‘Why, last year I couldn’t get pickers for love or money, and there were men, unemployed, working on a relief job right beside my property! I offered them work and they refused it. Refused it! Said they would have too much trouble getting back their relief again, and they couldn’t make enough to support their families picking. This relief work ought to be cut out. Stop a lot of this unrest. What the hell do they want? I’ve paid two-and-six a basket for the last ten years, and I’m damned if I’ll give three shillings to any man living.’
The sergeant listened quietly. He knew that Hacker had already told all his friends that ‘the sergeant was as weak as dish-water’ and secretly in sympathy with the pickers. Well, if it came to that, he did sympathize with the pickers. He had not always been a sergeant, and he had two brothers who were not in the police force. One of them was droving in Queensland, God alone knew where; and the other was breaking his heart and his back on a dried-up patch of stubble and scrub that he thought was a farm. Like many another broken ‘wheat cocky,’ the sergeant’s brother Jim might be packing his kids and wife into his old truck any time now, moving off on the roads, looking for work. As the sergeant strolled majestically down the main street, he often thought that it must be hard on the wives and children of these slouching, hard-faced men. It would be hard on the sergeant’s brother Jim, if he was trying ‘to make a crust’ picking.
‘I know how you feel, Mr Hacker,’ he said at length. ‘It’s cruel to see money ripening on the trees with no one to pick it off for you. But I can’t make these chaps pick for you. If they break the law, I’ll see to it. But I can’t drive them to work.’
He knew that this would be used against him, and he was troubled. Hacker was already rubbing in the fact that a fight had taken place without his knowledge. The sergeant knew Hacker was a powerful man. He would have to tighten things, whether he liked it or not. The first thing would be to clean up all the hotels and stop their trading after hours. Then, he supposed, he had better refuse dole to the pickers down at the show-ground. The Union was feeding ninety men there already — men who had no dole. He felt a spasm of anger against Hacker. It was all very well for Hacker to tell him what to do!
Fresh from his encounter, and furious over the sergeant’s recalcitrant tone, Hacker joined a little group of farmers on the street corner. ‘He’s a Red,’ he growled — ‘nothing but a damn Red.’
‘How about getting pickers over from Orange?’ one of his friends enquired.
Hacker hesitated. He remembered vividly one occasion when his orchard had been declared black and several loads of strikebreakers had been set on and battered by infuriated pickers whom he had sacked. ‘Yes,’ he said, but not in his usual confident tone, ‘we might have to come to that.’
At this point in the conversation a stout figure came waddling along the footpath, to be greeted by the group of farmers with a mixture of deference and jocularity, depending on their financial status.
‘Morning, Mr Waldo.’
‘Morning, Vladimir. How’s the boy?’
‘No cherries this year, Waldo. They’ll rot on the trees with the first rain.’
Vladimir Waldo might have been one of his own pickers. He wore a dirty, baggy old pair of trousers, below which his disreputable sandshoes bulged, with a cut in the toe for his bunion. Around his neck, instead of a collar, was a red cotton handkerchief with white spots.
‘You,’ Vladimir Waldo chuckled, slapping Hacker heavily on the back. ‘You big men, huh? Mek noise like little puppydogs? Me, I laugh to damn bloody hell!’ He patted himself on the chest approvingly. ‘I tell you, these chaps, they jus’ little schildrens.’
‘That’s all very well, but you can’t get any pickers.’
The district problem gave a wheeze that sounded like an old mattress taking a weight of twenty stone. ‘Ho-ho, I have no troubles. I rejoice.’ He threw his arms wide. ‘I roast an ox!’
His neighbour and antagonist Hacker fell back in dismay. Trouble and disappointment had plainly turned Waldo’s brain. Then, suspiciously, he came close enough to smell the magnate’s breath.
‘Roast an ox? Good God! what for?’
‘For my pickers.’ The old man chuckled. ‘Good boys. Loyal. They fight a little, they sing a little. Just schildrens. They will like a bullock roasted, I think.’ He nodded good-day and waddled off, still very pleased with himself.
Waldo and the ox he was going to roast had, before the day was out, become the topic of the moment, some asserting that he was crazy, others that this was another example of his superhuman cunning. By next year the growers would have fought the award in the courts and obtained some kind of a compromise. But this season they must not only refuse the extra money, but get their crops off the trees. The news spread and spread. Confidence among the orchardists revived. So Waldo wasn’t having any trouble with his pickers, after all. Waldo had a bumper crop, and was going to hold a dance and ox-roasting the following Saturday as a celebration.
‘A lot of bolony,’ the good unionists scoffed, as they rolled their swags, preparing to depart for other districts.
‘I haven’t seen an ox roasted since I was a kid,’ one youth exclaimed to another. ‘Gee! it’d be a lark to get on at old Waldo’s place for the next week just to see it. Needn’t do much work,’ he hastened to add. ‘We could just go up and ask if they was wanting any pickers.’
There was always the virtuous thought that working for Waldo would be collecting evidence for the Union that he was breaking the award. How was the Union to issue prosecutions against growers without evidence? There was a strange rush to collect evidence at Waldo’s orchards.
II
In his own camp Snow was facing mutiny.
‘True, I ain’t breaking no award,’ the Stray pleaded. ‘I on’y want some money to get me set of teef.’ She had found herself a job ‘facing’ cherries for a small farmer, one of the few who was paying the three shillings a basket, because he wanted to get his cherries to market early and reap bumper prices before the big men began to dump their crop. ‘Look, Snow, there ain’t anything about ‘facing’ in the award,’ the Stray triumphed.
Snow dubiously turned over the pages of the grubby copy of the new award. There was certainly nothing in it about ‘facers.’
‘All right,’ he said at length. ‘You can go on working until I see Crane. I’m going to see him first thing when he comes back from Orange. I still think a man ought to belt the hide off you.’ But he was impressed by the fact that the farmer was paying three shillings for picking.
‘I’ll chuck it now if you like,’ the Stray offered humbly.
Snow was regarding her with a chilly doubt that suggested she had sunk back in his esteem to that place she had first occupied when he found her burgling his tucker-box.
Did he think she liked standing from six o’clock in the morning until six o’clock at night on a concrete floor, until her feet swelled and her ankles swelled and she could hardly move? Several times already she had been on the point of just quitting in sheer weariness, but before her shone the vision of those pearly teeth that would make her so attractive to Snow.
It was just on sunrise when the Stray limped off every morning, a small, lonely figure, with a blackened billy-can for her tea in one hand, and a parcel of bread in the other. To reach the packing-shed she had a mile walk across the loose dirt of apple and cherry orchards, and at dusk she came trudging wearily back.
It seemed to be the Stray’s fate always to be employed by people who wanted the most work for the least money, and her employers considered a mid-day break of a quarter of an hour quite sufficient. They had a new motor-truck to pay for, and they were going to pay for it out of this cherry cheque, or know the reason why. If it had not been that ‘facers’ were so hard to get, they would never have taken on an unskilled girl, and they were constantly talking of the marvellous ‘facer’ they had last year, who thought nothing of seventy cases a day. The Stray, working furiously, could never do more than thirty cases
of these small early cherries that were so hard to handle, and at twopence a case, she was lucky to make five shillings a day. However, she cheered herself with the thought that, if she learned to ‘face’ skilfully, she might get a better job next year. But the thought of next year was something from which she turned away. To think of tomorrow was bad enough.
After five days of it, the Stray was profoundly relieved to see Christopher Crane whirling by, as she trudged back to the camp. She halloed him, and he slowed down.
‘Oh, mister,’ she asked fervently, ‘do the ‘facers’ have to come out?’
‘What’re you getting?’
‘Tuppence a case.’
‘Certainly. One of the worst-sweated jobs in the industry. Tuppence a case! Good God.’
‘There was nothin’ about it in that paper you gave Snowy.’
‘“Facin’ ” comes under packing.’
‘Hooray! I’ll stop right now. Gee! if I didn’t come out on strike’ — the Stray heaved a sigh of relief — ‘I’d a come home in a ambulance.’
‘Tell Snow I’ve got to go back to Sydney, and that Angus will be at the show-ground if anything crops up.’ A frown creased Christopher Crane’s forehead. ‘I don’t like going, but it can’t be helped. I’ve done all I can, and now it’s up to the men themselves.’
He had had interview after interview with the officials of the Orchardists’ Association. He had addressed the men; he had already more than twenty prosecutions against growers who were under-paying their pickers. Now, as he said, it was up to the men. A week, two weeks, would see the matter settled. Meantime, he must go on. He had too much work to do — work enough for six men — to remain longer in Orion.
The Stray was immensely flattered to be the bearer of a message from the organiser. ‘I’ll tell Snow,’ she promised. ‘Him and Thirty-Bob’s gone to look for some peas to pick.’
With a wave Mr Crane whirled away, and was seen no more in Orion that season. He had, as he said, done his best, and so far most of the men were holding out. The really good pickers had mostly rolled their swags and gone over to Orange, but others remained trying to get odd jobs, or, like Thirty-Bob, were out picking peas.
Thirty-Bob, if he had no native talent for keeping a job, could always find one for others. He had discovered several patches of peas, and each time came back with glowing reports of their quality and what his team could earn picking them. At first the Tyrell family turned out in force jubilantly, but it soon dawned on them that the peas around Orion were all in the same state — stunted, stricken, and almost worthless. The growls and ingratitude that assailed Thirty-Bob whenever he found another farmer with peas that needed picking were, as he said himself, ‘something fierce.’ No one thanked him for the opportunity of labouring all day in the burning sun, while the flies crawled maddeningly into nose, mouth and eyes. Stooping over the low pea-bushes made a man feel as though his back was broken. Picking peas was bad enough when there was a good crop to pick, but when the crop was light, a man couldn’t ‘make tucker’; he only ‘knocked himself up for nothing.’ Not even an occasional clod of earth stowed in the middle of a sack, or a few hefty paddymelons, could make the toil profitable.
In the end it was usually Thirty-Bob and Snow who went off in the sulky, with perhaps a few of the children. Children, being closer to the pea-bushes and having small, nimble fingers, did not find the work so back-breaking.
It was with Dick that the real trouble in Snow’s camp began. For the moment Dick was occupied training a greyhound he had received as part payment of a private deal, and tagging after Mary Burns in a way that enraged his brother Jake. Jake could not understand Dick’s lack of etiquette. He should have accepted the convention that since Jake saw Mary first, she was his property to court undisturbed. But Dick had disobeyed the rules in a most unsporting manner, and he was making enormous strides in Mary’s favour. Mrs Tyrell, who hated ‘dark blood’ as she hated snakes, and with the same unreason, was already hinting that the time had come to shift camp.
‘I like chaps with fair hair and blue eyes,’ Mary had stated quite openly, flickering her black lashes in Dick’s direction.
The Burns family ranged in complexion from light buff to dark tan, and they were all bitterly conscious of the pigment in their skins. Mary’s mother had been a nurse during the first world war; a big, hearty creature with a loud laugh and the gipsy colouring. In a convalescent hospital in Kent she had met an Australian, whom his mates nicknamed ‘Dark,’ as they nicknamed so many swarthy men. He had promised, when they married, to take her home to his lizard farm; lizard skins, as he told her, bringing a pound each on the world market. The war ended and she had insisted on coming back with him to Australia.
Joe Burns was a good husband, and they had started a small greengrocery run, doing well for a time. When she realised that there was a difference in Australia between her kind of people and her husband’s, Jennie Burns had held her head high and made the best of it. Hard times and high prices drove them out of business and on to the track, but Jennie, with an increasing tribe of children in assorted shades, still accepted things as they came.
‘Of course, it isn’t what I expected,’ she admitted. ‘But then I knew Orstrylia ’ud be different from ’ome.’ In many ways life in a half-caste camp was not so dissimilar from the picture of Australian life drawn by her English relatives long ago. ‘A better ’usband than Joe you could not meet,’ she declared sturdily — ‘drunk or sober.’
But though Mrs Burns tranquilly refused to notice such trifles as a colour bar, her children felt it sorely.
‘Me, I’m going to marry a man with fair hair and blue eyes,’ Mary had boasted when she was a little girl.
‘Me, too,’ her small sister Frances had chimed in. ‘Then the other kids won’t be able to say: ‘Go away, you dirty nigger.’ They’ll have to play with us then, won’t they?’
Mrs Tyrell did not mind her younger children playing with the Burns children, but she hated the way Dick would lounge over to take Mary to the pictures, or just to take her walking, and she spoke acidly of Mrs Burns’s lack of care of her daughter. But Jennie Burns took Mary’s flirtations with the same equable temper as she took Joe’s occasional drinking.
‘What can you expect with a life like this?’ she would say. ‘It ain’t much for a girl.’ But what other life was there for her?
Anyway, if Mary couldn’t look after herself, that was just too bad. Mary was certain enough that she could. She parried Dick’s clumsy attempts at love-making with a laugh. ‘Why don’t you do some picking?’ She would tease, when Dick had no money to take her to the pictures. ‘I’m working at Waldo’s, and you could come and pick with me any day. You don’t have to stay, do you?’
Dick only mumbled something about the others wouldn’t like it.
‘Why worry about them? They don’t own you, do they? Why, I’m making as much as a man meself, and you could earn a pound a day, I bet — a good picker like you. Why, you’d gun the paddock!’ She gazed at him admiringly. ‘I bet you’re as strong as a horse. We could pick together all day.’
For a time the thought of Snow and Thirty-Bob made Dick hesitate at such a tempting offer. After all, Snow and Thirty-Bob couldn’t stop him. And as for his father and mother — Dick gave his head an impatient shake. He had never taken any notice of them. The thought of what Thirty-Bob would say weighed more than anything else. Thirty-Bob had a wicked tongue, and Thirty-Bob was his mate.
‘I’ll think it over,’ he mumbled.
Next day, by ill chance, Thirty-Bob, Deafy and Snow went off to camp beside the pea-picking job they had found, taking Jimmy and Jake with them. It was too far to come back to the camp every night. They could have taken the Stray, but she was sick. Her head swam and she could not stand up.
‘I’ll look after you, woman,’ Mrs Tyrell promised maternally. ‘You just lie in the tent and have a rest. You’ve fair knocked yourself up.’
‘I don’t like going.’ Snow was uneasy.
‘But a man’s got to make a crust.’
The departure of the men left Dick, who had refused to go with them, bored and ready for anything. Mary had been talking of this ox-roasting that Waldo was giving for his pickers.
‘If you was picking with me,’ Mary suggested, ‘we could go together.’
There wouldn’t be any harm in getting a job at Waldo’s until after this feast. It would be fun. Dick’s slow blood lit at the thought of escorting Mary. There would be dancing. A chap had to have some good times, and there was something about Mary that hit him hard. He despised her at the same time that he wanted to be near her; to touch her, to put his arm about her, seemed the most desirable thing in the world. She was like a fever as unexplainable and sudden as that which had smitten the Stray.
When Mrs Tyrell came to see if she wanted anything, the Stray saw from the old woman’s face that something was wrong. ‘What’s up, Ma?’ she asked weakly.
‘It’s Dick, Dancy. He’s gone off to get a job picking at Waldo’s. It’s that girl,’ Mrs Tyrell declared bitterly. ‘He’d never a done it but for her.’
‘I thought you was against this strike,’ the Stray said after a minute’s silence.
‘Dick oughtn’t to go against his own people, Dancy. I don’t see what good the strike’s going to do; but if Alf and Thirty-Bob and Snow stay out, Dick ain’t got no right to pick.’ She shook her head dejectedly. ‘I never thought no son of mine would turn on us like this. Wait till his father hears about it.’
But if Mrs Tyrell could not get anything more out of Dick than an angry scowl, there was little likelihood that his father would be more successful.
The Battlers Page 31
