In Mine Own Heart

by Alan Marshall

  ‘How long will it take you to get there?’

  ‘Not long. Ten days, a week … We jump the fruit trains in Queensland. They don’t waste any time. A lot of the bo’s carry a timetable issued by the Queensland Government. They call it the Bagmen’s Bible. You come into a station and peep out from under the tarp to get the name. Then you look it up in the book. It gives you the population, what sort of place it is—things like that.

  ‘I’ve heard bo’s say, “This is Gutheringa; we’ll be in Townsville at nine-thirty tonight.” It makes the time pass. You know where you are and how long it will be till you can get a feed.’

  ‘There should be no need for all this,’ I said, suddenly feeling a need to express my resentment of the conditions that were robbing him of a future. ‘Hundreds of blokes hiding in railway trucks going up; the same number coming down. Work’s where the train is going, the train they’re on. There must come a time when all you are concerned with is to keep moving. A permanent job and a home are just dreams. The beaches of northern Queensland become a goal.’

  ‘You’ve got me wrong,’ he said quietly. ‘That’s not the way to look at it. You ask Blue; he’ll tell you. We’re making history, Blue says. The way things were going it just had to be like this, he reckons.

  ‘The coppers can’t keep men moving forever. The bo’s will have to pull up some time. There’s a poster on all the Queensland stations: “Use the Railways; You Own Them.” I told that to a copper once. “I own this train,” I said to him. “The Government says I do.”

  ‘ “You shut your mouth, you ignorant bastard,” he said. “Don’t try and be funny with me,” and he got me seven days for obscene language and resisting arrest.

  ‘Wait till you meet Blue. He’ll put you wise. I can’t explain things like he can. But I know we are climbing up. Slow, but we’re still climbing.’

  He suddenly stopped speaking and looked eagerly ahead.

  ‘Slow down now, will you! We don’t go through the town. The shelter is up the next road to the left. Hold on a bit. Let me think. Go up this first road anyway. I’ll get my bearings in a minute. Round here. That’s right. Hell, look at the dust! Keep on now. Where the hell is that dam? Right! Here it is! Now round to the left again. We’re set. There’s the shelter. See it? Hidden in those trees. There’s some blokes out in front now.’

  A galvanised-iron shed in front of which four men were standing sat on the edge of a large dam. A black box swamp lay behind it, the trees standing on a floor of cracked earth patterned like a paving. Upon this earth tussocks of grass and clumps of rushes had withered and died amid the pitted tracks of sheep.

  I pulled up in front of the men, one of whom had seated himself on the step. The local paper he was reading and the billy filled with milk standing at his feet were evidence of an early morning raid up one of the streets I could see across the paddock.

  Curly grabbed his swag and tucker bag and jumped out.

  ‘A bo called Bluey inside?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ one of the men said. ‘There’s only the four of us. Have you lost a mate?’

  ‘Yes, looks like it. I’ll pick him up today.’

  ‘Where did you lose him?’

  ‘Tarabine. I was with him there yesterday. We were taking the train out on the fly and he didn’t get on.’

  ‘What was he like?’ asked the man with the paper. ‘A tall bloke with red hair?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The man sat very still for a moment then rose to his feet and handed the paper to Curly. He pointed his finger at some item on the front page then turned and walked into the hut.

  Curly’s face as he read became white and emptied of life. Only his eyes were alive and from these I turned away.

  He dropped the paper, seized his swag and tucker bag and walked abruptly away. He walked in a straight line across the paddock, looking neither to the right nor the left.

  I picked up the paper and read the report of Blue’s death beneath the train—an unknown man, a tall man with red hair.

  I turned to the car with the intention of following Curly. The man who had given him the paper appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Let him go,’ he said. ‘He’d have stopped if he’d wanted you.’

  I came back and sat down with them beside the step. I never saw Curly again.

  22

  I did not go back to the bridge. I turned west and made for the station properties beyond the town where I hoped to be able to collect Australian folk tales and ballads from shearers and station hands in whom isolation increased the desire to talk.

  I put the material I collected into the form of notes. But they had no unity. I found it impossible to write creatively of my experiences as they occurred but had to wait until they became memories and merged into a pattern of living linked to all that had happened to me after, to all that had happened to me before.

  The immediate experience was always an encounter with facts of limited significance. Its growth outwards to embrace the lives of all people needed time and a thousand other experiences to fertilise it.

  Later I was to use these experiences for short stories and articles, but as I passed from station to station in Western New South Wales my accumulating notes sometimes seemed to me of little value. They dealt with the past experiences of other men. At this time the experience of communication and involvement in emotion with no contribution of action from me began to depress me with a sense of futility. I did not realise how such involvement was vital to the education of a writer and, indeed, to the education of all men seeking to understand their fellows.

  Towards the end of the winter I made back towards the Mallee country of northern Victoria where agricultural shows were beginning their season in the country towns and I could mix with crowds of people.

  The sideshow men, the showmen, were beginning their treks from town to town in caravans and trucks, in old cars … They pitched their tents on the showgrounds the day before the show opened. They erected the line-up boards, displayed their lurid banners and signs then emerged from their tented caves to the sound of drums and shouting on the crowded opening days. From the platforms beneath the posters they harangued the crowd:

  ‘The Irish Giant, the Irish Giant, the tallest man in the world. Seven foot six and a half inches of virile masculinity and still growing. He’s a whopper! Don’t miss it. Talk to the world’s tallest man. Talk to the Irish Giant.’

  ‘We’re the big five in one. Five big shows for the price of one. See the disappearing lady inside the marquee. She vanishes from sight before your eyes. It’s educational. It’s sensational. See Madame Arko, the mind reader. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, although you have never seen her before she will tell you what you are thinking. She’s amazing. She’s incredible. She’s a wonder of the world. See Delia, the dancer, do her notorious strip-tease interpretation of that famous dance the Lambeth Walk and when she strips does she tease! Hurry, hurry, hurry, she’s just itching to take her clothes off. No children for this session, definitely not. Not if you gave me five pounds. She’ll take five years off your life, ten inches off your waistline. Look as much as you like, men, but don’t touch. You’ll see all you want to see inside the marquee. Follow the crowd, follow the wise people … Here’s where they’re going. The Big Five. The Big Five. We’ll introduce you to the human sewing machine. He swallows needles. He swallows cotton. He threads them in his stomach. Now ladies and gentlemen put your hands together for the Indian Fire Eater here outside on the platform for a free show. He belches fire. See the burning flames from his mouth. See his tortured flesh writhing from searing heat.’

  ‘I’ll give one pound I say to any man who can kiss the little Jap lady beside me right on her delectable lips. One pound and no holds barred. Three lady wrestlers to be kissed. Three beautiful girls. Who’ll take one of them on?’

  ‘The good old game of Squareo. You pick ’em and I’ll pay ’em. You’ll get a hiding over there in the boxing tent; you’ll make money here. The only ga
me on the ground that’s fair. Here’s where you get seven pennies change for sixpence. All squares three to one. The good old game of Squareo. The line wins for the old man, the square for the punter.’

  In the evenings I sat with the sideshow people outside their caravans or with groups before a fire and listened to them. I was interested in their skill at exploiting human credulity and longing, their ability to play on the emotions of men.

  The spruikers of the boxing tents, cynical, contemptuous of those who believed their spiel, knew every trick to rouse a crowd to excitement.

  The indignant countryman who from a pack of people in front of the line-up board roared in protest at what seemed to him an evasion by the spruiker had taken his bait. When the crowd joined with him in his protest the spruiker smiled. He had them now. He had shaken in the ingredients, stirred them and brought them to the boil.

  They pushed through the doorway of the marquee, men who purged themselves of frustrations and resentments by identifying themselves with one who punished with blows. The boxer’s gloved hands, swift and savage, were their hands. The crumpling body that reeled from uppercut and hook, that gasped, that bled, was their fruitless work, their loneliness, their demanding wives, the banks, the drought, the unfulfilled dreams. It afforded a means of protest, an identification with might conquering and being admired.

  It is me.

  Red Mulligan was a ‘ram’, the name given to that member of a boxing troupe who goes ahead of the show posing as a local fighter hanging round to have a go at the champ of the troupe opening up on the showgrounds in a couple of days time.

  He was a heavy, powerfully built man with a flexible, expressive face that had been so loosened by punches his cheeks moved into folds when he smiled. He had never made the grade to big-time fighting. He was too slow, too deliberate.

  His act demanded he keep away as much as possible from other members of the troupe so he had plenty of time to talk which he did sitting over a fire with me drinking pannikins of strong, black tea sugared almost into a syrup.

  I sat on a packing case close to the fire so that I could attend to the chops I was usually grilling or stir soup simmering in a billy.

  Around us was the yapping of terriers chained beneath vans. By the shadows of wheels, monkeys with thin, nervous mouths and quick eyes huddled beside piles of canvas, dirty little velvet jackets, flags and tiny wagons with the harness of dogs loose on the shafts.

  Men tightened stay ropes, swung mallets above iron pegs. Faded women with wispy hair and tired breasts stood silhouetted against the light of caravan doorways and called shrilly to children. Piebald ponies tethered to pegs stamped restlessly.

  From the shadow of one big tent a midget played his sorrows on a fiddle, his big chin resting heavily on the ebony rest.

  The air smelt of fried onions and steaming horse dung, of coffee and moth-balled air from open cases packed with uniforms of braid and plush.

  There was movement of shadow and panting of light, restless, urgent yet strangely embracing under the lonely, compassionate stars.

  ‘I can’t make out how people don’t wake up to you,’ I said to Red as I turned the wire grill.

  ‘They don’t want to wake up,’ he replied. ‘They want to get stirred up.’

  ‘Do you always challenge the same bloke?’ I asked.

  ‘No, sometimes I fight the lot.’

  ‘How do you work that out?’

  ‘Well, you’ve got four blokes on the board. You’ve got to have as large a variety of fighters as possible so that all challenges can be met. There’s a novice learning the game. He’s on his way to city stadiums, he reckons. Then there’s an amateur, often a big bloke. We got a big bloke with us now, Bob. Then there’s a semi-professional; that’s young Davis. He’s fought in the stadium. Some reckon he’s got a tail. I dunno … He’s an abo. Then there’s the champ, the Star of the Board. That’s Johnny. He makes himself unpopular with the crowd. There’s not many locals who can beat him. Sometimes, if he wants to encourage a local who is a sitting shot but has a lot of friends in the crowd, he’ll wear twenty-eight ounce gloves and ride round on the boy’s punches for a while.

  ‘The trouble is if you get a local who is a good card he sometimes damages your fighters. Locals usually pick the novice. The boss has got to watch who he lets have a go at him. I’ve started off with the novice. He goes down at the beginning of the third round or when he gets a chance to jerk back his head from one of my punches like as if he’s been hit bad.

  ‘Then we go out on the board again and I start a blue, lose my temper, and the boss challenges me to have a go at Bob. We go on like that till I have a grudge fight with the champ the last house of the day. He has jumped off the board and taken a swing at me amongst the crowd where I’m abusing him. We bump a few people. It stirs them up when punches are being swung right up against them. You’ll see it all tomorrow.’

  ‘What have you been doing today?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve been down at the pub skiting my head off; told the locals I was a spud digger. “I’m going to have a go at one of those blokes in the boxing tent on the day of the show,” I told them.’

  ‘Is that supposed to be your job, a spud digger?’

  ‘Not always. The boss gets me leading a bull round sometimes. He gets a lend of it from a farmer. It looks as if I’ve brought it to the show. I lead it past the tent and when he sees me he starts yelling, “Who’s this big cattle man they are all talking about? Where’s the cattle man they say’s never been knocked off his feet? Is he in the audience now?”

  ‘ “That’s me,” I tell him. “I’ll fight any of those mugs you’ve got up there.”

  ‘He pretends to get wild.

  ‘ “Hang up your bull and come up here,” he shouts at me. The crowd love it.’

  ‘Do you really like the life?’ I asked him. ‘Where do you go from here?’

  ‘No place,’ he said. ‘There’s no place you go from here. You end up a plonko with bells ringing in your head or you might become a hanger-on in a pub cleaning up the yard. Some get jobs in a factory or somewhere if their eyes haven’t gone and they can see and hear and don’t go stumbling round like as if the ground moves.’

  He stopped and rubbed his spread fingers through his hair. ‘I dunno,’ he said; then, coming to a decision, spoke in a different tone, ‘I’ll show you.’

  He pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it and handed the foolscap sheet to me. ‘That’s my contract. Read it.’

  The printed form he handed me was an agreement couched in legal jargon in which Red Mulligan, ‘Herein-after called the employee’, promised to work as a boxer for William Hudson ‘and in addition do such other duties in connection with the erection, maintenance and dismantling of the plant, tents, baggage and gear or any other duties used in such business as the employer shall from time to time direct’ for a period of nine months.

  For these services Red was to be paid two pound per week and keep.

  ‘He shall devote his whole time and attention to his duties,’ said the agreement, ‘and shall well and faithfully serve the employer.’

  It went on to warn him that illness would terminate the contract, that the contract could be terminated for any other cause and that Red must ‘not divulge to, or discuss with any other person or persons the contents of this agreement’.

  Finally, it notified him that if he committed any act of misconduct or drunkenness his employer could dismiss him without payment of salary.

  ‘This last clause about misconduct or drunkenness,’ I said. ‘Who is the judge of what constitutes misconduct?’

  ‘He is,’ said Red. ‘We don’t get any pay till the end of the season when we’re supposed to get the lot but on the last week he turns on the plonk. We hoe into it; we’re like that. Then he puts on a show. We don’t turn up. We’re flat out in the caravan. That’s misconduct. Out the lot of us without a cracker.’

  He poured himself another pannikin of tea and b
egan sugaring it, spoonful after spoonful.

  ‘I wonder what sugar does to you,’ he said.

  ‘They say it gives you energy.’

  ‘By hell, I need it!’

  ‘How many fights do you have a season?’ I asked him.

  ‘Let me see now.’ He screwed up his eyes and looked upwards, his lips moving in silent calculation. ‘One hundred and fifty about. Say, two shows a week for nine months, two fights a show, four fights a week for thirty-nine weeks. That makes one hundred and fifty-six, doesn’t it?’ He paused. ‘Yes, that’s right—one hundred and fifty-six. It would really be more than that.

  ‘But it’s not all fighting,’ he went on. ‘We’d travel over twenty thousand miles a season. We often leave a town at eight o’clock and travel all night to get to a town where there’s a show that day. It takes two hours to rig the tent too. That’s work.’

  ‘I wonder how many blows land on your head in a season,’ I said thinking of the figures he’d given me.

  He grinned. ‘About a thousand, I suppose.’ He rubbed his fingers up and down his cheek. ‘And they all hurt,’ he added.

  Next day I stood amongst the few curious people standing before the boxing tent and watched William Hudson preparing to draw a crowd. He was a short, stout man with dry lips and a florid complexion. He was wearing a check suit, a red bow tie and a grey felt hat which was pushed well back on his head.

  He had the complete confidence of a man who had always been obeyed, who had made a lot of money, who was going to make a lot more.

  ‘Up here, Johnny,’ he said sharply to the champ, stabbing his finger downwards at a space beside a big drum at the end of the line-up board.

  Johnny, his hands thrust into the pockets of a blue dressing-gown he was wearing over his tights, walked along the board and stood beside the drum.

  The other three boxers stood in line along the board. They all wore dressing-gowns. Their faces showed no interest in Hudson’s preparations or in the people below them. They stared across the showground, occupied with their own thoughts. They waited, blanketing the approaching moment of their release in furious fighting by some escape brooding that had become part of their characters.