Hear the Train Blow

by Patsy Adam-Smith

  You may not be an angel,

  But still I’m sure you’ll do . . .

  and she danced a little behind the fire as the women of her tribe used to do while the men leapt in the forefront of the playabout dancers in the days before we came with our sophistication and weight of numbers. Dolly would sing to me in her language and try to teach me words, but I was not adept and we would roll and giggle helplessly with our arms round each other when I attempted to repeat the lesson. We decided, the two of us, that when she was old enough she would come to work at the Waaia Hotel, as many black girls did, and we would then be close to one another. The Murray has run many a banker since then, and the little black girl who ate bite for bite with me the food I secreted from the packed-away baskets as we sat behind the gums in the dark has no doubt had the sad battle of most of the girls of that place. I hope she remembers that we kissed when we parted at the close of those visits because we were such good friends and only had to look at one another to start laughing. Memory might make clear to her that we are not born with colour prejudice, that she and I did not have it when we were kids together.

  Waaia of course had no colour bar. Waaia had no bars of any kind. Black Viney worked at the hotel for a long time and was a good friend of everyone in the town and the boys danced with her at the race ball; we used to ask her to our birthday parties. She went back to Cummeragunja and married a full-blood like herself and came back twelve months later on the train to show us her oily black baby, naked in the heat on a clean white cloth.

  ‘What do you oil him with?’ Mum asked as we saw her off in the train.

  ‘Goanna oil, missus,’ she replied. Mum wouldn’t let us laugh at this, saying that it was a wise precaution to protect the skin against the heat and wind until the child was older. It obviously thrived on whatever she gave it because it was now only weeks old and could sit up and was fat and healthy and laughed the whole time it was awake.

  There was plenty of social life for us. Dad had been fond of tennis all his life and here at Waaia he put down a court on the sun-baked red ground and painted lines on it with whitewash and encircled it with wire netting, which also served for the net. Neighbours came from far and near to play on this court, more for the company of lively Dad and the hospitality of Mum than the game. It was too hot to play during the heat of the day; Kevin often came over of a morning and he and I would play from 6 a.m. to 7 a.m., then no one would play until the sun dropped lower around about 6 p.m. From then until night fell the court was never vacant. People arrived in jinkers, on horseback, by push-bike and in tin-lizzies. Mum in mid-summer bought cases of bottled cordials and we kept these in our Coolgardie safe (a wooden frame enclosed by hessian down which water trickled from strips of flannel leading from a dish of water on the top), and when each set finished those four players came in for a drink.

  We also had a wireless. Later the Mothers’ Club bought one for the school, but ours was the first. In between sets players would come in to listen. Dad and Dave was the favourite and our Dad wouldn’t miss it – he listened to it for over thirty years and whooped and laughed and identified the characters with men and women he’d known in the bush. Our set had a big speaker like the one in the advertisement for His Master’s Voice, and we’d crowd close, turning one ear into this, listening, as much in wonder at hearing anything at all as to attend to the actual broadcast.

  Mum was listening intently one day, her ear deep into the flower-like trumpet, and when I walked in she motioned me to be quiet. Then she turned the knob and the machine was silent. She turned to face me and there were tears in her eyes.

  ‘Run over and tell Mrs Young the King is dead,’ she said. It was George V.

  I delivered the message to Mrs Young, who made the sign of the cross on her forehead and each shoulder, and said, ‘May God have mercy on his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed. Amen.’

  Then I was to ride to the Tweddles’ and tell them the news. This was further away across the wheat fields, far enough for the importance of my mission to manifest itself in me. I was the bearer of tidings of national, nay, world-wide importance. Swiftly but carefully I must go. Marathon, Mercury and Roland the Horse, these names flowed about me. I was little for my age, but now my moment had come. I reached the homestead, dismounted and stalked to the door.

  ‘Madam,’ I said to the startled Mrs Tweddle. ‘My mother has sent me to inform you that the King is dead. Long live the King!’

  For good laughing fun there was nothing to beat a trip to Numurkah on the Casey with Dad on Saturdays. This was a routine trip up and back to see that there was nothing amiss on the section. Mum would give us messages to do in town and money for an ice-cream. Over the loud explosions of the motor Dad would sing,

  One, two, three, Australian boys are we,

  Four, five, six, we’ve got the Germans in a fix,

  Seven, eight, nine, we’ll beat them every time

  There’ll be a great time in the old town tonight!

  He’d make up rhymes, sometimes as spoken words, sometimes sung to a well-known tune. In between times he’d shout out loud and the birds would shower from the trees in the bush in fright. ‘Whacko! Jeanie-weanie-cat’s-eyes!’ because my eyes are green. And, ‘We’ll cut old Mickie’s head off ’cause she doesn’t want it on’ – this was a cry from the old Stiffy and Mo days, seemingly.

  It’s only an old piece of bunting, it’s only an old coloured rag, But many have died for its honour, and shed their life’s blood for the flag.

  His favourites were quotations, of which he knew hundreds, but the two most frequently used by him were,

  Life is mostly froth and bubble, two things stand like stone,

  Kindness in another’s trouble, courage in your own.

  and:

  Lives of great men all remind us, we must make our lives sublime,

  And in passing leave behind us footprints on the sands of time.

  We’d always have a dog with us, sometimes two dogs. Nip we’d had since I was a toddler. He was supposed to be mine, but he deserted me as soon as he met Dad and never left his side until his own death of old age. Nip was a great rabbiter and as the Casey roared on he would sit, nose into the wind, watching for the bob of a white tail ahead. Then he’d whine and paw at Dad to pull up so he could range out across the plain in pursuit.

  Even better on rabbits than Nip was Whacko. This dog was given to me by a schoolteacher who bred water spaniels. I’d heard him tell the bigger boys, ‘A nigger got in the wood-pile this time.’ Whacko was one of the results. An odder dog never took to the bush. He was big-boned, ugly as sin, with a tail like a kangaroo that he swung wildly from side to side in excessive exuberance and joy of life. If you were walloped round the legs by this two-foot-long tail like a piece of rubber piping you really felt it. There were times when tears sprang to my eyes as he lovingly walloped me. The day I carried him home as a puppy Dad was waiting for me. I put him on the ground to show him off and Dad took one look and said, ‘Whacko!’ and laughed. The name stuck. I lost the pup, for no dog could resist Dad. He jumped off the Casey when it was going full speed once and broke his leg. The men brought him home on a bag and set the leg in splints, and though he could only use it thereafter as a balance he nevertheless was just as good a rabbiter and once ran down a hare on his three good legs and the brummy one.

  Waaia was not rich in bird life because of the scarcity of trees and water, but we learnt to call those we knew up to us. Alex Walker, now known throughout Australia as the ‘Birdman’, taught us. Alex was an odd-job man. He was a cross-country rider, boot-mender and wheat-lumper – he’d have a go at anything – but his great love was birds. He trained our school (fourteen on the roll at that time) to whistle and call curlews, cockatoos, crows, magpies, pallid cuckoos, kookaburras and many others, and then he took us down to Shepparton radio station where we went on the air.

  The parents all piled into our house back at Waaia to listen in while we first sang ‘Bird of
the Wilderness’, and then went into our repertoire.

  ‘Jean Smith,’ said the announcer, ‘will now imitate the pallid cuckoo and the blackbird.’ Kevin with the morepork followed. Oh, we were big time that night, all right!

  School concerts were another opportunity for us to show off. I always gave lots of items, not because I was a better performer than the others but because the teacher knew he could depend on Mum to dress me well. If it were a toss-up between a new dress for herself or a stage costume for me Mum didn’t hesitate. I was a jester in crimson and gold, a pied piper in red and yellow, a ‘sweet queen of loveliness and grace’ in blue brocade, and Ted Jorgenson sang to me ‘Dressed in your gown of blue brocade’, and we trod a measure or two of a minuet. We thought it was all very aesthetic.

  Weddings were fun, or at least our part in them, which seems in retrospect to have been restricted to kitchen teas and tin kettlings. Kitchen teas were a good excuse for a dance. Everyone brought gifts and placed them on a table near the stage – you didn’t have to know the parties concerned, everyone was welcome. Bill Leaf always made a speech and the prospective groom would reply. Tin kettlings came after the bride and groom settled in their home, usually the day of the wedding in those times when honeymoons couldn’t be afforded.

  When Bill Martin and Bessie Leaf were married I made as much noise as anyone with my old saucepan and soup ladle. We drove up to within half a mile of their house and walked the rest of the way, creeping silently on foot to surprise the couple. We surrounded the house and at a signal began to bang our ‘kettles’. Some did have kettles, others had pots, pans, dishes, iron bars, bolts, crank handles, anything that would make a noise. All round the house we stood, banging and singing ‘For they are jolly good fellows’ until they opened the door and let us in. Then everyone threw their ‘kettles’ on the roof – except the man who had an enamel bedroom utensil which he placed decoratively on the roof of the front porch – and trooped inside. Bessie had a baby grand piano (the first time I’d seen this it was in her father’s house and it so filled the front room one had to sidle in past it). There was enough space around it in her new home for us all to dance around it as she played. After supper we sang ‘We won’t go home till morning’, and the adults made sly remarks which we children didn’t understand but pretended we did.

  Travelling shows were few and far between. Times were hard. A man once came to the school and wrote out by hand a note for each of us to take home. This said he would perform ‘tricks of magic and entertainment’ in the hall the following day and the teacher was willing to let the pupils off early from school. The charge would be a penny for children, threepence for adults. Somehow the parents of all of us read this to mean it was a children’s show only and therefore didn’t come . . . and the best stage magician I have ever seen played to fourteen children and Mr Gregory our teacher for 1s 5d.

  I was first to bring home news of another travelling show. I found it one morning when I was bringing the cows home. We would put our cows up the line at night to graze, and in the morning I’d go after them on the pull-trike. This was my favourite lone expedition. In the crisp, early morning air I’d go off with an apple or sandwich, take the trike from the shed and turn it on the line, and off I’d set pulling the handle in, out, in, out, for a mile up to the crossing towards Numurkah. There I’d let the rails down in the fence and our cows would cross the road to our side of the crossing. Then they would plod home without any help from me, anxious as they were to have their udders relieved. At the crossing I must turn the trike around to face home. It was a heavy, solid thing with three big iron wheels. An unskilled grown man would have found difficulty turning such a machine. I, with one hand doing the ‘lifting’, which was more like swinging, and with the other hand steadying, with my apple held casually in my mouth, was nonchalantly turning this thing of wood and iron on the rails one morning when a man and woman appeared. They found this sight of a very small girl effortlessly turning such a weight so interesting they asked me to their camp for a cup of tea.

  ‘Who taught you to do that?’ the woman asked me.

  ‘My mother. She can do anything.’ As I said this, the man turned a somersault without putting hand to the ground.

  ‘Can your mother do this?’

  I was too amazed to think of the humour of dear roly-poly Mum doing a free-flip.

  They were camped in a clump of trees in a caravan drawn by two mules.

  ‘We are entertainers. You must come to see us.’

  I had half Waaia waiting for them by the time they trundled in and put on their show that night outside the hall, with lanterns hung on forked sticks for illumination. They were a bright pair. The man played the violin all ways – behind his back, above his head, between his legs, with a bow and with a broomstick. The woman sang and clacked castanets, and the mules did odd tricks and were dressed for one item as famous figures. It was a good show, fast-moving and funny, but Waaia itself put on the best act when the front seat collapsed and all the young girls including Mickie and her friends the Martin twins, Rene and Anne, went head over heels backwards.

  ‘What a poppy show!’ the boys said at school next day.

  THE OPEN ROAD

  Times being what they were there were many swaggies on the roads: a strange, wandering race who played life solo. They all had serenity, and I sometimes wonder if the times didn’t give them the excuse to find solitude and freedom from conformity.

  Waaia was on the time-honoured trade route of swagmen coming down through central New South Wales. They had some kind of bush telegraph or perhaps secret signs like gipsies, because they made straight for our place, passing others by without a glance. Mum was always good for a handout.

  ‘Would you mind fillin’ me billy, missus?’ they would ask, and hand a blackened billy and cotton bag of tea over. Mum would never use their tea.

  ‘These times none of us know who’ll be next on the track,’ she would say. Always she’d give a man ‘on the wallaby’ a few cuts off the roast, some vegetables and fruit and a slab of cake. If it was near our mealtime she’d tell him to leave his tin plate and later Dad would take his meal up. These men always camped in the lee of the wheat shed and when Dad went with the meal I went with him.

  ‘A bit of scran, mate,’ Dad would say. Dad never spoke much, but seemed more like a receptacle for other people’s thoughts. I heard more telling, interesting, pungent comments made to Dad than anyone else. These men would usually talk of the track, tell of mates ‘crook’ who had to be left behind (a swagman wasn’t allowed to stay more than forty-eight hours in one town), of ‘hard runs’ where the squatters ‘turned their mongs on a man’. Some were well spoken, some were dead-beats. Some were old, some young, some garrulous, some taciturn, but I never heard one of them speak of his background. Who they were, where they came from and who they left behind we never knew. None of those who came to our house were ‘bots’. While Mum was boiling the water for their billy they would go over to the woodheap, unasked, and cut a pile of wood, or stack what Dad had cut. One man used to sell clothes pegs made from willows, another made dippers from old 7-pound treacle tins using the lids to make firm handles. Until the end of her life Mum used one of these solid, craftsmanlike utensils, the solder smooth and almost invisible. This same man used to make ‘jardinières’ with curled and twisted ornamentation and legs, tastefully painted. Mickie had one for years.

  The swagmen’s rig-out was uniform and consisted of things that could be found in any country home, as Sylvia Martin and I found the day we became swaggies too.

  Mum had gone away for the day and I had known in advance that she would, so we planned well ahead. When Dad left for work we were to meet at the big gum down in our house paddock where the swaggies often rested.

  I found most of my ‘clobber’ in the wash-house – an old pair of dungaree trousers and an old ‘bluey’, a bushman’s coat. I tied a pair of raw-hide bowyangs round my trousers below the knees to stop them dragging with the
weight of wet mud in winter (it was now actually the heart of summer and we were in the midst of dry, crackling drought). The hat position was difficult. There was a wonderful battered felt under the bath, but I couldn’t get my hair up under it so I settled for Dad’s old cloth cap instead. Mick helped me pack a swag with spare clothes and roll a bluey from an old grey blanket. This I tied across the front of my chest and around my back. I had a billy to carry in my hand and a frying pan to tie on my swag. Mick gave me a clean washed flour-bag with tea and another with sugar. I had gathered bottles and old newspapers to sell at the store in exchange for bacon and bread.

  Then I was off. I was a little late and found it hard to keep my steps languid and unhurried as I ran out the gate and looked down for Sylvia, who should be there by now. She wasn’t. Instead, to my alarm, a real swaggie was sitting under the tree, resting his back on its trunk and rolling a cigarette. As I approached he lit up and rolled over on his side, surveying my coming. I had to pass him to get out of the far end of the paddock to go and look for Sylvia. He didn’t take his eyes off me. I skipped along a bit and then tried to look nonchalant like a real swaggie, but it was hard what with my trousers falling down and my hair pushing my cap off my head, and me trying to rectify matters by holding my trousers up with my elbows and wondering whether to drop the billy so I could tuck my hair in again. I wished I could have worn a hat like this real swaggie. His felt hat had strings with corks on the ends hanging down all round the brim to keep the flies off his face. I was almost opposite him when I heard Sylvia’s voice. The swaggie was she.

  ‘I thought you were a real swaggie,’ I told her. ‘Can you smoke?’

  ‘Yes, can’t you?’

  ‘Of course.’ I wouldn’t do less than her. She handed me the makings. It was like canary seed and I couldn’t keep it in the paper. Finally I got a sort of rough cigarette made, lit it and drew in. It was wonderful. I drew in again and let the smoke trail through my nostrils. Then I wondered how I’d ever get enough of them – they were so good. I smoked four more before the day was out and didn’t change my opinion of them. There by the tree I hitched up my trousers and took the ribbon off the top of my hair, which made the cap sit down better.