The Battlers

by Kylie Tennant

  Dedication

  To the ‘Battlers’

  I wonder where they are now?

  They will never read this, never know it is written.

  Somewhere a dirty crew of vagabonds,

  Blasphemous, generous, cunning and friendly,

  Travels the track; and wherever it takes them,

  Part of me follows.

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  About A&R

  About the Author

  Other books by Kylie Tennant

  Copyright

  Introduction

  An English reader wrote of The Battlers: ‘All its people should, of course, be put in a lethal chamber, but somehow by the end of the book, one manages to regard them with sympathy and interest.’

  That reference to the lethal chamber was a great shock to me. I felt, though, that to have chipped even a flint off such a mind was of some moment. It had never occurred to me that vagabonds, failures and criminals, about whom I habitually wrote with affection, might, to orderly and reasonable people, be candidates for extinction. This was before even more orderly and reasonable people brought to a dreadful practicality methods of removing large numbers of persons, under the excuse of wartime expediency, from a life which however miserable still gave them breath and hope.

  The people who are absent from The Battlers are much more alarming from the human point of view than those with whom the book deals: the people who ‘look on our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies’, who consider that those who cannot pass examinations and tests for fluency in language or modern skills, should be filed away under a number in an institution. It is true that in the past century the wheels have moved so fast that there are increasing numbers of us left limping in the rear if we cannot translate the mixtures of Greek and Arabic which result in larger engineering achievements, fouler cities and a general level of dread.

  Pockets of primitives, among whom I would number myself, have been abandoned by the roadside, breathless in a roar of exhausts and dust. More and more people are battlers, not only on the track, but in the suburbs, the factories, the automated living where to be a man or woman is no longer any claim.

  I have long borne the reputation of being an observer of human behaviour, a binocular naturalist objectively recording wild life in human form. If I have said that I sought the society of unlettered and poor people from choice, because I took pleasure in their company and gained more by it than I did from the learned, this has been laughed off as mere perversity or quaintness. How clever to select such little-used material!

  The human eye records best at the pace at which one walks. In fact, to see properly one must sit still. In a fast car, attention is given not to small details but to the larger objects in the landscape. To meet the people I wished to write about, it was necessary to camp where they camped, go at their pace, learn the meanings they gave to words that were used by others in a different sense. Also I must think and feel as they did. This takes time and a large amount of common hardship.

  I can remember sitting by a muddy pool in which the horses and men had been bathing and from which I had just drawn a kerosene tin full of drinking water. I was reading a letter in which friends told of a very good white wine they had drunk with ice (ice!) at a fashionable hotel. It made me smile ironically to think that for the price of those drinks my companions on the track could live for a week.

  Laughter is one of the goods that are never rationed. Indeed, among primitive people laughter is the great protection. A famous Arctic explorer told how the Eskimos among whom he was living were so exhausted by a seal hunt that when they had drawn up their catch on an icefloe, they all went to sleep. While they slept, the icefloe broke away taking their food supply with it. The cream of the jest was — and they rocked with laughter as they related it — that the polar bears would be so glutted with the slaughtered seals, they would not come ashore and so the villagers would lose that food source also. Think of it — the polar bears, too!— they had to laugh. A civilised man would not see anything funny in such a situation; but then a civilised man has other defences against lack besides the ability to go hungry and grin about it.

  If there is one thing I regret about the long journeys I took along the track, to live with the Battlers, it is that I did not ever come to terms with the horse that drew my van. I had never driven a horse before, and that jib mare and I regarded each other with mutual suspicion. It was not till long after that horse and I had parted for ever that I learned to know how horses think and feel, or to come to any sympathy with them. The horse was to me a burden of responsibility. I had to hobble it, feed it, track it when it wandered. After driving a car I was impatient with a living creature in place of a machine. Even its harness was complicated and strange.

  The horse knew of my unhandiness and took constant advantage of this, nearly succeeding in maiming me on several occasions. After a long variance I came to a town where I bestowed the mare in a safe stable. An old drover showed me a knot which, he maintained, would hold any horse securely. Alas! in my impatience and incompetence I strangled the horse, tying it with the new knot. My version of the knot turned out to be a slip knot, and the poor mare, alone and frightened, pulled on it ever tighter and tighter until she died. To have murdered a horse by ignorance and lack of skill is a painful matter, even when the horse is by no means beloved.

  I am sorry for it and have continued to be sorry for it for many years. When I hear of others who have committed nameless crimes, I remind myself that probably a good deal of ignorance and callousness were to blame as in my own case. There is, however, less excuse for strangling a fellow creature in mere hastiness and bungling than for other deeds. I would proffer that many horses are natural suicides, and even the best of them neurotic and self-centred. Although I have had enforced association with other horses, finding many of them gentle and affectionate, I have always regarded them with some reserve.

  The code of the travellers, with whom I worked and camped, was not my code of behaviour. I do not believe, for instance, it is salutary to take a whip to your wife, although this was behaviour which was spoken of in certain cases with approval. Nor did I regard fist fights between drunks as a social diversion. If I had my reservations about my comrades, they always treated me with the kindliness and gentleness the best people show a helpless idiot. I aroused in them both pity and bewilderment and this worked very much to my advantage. Those who are accustomed to a position of bitter inferiority come fresh to the pleasures of philanthropy.

  At stealing sheep I was a hopeless failure, making far too much noise; but I continued to enjoy my share of the fresh mutton. Whatever was looted in our passage, my share, although I had done nothing, was placed aside because I was ‘one of the mob’. I shared with them what I had. I remember two men sitting by my camp fire planning to steal an old set of harness from a ‘cocky’s’ barn.

  ‘Why go so far?’ I asked. ‘I have a new set of harness, and you
could take that without any trouble.’

  They were outraged and insulted that I should even think they were capable of it. They spoke severely, and with much bad language, of people with minds like mine. One does not steal from one’s mates, for that is unforgivable. Also one tolerates in friends conduct that in unknown persons would incur censure.

  I ask you to make the acquaintance of the Battlers, as worthy of friendship and requiring it, wherever you meet them, as primitive tribesmen, wanderers in cities, patients in institutions, jailbirds, and others whose acquaintance has no immediate advantage, assuring you that however burdensome the charge, you will be the better for it, unless you are superior or patronising. Humility is all.

  There may come a time, and not so far distant, when all of us could be in need of the virtues of the Battlers: which boil down to a talent for survival. After twenty years, people tell me, the travellers are now all working industriously in an affluent society. I doubt this. Give me yet another twenty years, and I may be able to point out to you little groups of migrants and wanderers, among whom you may be one, making as best they can in circumstances they have not chosen. Even the most intelligent and superior are casting about now in their minds for boltholes. Do not pity the lean desert dweller until you have learnt to go without water.

  KYLIE TENNANT

  1965

  1

  If Snow had taken the road through Belburra, instead of the track through Currawong, his whole life would have run a different course. He had pulled in his horse at the fork of the road, and for a minute he sat thinking. True, the road to Belburra was the shorter way home, and he had been away nine months. But Snow was not any too eager to reach home. His return was never the scene of wild enthusiasm. One of his sons might stroll inside and announce: ‘Hey, Mum, Dad’s here.’ And his wife would remark grimly: ‘Hello! so you’re back, are you?’ and Snow would say: ‘Yeah, I’m back.’

  He had come over the black-soil plain; the plain that stretches from Narrabri to Moree in a loneliness where the mirages smoke and the great brown kangaroos leap away from the road, where the enfiladed telegraph-poles dwindle to a pinpoint and disappear over the rim of the earth, where the ground is baked like a tile in summer, and in winter forms a black bog that the drovers dread. Snow had crawled slowly across it in the lumbering van he had got in exchange for his sulky. It was slow, but, as Snow said to himself, he was a man who ‘liked a bit of comfort.’ He was of that singular breed who travel alone for preference; and as he reined Don in at the fork of the road, there was no mate to influence his judgment which way he should go.

  There was the wind, of course — the vicious westerly that makes winter a hell, a westerly biting with all the malice of the thousands of miles of barbed wire over which it had blown. Whichever way he turned, that wind met him face-on. The track through Currawong was more sheltered than that through Belburra.

  Then also Don, the horse, was tired; even Bluey, the cattle-dog, was tired, panting and dusty at the end of his chain under the van. Five miles this side of Currawong, Snow knew of a camp where there was good feed and water for the horse. But more important than grass or water, it offered that privacy and retirement so essential to anyone who meditates an onslaught on someone else’s sheep. Snow was a big man, six feet one, and every inch of him meat-hungry. To his mind, there had always been something contemptible about buying mutton when it was walking about in the paddocks all around him. Visions of roast mutton floated before his eyes. He clicked his tongue to Don and turned him along the left-hand track to Currawong. All his life, with that decision, veered into a different course.

  When Snow made camp late that afternoon, it was in a hollow between two ridges where a high steel windmill whirled above the tank provided for travelling stock, clanking the pump-rod up and down with a lonely clatter, like a ghost rattling in chains. All along the track there had been a scarcity of feed because, although it was the middle of June, not enough rain had fallen to break the drought. But here was a clearing green with tender grass and, in the grass, patches of reedy, red garden flower and a few overturned stones to tell of a forgotten homestead. Beside the stones two great coral trees lifted naked grey branches that showed, instead of leaves, clusters of flowers, curved blades of scarlet around the stamens, as though a flock of fiery-coloured birds were tilting their tail-feathers in council.

  At a decent distance from the civilised trees, all about the open space, a grey-green wall of gums reared up, roaring with the ridges behind under an intermittent surf of wind. Now the wind was thunderous as city traffic; then there was only a faint hissing as the topmost leaves of the gums boiled over in silver spray, flashing like a mackerel shoal that ruffles a dark sea. A pause, and then once more the boughs would leap and whine as though some small animal were caught in their crotch, straining and lashing until the very trunks groaned again.

  Snow cared little for the wind, as it hushed his fire sideways like a mother soothing a rowdy child in its cot. All day the wind might fluster the road dust and level the tussocks; but at sundown there would be a breathless, tranquil silence, as the world turned over on its side for the night, with the sky like a translucent bubble of pale green glass, so fragile you would think that, at the tap of a finger-nail, it would ring and shiver the first stars down in trails of fire like water-drops on a window-pane.

  Snow, busy making camp, congratulated himself that there were no other travellers on the reserve. It was a cold night, with a frosting of stars, and Snow waited for the wind to come up again before he began his walk towards the homestead a mile back, where he had marked a paddock of promising wethers. Noiselessly he climbed over the barbed-wire fence and made his way across a stubble-field smelling like new bread. Behind the field was the paddock, darkly blotted with trees.

  As he listened for the faint bleating that betrayed the presence of the flock, and moved, with a low word to Bluey, towards that uneasy sound, Snow’s big, loose, slouching body knitted into the swift decision of the born hunter. Even his face altered. Usually Snow’s face had no notable handsomeness, resembling closely the countenance of a particularly sleepy shark. His little, light-coloured eyes, each side of a huge, jutting nose, were half shut, just as his mouth — he breathed through it — was half open to a gape of big, yellow teeth above an almost imperceptible chin. His forehead did not count in the assembly of features, as it was either hidden by an old felt hat or by a growth of straw-coloured hair which had earned him the usual bush name for fair-haired men: ‘Snow.’ His words were few and his speech slow. If he became excited, he stuttered. He seldom spoke a sentence without three ‘bloodys’ in it, but he never knew he was swearing. It was as natural as his stutter.

  In sheep-stealing, however, he took the quiet pleasure of an artist exercising his skill. Returning with a plump yearling over his shoulders, he had something of the benevolent aspect of a good shepherd in a church window. He was at peace with all the world. As he cut his find’s throat and flung the entrails to Bluey, he was thinking that life ‘on the track’ was not so bad, with good places to camp and ‘cockies’ sheep to knock over.’ He reflected wistfully that in a week or so these good things would be put away from him, and the vacant space filled by his wife’s nagging, until restlessness seized him and he started out on the track again. He had posted home from Narrabri no less than ten dirty pound notes, and the thought of the surprise his wife would get made him more than ever feel that life was good.

  He hung the carcase in a tree removed far enough from the clearing to escape the notice of any inquisitive visitors. Snow had been ‘in for meat’ several times, and another gaol term was something he did not welcome. It was different in Queensland, where a man could always take a sheep for food as long as he left the skin hanging on the fence.

  They had reached the edge of the clearing when Bluey stiffened with a low, warning growl. Instantly Snow stopped in his tracks, peering towards the camp. There was someone there. Snow’s great fist tightened round his butcher’s
knife. Someone was at his tucker-box, noisily and unhandily rummaging in it. A virtuous indignation seized him. Some thieving (adjective) robber was ‘ratting’ his tucker-box! He leant down and gripped the dog’s collar as he trod cat-footed into the fire-light and contemplated the dim shape.

  ‘What the hell you think you’re doing?’ he asked angrily.

  A long-drawn shriek as the figure straightened up gave him nearly as great a fright as he had given the thief.

  ‘Cripes! it’s a woman!’ he said out loud, half in relief.

  The object huddled in terror by the tucker-box, babbling at him, did not look like a woman. It looked like something the darkness had spewed forth in disgust. Its hair hung in bedraggled wisps through which the eyes stared bulging with horror. A toothless mouth gaped at him as the creature panted and stammered. A shapeless mass of ragged clothing covered a body so insignificant that it looked like that of a child.

  ‘Oh, mister, don’t, don’t … hit me. I was that hungry. And I been walkin’ and walkin’ …’ the thing gasped, ‘ … in the dark.’

  ‘Here,’ Snow said, quietening the snarling Bluey, ‘take it easy.’

  He removed from the fire a blackened billy, from which he poured a no less blackened brew of tea.

  ‘Drink some of this.’

  His captive gulped it down. ‘He chucked me out,’ she mumbled. ‘Jus’ left me by the side of the road hundreds of miles from nowhere an’ says: ‘Get to hell out of this, you whore.’ And I ain’t. Nobody ain’t got any right to call me that. I was married to ’im. I was. And I come away cos he says it’s a great life on the track, an’ …’ She broke off: ‘I ain’t had nothin’ to eat since yestiday morning … An’ it was dark …’

  ‘You stay there,’ Snow admonished. ‘I won’t be long.’ The meat might be a bit tough, as it was so fresh, but if the hobgoblin hadn’t had anything to eat for two days, she wouldn’t be fussy.

  He had just cut off a leg, and was turning back, when another scream brought him back the rest of the way at a run.