‘This climate breeds good kids,’ Charlie said to me as a coffee-coloured youngster toddled by. ‘My grandkid.’ So Charlie had children? ‘Yairs. I adopted two-’ He pointed to a half-caste girl down by the river and a dark boy by a tractor. ‘They’re mine, of course.’ A pair of stick-thin black legs passed beneath the partitioning wall of the verandah-cum-living room and the kitchen. ‘Me cook.’ In this way Charlie Dargie has legally guarded his children’s, and therefore their mother’s, future in a way most of us would wish the hundreds of other white men who passed along north of Capricorn had done.
Charlie Dargie is all man, the type of man you’d expect a real song to be written about:
Now come all you sports that want a bit of fun,
Roll up your swag and pack up your gun,
Throw in some sugar, some flour and tea
And don’t forget a gallon of Vic. O.P.
Crank up your lizzie and come along with me
And I’ll show you such sights as you never did see,
Down on the Daly River O!
Chorus
There was Wallaby George and Charlie Dargie
Old Skinny Davis and Jimmy Panquee,
Big-mouthed Charlie and Old Paree,
The Tipperary Pong and Jim Wilkie,
And wherever you may roam you will find yourself at home,
For they’re noted for their hospitality.
You’ll wake in the morning and your heart’s filled with glee
By a little nude maid with a pannikin of tea;
She’ll give you such a welcome you won’t want to go
Away from the Daly River O!
Now I saw a nigger sitting up an old gum-tree
The crows had picked his eyes out so he couldn’t see.
Never, oh never a word said he –
For he was as dead as dead could be
He was just about ripe, you could smell him for miles
And his bum was sticking out like a horse with the piles,
When Dargie threw a gibber and hit him in the guts
And the nigger went ‘Whoof!’ and we all went bush
Down the Daly River O!
(Then out with the chorus again, pre-breakfast rum swishing away in the tin pannikin as it is swung in time to the music.) Charlie Dargie told me the ‘big-mouthed Charlie’ and ‘Jimmy Panquee’ were the Chinese who started off at Fletcher Gully gold mine – ‘found nothing worthwhile, but kidded everyone they had. You shoulda seen the mining engineers and whatnots that came pouring in to look for gold, and big-mouthed Charlie and Jimmy Panquee smiling like the Chinks they were, and nodding and saying, “Plenty gold, plenty gold”.’
Squizzy, holding out his pannikin for more rum, launched into a poem: ‘Oh, I’ve taken my fun where I’ve found it …’ – ‘that’s Kipling’s “Ladies’ you know” – ‘she knifed me one night, when I wished she was white’. He’d asked me earlier if I wanted a drink. I didn’t know how I’d go on rum before breakfast so I said no. Near to midday I was dehydrating fast, so I asked what else there was to drink but rum. This request threw Squizzy, who claims his father was at Eton, into a flurry. So courteous was he that each time I stood, he leapt to his feet. After the second time when Charlie had followed suit, Charlie said ‘What’re we jumping up and down for?’ and Squizzy said ‘Because the lady’s standing up’. Charlie said to me ‘Well, you’d better sit down or we’ll end up bloody well killing ourselves’. So I didn’t stand again but lolled back as they did in the wheatbag-covered deck-chair-type seats. Charlie reclined like a Roman at a feast, with one foot cocked up on the other knee, and Squizzy jiggled round displaying his chest. I couldn’t take my eyes off it; it was like the back of a crocodile, as dark in colour and horny, and down below where his navel whorled there were occasional noises that threatened to geyser out in a boiling spurt when he told me, ‘I drink anything, spirits of salts, anything.’ ‘Surely not spirits of salts?’ ‘Yes, certainly a few drops in a glass of water, tastes dreadful but settles the nerves.’
A seed buyer had risked his axles and come to talk business with Charlie, but he would have to wait until Charlie was ready. He said, ‘I once came out here and Squizzy had been on the Worcestershire sauce. You were a mess that day, Squizz.’
‘Oh’ agreed Squizzy, ‘I’ll drink anything. But I prefer rum.’ This last was a hint to the seed buyer that if he had anything in his car, now was the time to produce it. ‘I’ve some whiskey’ the innocent announced, ‘I carry it in case of accident. I only mention it because perhaps your guest may prefer it to rum.’ (By now, the ‘guest’ would have settled for spirits of salts, anything.)
The whiskey was produced and the seed merchant tried to hang on to the bottle, but Charlie threw the cork away. ‘We don’t keep corks here’, he said. Squizzy was in a private dither. There didn’t appear to be a spare pannikin. Then, ‘A glass!’ Squizzy cried, as though he had invented a new vessel. He stirred around in a tin trunk and magically came up with a glass, unwashed since something like Condies Crystals was last mixed in it. But that was soon fixed: Squizzy had long fingers, particularly the index finger which reached to the bottom of the glass where his black nail scraped off the brown sediment before the whiskey was poured in, neat.
‘There’s been plenty seen the possibilities of The Daly’ Charlie claimed. ‘It was the battling they didn’t see. We used to have a licence to work the blacks. One day a policeman came down the river like a packet of salts. “Where’s your licence to work niggers?” he says to me and I says, “You can kick me arse, I’ve got a licence.” And I did too. I’d be a goner if I hadn’t.’
‘You know what that track you were on this morning is called? The Pumpkin Road. That’s because we once carted truckloads of pumpkins over it, trying to make a go of things. A city scientist fellow came out here once and tried to tell us what to grow, strutting round he was. If you’da stuck a feather on his bum he’da looked like a peacock, but every time he told us what to grow we said “we tried that”. We tried everything. When the crop was good, the market was bad; when the crop was ripening, the wallabies came in and ate it to the ground; when we put up fences, the floods washed them 20 miles away; and last year when we had a bumper crop and had 7000 bales of hay and down south the animals were starving for want of food, no one could pay the freight out. So it just rotted.’
Charlie later made good with Townsville lucerne seed. So well did he do that he may be remembered for it up in that area. I wish history were the stuff of life and that Charlie could be recorded as the man who came to some sort of terms with living in a plural society. But this isn’t the way history works. We’ll record the exotic, for it is facile, simple, romantic – and with it the half-truths that are sticky with sentimentality. These things will come to be traditional beliefs, a sort of folklore, the limbo-like life of white and black Australians thrown together today will not, I am convinced, ever be recorded.
I envy those experts who see a solution for every problem. I hope they are right, even though each has a vastly different idea of the solution. In fact, in no other field of endeavour have so many people, each unquestionably sincere in their approach, been so bitterly divided as to what should be done. As Bill Harney once said, ‘The poor old Abo is being pushed and pulled one way and another by the lot of them.’ The critical analysis and judgement of the exploitation of the Australian Aboriginal was made long ago. Nothing new that comes to light will alter the finding. The future alone can be altered.
My travels in the outback gave me material for No Tribesman and, later, Outback Heroes. When No Tribesman was published, Lord Casey (then the Governor-General) wrote to me: ‘You have presented them (the Aborigines) to us … as people we can relate to, the good and the bad, men and women any of us could meet and know, if we were as enterprising as you obviously are … It is one of the best books about Aborigines I’ve read.’ It was not as good as all that – even for those times but I paid my way everywhere I went – no fancy grants, and best o
f all, I fitted in everywhere I went and made friends, black and white and can still greet those alive today. And mourn those dead in this hard land.
The commendations for Outback Heroes came from quite a different quarter. Once, only once, Gerry came down south. He loved the green grass, sparkling cities and ‘the posh’ style of eating and drinking. ‘Struth! They’d never recognise me in the Kimberley!’
When he and I returned to Kimberley I wrote this letter to my daughter, Cathy. We’d flown up to Alice Springs, picked up the old truck, and traversed the Tanami desert.
Alice Downs
Locum caretaking
My dear
It is 42° from 8 am to 11 pm, then temp. drops to 38° until 7 am when it rises suddenly. No air-conditioning, TV, radio, newspapers; nearest town Halls Creek, 60 km away for mail. But all fun.
Had a grand trip up. The old truck crossed the Tanami Desert in great style. Reached Rabbit Flat – and tin shed and bowser (but licensed!) and Bruce the owner shouted ‘Gerry Ash! I’ve just been reading about you! Last night!’ His wife had returned from the 9 hours journey to and from Alice Springs and brought him Outback Heroes. Gerry said, ‘And this lady is the author!’ Well! The cavortings, slapping of hand on forehead, exclamations of Jove! Blow me down! Small world! kept up until 3 am when we tottered out of the tin hut to our swags rolled out under the great big stars.
We clocked up over 1000 miles before we got back to Alice Downs after taking the family being relieved to Kununurra airport then getting back here. I travel with a sopping wet bath towel hung over the truck window to ease the heat and when it dries I dip it in water again, but nothing makes it bearable. Nothing.
Have a lovely Christmas m’dears and I’ll see you in the New Year. G sends, ‘Courteous good wishes.’ Struth!
Love P.
Footloose in Australia, The Barcoo Salute, and The Shearers all came out of my extensive travels throughout Australia. Apart from my years of taping the reminiscences of railwaymen, soldiers, sailors, airmen and Merchant Navy men, my greatest work was done with shearers. This large body of men, who have been migrating the length and breadth of Australia almost since settlement, provides Australia with our most unique wealth of folklore. To meet and tape these shearers I went to all States, even to areas where sheep no longer run, such as the Kimberley. Once huge flocks of 100 000 and more were shorn here, and great numbers of Aboriginals worked around the shearing floor and their womenfolk drove mobs down dry creek beds to the sheds. Gathering this lore was the most valuable and pleasant labour I have known. The shearers were the most helpful, and the female cooks, shed hands, pressers and sorters were the most generous with stories. And it was fun. Mostly I stayed at country pubs and got a lift to the distant sheds with the agents for the growers.
There was a pub at Longreach, in the heart of Queensland shearing country. A wide upstairs verandah ran the long width of the building and hung over the footpath. The proprietor in the bar told me to ‘settle in any room that takes your fancy, love’. His wife said, ‘Better take these with you’. Two sheets. I climbed upstairs. All the rooms looked alike so I took one in the middle. They had bare board floors (no, not polished wood), the sheets were the only bedding (and all that was needed in that broiling climate), there was a weak, fly-speckled light-globe away up on the high ceiling which didn’t give enough light to enable me to read the firearms notice on the back of the door and, of course, there was only one light switch. It was beside the door, a long way from the bed. The bathroom was at one end of the long passage, and if you wanted to have a bath you had to order ahead because the big boiler outside in the back yard had to ‘get up steam’. The rooms had no windows except for a piece of frosted glass in the upper part of the door that led directly on to the front verandah. The single pane of glass had lost much of its frosting, both from age and the scratching of etched initials.
That first night I scarcely got into my room when a great thumping and stumping and dragging sound began. It went on for about ten minutes and then stopped, I had been told I was the only ‘guest’ in the huge, old hotel, I was in my dim room on my rock-hard iron bed when I realised I had to get up and tramp over to the door to turn off the light. I got the feeling I was being observed. Yes, I looked at the glass pane above the door and, sure enough, there was an eye. We observed one another for some time, quite unfairly because I could see nothing but the eye could see all of me. I had to get off the bed with the sheet wrapped around me, trot over to the door and turn off the globe, and fumble for a door key until I realised there wouldn’t be one. As the door to the verandah was locked it would be silly to make a fuss, so I returned to bed and went to sleep.
At breakfast in the morning, in the kitchen of course, I mentioned the eye to the proprietor. Quite unruffled, he said, ‘Oh, that silly old bugger. He doesn’t come into town often. I told him to take any room. He’d only be having a squiz to see who’s in the pub so he could have a yarn with them.’ As for the thumping noise – ‘that’d be him dragging his mattress and gear out on to the verandah. He never can stand being shut inside.’
My dog, Tigger, was sent to me as a gift by shearers after I wrote The Shearers. She’s a Jack Russell, a gutsy little dog who has accompanied me on many a long, sometimes lonely journey. Up north she rides on the flat-top tray of trucks, giving the Kimberley cattle gyp. She takes on anything. She can be the ‘dear little dog’ (as friends call her), but when she gets out in the bush she’s a hoyden. She has journeyed by helicopter on cattle mustering, and on down to the Great Sandy Desert of Kimberley where she once visited for three months when I had to go overseas. ‘Oh, she’s got no morals at all,’ said the stockman when I returned, ‘she’ll sleep with anyone, Pat.’ Tigger had simply gone to the man who picked the cosiest position to throw down his bedding roll for the night and Tigger snuggled down with him. ‘When daylight comes she sticks her head out the bottom of the swag, looks around, treks off over the desert for a quickie, and back to the bed roll until she smells the breakfast cooking. When she’s through that and the boys are heading off for the trucks or horses, she’s waiting for them. She rides on the pommel of the saddle or, if things are dickie, is shoved inside the front of a stockman’s shirt. Talk about a dog’s life!’
Research for The Shearers took me to all States: inland to places such as Marble Bar, Leonora, Quilpie, Derby, Barcaldine, Bourke, Broken Hill, Port Hedland and Albany which were all jumping-off places to head to the shearing sheds further out. Hay, Hell and Booligal, Old Man Plain, One Tree Plain, and the great rivers, the Paroo, Barcoo (‘where churches are few’), Lachlan, Murrumbidgee and the Billabong Creek where Granddad Adams sheared and Grandma caught one of the monstrous cod on the great Boonoke Station. This is one hell of a great country and God alone knows why we’re so timid in saying so.
I went to sea in 1954 and became the first woman to receive signed Articles in Australian waters. As well as my ordinary duties on board the Naracoopa, on which I served for six years, I had to stand by and man the ship’s radio three times a day.
The majesty, power and cruelty of the ocean is always there for a small ship’s crew to see. My radio shack on the Naracoopa was to the bottom right of this picture.
Michael on the Naracoopa. Term-time was spent at school in Hobart but holidays meant going to sea.
Cathy doted on the Naracoopa’s captain, Alastair Maddock, from the time he took over the ship in 1956. This was her birthday card to him a year later.
The crew of the Naracoopa, 1956. Clockwise from me are Bill and Wally, who had both owned fishing boats before signing on; the captain, Alastair Maddock; our splendid engineer, Mick; the bosun and the cook. The other crew members were, like many of our seamen, men who moved from ship to ship, the gypsies of the seaways.
We would anchor off Tasman Island and row to the rocks to the left of the crevasse in the centre of this photograph. From here we climbed into a basket and were pulled up to the landing via a cable. A trolley, operated by a winch and
a horse, hauled us 1000 feet to the top of the island, where a horse-drawn sled took our cargo to the lighthouse.
Sometimes the Tasman Island’s lighthouse keeper’s wife and children would come to meet us.
Our engineer played his bagpipes for Alastair’s 32nd birthday – a rare break from the toil.
Alastair – the ‘Big Fellow’, as the crew called him – on ‘Monkey Island’, the exposed deck above the wheelhouse. He took station here when we were in narrow or dangerous waters, calling instructions to the ‘man’ on the telegraph below in the wheelhouse (the engineer below had an identical telegraph face).
Loading cattle was always fun – for the onlookers.
‘Inevitably Alastair and I fell in love.’ In 1957 we all holidayed in Victoria with my parents.
Michael took this photograph of Alastair and me at Randalls Bay, Tasmania, in 1957.
Camping at Randalls Bay, Tasmania, 1958.
Alastair on Mum’s farm teaching Michael to drive the tractor (Cathy, ever the dedicated reader, sits behind on the trailer).
Alastair and I were happy. We fitted well together. New Year’s Eve, 1959.
Captain Vilhelm Pedersen, Arctic and Antarctic mariner, 1960.
Vilhelm (‘Bill’) Pedersen (right) feeding the Emperor penguins he carried from the Antarctic to his homeland, Denmark.
Goodbye Girlie Page 21
