The Complete Stories of Alan Marshall

by Alan Marshall

  ‘In the early years of this century an old drover named Jim Dillon settled down on a bit of country out sou’-west from Wyndham, W.A., and called it the Speewah and it still appears on the map as such, thus giving rise to some argument as to whether it was not the original Speewah from which all outlandish places and events took their origin.’

  Whatever its origin, it is possible, from the stories told about it, to get a picture of this mythical station and of some of the men who ran it. The hundreds of stories told about the Speewah are fairly consistent when it comes to giving an idea of its size and though many men feature in the tales one or two crop up regularly, giving the impression that they were ‘permanents’ known to all the ‘casuals’ who came out with yarns about them.

  Firstly, there is ‘Crooked Mick’ who tried to strangle himself with his own beard in the Big Drought. He was a gun shearer; five hundred a day was nothing to him. Once, the boss, annoyed because of Crooked Mick’s rough handling of some wethers, strode up to him on the board and barked, ‘You’re fired.’ Crooked Mick was shearing flat out at the time. He was going so fast that he shore fifteen sheep before he could straighten up and hang his shears on the hook.

  His later days were saddened by a serious accident. He was washing sheep when he slipped and fell into a tank of boiling water. Big Bill, who was standing beside him, whipped him out, tore off his clothes then seized two wethers and cut their throats. He ripped the hides off the wethers and wrapped them, flesh side in, round Crooked Mick’s body and legs. When they got him to a doctor three weeks later the doctor took one look at him then said, ‘Boys, you’ve made a wonderful job of him. It would take a major operation to remove these skins. They’re grafted to him.’

  According to Big Bill they took Crooked Mick back to the Speewah and shore him every year after that.

  ‘He made twenty-two pounds of wool,’ Bill said. ‘Not bad.’

  Big Bill, who built the barbed wire fence, was the strongest man on the Speewah, they say. He made his fortune on the Croydon goldfields cutting up mining shafts and selling them for post holes. He was originally put on to fence the Speewah but gave it up after a day digging post holes. He left his lunch at the first hole when he started in the morning, then at midday he put down his crowbar and set off to walk back for his lunch. He had sunk so many holes he didn’t reach his lunch till midnight. That finished him.

  ‘A bloke’d starve going at that rate,’ he said.

  Then there was Uncle Harry who rode the crowbar through Wagga without giving it a sore back. He was a modest man who had carted five tons of tin whistles through country that was practically unknown at the time. Once, when Big Bill was boasting about his strength, someone asked Uncle Harry had he ever done any heavy lifting.

  ‘No,’ he said modestly, ‘I can’t claim that I’m a strong man. Weight lifting was never in my line. However, I once carried a very awkward load off the barge towed by the Tolarno. It was near the Tintinnalogy shed and, mind you, I’m not claiming this load was heavy, only that it was very awkward. I carried, and the banks were steep, too, a double-furrow plough, a set of harrows and eight loose melons. As I say, it wasn’t the weight, only the awkwardness of it that makes it worth telling.’

  Slab-face Joe was the bullocky on the Speewah. He drove a team so long he had a telephone fitted on the leaders with a line going back to the polers. When he wanted to pull up he rang through to the black boy he paid to ride the lead, and told him to stop the leaders. Half an hour afterwards Slab-face would stop the polers. Once when he rang through he got the wrong number and wasted a day trying to raise ‘Complaints’.

  His team was as strong as they come. When Slab-face Joe was shifting a shed from the Speewah out-station it got bogged in the Speewah creek. Then Slab-face really got that team into it. They pulled so hard they pulled a two-mile bend in the creek and they weren’t extended.

  ‘The Boss’ featured in many tales of the Speewah. He had a snout on cockatoos and covered an old red gum with bird lime to catch the flock that was eating his grain. After they landed on the tree he yelled out, ‘Got you,’ and they all took off at once. They tore that tree out by the roots and the last he saw of it, it was two miles up making south.

  Hundreds of men worked on the Speewah. In fact, there were so many that they had to mix the mustard with a long-handled shovel and the cook and his assistant had to row out in a boat to sugar the tea. When shearing was on the boss had to ride up and down the board on a motor bike.

  The Speewah holding itself was a tremendous size. When Uncle Harry was sent out to close the garden gate he had to take a week’s rations with him, and a jackeroo, going out to bring in the cows from the horse paddock, was gone for six months.

  It was mixed country. There were mountains, salt-bush plains, and thick forests of enormous trees. Crooked Mick, bringing in a mob of three thousand sheep through the big timber, suddenly found himself in pitch darkness. For three days and nights that wretched man punched those sheep along without being able to see one of them. Then daylight snapped on again and Crooked Mick looked back. He had come through a hollow log.

  Some of the hills were so steep on the Speewah that when a man rode a horse down one of them the horse’s tail hung over his shoulder and down the front of his chest, giving him the appearance of having a lank, black beard.

  The Speewah was cursed with every plague. Rabbits were there in millions. They were so thick you had to pull them out of the burrows to get the ferrets in and trappers had to brush them aside to set their traps. On some of the paddocks they had to drive them out to get room to put the sheep in.

  Galahs, too, were bad. When the Big Drought broke, the Speewah remained dry as a bone though the rain fell in torrents above it. The first clap of thunder had scared the galahs into flight and they were so thickly packed as they winged over the station that not a drop reached the ground. A mob of them, swooping under Crooked Mick’s hut to avoid a hawk, lifted it off the ground with the wind of their wings and carried it for thirty miles. Mick finished his breakfast while going through a belt of cloud at twenty thousand feet, the galahs still pounding along just beneath him.

  The kangaroos were as big as elephants on the Speewah—some were bigger. They say that Crooked Mick and Big Bill were once climbing a hill of fur grass when they slipped and fell into a kangaroo’s pouch. The hill got up and made off with Crooked Mick and Big Bill arguing the toss as to how they would get out.

  For six months those two men lived on kangaroo meat and water they got by sinking a bore in the sand that had collected in the bottom of the pouch. Then some silly cow, out with a gun, shot that kangaroo when it was in the middle of a leap. Crooked Mick and Big Bill, who were ploughing at the time, left that pouch like meteors. They were thrown fifty miles and the skid they made when they hit the earth gouged the bed of the Darling.

  Women never feature in the Speewah tales. I have only heard one story in which a woman was supposed to have worked on the Speewah and I’m inclined to think it was a lie. She was a cook and her name was Gentle Annie.

  The story was told to me by an old man with pale, watery eyes who lived in a hut on the Murray, and, in the telling of it, he kept glancing uneasily over his shoulder towards his hut in which I could hear a woman banging pots around and singing in a husky voice.

  According to this old man the Speewah had gone, disappeared, been burnt off the map, and all because of the one and only woman who had ever worked there. Gentle Annie, so he told me, had limbs like a grey box and a frame like the kitchen of a pub. She was always singing and when she sang there was always a change for the worse in the weather. She cooked jam rolls a hundred yards long and her suet puddings had killed twenty shearers.

  Once, at the shearing shed dance, she seized Crooked Mick by the beard as she was dancing the waltz cotillion with him, and kissed that horrified man squarely somewhere about where his mouth lay concealed in hair.

  What a kiss that was! Its like has never been seen before or sin
ce. The whole shed rocked upon its foundations and a blue flame streaked away from the point of contact and tore three sheets of galvanized iron off the roof. A thunderous rumble rolled away across the plains and the air was full of the smell of sulphur, dynamite, gunpowder and Jockey Club perfume.

  Ten fires started up at once and the roar of them was like a thousand trains going through a thousand tunnels.

  For three months men fought that bushfire without a wink of sleep. They were famished for a drink of tea. As soon as they lit a camp fire to boil the billy the flames of the bushfire engulfed it.

  As a last, desperate measure, Crooked Mick ran ahead of the fire at sixty miles an hour holding a billy of water back over the flames till it boiled. The tea he made saved the men but not the Speewah.

  Then Big Bill came galloping up on Red Ned, the wildest brumby ever foaled. He drew one enormous breath, then gave one enormous spit and the fire went out with a sizzle.

  ‘What happened to Gentle Annie?’ I asked the old man.

  ‘I married her,’ he said with that uneasy glance at his hut.

  I knew then he was a liar. No man who worked on the Speewah ever got married. It was too sissy.

  Well, that was the Speewah where the grandfather clock in the homestead hall had stood in the same place for so long that the shadow of the pendulum had worn a hole in the back.

  Stories of the Speewah are our folklore. While there is still time we should collect and treasure them. They are more than just tall stories of the bush. They are the unwritten literature of men who never had the opportunity to read books and who became tellers of tales instead. They are the stories of the Australian people.

  Blue Stews

  I was sitting at a table in Ricco’s Cafe in Spring Street wondering whether I would start off with a plate of oysters when I heard a voice I knew ordering Minestrone. I turned around and, sure enough, it was ‘Dervener’ Jack Mulgrew, the shearers’ cook I had last seen on the Paroo.

  He looked momentarily embarrassed then explained, after a perfunctory, ‘How ya doin’?’, that he always liked to have a first-class feed once in a while.

  ‘I never have enjoyed tucker I’ve cooked myself,’ he said as I drew my chair around.

  I could well understand it. ‘Dervener’ received his nickname because of his allegiance to a certain mongrel hash known to shearers as ‘Dervener’. Shearers’ cooks are always reticent in the face of enquiries aimed at discovering the ingredients of a Dervener. When asked, ‘What is it made of?’ they scowl at you as if you have cast a reflection upon their hash—as indeed you have.

  In the days when the shearers’ cook was a man to be reckoned with and a power in any shed, many of them attained a fame that spread far beyond the station boundaries within which they operated. If a shearers’ cook was a good cook he had the backing, against an odd complainer, of all those who enjoyed his dishes. If he were a bad cook, however, then he only retained his position by force of arms, as it were. All bad cooks who held on to their jobs could fight like threshing machines.

  ‘Dervener’ was such a man. He had a most impressive chest. Those men who survived after hitting him thereabouts reported to their mates, as they were carried away on a hurdle, ‘When you punch him on the chest you can hear it echo round inside him like in a deserted pub.’

  Whether this was true or not I do not know, but I do know that years ago on the Paroo when ‘Dervener’ packed a punch that would flatten most men like a tack, the shearers in a shed where he was cook, seeing no relief from weeks of mongrel hash, and angered by the speedy belting of those who complained, sent to a Sydney Gymnasium for the loan of a professional pug, cash on delivery.

  The thickset chap with the battered face who duly arrived was given the simplest instructions:

  ‘As soon as he serves the stew bawl him out, see, then hop into him.’

  The man from Sydney expressed himself as being satisfied with this procedure provided he got his tenner forthwith. The collection realizing the correct amount the pug took his place at the table surrounded by the happy shearers who were all confident that the Day of Judgment had arrived for ‘Dervener’.

  ‘Dervener’ dished out the hash with his usual aggressive demeanour so was unconsciously set to beat the gun when the man from Sydney spoke his piece. This confident gentleman suddenly stood up and flung his knife and fork on the table with an explosive: ‘What ya givin’ me—dog food?’

  He was still rubbing the back of his hand across his mouth with grimaces of distaste when ‘Dervener’ hit him.

  Later on, when the hurdle upon which he was lying was placed near the doorway of the Men’s Hut, he explained: ‘’Struth! I wasn’t ready. He musta picked it up from the floor. I never seen it comin’.’

  The shearers’ cook known on the Darling as ‘The Black Dog’ could also scrap. He received his name after the circulation of a whispered tale that he had once cooked a black dog and served it up to its unsuspecting owner, a shearer who had been critical of his cooking. It is said that the owner enjoyed his meal and congratulated the cook on his excellent dish.

  It was probably the only tribute to his cooking he had ever received.

  The dish he specialized in was cold mutton. He served it for breakfast, dinner and tea in the manner of a man expecting criticism but quite prepared to meet it. However, there came a day when one shearer, sitting down without enthusiasm before the usual plate of cold meat, felt impelled to express something of what he felt.

  ‘What! Cold mutton again!’ he exclaimed plaintively.

  ‘The Black Dog’ heard him from the lean-to where he carved the meat and he appeared in the doorway with disconcerting suddenness. He stood there gazing wrathfully at the astounded shearer for a moment then thumped his hairy chest with his fist and yelled, ‘Here’s yer hot meat. Come and get it.’

  The shearer didn’t accept the invitation.

  ‘The Blue Stew Cook’, another Darling identity, specialized in stew.

  He had a large, three-legged pot into which mutton and vegetables were thrown each day. This regular addition to the stew meant that the pot always remained full. It simmered away above the fire from week to week, always retaining its volume though a score of men were patiently eating it.

  It was only natural that they began, finally, to look at the three-legged pot with some distaste. It was said that pieces of meat and vegetable lying round the bottom of the pot had been resting there for a month or more despite the frequent stirrings to which the cook subjected the stew.

  Finally, a dyspeptic shearer, determined to have the pot completely emptied for once, tossed a couple of knobs of Reckitts Blue into it as he passed.

  Just before the next meal the cook gave the stew its customary stir, started visibly then recovered and yelled to the men as he ladled out the stew on to the waiting plates: ‘Blue stew today, boys.’

  The Riverina cook known as ‘The Busted Oven’ had a deep dislike for some of the old-time, smoking ovens in which he was expected to prepare the shearers’ meals. It was his custom, therefore, when the shed cut out, to ram a crowbar through the offending oven so that he could be reasonably sure it would not be there when next he passed that way. The line of stations along which he travelled were always equipped with new ovens for his second visit despite the scowling reception he received from the station owners.

  In those days it was unusual for a shearers’ cook to work with an apron on. Most men cooked in flannels. A Scots cook on the Lachlan, however, wore an apron and cap, dispensing with shirt and flannel. He became known as ‘Scotty-Without-a-Shirt’ and was reputed to be cultured, an imputation he always denied vigorously. Indeed, the conditions under which he worked did not encourage the development of an interest in the arts. Like all the shearers’ cooks of those days he slept when he wasn’t working and worked when he wasn’t sleeping. There was no in-between period of leisure.

  There was no refrigeration on the stations. The meat was kept in hessian safes or excavated pantr
ies, often inadequate protection against flies.

  ‘Hey! The meat’s blown,’ was a common complaint.

  ‘They’re dead, they won’t hurt you,’ was the usual rejoinder from the cook.

  Each man ate about four ram-stag chops for breakfast. There was brownie and damper to be made. Seven meals a day had to be prepared.

  At smoko’s, morning and afternoon tea, and at supper the men ate almost as much as at a regular meal.

  The cook’s rouseabout—or offsider—carried the smoko tucker down to the shed together with a couple of kerosene tins of tea. He had a tough job. He was always on the run and had to put up with all the abuse about the place.

  One cook who brought his eighteen-year-old son along as his offsider was in the habit of making long jam roley-poleys. The shearers enjoyed them provided they were served a piece from the centre section where the jam seemed to collect. The ends were jamless and avoided by the men.

  The unyielding attitude of the shearers to the ends soured the cook a little and once, as he stood with raised knife before a roley-poley of great length he called out to the shearers gathered round the table, ‘Does anyone here like ends?’

  There was dead silence.

  ‘Well, me and me son does,’ he announced truculently and cut the roley-poley through in the centre, pushing one half aside for himself and the other for his son.

  Roley-poleys were a favourite dish. The cloths in which they were cooked were never selected with a view to suitability and sometimes the roley-poleys were coloured with dye.

  One startled shearer on a Riverina station, looking unbelievingly at a cauldron of bubbling blue water, said to the cook, ‘Hey! The dye has come out of the cloth.’