Four Fires (63 page)

Nancy knows that this way everyone in town will know that she's sticking it up Philip Templeton good and proper and that doing the parade in the Diamond T, the town's clapped-out old garbage truck, shows the Maloneys are not stuck-up and are proud of who they are. Which isn't exactly one hundred per cent true, but we're getting prouder by the year, with Sarah nearly a doctor, and now Bozo, and no doubt Mike will come good. Of course, there's always Tommy to remind us not to get too cocky.

The shire council are not too pleased with the arrangement, but there's not a lot they can do.

With the band, led by George Fisch playing 'Waltzing Matilda', 'Colonel Bogey', 'When the Saints Go Marching In', as well as other things, the parade goes down King Street. The Diamond T is decked in gold and green crinkle-paper streamers and the council gives those beaut long-throwing streamers to the crowd, which is most of the town. By the time we reach the town hall, we're all covered in streamers and you can hardly see us, and Tommy's lettering on the side,

'Maloney & Sons - Garbage', is obscured by the streamers.

The reception is on the steps of the town hall so everyone can see and Nancy, Tommy and Bozo are seated in a row of chairs on the top step along with all the councillors and their wives. Philip Templeton, with his chain of office round his neck, is in the middle. There's a microphone standing in front of him but placed on the first step down.

Nancy is wearing her yellow-daisy dress and a big white hat and white gloves. Mike has begged to make her a new frock instead of what he calls 'the garden tent', but she won't hear of it. 'This is how folks know me and they know it's clean and neat. Besides I'll wear that hat Mrs Barrington-Stone give me and gloves and stockings.' Mrs Barrington-Stone is seated next to Nancy with her husband, Peter, who is back on the shire council. Big Jack Donovan sits on Tommy's left.

It's Templeton that's the dolled-up one. She's four years old and she's wearing this Suckfizzle little-girl outfit that makes her look like she could be Alice in Wonderland in Australian colours, with yellow socks and little-girl shoes, with the one cross-strap and button, a green dress and little yellow pinafore with a green ribbon in her hair, which is the exact same shade of copper as Sarah's. The green suits her hair colour and she looks beaut because she's a really pretty little girl anyway. What's more, she's seated on Nancy's lap for all the world to
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see though Mike says the daisy-dress garden-tent is the worst backdrop possible for Templeton's outfit, but what can you do.

All the councillors are wearing suits and ties, Big Jack is in civilian clothes, a tweed sports coat and his South Melbourne club tie, but Tommy has on a white short-sleeved open-necked shirt and brown daks, though his shoes are polished. That's because they're my school shoes, he only wears workman's steel-cap boots. I'm the one wearing his boots, which is a bit of an embarrassment, but I'm in the crowd and I don't think too many notice.

Tommy's probably never been in such distinguished company in his life and, with what's left of his hair glued to his head with Brylcreem, one eye closed and his dented cheek and crook arm, he looks bloody miserable. I reckon he'll be in the pub right off afterwards to wash away his embarrassment with a dozen or so cleansing ales and probably stay at it for a week. Nancy's insisted he be with her on the podium for her hour of triumph over Philip Templeton, but I can tell you he's not a happy man sitting there among the nobs. Sitting next to Big Jack Donovan, if you sort of squiff your eyes up a bit, Tommy looks like one of those ventriloquist dolls with Big Jack about to make him say something.

I've got to say this for Philip Templeton, who some people thought might not even show up on the day, he did a very good speech. He said how proud Yankalillee was of its favourite son, Bozo Maloney, an outstanding young man who had earned the respect of the community even before he was chosen for the Olympic Games. He lays it on really thick so nobody can say he hasn't done the right thing by us, though, of course, he doesn't mention Sarah or any of us. He ends up by saying he's sure that whatever Bozo does in life he will be successful. Nancy's mouth is pulled down to the left and her nose is in the air like she'd been forced to sit through a bad smell. The crowd claps when Philip Templeton announces that the shire council has agreed to honour Bozo with the keys to the city, which has only been done twice before, both times to the men returning from the world wars.

But, trust the shire council, the key to the city doesn't turn out to be a key at all, but a bottoms-wiping certificate with a cut-out picture of a key in gold foil stuck on it. At least this time it's framed. Philip

Templeton then calls upon Bozo to accept the freedom of Yankalillee and to make a speech.

Bozo's a pretty shy sort of bloke when it comes to that sort of thing but he surprises us all with his speech. He must have learned something in Rome, because he speaks quietly but well and you can hear every word on the microphone. He turns around to acknowledge Big Jack Donovan and then turns back to the microphone, thanking him for everything he's done. He also mentions Bobby Devlin and gets a bit of a laugh when he says he was also one of Yankalillee's citizens, although he didn't enjoy the freedom of the city all that much as he was doing a stretch up the hill. This brings a real big laugh. Bozo also thanks Mrs Barrington-Stone for all her help and all of us in his family, even Tommy mentioning that it was Tommy gave him his first pair of boxing gloves. He thanks the crowd for supporting him and says the medal really belongs to all of them because if it wasn't for all the garbage bins he'd had to lift since he was nine years old he probably wouldn't have been strong enough to box at the Olympics. 'So, thank you everyone for putting out so much garbage!' he says, grinning. The crowd claps and whistles and he's won them forever.

Bozo shakes the hands of all the councillors and their wives and I wonder what's going to happen when he gets to Dora Templeton. But he shakes her hand and to my astonishment seems to be talking to our mortal enemy, saying something more than thank you before he smiles and moves on.

Later, when we're home and all having tea, Nancy has a go at Bozo. 'You should've given Dora Templeton a snub, Bozo, 'stead of stopping to talk to her like you were grateful or something.'

Bozo smiles. 'I simply thanked her politely for staying sober for the occasion,' he says.

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chapter eighteen

It's been some time since I've talked about fires and the bush. While there have been a few fires in the district and we've even been out as far as the Snowy Mountains for two of them, they were scrub fires, not the sort of big blaze that you'd hear about in the news. Anyway, you'd probably be a bit bored reading about them, fighting a fire is different for a firefighter, who knows that no two fires are the same, but to people who don't know, a fire is flames and bush and more of the same, scary if you're in one or if lives and houses are threatened, but otherwise it's ho-hum.

Over the years and since I attended my first fire with Tommy, I've learned a bit about the behaviour of bushfires. The first thing to learn is that you may think you know all there is about the nature of a particular fire, and then it will spring a surprise on you. If you're arrogant, you're going to get yourself burned and your pride dented, there's many a silly coot who thought all was going well and so he'd take a bit of a short cut in procedure and the next thing he's in the deepest kind of trouble.

A bushfire, even a small one, is not something you can take for granted. Most of the smaller district bushfires are started by farmers who reckon they'll do a bit of burning off, get rid of the rubbish and get some green grass growing when the autumn rains come. A bit of burning to keep the grass down late summer can't do too much harm.

Next thing the house is threatened, or a couple of thousand acres goes up in smoke and with it his neighbour's haystack, or you're piling up burned dead sheep and pouring a tin of kero over them and having a second fire to mark the stupidity that caused them to die in the first place.

The Yankalillee Bushfire Brigade is a bit of a Dad's Army, with a fair amount of quarrelling going on amongst some of the old-timers and some of the younger blokes who want to introduce new methods. As far as I can see, the aggros been there for a while and Tommy says it goes way back to just after the war when the Country Fire Authority was formed after the Royal Commission into the January 1939 fires in Victoria where seventy-one lives were lost. The war got in the way and the CFA only really got going just before the war ended.

From day one there was resistance to change, the landed gentry', that is the big graziers, had always been the boss cockies in the bushfire brigade and they reckoned they knew how to fight a fire. They learned it from their fathers and their fathers learned it from their fathers since time out of mind. They reckoned the government couldn't teach them nothing.

They were wrong, of course. Just because your family has been on the land for a hundred years doesn't make every generation an expert firefighter. But you couldn't tell them that. Besides, it was sort of prestigious to be the big boss in the bushfire brigade, you'd go to meetings dressed in your moleskins, tweed jacket, old school tie and big hat and people would say There goes the bushfire boss.'

So when one of the recommendations of the Royal Commission was to appoint a salaried fire chief, to be called a regional officer, the cow cockies and the graziers didn't like it one bit.

Losing control over firefighting operations meant, in their eyes anyway, that they were losing their power and influence in the community.

Tommy and John Crowe reckoned it was a bloody good thing as the graziers who put themselves in charge were generally a bunch of old farts. What made it worse for these elder statesmen in the brigade was that many of the new regional officers were ex-servicemen. The old-timers couldn't come right out and be critical, though privately they reckoned the ex-soldiers were given the jobs because of what

they'd done in the war and that they knew bugger-all about fighting fires. So it was a sort of Mexican stand-off, both sides reckoning the other side were a bunch of bloody wankers.

Mr Reed was our regional fire officer, he was known as Nick to one and all, except to me and a
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few of the other young blokes. Like Mr Gee and Tommy, he'd been a prisoner of war under the Japanese but his real sin was that he lived in Wangaratta, which was a big mistake. You see, Wang wasn't a little town like Yankalillee and it had its own municipal fire brigade and everyone reckoned you had to be a real bushie to know about fires.

As far as I was concerned, Nick Reed was a pretty good bloke and he and Tommy worked well together. He respected Tommy for being 'the real maloney' and Tommy said he was a sensible sort of bloke who wasn't likely to make too many mistakes and didn't big-note himself.

He'd always be out there for the real big fires but the small local ones, like the one where we rescued Mrs Rika Ray, he'd leave to Tommy, who could always reach him on the HF radio when he was needed or if the fire got out of hand. The old blokes would say it was a conspiracy between war veterans, which was pure and utter bullshit. Nick Reed trusted Tommy's judgement and his ability to get on with the job.

It was just that some of the older blokes never got used to taking orders. They'd been a law unto themselves for so long they resented anyone but their own. So the Owens Valley CFA weren't always happy little Vegemites. For days after fighting a fire there would be postmortems in the pub, mostly about what an idiot Nick Reed was and where he'd made his mistakes. It wasn't true and was just the usual whingeing and big talk and thinking the old ways were the only way.

Tommy, being like a petty criminal, couldn't stand up and tell them they were talking shit. When a fire was over, his standing in the community vanished with the last embers, except for those who knew a bit about fires and that certainly wasn't the majority.

For instance, when Tommy first got back from the war, he wanted the Owens Valley Brigade to buy up six army-surplus high-frequency radios to be used for firefighting. To raise the money, the bushfire brigade would have had to have a fete as well as raffles in the pub, cake stalls and that sort of thing. The people who were against having the radios, which they called newfangled nonsense, were mostly Church of England and among the toffs, some of them on the shire council. Their catchcry became 'You can't put a fire out with a bloody wireless set, boy!'And since their wives were all in the Anglican Women's Guild and many also members of the Country Women's Association, who would also have needed to be involved, all it took was for the men to put the kybosh on their wives' involvement with the fundraising.

Tommy, who at the time wasn't into crime and wasn't yet known as an alcoholic, put it to Nancy that the Catholics could do something similar to raise the money. 'Show them toffee-nosed Anglicans the Micks can do it without 'em, hey?'

Nancy reckons that's fair enough, time the Catholics took the initiative, and she takes the proposition to Father Crosby, suggesting they run their own fete and raffle.

Father Crosby isn't so sure. Privately he isn't game to take on the powerful elements in town and he urns and ahs before he finally says he'll have to refer the matter to the Bishop. Well, he's back soon enough with the Bishop's opinion, though Nancy said she doubted he'd ever asked for it, just drank some altar wine and cogitated in the priest's house and as usual took the coward's way out. She said having Father Crosby on your side was like having a large thorn in the sole of your foot at the start of a race.

The Bishop is of the opinion that the purchase of five wireless sets is not an issue that is sufficiently important to disturb the good relationship which exists at the present time between Catholic and Protestant in Yankalillee.'Just to come out with a dumb sentence like that shows Father Crosby's invented it. Then he goes on, 'Besides, there are some very important people in the district, all of them experienced in firefighting, who see no value in acquiring these wireless sets.' He didn't even know that they were radio sets, not the wireless sets like you hear the ABC

on at home.

'Yeah, all of them Protestants and all of them bigwigs!' Nancy replies. Remember this was way back in 1946 and she wasn't a fully collapsed Catholic yet and still had some faith in the Church and didn't yet have the goods on Father Crosby like she does now.

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Father Crosby then points out that the last big fire happened in 1939, before the war, and that a lot has been learned since then. Which was a whole load of manure. It was funny how everyone seemed to think, because there had been a war, a lot had been learned. In fact, Tommy said bugger-all had been learned, that just the opposite had happened. The war sort of put all civilian things on hold, and bushfires are a voluntary civilian occupation left to the volunteers to fight and so things hadn't improved one bit since the tragic fires of 1939.

Father Crosby's cautionary words, after supposedly consulting with the Bishop on the matter, were, The fifty pounds you'll need to buy the wireless sets with the installation and the power packs to make them work, which I am told on good authority will cost the same again, is a poor use of such a large sum of money.'

He'd wagged a finger at Nancy, 'Are you aware, Nancy Maloney, that's the cost of feeding a hundred orphans at the St Vincent de Paul's Boys Orphanage in Melbourne for three whole weeks?' Father Crosby looked accusingly at her, The Bishop has chastised me for my lack of priorities and my diminished sense of where God's chanty should be placed! He has pointed out that we are in the business of avoiding hellfire and not bushfires!' He also said that the Bishop had recommended that the Catholics of Yankalillee contribute the selfsame sum of money to the saving of heathen souls in New Guinea.

Now, Nancy Maloney, where are we going to get such a sum of money, I ask you?' His manner suggested that it was Nancy's fault and that she'd compromised the Catholics of Yankalillee.

All Nancy could manage to say in reply was, 'Father, what about the seventy-one souls that died in the Black Friday fires of 1939?'

Ah, my dear,' Father Crosby replied, 'they were souls already saved and only ten of them were Catholics, all of them elderly and granted the last rites and absolution by special dispensation.'

Anyway, the end result was that there were no radios in the Owens Valley Bushfire Brigade even after the disastrous 1952 bushfire hit north-eastern Victoria. The old-timers won out and we still don't have them. Some of the old blokes are proud of the fact that they've fought off the radio gimmick'. One old codger said to me, 'Mole, the fires ain't changed none and we've fought 'em before and won without them stupid things crackling away confusing matters.

Government's now talking about bombing fires with aeroplanes, water bombs, next we'll have pelicans trained to do the same thing, never heard nothing so stupid in me life. Radios and water bombs, that's Canberra for yer, pure mahogany from the bloody neck up.'

In the end Tommy shrugs and says it would be good to have radios, cut some of the danger out, but it's how well you know the bush that counts. He even admits that the radios have a problem.

When there's a lot of static around, it's because of lightning and thunder, the sort of weather bushfires bring. In other words, in bushfire conditions, HF radios often prove difficult to use and sometimes you can't hear a word for the static and interference. Sometimes you can hear people talking in South-East Asia but not ten miles away where a fire is raging. But on the other hand, the radio can save lives and get people to a fire as well as direct them when they get there.

That's what I've been learning since my twelfth birthday and Tommy reckons I've picked it up a fair bit, although in five years you can't even begin to know all there is to know and every time we go out I learn something new that's important.

One thing that's happened is that Big Jack Donovan has spoken to Mr McDonald, the District Forestry Officer at the Forestry Commission, and since I've been thirteen he's taken me on work experience for three days a week during the summer holidays and taught me their side of things.

It's okay by Tommy, but some of the others in the volunteer brigade reckon I'm consorting with the enemy. The bushies reckon the Forestry Commission is up its own arse, but Tommy says to take no notice, to ignore them, the Forestry Commission has facilities and practices any firefighter should know about and fuck the silly bastards that think different.

They've got high frequency radios and all sorts of gear and I reckon I now know just about the
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lot. One of the things I've been trained in is fire spotting from a fire tower. There's eight Forestry Commission towers all around, in places you can see a fair distance, like about thirty miles. So you'll spot a fire no matter where it starts. The tower I use is called Mt Pilot and it stands just above a large forest of Scribbly Bark and has a good view of the flat land and to the north. On a good day you can see the

heavy eucalyptus forest that follows the meandering Murray River.

I know how to read all the instruments, like the relative humidity, wind speed, the temperature and the extent and nature of the cloud cover. I know all the HF-radio call signs to the district fire brigades and exactly how to report the presence of a fire. All this is theoretical, mind you, I've never really been in the tower when a big fire happened and I don't know how I'll go if I'm there and there's fires to report. A person can panic and do it wrong so I hope I won't.

Tommy and John Crowe and myself are sort of a team when it comes to working with fires and John Crowe reckons Tommy knows more than any professor of botany about things like eucalyptus trees and what to expect from a big burn.

I don't want to go on too much about things, but if you're going to be a bushfire fighter you have to know a fair bit about what's burning and, if it isn't a grass fire, it's usually eucalyptus and the stuff that lies under the forest canopy. So I'll need to tell you some of the history of this remarkable tree for you to understand how a fire works on the driest continent on earth.

If you get bored just skip this part, though that would be a pity, because all Australians should know why we're a different country to anywhere else and that's mostly because of eucalyptus and fire.