The Battlers

by Kylie Tennant

  His visit had come about through the sudden lizard-like awakening of a Court that all concerned had thought, if not dead, at least slumbering. A few months before, the Australian Workers’ Union had decided to submit a log of claims to the Arbitration Court for cherry-picking at Orion. The growers, seeing in this only a political move, and taking legal opinion that the claim would not be heard before the cherry harvest, had allowed themselves to be lulled into a comfortable contempt. Imagine their anger and alarm when they found that not only was the case heard before the picking, but that the judge had ruled that the award in force for Mildura, where cherry-picking was carried on on a similar scale, would apply, and would apply then and there, that year! If the growers at Mildura could pay a minimum wage, the growers at Orion, the judge reasonably suggested, could do the same.

  This sounded fair enough to everyone except the Orion orchardists. In vain did they argue that the judge’s decision would mean one hundred per cent union labour where they had never engaged more than seventeen per cent; in vain did they plead the unfairness of paying by the week instead of the basket, especially of paying keep or extra money, when their labour was mostly itinerant, unskilled, and almost unemployable. A basic wage of three pounds sixteen shillings for men, and two pounds ten and fourpence for women, was the verge of ruin. All the old happy-go-lucky hire-and-fire ways would be gone for ever. A powerful union was the last thing they wanted. Meetings of the growers vowed, with clenched fists and angry oaths, that they would never submit to anything as unfair as an award wage. Let the Union members insist on their award. They would employ only travellers and locals who were not unionists; and, what was more, every picker must sign a declaration that he was not a unionist and would not join the union while on the job. That would settle this (adjectival) union and its (adjectival) award. Since the award applied to unionists only, there would be no unionists for it to apply to.

  Sympathy, however, need not be wasted on Christopher Crane, driving so stoutly towards the wasps’-nest that awaited him, a wasps’-nest of infuriated growers, incensed ‘gun-pickers,’ who under the old terms could have earned a pound a day, but who now found themselves on the level of the rank-and-file whose daily earnings were no more than a few shillings. Christopher Crane, in long years as the battling organiser of the Agrarian and Harvest Workers’ Union, and then of the Australian Workers’ Union, had emerged safely from more nasty situations than most men had ever entered. He had the kind of tough, rubbery, disposition from which crushing blows bounce back; and he would have echoed Mrs Tyrell’s inspired words that ‘you can get used to anything,’ the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and the no less frequent slings and arrows of outrageous human beings.

  III

  The regular pickers, sure of a job, sure of themselves, put up at boarding-houses and hotels. Some of them even paid their way instead of getting credit from the landlord until they went out to So-and-so’s place as soon as he began ‘spotting out.’ But by far the most popular camp was, as usual, down by the show-ground, where water could be taken from the tanks behind the sheds. To camp by the river would have been more pleasant, but the river had long ago been fenced off into the back paddocks of the residents, and there was no more chance of camping there than in the vestibule of the Town Hall. There were from fifty to sixty camps around the show-ground, so that Snow after one glance declared for ‘the Three-Mile, out the other side of the town.’

  ‘At least we’ll get a bit of feed for the horse,’ he grunted, when the Stray complained against being marooned three miles away from the town. ‘There’s no chance of having it on our own. The Tyrells’ll be there, and Gawd knows how many more.’

  He indicated to the O’Briens that they could either come out to the Three-Mile or go their own way, and the couple decided to stay and camp on the show-ground.

  ‘You been real good to us,’ Mrs O’Brien declared with voluble gratitude, ‘but if we camp right near the town, we can look out for a job or a lift.’

  Snow, who was glad to bid them farewell, wondered dimly why it was that he had always been able to travel unencumbered before, while now he seemed to be picking up lame dogs and lame human beings almost every step of the road. He decided that it must be the Stray’s fault. The Stray liked company. She had a most welcoming way with her. She made strangers free of all his belongings; she royally invited persons, whom he would have greeted with a grunt, to a love feast, an exchange of life-stories, and even to meals. It was due to her city training. She had no nice reserves or caution. In fact, feeling herself secure and adopted, she was ready to be friends with all the world.

  The hard asphalt was slippery smooth, and old Don lifted his feet carefully, feeling as uneasy and out of place as Snow felt under the hard, slippery looks of the townspeople on the footpaths. He and his horse would both be relieved to be on a dusty road once more between the fields. But with the Stray it was different. She liked to snuggle into layers of people as into warm blankets, nestling into the heat of humanity, the comforting reassurance of crowds. Snow could say this was good country, and it certainly looked greener than some she had jolted across; but sometimes the Stray felt that the landscape put on a thin sneer as real and frightful as if it had bared big, yellow, tobacco-stained teeth. Snow could talk till he was blue about apple-gums and ironbark and spotted gums, but all the trees for her had the same look, as though they had suicidally hurled themselves into the gulfs of air, and then despaired, clutching at nothing with dead, crooked boughs. Not that she put it like that. She only knew vaguely that they made her think of a man hanging himself; but the Stray’s imagination was always morbid. If it had not been for the comforting presence of Snow and Jimmy, for the intermittent occurrence of towns at intervals of every twenty miles or so, she would have bolted back to the city long before.

  The Three-Mile Camp was nothing to boast about — merely a stretch of mullock dumps beside the sandy bed of a tiny watercourse — but there was a dam for travelling stock, and that was the main thing: water. An unclosed patch of land where three farm fences met, about six acres of it, with a few trees and bushes and fairly good grass. What could you want more? The Stray’s glance gloomily took in the usual dust-coloured tents and bicycles of the bagmen, and then lighted on the Tyrell van modestly sheltered by a group of trees. She brisked up at once. Friends! Companionship! This was better!

  ‘Yo-ho!’ she yelled, full of excitement, waving her hat, running across the grass, not waiting to help with the horse. ‘Hey, Ma! Dick! Jake! How’s things? Oh, look! the baby! Geeze, he’s a fat little beggar!’

  They had, of course, all come out to see who the new arrivals were, and there was the usual confusion of questions and answers, shrieks, laughter, barking of dogs, jingling of harness, and then the orderly routine of making camp, so pleasant, so busy and friendly. From a distance the single bagmen watched sideways, aloof, considering this hurly-burly of undesirables, these slatternly, screaming women and their sinister, thievish men, people with whom decent bagmen had nothing in common.

  ‘Woman’ — Mrs Tyrell regarded the Stray critically — ‘you’re looking as though the road agrees with you.’ And truth to tell Dancy did look a little less like a damaged beetroot topped with straw. She had almost a trace of good looks.

  ‘I told you, Dancy,’ Thirty-Bob grinned. ‘Once on the road, you’re on it for life. And you die on it.’

  ‘What’s the chance of getting a bit of pickin’?’ Snow turned to Thirty-Bob and Dick Tyrell.

  ‘Well, Waldo will be starting next week, and I saw Bill Waldo, and it looks as though there might be a chance there, though most of the gun-pickers’ll make for Waldo’s. There’s Hacker’s …’ Snow made a face of disgust. ‘Yeah, Hacker’s a cow, but he’s startin’ and that’s more’n the others are yet. There’s a few little places out on the North Road coming along. They’ll be wanting pickers about the middle of the week.’ Thirty-Bob seemed dubious. ‘There’s a chap telling me there’s going to be a strike.’
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  ‘What’s that?’ Mrs Tyrell had caught the ominous word. ‘Who said anything about strikes?’

  ‘Chap was tellin’ me today, Ma. They’re holdin’ a meeting tonight in the Southern Cross Hall.’

  Mrs Tyrell turned on him lowering. ‘Don’t you let me hear anything about no strikes,’ she threatened. ‘Who wanted to leave Orange? And why? Gawd Almighty! because the pea-pickers were on strike! That’s men all over. Never damn well satisfied till they’ve found a way of getting out of any work that may be about. Dragging me to Orion, and here’s the cherry-pickers on strike!’

  ‘Now hold your horses, Ma. There ain’t no strike yet.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me. The laziest set of bums on the road. Oh, I know you, Thirty-Bob; if there wasn’t a strike, you’d start one.’ She turned to Dancy. ‘There I was this mornin’ with all the baby’s washing and all the kids’ washing and all their own dirty shirts, and do you think I could get them to carry a drop of water from the dam? Told me to hang the clothes out and pray for rain! That’s the kind they are.’

  ‘It’s always the same,’ Dancy agreed. ‘You’d think, to hear them talk, they was the lords of creation. But it’s the women and kids does the getting of wood and water and goes out selling, while the men sits in the shade.’ Dancy was getting a lot of satisfaction in the role of a care-worn family woman.

  Snow and Thirty-Bob moved quietly away. ‘Know if Angus’s got here yet?’ Snow asked.

  ‘Angus’s mob’s out at the show-ground. Matter of fact, that’s who told me.’

  ‘I ought to see him,’ Snow spoke doubtfully. Some of his fine enthusiasm for a Trackmen’s Union had evaporated.

  ‘If you want to see Burning, we could go in to the meeting tonight. He’ll be there for cert.’

  The thought of meeting Angus again held no pleasure for Snow. He had no successes to report. All the men whom he had sounded out concerning the formation of a Trackmen’s Union had been discouraging, full of the difficulties, the almost insurmountable difficulties, in the way. It needed a less diffident man than Snow to give a lead. He had none of the Scotsman’s burning, obsessing faith; none of the Dogger’s stout-hearted humour. He knew only that life on the road was dreary and brutal, and that there must be some hope of making it less dreary and brutal, less that of criminals on parole, as constantly under the eye and the hectoring of the police as if they were within the four walls of a gaol.

  ‘I dunno.’ He roused himself from his abstraction to answer some question Thirty-Bob had put about the road through Wombat. ‘Yeah! I think the road was pretty good. Yeah, I’ll come in with you to this meeting. May as well see what it’s about.’

  That was exactly the attitude of all the other prospective pickers. They would be there, but they would withhold judgment until they found out the facts.

  ‘Hey, Bob!’ Dick Tyrell gave a low whistle. ‘Take a look at that good sort.’

  He had been gazing idly across the eroded red bed of the watercourse towards a little tin shanty, where Snow also had noticed small dark children playing round the door. But his was not the connoisseur’s eye of Dick. It had been for that stalwart judge of female beauty first to behold the girl who issued from the door of the hut holding a small baby in her arms. She stood now, rocking the baby, and smiling negligently at nothing, in the way of pretty, young girls who feel themselves observed. She had a small brown face and great black eyes; coal-black, wavy hair that fell over her shoulders in curls; and a broad mouth that showed tiny, even white teeth. Her hair was that black that has white lights in it. Like the tail of a little foal, Dick thought poetically.

  ‘Not bad,’ Thirty-Bob agreed; but it was Jake who lifted up his voice in ownership.

  ‘You lay off Mary Burns,’ he threatened in his boy’s voice that was half shrill and half gruff: ‘She’s my girl. I saw her first.’

  ‘Ar, who the hell wants a gin?’ Dick answered brutally, turning away. ‘You can have her.’

  Jake chuckled. He had a perverse, jeering manner to Dick that sometimes nearly drove his elder brother wild. ‘Hah-hah,’ he chanted. ‘Curry-eater, curry-eater.’ He danced away from the blow Dick aimed at him. ‘Dick the curry-eater. Who went after Abdullah’s girl in Dubbo?’

  He took to his heels with Dick in pursuit, for the subject of Dick’s courtship of the daughter of an Afghan hawker was still a sore one.

  The girl across the creek watched the two brothers indulgently, then turned and strolled into the hut. She could not have been more than fifteen, but the childishness of her was one of her attractions. Her thin, lithe body and long, thin, sinewy legs and arms were part of her aboriginal heritage, the beauty of bone that makes white flesh seem uninteresting and feeble. Unlike many girls with a strain of dark blood, she had tiny feet, and she was exceedingly proud of them, showing them off in little, bright, cheap shoes.

  ‘There’s another mob come and camped over the other side of the reserve,’ Mary called to her mother inside the hut.

  Mrs Burns looked up from cleansing a little of the rubbish out of the fireplace. ‘Don’t you take any notice of them travellers,’ she said loftily. ‘You don’t want to mix with a lot of riff-raff.’’

  ‘This business of ‘I seen her first’,’ Mrs Tyrell despaired to Dancy. ‘They play it all along the road. There was one girl in Cowra used to ride past on a big horse, a girl in a red jacket, and she’d wave her hand and smile. They galloped the horses poor riding into town after her, and they never found out where she come from.’ She smiled indulgently. ‘I don’t take no notice.’ She turned to more business-like considerations. ‘You want to ask that Mrs Burns over in the hut if you can go up with her to the farm-house and get some tank-water. She’s in pretty good with the people at the house. They give her eggs too sometimes. And the dam-water’s that mucky to drink, what with the boys swimming in it and the dogs swimming and the horses drinking. I always say they oughtn’t to go in it till I’ve got the water, but they don’t take no notice.’

  So the Stray and Mrs Tyrell presently moved in a dignified embassy towards the Burns’ hut and sat by Jennie Burns’ fire and drank tea and conversed politely of the hard struggle one had to live at all and the chances of the picking and the lack of feed for horses.

  ‘And all the men going to a meeting to see if they can’t strike,’ Mrs Tyrell flung out dramatically. ‘Women, I tell you they’d better just take me to the meeting. I’d give them strike.’

  ‘Well, my ’usband ain’t going, anyway.’ Mrs Burns tightened her lips grimly and nodded as though she could prevent him. ‘What do they want to strike for?’

  ‘It’s got me,’ the Stray chimed in. ‘Snow had just better let me catch him.’

  Shortly after darkness fell, Snow and Thirty-Bob, Dick, Jake and even Deafy, who would not hear a word of the speaker’s, were trotting off towards the town, two sulky-loads of them, leaving a rather disconsolate group of women and children talking in undertones round the fire.

  20

  The Southern Cross Hall was one of those shabby, weatherboard structures in a back street, left over from a bygone era before the Town Hall was built, and given over to visiting lecturers of the lesser breeds, meetings of Oddfellows and occasional dances. The windows were used on this, as on other occasions, for the exclusion of air; and the light of a few dim electric bulbs filtering through a drift of tobacco smoke invested the waiting men in a yellow ooze like half-melted butter. Although the meeting was so late in starting, there was little impatience. Half the audience was out on the footpath, talking and arguing, and the other half was inside, talking and arguing, while Mr Christopher Crane hurried here and there in seemingly endless consultation with first one group, then another. Almost everyone had the same idea: to go to the organiser personally, and state their views, and hear from him privately what he intended to say at the meeting. So that it seemed probable that he would have to argue with most of the audience separately before he could argue with them collectively.

  The greater nu
mber were young — boys in their teens or just out of them, loud-mouthed, cheerful and full of self-assertion and blasphemy. But it was almost pathetic to see the half-defiant deference with which the organiser was treated. The men pressed forward to hear what he had to say, hanging round him in a thick cloud, those on the outskirts repeating to their mates who could not hear what he was telling them. It was Crane himself who first became impatient and began urging that the meeting should begin, so that, after more lengthy conference, Mr Crane, his assistant-secretary, and the chairman who had been elected by a casual ‘Oh, well, Barney’d better open up. Go on, Barney, you can have the job,’ finally climbed the low wooden platform and lowered themselves cautiously on to three rickety cane-bottom chairs.

  Word having passed to those outside that the meeting was about to begin, they presently filtered in and squeezed into the back benches or stood round the walls. There was throughout a constant coming and going, a whispering and murmuring that would have daunted a speaker less accustomed to the ways of such gatherings. Nor were interruptions infrequent. Every man felt he had a right to give his views, and although on the whole the meeting was orderly enough it stirred and hummed like a hive of energetic and restive wasps.

  ‘Order! Order!’ the chairman intoned. He was a stocky young man with a thick bruiser’s face but he took himself very gravely, with that dignity so many working men will show when they are following the procedure of Labour meetings. ‘I have the pleasure to introduce to you tonight a man most of you fellow-workers know, Chris Crane of the A.W.U. He’s going to give us the low-down about the new award and I’d ask you all to give him a fair hearing and ask questions afterwards. Mr Crane.’