by Don Watson
As the Commonwealth of Australia was born amid great hopes, and an Irishman in Western Australia wrote home to say that he couldn’t see himself getting married that year because the lambing had been ‘so very bad’ and flyblow had killed his best ewes and he was ‘as thin as a post’ and living on bread and jam, and rabbits, bushfires and the Labor Party were all bearing down upon the man on the land, Cyril Penny was born on a little farm at Dongara, near Geraldton on the West Australian coast.
Cyril was half a century younger than Arthur Ashwin, but his life would follow a similar course. His high hopes never failed to collide with circumstances that were too strong against him, yet he made a kind of unfortunate life and in the end thought it was a story worth telling. He was right: to follow Cyril from birth to almost death is to see how the bush could grind down a man of little means and mainly feckless ambition, leaving him with nothing in his pocket and an identity secured by little more than the scars of experience.
When he was nine years old his father set him to work with his six-year-old brother grubbing ‘white bush’ and marshmallow on the farm. His father would mark off a quarter of the task and demand the children finish it by a certain time. It might be 38 degrees in the shade, but if they didn’t finish his father wrapped the thong of his stockwhip round the handle and flogged them with it. It was no mere hiding. ‘We were flogged until he was tired . . . When a strong man gets to work flogging a child from his neck to down his back to his feet it sure cuts some nasty gashes, leaves the flesh and skin all cut and bruised for months.’ One flogging nearly killed Cyril.
He was, he said, ‘a bush child’, with bush instincts and bush skills. He knew how to find cattle in the scrub: put your ear to the ground and you can hear them from a hundred metres away, puffing and blowing as they feed. He knew where to find bardi grubs and how to get them out of the roots of trees. He’d take them home to cook and eat; they tasted like bananas. He ate all manner of bush tucker – ‘Worms, Grubs and Ants’ – but he couldn’t come at snake. One might think from the early part of his autobiography that Aboriginal knowledge had found its way into Cyril Penny’s childhood well before he met any Aborigines, and the fact that he hated ‘niggers’ doesn’t diminish the suspicion.
All the floggings ‘poisoned’ him against his father, but, like Arthur Ashwin, he did not lack filial loyalty. In old age Cyril said he’d always seen his father’s good points and felt proud of him. His dad had had a run of rotten luck: twice in two years a passing train set fire to his wheat crops and he ‘lost the lot’. But Cyril reckoned he was ‘fearless’, a champion buckjump rider and much admired by women. He was ‘a credit to any child, if only he’d been kind to us’. And kind to his dogs, perhaps: Cyril recalled him shooting a kelpie that failed to come when he called.
A few weeks before his fourteenth birthday, Cyril’s father sent him off to work on a big station some 500 kilometres north of Geraldton. He told him the owner had permission to ‘belt’ him if he was ‘cheeky’. He also told him there were ‘two nigger lads up there older than me and only half tame’ with whom he must not play, ‘rather give them a kick or a punch whenever you get near them to show them who was Boss’. ‘Right Dad, I will,’ said Cyril.
He was not so blind he failed to see the two boys, named Winker and Jupiter, had been hard done by. They were slaves, ‘kept under close guard’:
They were taken from their parents when they were 8 or 9 years old, by the station owners and brought up on the station for cheap labour. Poor devils never knew their parents as their parents weren’t allowed to visit them . . . They were treated like dogs, put in a shed on a few bags to sleep. The food wasn’t handed to them, it was chucked in and if it fell into the sand they still had to eat it. Naturally they hated all white people.
But Cyril had to live by his father’s instructions and ‘show no fear’ of these boys. ‘What’s worth doing is worth doing well’, his father always said, so when he took on one of the black boys, ‘I punched him. I jumped on his guts. His face was black when I started, it was red with blood when I finished. I didn’t care if I killed him.’ It seems possible that he was trying to pulverise more than the black boy. Of course, Cyril shared his prejudice with the vast majority of his fellow Austral-Britons, not to say the whole white world, but the general racism did not so evidently suggest an effort to repress some nameless terror in the unconscious. Cyril was haunted by Aborigines – tame, half tame and wild.
On the station he rose at four in the morning to milk twenty-two bush cows. He went mustering cattle, tailing sheep, camping out with the drovers. He rode races for the station owner, and one day had to make sure he lost, or suffer gruesome punishment from the other jockeys. He broke one wrist and dislocated the other, but the ‘windmill man’ treated the broken one the same as the dislocated one, by putting his feet on Cyril’s chest and pulling on it. ‘After being away from my mother, sisters and brothers for 12 months, 300 miles, a small boy trying to live like a man . . .’ he went home.
Life didn’t get any better for Cyril. He was unconscious for a day and a half and the doctors gave him up for dead after he was thrown and dragged by a horse. A brother was killed in a brawl in Derby. For a couple of years Cyril was a nervous wreck, a ‘near crank’. He went boxing in Perth. He went kangarooing, at least some of the time, it seems, pursuing them at night on a bicycle. He became a drifting worker. He got boils. He got beaten up by a much bigger man. He had to shoot a horse that got tangled in a fence. He had to shoot a dog. By a waterhole he wrestled for ten minutes with a 7-foot old-man kangaroo. It was a life-and-death struggle: ‘he kills me, or I kill him’. Eventually Cyril ‘killed him with a stranglehold’. He fell out with his mate Les, because Les didn’t believe the story. He took up a pipe, but a crow stole it when he left it on a fence post. The bush had beaten Cyril. He walked out of it vowing never to go back. ‘I left everything I had or owned in my camp . . . Rifles, rugs, clothes, push bike and many more articles too numerous to mention. I just walked off with the clothes I had on my back . . .’
He became a groundsman at the local convent in Dongara. He took a job with a farmer, a ‘dopey old bugger’ who was ‘very religious, and every night he would get the whole family to kneel on the cement floor and say the rosary’. He went back to the bush. He took jobs breaking horses, hunting wild ones, ploughing, clearing and sinking wells, a dangerous job as two men down in Albany found when they ‘both got stifled with foul air’ and died. One time he was cutting down salmon gums full of nesting cockatoos and parrots and he ‘made quite a few pounds out of selling these young birds’, but it didn’t last. An Indian called Panda Khan offered him his camel team, but he passed it up – a mistake, he thought later. He took on buckjumping. He became a runner and won the 1924 Sheffield Handicap in Geraldton. He chased girls. He’d set his 500 rabbit traps and go into town and dance till midnight. He took up hunting foxes with a Pomeranian and a big kangaroo dog he found.
He’d been born in hard times and he married in them, in 1936. He couldn’t find work anywhere, and had to line up every morning at the unemployment office. He and his wife Hilda soon had a daughter, but the dole and government rations were not enough to feed her, so they put her in a Catholic children’s home ‘until such time as we could afford to look after her better’. The unemployment office sent him to work in a gravel pit in Katanning. He took his wife and second daughter. It was terrible work and the gangers picked on him. The daughter died. He was sent to work on the aerodrome at Albany. Like everyone else reduced to sustenance, he was humiliated by it.
It must have been sometime in the 1950s that Cyril managed to borrow £400 from the bank and build a new home. They loaded all they had onto a one-ton truck that didn’t go and, with Hilda steering, towed it with one that did. No more were they at the mercy of landlords, especially Italian landlords. ‘Goodbye to being harboured by . . . Italians’, Cyril wrote, ‘ . . . no one knows but people who are under their claws what a rotten race they are.’
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br /> While working in an abattoir, Cyril was badly injured. With the compensation he received he sold the first house and bought another, a smaller one in Swan View. They had been there just four months when Cyril’s ‘darling wife’ fell ill, and three months later she died. ‘In this new house she had so anxiously looked forward to,’ he wrote, ‘I live a broken-hearted man.’
His life was a broken-hearted story. The bragging and aggression read like expressions of childhood wounds and his fear and prejudice less like bigotry than an effort to believe in something, to define himself. It’s perhaps telling that when he comes across an Aboriginal man who has been left to find his own way home after a long cattle drive, he is gripped by sympathy. The man has to return across the lands of traditional enemies who may well kill him. ‘This poor fellow had to hide all day and travel all night dodging all black fellas on his way . . . The white fellows only used these fellows for their own gain.’ It seems possible that Cyril recognised something of his own life in the black man’s plight.
You could put Albert Facey by a waterhole and make him the archetype of the swagman, and ‘fortunate’ though he thought his life was, if you caught him in a dark moment he might even jump in. Born in 1894, Bert Facey was two years old when he lost his father to typhoid fever on the West Australian goldfields. His childhood would be no better than Cyril Penny’s or Arthur Ashwin’s. His desperately necessitous mother was twice obliged to give him up. Bert believed she had abandoned him and he never forgave her. If this was a flaw it was the only one in his soul. He went to work at the age of eight, laboured long hours for poor farmers who then refused to pay him, and lived rough in the bush snaring possums and hunting kangaroos. Aged nine, he was living like a child slave among a mob of drunken horsebreakers and thieves, with an Aboriginal named Charlie his only friend and protector. He was flogged with a stockwhip and took weeks to recover after running away with his swag in the middle of the night and walking 30 kilometres. He knew poverty, loneliness, terror and hunger as well as any of Dickens’ children did. When in the 1970s he described his childhood in his memoir A Fortunate Life, a quarter of a million readers were spellbound and hard men cried.
Bert was fourteen when he joined a six-month, 600-mile cattle drive from Geraldton to north of the Ashburton Range. There were ‘six whites and eight blacks’ in the party. By the time he returned Bert could call himself a bushman. He taught himself to read and write and took work where he could find it: clearing and burning the scrub that would become the West Australian wheatbelt, farm labouring, lumping wheat, laying rail lines, cleaning out dams and wells, boundary riding. When the Great War began he joined the AIF with two of his brothers, and all three fought at Gallipoli. The two brothers were killed. Bert was badly wounded and eventually repatriated home. He had taken part in at least eleven bayonet charges, an experience that never left his mind. He lost his religious faith at Gallipoli. He decided God was a ‘myth’.
Facey’s hero of the Gallipoli campaign was John Simpson, the saint-like stretcher-bearer who was also a myth. Around 1910 the teenage Simpson had deserted an English Merchant Navy ship and knocked around in the bush for three or four years, in part, presumably, to avoid being detained for desertion. When the war started, enlisting in the AIF offered a way of getting back to England. He was twenty-two when he landed at Gallipoli on April 25. Twenty-three days later he was dead. Though he was much less an Australian bushman than a prototype of the English backpacker, and though the records show he did no more than other stretcher-bearers did, his bravery earned him a place in the Glorious Deeds of Australasians in the Great War (1916) and his name became synonymous with the Anzac legend. ‘Simpson’s actions are regarded as the highest expression of mateship,’ declares the Australian War Memorial, which suggests either that the creed could be very quickly learned in Australia or, what is more likely, that it was something one could pick up just as easily in the north of England, which was Simpson’s home. Perhaps Facey saw mateship or some distinctive Australasian characteristic in John Simpson’s action, perhaps he just admired the selfless deeds that humanity in general admires.
The Perth doctors gave Bert Facey two years to live. He became a tram conductor, a trolley-bus driver, an advocate for returned soldiers, and, like John Simpson, a unionist. He married. He lived. He and his wife Evelyn took up a 485-hectare soldier settlement, and did all right for a while, but the rabbits and the Depression drove them back to the city. He camped near the lime kiln at Wanneroo, where he took a job with his eldest son Barney, ‘loading seven tons of lime onto a truck three times a day’. The lime blistered his skin, all the hair fell off his body, and after five months he was sent back to hospital. People, he said, ‘cursed Australia and the state it was in’ and the returned soldiers cursed it most of all.
Barney and two other sons joined the Second AIF. Barney ended up in Singapore and was reported missing until, four years later, Bert and Evelyn got news he’d been killed in the Japanese invasion. They bought a chicken farm. They went in for pigs. Bert never entirely recovered from the injuries he suffered at Gallipoli and it is possible that Evelyn, ‘the loveliest and most beautiful woman’, his ‘lovely girl’, his wife, never recovered from the ordeal of Barney’s disappearance and death. She developed a chronic illness and died just short of their sixtieth wedding anniversary. He finished his memoirs at the age of eighty-three, writing famously at the end: ‘I have lived a very good life, it has been very rich and full. I have been very fortunate and I am thrilled by it when I look back.’
Tall, handsome, resourceful and a fierce warrior (in battle he killed ‘hundreds of men’, he said), the man that emerges from the bush in the form of Albert Facey is the man that Charles Bean fancied he saw west of the Divide, in happy combination with something of John Shaw Neilson’s gentle sympathy and what the historian John Hirst calls an ‘elemental purity’ of voice.
It may be that the bush made Facey the way he was, but Methodism might just as easily take the credit for his armour of moral purpose, as it might for his social conscience and his Labor sympathies. Perhaps his character was cast less by the bush than by the abuse of those degenerate bushmen. It might not have been the silence and loneliness of the bush which made him, but the silence and loneliness of his mother’s absence and what he felt as rejection. We can fit him into the Bean mould, but only by ignoring who he was.
‘It was in itself a study to mark the different countenances’ among the wanderers who came to the door of Mrs James Foult on the Darling in the 1870s. There were French, German, Irish, English, Scots and Welsh, and ‘not a few from the Chinese Empire’. They were a ‘great tax’ on her own family, but she could not turn them away. Some were ‘hale and hearty’ and some ‘bowed down with the cares of this world’. Some were on the run from faithless women. Some had been prosperous once, but were now obliged ‘to look for their daily bread in the Australian bush’. The legend insists the national character was moulded by the land’s embrace, yet it is just as true that the bush did not so much embrace its denizens as license their eccentricities and instincts. In the bush they could be lord or wanderer or miserable wretch, or many other things to which their souls were suited, including both creator and destroyer.
Paterson, Lawson, Furphy and Rudd, all of whom are generally held up as architects of the legend, commonly wrote about people who did not conform to it, or to anything else so stereotyped. Other writers – Xavier Herbert, Patrick White, Judith Wright, Thea Astley, Thomas Keneally, Roger McDonald and Rodney Hall among them – have been concerned with the darker eccentricities of bush humanity, the ambivalence and savagery that goes with living there, as if to say that the ‘weird melancholy’ of the bush is just as often the weirdness of the people living in it.
As often as they found mateship on the track, Arthur Ashwin and Cyril Penny found meanness and betrayal – what need of mateship without its opposite? Men steal Arthur’s equipment, sell shares in his mine, empty waterholes so other men can’t follow them. In t
he bush where most men have been desperate at some point in their lives – lost, hungry, thirsty, broke, stranded, sick – generosity is just about the greatest good and its absence the greatest evil. As they find good luck and bad, they also find good, reliable men and men who are treacherous, spiteful and mad. Men like Henry Lawson’s arsonists who, he said, were ‘very, very common’ and kept bush people in a state of terror. The bush was the ‘Bible’ of the true bushman, Sorenson said, and all the life it contained were chapters in it to be read and reread. It taught folk how to live, how to judge, what to value, what to reject, what to love and what to destroy. The bush could show them how to be good, and just as easily seduce them into folly and wickedness. There was, it seems, a true path through the bush that led to salvation and enlightenment, and many paths that led nowhere.
To his immense satisfaction, Arthur Ashwin gets hold of a tank for five quid, just the thing for a boiler to take with him on a trek past the waterhole at Yilgangie where ‘the country takes a change from salmon gum to mulga’. Long George and a couple of others were with him and in the baking sun they crossed Lake Carey, dragging their horses out of the slurry beneath the salt crust, following footprints that others had left in the salt, while others followed theirs. Apart from a couple of pennyweights dropped from the arses of emus in a quandong patch, they found no gold on the way and very little at the end, but later they heard that if they had dug a hole 2 metres deep on the site of their first camp they would have found plenty. Even for this most purposeful of wanderers there was always a suggestion that, whatever their seeming goal, his journeys were less a quest for treasure or employment than an expression of the psyche, or a form of therapy.
