We were well aware of our good fortune in not having to fight a prolonged war on our own soil. When General de Gaulle marched back into Paris, Tuesday’s French lunch was quite a party. With Madame in tears, we toasted victory with our elegant glasses of cordial, and were quite overcome.
Life changed quickly. Car charcoal-burners went as petrol became available, identification tags were removed, and gas masks were returned, unused except in drill. Blackout curtains were taken from windows; never again would an irate air-raid warden come pounding on your door late at night, warning that the chink of light at your window would cause the entire city to be bombed.
With rationing over, Christian Dior dropped the hemline to the ankle in an exuberance of fabric and created the ‘New Look’. Then the glamorous Coco Chanel, who had been branded a collaborator with the Germans, returned all forgiven and with renewed force. She cattily declared Dior’s New Look hideous: ‘Look at how ridiculous women are, wearing clothes designed by a man who doesn’t know women, never had one, and dreams of being one.’
We enjoyed this frivolous rivalry in the magazines; it was such a change from the anxious talk we had endured for years.
PART II
‘[A man’s] heart must thrill for the saddle and not for the hearthstone.’
THEODORE ROOSEVELT, 1916
‘Out on the wastes of the Never Never—That’s where the dead men lie! There where the heat-waves dance forever—That’s where the dead men lie! That’s where the Earth’s loved sons are keeping Endless tryst: not the west wind sweeping Feverish pinions can wake their sleeping—Out where the dead men lie!’
BARCROFT BOAKE
‘In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy Gone a-droving ‘down the Cooper’ where the Western drovers go; As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing, For the drover’s life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.’
BANJO PATERSON
CHAPTER 22
Emerging from the Cloister
I was seventeen when I emerged from the cloistered custody of the Anglican Sisters of the Sacred Advent. I was summoned to take tea with Mother Superior in her private den, and gently warned of the pitfalls that awaited the unwary in life—pitfalls of which many of us were more aware than Mother Superior herself, in the limited experience of her world. She hoped I would be mindful of my training in ladylike behaviour—not something uppermost in my mind.
Then, duly warned, I was sent forth to deal with the perils ahead. If she only knew, I would no doubt have been the subject of many of her late-night prayers. I had been in boarding school since I was five, so freedom was heady stuff, and like many of the freshly released I was determined to make the most of this new life.
With the war over there was an air of euphoria. We felt we could now make plans and get on with things, where previously we were in a sort of limbo, not knowing what to expect each day.
Service members were discarding their uniforms for civvies and endeavouring to fit back into uneventful civilian routines. My mother, released from the Army Nursing Corps, took up a nursing post in Darwin—a town still in upheaval, with the military encamped around its outlying areas. She was on the staff of the Civil Hospital, as it was known, and for a period flew out to medical emergencies with Jack Slade, who for so long was pilot for the Flying Doctor Service and well known to bush folk.
I reluctantly went into nursing training to please Mother, but after twelve months had to admit my only talent lay in decorating and design. A friend from Mother’s fashion trade days suggested I become his house model while learning something of dress design, a career I regarded with much more enthusiasm.
Life settled into peaceful routine, all over the country.
My parents had formed a fragile marital truce and gone back into the hotel business—first in the business district of a tropical town in north Queensland, later on an island off the Queensland coast.
So soon after the war, there were no great holiday resorts. Islands that are now luxurious and quite famous holiday destinations were then completely barren, with barely a beachcomber’s shack. Before the tourist trade gathered momentum, life on these tropical islands was ideal.
When my father gave me a casual ‘come on up’, I dropped everything and did just that. He was always ready to encourage you to have a good time, whereas my mother thought one should aim toward a more productive life—not always the most popular choice.
What a wonderful period in my life to look back on. My friends and I dallied through our days in bathing costume and sarong, with oleander flowers in our hair. We wore our long ropes of fine pearls entwined with shell necklaces on the beach, a la the French socialite Sara Murphy. Swimming at night in the warm tropical sea left dense starry trails of phosphorescence in our wake. A beachcomber’s paradise!
An aimless lifestyle for a young person, perhaps, but after growing into adulthood throughout a long war, the sudden normality of peacetime had produced a certain world-weariness in me.
These good times were not to last, however. My parents took up a hotel further north on the Queensland coast and I settled in Townsville at a YWCA hostel—not unlike boarding school, but with more fun, more freedom, no nuns to disapprove when slinking home after curfew. I began work in cosmetics and beauty therapy, although it wasn’t something I felt I would pursue for long.
When I flew up to visit my parents, my father usually found some minor adventure for us to go on together. ‘Are you ready for some crabbing?’ he would say, and clad in our scruffiest trousers we would advance on the rubbish bin areas of fancy seafood restaurants to collect fish heads, guts and discarded raw bones for bait. My mother forbade us entry through the hotel’s front entrance in our smelly clothes, clutching our hessian bag of fish offal—although later, when our catch was delectably cooked and served, it was fallen upon with relish by all.
During one such trip, my fox terrier along for the ride, we rowed across the harbour to the mangrove-lined shore and cast our pots. When we turned for home it was almost dark, the water choppy, and we got into a predicament on the open sea beside ships moored at the wharves. Luckily our situation became obvious to sailors on a freighter close to where we were bobbing about. They waved for us to approach and then let down a rope ladder that hung loosely from the deck.
I was thirsty, hungry and dead tired, and the top of the ladder looked like Mount Everest. I discarded my shoes and, in spite of the bucking rowboat, managed to clasp the ladder. My father was right behind me, clutching the precious crabs, with the terrier in his shirt. I made it to the top with the help of the sailors, who came down a bit to keep the ladder from swaying with the ship’s movement. I can’t remember what became of our rowboat and pots. We trudged home to the pub’s back entrance.
How many gals can say they climbed a long rope ladder in darkness into the arms of a bevy of sailors?
Now and then I returned to the old haunts of the south coast to spend time with Elaine and her family. While there I met and befriended Miss Van Weine, a Paris-trained couturier who designed and made the most divine clothes. She was happy for me to wear them on special occasions, which ensured I always had something elegant to wear that I would otherwise not have been able to afford.
Van Weine made me the most gorgeous dress I ever owned, a strapless gown of a white sharkskin fabric, with metres and metres in its heavy skirt. A maze of boning and hidden tapes supported its shape, ensuring it hung just so. Sometime later, as its life was waning, I gave it to a hotel barmaid in Alice Springs who’d admired it. As women are wont to do, I remember it still.
CHAPTER 23
Back to Newcastle Waters
‘Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst.’
RUDYARD KIPLING, ‘MANDALAY’
In 1950 my parents’ German tenant Max Schober decided to move on from the Junction Hotel at the Ridge, which he’d been leasing since the early 1930s. He opened a store in the new town of Elliott. With n
o provision made for a caretaker to stand in at the pub, the only thing my mother could do was return alone to Newcastle Waters. She would see what could be done with the old place my father had built, which she hadn’t set eyes on for sixteen years.
Mother found that the intervening years had wrought big changes in the old pub, which was rundown and dirty beyond belief. She quickly realised that she would need to take a very firm hand in dealing with her customers; the slightest sign of weakness and control would be lost, and there’d be anarchy.
Early on the first evening, with the old management still in place, she sat in the office behind the bar, listening to the buzz of laughter and high spirits echoing around the iron walls. Suddenly a deathly silence descended and she wandered into the bar to see what was doing—or undoing, in this case.
Bill Fulton, the enormously fat barman, was there alone, hanging from a rafter with a rope around his neck. He was red faced, his eyes bulging alarmingly, toes scrabbling for contact with the top of the bar.
Bill had been accused of a crime: something terrible, to be sure—maybe overcharging for a drink or watering the rum a tad too much. Ringer court had sat! The prisoner was pronounced guilty and sentenced. A rope was thrown over a beam and the prisoner hoisted onto the bar—no mean feat in Bill’s case—there to be hanged by the neck, presumably until dead.
At this undeniably critical point in the proceedings, something of general interest had taken place outside on the road. Perhaps a fight had broken out or a new arrival needed investigating, and judge, jury and executioner had cleared the bar in seconds, the fun of Bill’s hanging entirely forgotten.
At Mother’s anxious insistence, they returned sulkily to cut Bill down. Resentfulness prevailed that anyone should take the incident seriously and spoil the fun. ‘He’s a good mate, Missus,’ they insisted. Why would they harm old Bill, who’d suffered little more than a rope burn around his fat pink neck, and continued on serving at the bar as if nothing unusual had happened? And in view of the pub, the place and the times, nothing unusual had happened.
‘What do you do when they get out of control?’ my mother enquired.
‘Oh, put the drunks in the monkey room until they settle down.’
The small monkey room, she discovered, was locked from the outside and fronted with a heavy, galvanised mesh grille. It closely resembled a prison cell.
That night Mother retired to a none-too-clean bedroom with some misgivings. If this was the first night, what was to come?
Tom Quilty, an old friend, said to her, ‘I hope you know what you’re taking on, here alone. If you can handle this lot, you’re a better man than I am.’
My God! I can tell you that this was a place to intimidate the toughest bush publican. Another memorable night Mother heard about a drunken couple in flagrante delicto on a public pathway in broad daylight, she called her yardman. ‘Remove them,’ said she, and stood by as he cast a bucket of cold water on the love-makers. Was my mother, a genteelly raised lady, intimidated? Did she go pack her bags and depart a place of such immoral decadence? Not she! She handled it alone, and in her usual efficient and orderly way proceeded with her intention to clean the place up and sell out as soon as possible. She’d spent years as a hospital matron, terrorising probationary nurses and untidy interns in her wards, and wasn’t about to be intimidated by unruly drinkers.
Mother set about proving she was equal to the challenge. She soon learned that staff were hard to find, with advertisements in southern newspapers either going unanswered or bringing unsuitable applicants. Sometimes after just one look at the miserable, lonely landscape of scrubby Bullwaddy, they were on the next trip out.
Newcastle Waters seemed like a town where there would never be anything to do you shouldn’t be doing. But looks belie, for this town had a wild past, and a wilder future awaited the wary new publican.
There were good men to deal with, and bad; happy drinkers, and dangerous ones to be handled with tact. This was an establishment where the public played really rough. For years they’d behaved how they wished.
The pub’s patrons were an unruly bunch to be sure, but big reforms were in the wind with my mother’s management:
No spitting on the floor.
No excessive swearing in the bar.
No cheques cashed with the merest suggestion of rubber in their make-up.
No credit to anyone with the faintest unsavoury whiff to his character.
She also banned from the premises a small group of local women who’d spent most of their day settled on the verandah, causing trouble with drinkers.
Shock! Horror! was the response of the Junction’s regulars, who had real trouble dealing with the passing of their ‘good ole days’. And a woman to deal with too! How bad could it get? Were the days of undisciplined drunken revelry gone forever, when you could ride your horse into the bar to fetch a bottle of rum, cheered on by your mates? Were there to be no more mad gallops down the road outside, firing your rifle into the bar to give everyone a scare? Just for the hell of it, y’know. That slash in front of the bar was a reminder of the time you brought out your big bush knife to deal with someone similarly armed. ‘What harm in that, eh? We both lived to tell of it.’ Was all the fun to end?
When Mother was under siege from determined revellers, reinforcements were slow to arrive. The policeman and Long Tommy, his Aboriginal tracker, were rarely anxious to get involved in problems 30 kilometres away.
Tommy, who had once tracked for my father, was unusually tall and had a thick mop of snowy white hair, which he coloured a lustrous dark reddish-orange with powdered ochre. He was a sight to behold in his police uniform, with his old-style, high-crowned trooper’s hat balanced precariously on top.
The next pub out through the Murranji Track was at old Halls Creek, hundreds of kilometres distant, so Mother had a dedicated clientele. Under her firm rule, they were no worse than drinkers anywhere else in the bush—just seeking company, a break from life in isolation. Sure, they were wild men at times, but if a drunk became truly unruly, his mates usually took him in hand.
The Ridge was a regular Territory cow-town, where drovers brought their big cattle herds right through. Copious amounts of rum were sold, and beer came in large bottles, each covered with a straw sleeve, four-dozen to the wooden case—always referred to as a case of beer, never a crate or box. When Cuban-heeled riding boots clumped on the pub’s stone floor, and the rum and beer bottles began a-clinking, a wild night could be expected and stern measures were needed to keep control.
The law demanded 10 p.m. closing, and my mother saw to it that the doors closed right on time, in spite of desperate pleas: ‘Aw, c’mon, Missus, gissus another ten minutes, will ya?’ Banished from the bar, they would continue their big night, if in a serious party mood, right across the wide road out front.
In cold weather they made a big campfire, gathered around in a wide circle and settled right down to make a night of it. Supplies to see them through until morning were piled into the big hotel wheelbarrow and trundled across to the site of festivities. It was of little importance if the beer wasn’t cold: ‘Cold or straight from the case—doesn’t matter, Missus, so long as there’s plenty of it!’ Mother ensured her stocks never ran out—sometimes low, but never out.
In the morning amid the powdery ashes and surrounded by high piles of empties, the revellers were to be found in various stages of inebriation or recovery. Often they would continue on through the next day, or they could even make a week of it, by which time the beer bottles were mountainous and the drinkers who were still vertical were subdued and very shaky of paw.
Throughout their revelry they sang, boasted, swapped yarns—and fought. A curious phenomenon among Territory ringers was that when they fought, it was with a suddenness and savagery, and for reasons they couldn’t really explain; but, with the fight over and tensions released, camaraderie restored, they subsided back to peace and good will, mateship with no grudges held. The only evidence of it were the
wounds of battle, rarely more than a split lip or black eye.
During such a battle, a top Territory cattleman, Elmore Lewis, took a more damaging punch than usual—it split his lip open right to his nose. A hawker known as Happy Wilson was camped with his van outside the pub, a good spot to latch on to retiring drinkers who may still have the odd bit of cash. With bag needle and strong black thread, Happy stitched Elmore’s lip together. Antiseptic? None—only the alcohol that passed over it on the way down his throat during the remainder of the evening. But Happy made a neat job of it, with only a faint scar.
When drinkers got too rowdy my mother would call on the services of those still sober to act as gaolers. Occasionally two or three men would be incarcerated in the monkey room together. There’d be a loud protest and a few swinging kicks at the door, or perhaps a fight that bounced them off the walls and bulged the door, after which they’d settle and fall asleep until released in the morning.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, cattle droving through the outback stock routes was at its peak. Herds weren’t yet transported by motor vehicle, but trucks carried loading through the bulldusted roads of the Murranji to outlying western stations. The transport drivers were as given to off-the-track revelry as the stockmen.
The Martin brothers, Stan and Jim, were the Territory-born, station-raised sons of Alf Martin, long-time manager of Victoria River Downs Station. They carried loading through Newcastle Waters and the Murranji, and both they and their drivers knew how to party ringer style. To liven a dull evening, they invented crazy competitions of the reckless and dangerous variety.
On a prolonged binge, fuelled with enough alcohol to launch a rocket to Mars, they marked out a race course with the prime-movers of their semi-trailers. It led over a rough bush track and culminated in traversing a rickety bridge, of two narrow timber wheel tracks, that spanned a deep creek—with no side rails and a cavernous nothing beneath.
Daughter of the Territory Page 12
