and certainly wouldn’t be a waitress. I think that would be the worst of jobs I could think of; very boring. I like working in the Outback.’ She fell silent hoping this was the end.

  But he was a dedicated doctor. ‘You should really think about living in the city and working in a restaurant; maybe being a topless waitress would not be too boring?’

  ‘No, thanks! I wouldn’t think of it!’ Marlee replied with forceful determination. Deciding it was time to terminate the conversation, she stood up, bade the doctor good morning, and walked out of the room. The doctor gave Ralph a hands-up gesture, with a sympathetic shrug of his shoulders behind Marlee’s back, as she walked into the waiting room.

  ‘How did you go?’ Ralph asked.

  ‘The eye is on the mend; I need to get some ointment. Boy, that doctor is a bit of a weirdo! Does he own a restaurant?’

  ‘Not that I know of. Why?’ asked Ralph innocently.

  ‘He was dead-set on me working in some topless restaurant here in Sydney! Wouldn’t get off the subject; just went on and on!’

  ‘That’s strange,’ said Ralph, smiling hugely.

  We all had a good laugh over dinner when Marlee recounted the strange conversation—which was extremely funny now she knew what Ralph had told the poor doctor.

  17

  * * *

  VILLIE AND THE FLYING DOCTORS

  The drive-yourself, rented Toyota stopped at the back gate. I watched the man unwind himself from behind the wheel and stretch; all movements indicated a long journey without rests. As he walked towards the homestead, I got the distinct impression that he was German. Very tall, big shoulders and hands, fair complexion, the purposeful way he walked, his clothes, all suggested that he was German. Then he spoke, and confirmed my assumption.

  His big hand shook my hand heartily, the greeting reverberating right up my arm; by the time I let go, the handshake had reached my toes.

  ‘I-am-Villie; I-come-to-help-from-Germany. You-need-help-ya?’ The words came out slowly, and each one was accentuated with the pumping of the hand. My head moved in rhythm. I found myself responding in like fashion.

  ‘Ya—ah—yes—ah—I-not-sure.’ The head-and-handshaking rhythm continued as ‘Villie’ told me he had seen a documentary in Germany about Bullo River, and it said we were women alone, working a farm the size of half a million acres. So he had decided we needed help, and so he came to help, all the way from Germany! By the time we got to the end of the speech in halting English, with the hand-shake on each word, my eyes were out of focus. This was what I assumed he said, but I wasn’t going to question any of it; I just wanted my hand back!

  I was at a loss; it seemed the man only had two weeks holiday and he had travelled all the way from Germany to help us. Well, this was what I gleaned from the little English he could speak. There was a lot of head-nodding and ya-ing going on, and I thought I might have got it completely wrong; maybe the poor fellow was lost, and was asking for directions. Nevertheless Villie stayed and pottered around and helped wherever he could in the role of handyman about the place. He was mostly in the workshop with Dick, cleaning parts, sweeping the floor and doing anything that would generally help.

  The documentary must have portrayed us as two women completely alone, because Villie showed surprise when he first saw Dick, then the stockmen, arrive for meals. When the film said ‘alone’ he assumed no-one else was here.

  Everyone wanted to know why he was on the station; they all knew who he was, that was about all he was able to say. The stockmen would turn around and there would be Villie saying, ‘Hullo. I am Villie; I help.’ I told them my information was on par with theirs. Villie was there to help, this much we knew; for how long I had no idea, and there wasn’t much chance of finding out.

  Then he appeared one morning dressed, not in his work clothes, but in the clothes he had arrived in. He had breakfast, and in another rehearsed speech he told me, ‘I-finish-help. Germany-I-go.’ He pumped my hand a few dozen times again, got into the four-wheel-drive, and was gone in a cloud of dust. He left a gift, a napkin holder in the shape of a black and white Friesian cow, and a small amount of money that he considered represented board for the period of his stay. I never did find out his last name, or where in Germany was home; he remains in m
y memory as just ‘Villie’.

  Another of the documentaries on our life on Bullo reached Canada. I answered the phone, and a man introduced himself as the doctor-surgeon of a hospital in a village somewhere in Canada. On behalf of the entire village, he was calling to congratulate us on our success in the Outback. He went on to say the entire village had watched the programme on Bullo. Maybe the fact that they were in the grip of a blizzard, and the village had two metres of snow that day, might have had something to do with our high ratings! But nevertheless, the captive audience enjoyed seeing the sun and the life of the Outback, and I suppose, sitting in seven feet of snow, even the dust could look attractive!

  It was a long and friendly conversation from the freezing minus twenty of Canada, to the sweltering forty-two degrees Celsius of the tropical Outback. When something like that happens to you, it makes you stop and realise how truly wonderful people are. The average human being is a very nice person to know. Characters a lot of them may be, but great human beings.

  Some of the greatest human beings I have had the privilege of meeting are in the Royal Flying Doctor Service. All Australians know of this service, and indeed it is known all over the world, representing everything that is truly Australian. Even if people you meet can’t speak English, their faces register recognition when you say the magic name. I grew up in the city, always hearing about the courageous acts of the RFDS in the vast Outback, and never dreaming that I would be so closely connected with the service later in my life.

  As I explained in From Strength to Strength, when I went to Bullo in 1964 the only contact we had with the outside world was through our RFD radio sessions. These were for medical emergencies, but soon they also became a lifeline for all the families spread across the vast Australian bush. So messages were passed, then telegrams taken, gossip sessions took place between stations, and people travelling with two-way radios extended the service; so it grew and grew, until the Outback couldn’t function without it.