In Mine Own Heart

by Alan Marshall

  The girls danced with them under the hostile glances of the boys they knew so well. A stranger was always more interesting. There were fights in the yards of halls, calls for the police and stretches in the local lock-up where a bo marked by fists brooded over ways of getting even.

  The youths on the track had left the cities without ever having experienced the stimulating effect of earning a living by working. Their parents, out of work, could not support them so they set out to earn their own living on the track which soon became for them, not a road to security, but a permanent battlefield upon which they fought the society that had betrayed them.

  Hunted from town to town by police they made north in the winter, south in the summer. If a job was offered to them it did not include giving them respect with it.

  As a group they were viewed by country townspeople, not as unemployed men seeking to live, but as hostile loafers on a raiding foray across Australia. To those secure in farms and country businesses they were the scum, the riff-raff, the failures amongst Australians; men of whom one must beware.

  ‘They don’t want work. They love loafing. They’ll knock off a sheep, your apples, your hens, your bread …’

  ‘So it’s a pound a week I’m offering you and sleep in the shed. The farm’s ten miles out of town. We start milking at five in the morning. We finish the day when it’s dark. We work seven days a week. Take it or leave it.’

  Some took it for a while, bitter with the cracks in their hands and their cow-dung-stained trousers and the couple of quid in their pockets; then moved on with defeated walk back to the town.

  The young man approaching me along the river bank had probably experienced it all, I thought.

  He came up to the car and greeted me by saying, ‘Typing eh! What’s the strength of you? Writing to the bank to tell them you won’t be back?’

  ‘We’re both on the run,’ I said, ‘but not from banks. What’s chasing you?’

  ‘Coppers mostly,’ he said and laughed.

  He suddenly changed his tone. His face took on an expression of pathos and he came close to me as I leant out of the window. He had held out his hand.

  ‘Look,’ he began, ‘I’m out of work and I haven’t had a feed …’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know,’ I said, interrupting him. ‘You just beat me to it but neither of us has a girl here to impress so it won’t work. Get that tucker box of mine out of the back of the car and we’ll have a feed.’

  He grinned. ‘You seemed a perfect bite to me,’ he said as I clambered out of the car.

  ‘You didn’t look too promising to me,’ I said clapping him on the shoulder. ‘When did you eat last?’

  ‘I had a good feed last night,’ he said. ‘Only stale bread today.’

  ‘We’ll eat now,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a fire going under the bridge. Bring the box over; I can’t carry it myself.’

  I had kept the fire burning throughout the day. There was a stew simmering in the billy I had left on the coals. It was after five o’clock; time for us to finish a meal, clean up and unroll our blankets before dark.

  We ate sitting before the fire on a log he had dragged in from the river bank. He had gathered wood and piled it beside the fire in anticipation of a frosty night. All his movements were quick and efficient.

  He was a handsome man with black wavy hair and brown eyes. He was clean and tidy and smelt of brilliantine.

  He looked older than he was—twenty-two he told me later. Maybe the deep lines already engraved on his face owed their origin to cynicism and bitterness but if this were so I felt they had been robbed of their revelation by his sense of humour. His resilience had arrested their development into proclamations of defeat and presented them as expressions of irony, amusement and friendliness.

  His name was Curly, he said, though the name he gave to coppers was Owen Fares. (‘I owe railway fares all over Australia.’) He was an interesting talker and often directed his humour against himself.

  We continued sitting before the fire long after our meal was over and only the surface of the river retained the light of the sky. Frogs were chorusing from the reed beds and water hens called sharply to each other as, silhouetted against the water, they walked with deliberate steps and jerking tails on the close-cropped grass of the bank. The cold air that touched our backs was laden with the smell of green stems, lifted leaves and saturated moss-plants releasing their day’s gathering of fragrance into the night.

  Beneath the bridge the fire sat in a cell of light it had scooped for us out of darkness. Shadows searched the heavy planking over our heads and caressed the brick wall beside us with delicate fingers.

  We sat side by side in this bright cell beyond which was the world we were challenging. Curly’s mate was out there somewhere. He had a mate. Maybe he was lying by the railway thirty miles back with a bloody stump where his leg had been.

  ‘I don’t think Blue could have tripped,’ he said, ‘but why wasn’t he on it? I left it on the grade just over the paddock there. He’d know we couldn’t leave it in the Bundawillock yards in daylight. We’d be picked up by coppers there. No, he wasn’t on it.’

  He suddenly stood up, took a few restless steps then returned and sat down again.

  ‘After the copper told us to keep going back at Tarabine we went along the line till we came to a good grade. We were going to take the first goods train on the fly.

  ‘There was a clear run beside the rails for about a hundred yards. No washouts or loose stones. There was a cattle pit further on but we’d be aboard before we reached there.

  ‘We hid behind some gum suckers beside the line till we heard her coming then waited till the engines passed—two of the bastards hooked together. They were those hump-back engines, big fellows. We call them “pigs”. They pick up fast. You can’t waste any time with them. There’s a Pacific type engine in South Australia like that. They’re hard to leave on the fly; hard to take, too.

  ‘If Blue and I had had some dripping we’d have melted it in a tin then poured it on the rails. That slows the bastards up. When they come to it their wheels spin and they snort like bulls. The driver opens the sand box but it doesn’t help much with dripping. The sand mixes with it and they run out of sand. I remember a time we pulled a train up like that. The crew had to back a couple of miles then take a run at it.

  ‘When I saw a couple of pigs were pulling these trucks I knew she’d be hard to take. They were open trucks with no tarps. Once you get a hold of them they are easy to get into.

  ‘I got going before Blue. I wanted to give him room. You want a gap between you for a clear run. I had to throw my swag and nosebag in first. I carry my hardware in the nose-bag—it’s handy to swing at Railway D’s when you’re making a break—and I was worried it might land on some bo in the truck. I’ve known blokes knocked out like that.

  ‘I picked a truck, yelled out, “Look out for the nosebag”, and threw it low to skim the side. If you throw it too high it’ll fall between the bumpers if the train’s fast. And that’s the end of it.

  ‘She was picking up fast but the nosebag went in all right. Then the swag in the next truck. I was hoofing it by now, I’m telling you. I launched myself at the stanchion and got it, took the jerk and clambered over into the truck.

  ‘I looked back for Blue but we were going round a bend and I couldn’t see back along the line. Blue used to run backwards to take a train on the fly. He was a champion at it. But this one picked up too fast.

  ‘I picked up my nosebag and swag from the trucks in which they’d landed and went back along the train to see if I could find him. I knew he wasn’t ahead of me. There were six bo’s in a truck near the guard’s van playing cards. They hadn’t seen him. I told them Bundawillock was a bad town and they’d better leave the train with me. The coppers would pick them up at Bundawillock. Anyway they were in a hurry to get north and they were going to chance it. Their truck had a tarp on it.

  ‘I stayed with them till we reached the grade over there t
hen I pitched off my swag and nosebag and left. I took a fall but I got off all right. Now I’ll have to find Blue.’

  ‘How will you go about it?’ I asked him.

  ‘Well, he can’t get another goods train till five o’clock tomorrow. I’ll catch a train back to Tarabine in the morning. The coppers may have picked him up there.’

  He looked out into the darkness towards the railway line.

  ‘It’s cold tonight,’ he said then added, after a moment’s pause, ‘There’s plenty of wood in the shelter at Tarabine anyway.’

  ‘I heard a train going through to Bundawillock late last night,’ I said. ‘There’ll be another one tonight. Maybe he’ll get on that.’

  ‘It would be a passenger train.’ He put a log of wood on to the fire. ‘The guard might let him travel with him though. Some of them are good fellows.’

  ‘What about me driving you in to Bundawillock in the morning?’ I said. ‘He might be down at the shelter. It’s worth trying.’

  ‘The coppers don’t like me in Bundawillock,’ he said raising his hands, palms uppermost, in a gesture of cynical resignation. ‘I’ve been picked up there. Anyway we’ll try it. I’ll be all right as long as I don’t go walking round the streets.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be picked up just for standing round, would you?’ I asked.

  ‘No?’ he questioned ironically. ‘That’s what you think! They’d pick you up if you ran through the town. You’re money to them.’

  ‘How do you make that out?’

  ‘The more they pull in the better. I’ll tell you. The copper in there goes for the train-jumpers. There’s an overhead footbridge crosses the railway just before the station. He stands on it and looks down into the trucks going underneath. If you’re not covered you’re gone. He counts the bo’s aboard then runs down to the yard and picks up the lot. We all know him.

  ‘The butcher and the baker are the J.Ps in there so the lock-up is always full. The copper’s got to feed you for a week, see. He gets so much for every meal he dishes up. He takes care he gets a cut on that. The meat and bread he buys to feed you comes from this butcher and this baker. They’re all in on it.

  ‘The copper picks you up on a vagrancy charge and the butcher or the baker gives you seven days. We’ve brought prosperity to that bloody town. The butcher and the baker have never had it better.

  ‘I’d like you to see the meals you get in these lock-ups. There’s a copper in Mackay in Queensland. He had a poor-man’s bean growing over the lock-up—some people call it New Guinea bean. It looks like a marrow. Every day he’d have us out picking these beans from the vine then he’d dish them up for every meal. He’d shove in a shank of mutton to give it body and that’s all you had to eat. He did well on the bo’s he pinched.

  ‘When he let me out he says, “Now get cracking and don’t bite the town before you leave.”

  ‘What the bastard didn’t know was that I’d ring-barked the vine when I was picking beans for our last meal. A bo was telling me a few weeks ago that he’s still looking for me.’

  ‘Was Blue with you then?’ I asked.

  ‘No. I met him later; over a year ago. We’ve been mates since.’

  ‘Where did you meet him?’

  ‘Broken Hill. I was crook up there. What happened was I had landed in Ivanhoe and couldn’t get out of the town. There were some box cars going out on one train but you’ve got to travel on the roof of them and if you don’t keep your head down you’ll get wiped off at the first bridge you go under.

  ‘I was down at the station keeping out of sight when I saw some empty water gins about to go out. They’re big tankers with a manhole on the top. They use them for bringing water up to Ivanhoe from the Darling at Menindee. I got through the manhole into one of those. There was about six inches of water slopping round the bottom; they never empty them right out. It was a hell of a hot day, over a hundred I reckon, and you could hardly touch the iron on the outside.

  ‘When we got moving the water used to go from one end to the other in a wave. It would hit the baffle plates and break and slap the sides and shoot up them and the bloody tank was full of a hot fog. I was wet through and sweating at the same time.

  ‘I stayed there till we were well out and I was gasping, then I climbed up and sat on the edge of the manhole. I tell you you could have served me up as steamed rabbit.

  ‘I’ll never forget how good that wind was at first but night came on and I got that bloody cold and stiff what with my wet clothes and that, I could hardly walk when I left the train.

  ‘I got to Broken Hill next day but by this time I was burning hot one minute and shivering the next. I had the shakes like a bloke after a bender so I crawled under the stand of one of the railway tanks where the engines fill up and curled up in my blanket. I don’t know how long I was there but I must have been talking to myself because a bo came up to me. This must have been next day. He came up and said, “What did you say?”

  ‘Well it was Blue. He was a lanky, red-headed chap. I must have told him I was crook or something because he felt my head and said, “Hell!” I had a sore throat and couldn’t talk properly even if I’d had any sense. I couldn’t have told him much.

  ‘He had a look at my nosebag and it was empty so he left his swag with me and went in to bite the town. He came back with some meat and made some soup and I got that down. He had bit a chemist for some aspirins and he kept giving them to me.

  ‘He looked after me for over a week—until I could get on my feet. But, hell, I was weak! He was always reading. He used to sit beside me and read. Whenever he asked for a handout he’d ask for a book. He got a lot like that. He was a Communist and I learnt more from him than from any man I’ve ever met.

  ‘We had to hang around there till I got stronger. All I wanted to do was to sit in the sun. But tucker was hard to get. Blue must have bit every street by the time we left.

  ‘We decided to make for Adelaide. We were going to take a goods train at night from the yards. There were about eight other bo’s with us. We were just about to climb into the trucks when coppers appeared and scattered us. I went under the train and out the other side then hid on the top of a box car. They never look up there.

  ‘I would have come down again to look for Blue but the train got moving and I had to flatten out on the roof. I left it at the first stop, a one-horse place further down, and hung round there for a couple of days. I used to run along every south-bound train pulling in, yelling “Bluey”, but he wasn’t on any of them.

  ‘I got a train back to Broken Hill but I’d no sooner left it than I was nabbed by a copper hiding in the yard and slammed in the lock-up.

  ‘The copper told me he’d vagged Blue on the night of the raid and he’d got three months. They give you three months for vagrancy in South Australia. They were taking him down to the Adelaide jail that day. Funny being nabbed by the same copper, wasn’t it?

  ‘Anyway now I knew where he was. I had a clean-up and washed my shirts and socks when I was in the lock-up. That’s one thing about them. You can use the government facilities while you’re there. I bit the copper for soap and washed my trousers and pressed them with an old iron he let me have. I like my trousers to be just right.

  ‘I was feeling good when I faced the magistrate, a bloke with a face like a bloodhound and eyebrows like clumps of dry grass. I thought I’d tell him the truth. I told him how Blue had looked after me while I was crook and how I had intended leaving the town to go to Adelaide but I’d come back to see what had happened to him.

  ‘ “This is very touching,” the magistrate said. “I didn’t think bagmen took so much trouble over a mate. A most touching story. Seeing there is such a wonderful friendship between you both I will see you are not separated. I’ll make your sentence one day less than his so you will both come out together. Three months.”

  ‘ “I’ll do it on my head,” I told him.

  ‘ “Don’t be too cheeky,” he said, “or you won’t be getting out with you
r mate.”

  ‘I shut up then.’ He stretched himself and smiled. “So I caught up with him and we did our three months and came out together. Now look what’s happened.’ He poked the fire with a stick then added confidently, reassuring himself, ‘But he’ll be all right.’

  ‘Do you reckon you could bite a garage for a couple of gallons of petrol?’ I asked him.

  ‘A couple of gallons of petrol!’ he exclaimed. ‘Well … I don’t know. That’s money. I could have a try. Why?’

  ‘If we don’t find Blue in Bundawillock tomorrow I could drive you down to Tarabine to look for him. I can only allow myself so much petrol a week,’ I explained. ‘I’d need another two gallons.’

  ‘By cripes, that’ll do me!’ he said smiling. ‘That’s good. It’ll be a hard bite but I’ll have a crack at it.’

  The night train went through while we were talking. He stood up and watched the squares of light moving in a line across the far darkness. The whistle screeched, the carriages rumbled and clattered in rhythm across the bridge.

  He smiled as he watched it. ‘I have an idea he’ll be on it,’ he said. ‘We’ll pick him up at the shelter in the morning.’

  When I awoke in the morning he was toasting bread over a revived fire. The sun had not yet risen. Even the birds were silent.

  ‘We’ll get cracking early this morning,’ he said. ‘I’d like to get to the shelter before Blue sets out to bite the town. He wasn’t carrying any tucker.’

  We ate our breakfast, packed up and set off to Bundawillock with the long shadow of the car speeding beside us along the edges of paddocks. The paddocks were white with frost but the morning sun was already absorbing it from the tops of the rises. Clumps of trees stood huddling in the still, crisp cold waiting for a movement of air to wake them.

  ‘You can sleep out on the beach right through the winter in North Queensland,’ Curly said, his tone reflecting appreciation of the cold merely because he was leaving it. ‘You never get frosts up there.’