Warrigal's Way (14 page)

19

Eventually we decided we couldn't handle all the excitement, so it was time to head for Bowen. Ah, Bowen. Swaying palm trees, beaut beaches, and the best looking women in the whole world, so the boys told me. We meandered up the coast, taking our time, having a drink, stopping for a day when the fishing was calling. (Have you ever tasted a reef fish laid on a bed of coals and eaten off a banana leaf? If you have, you've dined in the company of angels. Have you known the thrill of feeding a thong to a huge mud crab, so it can't remove your finger with its huge claw? If you've eaten the cooked claw and with a cold tinnie, you wouldn't change places with the Queen.)

We pulled into a little village just outside Mackay. I was perched on a stool at a bar, watching the boys play a game with wooden mushrooms and billiard balls, when I started having a yarn with “Dad Rudd”. You know Dad! Him and his son Dave had a radio show on the ABC for years. If it wasn't him, it sure looked and sounded like him. You know, “Youngsters of today ... not like they were in my day ... Bloody empty-headed Yank clones now, hanging around milkbars.”

“Yeah,” chipped in his old mate, Bill. “Mention work and they either faint or run for their lives.”

Old Dad was moaning in my ear that he had twenty acres of sugar-cane to cut and he couldn't get anyone to cut it. Well, I thought, we've been getting a bit slack, with all the time off we've been having. So I told him in my real serious voice, “No worries. Me and the boys will fix it up for you.” We negotiated a price, twenty-five bob a ton—Dad hadn't caught up with dollars yet. “Cut in the paddock, you pick up,” I said.

“Done,” he said happily and we shook hands.

I knew the boys would be thrilled at the chance to cut some cane so I rushed out and hid the car keys so they couldn't shoot through.

“Oh no, not again,” moaned Stumpy. “Tex, you bugger, you were supposed to keep an eye on that bloody Warrigal—for that, you're the cook!”

Dad Rudd told us his name was Jim Edwards and he would give us a knock-down to his mate at the store. We got enough to keep us in the lap of luxury for about the next two weeks. If we were going to work hard, we were going to eat well. The bloke in the shop nearly broke an ankle opening the door for us when we paid cash for the groceries. With a big, beaming smile he threw in a bag of boiled lollies, for the kids. If you were under eighty you were a kid around here.

We followed Dad Rudd up into the mountains. I think he forgot he had a Land Rover and we had a Holden. Just before we got to the bridge where the troll of the mountains lived, we turned off into a giant cane patch.

“Hope that's it,” said Stumpy.

“No way they can get the harvester in there. It's going to be rough and steep for sure,” Mick stated morosely.

The quarters were excellent—good beds, electric stove and plenty of hot water. No woodstove, thank goodness, so no cutting wood. The rest of the day we used to sharpen up the cane knives with the oilstones. The cane knife is like a
big broad butcher's chopper with a hooked bit on the end, a thicker handle, and it is a bit lighter and better balanced.

Next morning at cock crow Dad was outside the quarters with the tractor and trailer. We jumped aboard and he drove us up to the patch. It wasn't as bad as we thought it would be. The slope was too steep for the harvester, but good for us, as the cane would fall behind us. It had been recently burned so we got covered in black soot but it washed off. We grabbed our knives, took a line, and started.

Tex took off, going like the clappers, with Stumpy close behind. Mick and I were just pacing ourselves, reserving our strength. By about nine thirty Tex was half a row ahead and still going like the clappers, when suddenly there was a scream, a cane knife flew up in the air, and Tex came flying down the row bellowing. We thought he'd seen a snake.

“Hey, you mad bastard, come here. What's up?” Mick asked.

“I just seen the biggest frog I ever seen in my life,” Tex gulped. “And the dirty bugger spat at me. Stuff that, I'm finished. I can't handle those bastards.”

No matter what we said, Tex wouldn't budge. The rest of us were enjoying it and didn't want to just up and leave. Mick drove Tex into Mackay to catch the bus up to Merinda, and we arranged to meet him there later.

We finished the cane in three weeks. It was hard work but we had enjoyed it. Each evening we'd have a hot shower, then a beer on the front step, and we all took turns at the cooking. We were all fair hands at preparing a plain meal, but we weren't in Tex's class—he was a chef without peer. On the last night Dad Rudd came down to the pub and paid us up. We had a few beers, got a carton of cans and headed for Bowen.

Back on the road again, I was driving and Mick was alongside in the passenger seat. Stumpy as usual was flat out asleep in the back. He was not talking to us again. We had
filled up with petrol at the Tannum Sands garage and got some takeaway—Mike and I got fish and chips and Stumpy got a chicko roll. Stumpy was wandering around the road-house looking at the wildlife when this big ugly emu stuck its head over his shoulder and gobbled his chicko roll. He let out a yell and bolted. When he came back and calmed down a bit, we got the blame. Mick told him it was probably an Italian emu, because they like Chicko Rolls. Well, that set him off again.

“You buggers probably put that ugly bird up to it,” he said.

He wouldn't tell us just how we were supposed to have done it. I asked him, all innocence, whether he wanted to take a photo of it to go with the owl.

For some reason Stumpy and animals didn't get along. The owl incident happened on the way up. We saw this real ugly owl sitting on a fence post and Stumpy went into raptures.

“A tawny frogmouth! Stop the car! Where's my camera?” His camera was a flash thing with knobs and dials all over it. “Hang on,” he said, running back down the road. “I want a shot of this.”

Christ knows why. It had to be the ugliest bird that ever lived. He was crouching down, lining it up, when it gave a bloodcurdling screech and flew straight off the fence and landed on his woolly head. It latched on with its claws and, adding insult to injury, pooped right in the middle of his hair.

Poor old Stumpy jumped up and down and ran around in circles yelling at the top of his voice, “Get it off, get it off. Get the bugger off.”

Well, all Mick and I could do was hang on to each other and laugh till our ribs were sore. We were so weak that we had to hold each other up. Stumpy said that we were rotten bastards who wouldn't give a mate a hand, and he wouldn't talk to us for about an hour.

The tomato-picking season went well—good money and beaut beaches. The fishing was unreal. Once I caught a prize coral trout which was delicious barbecued.

We partied a bit but still saved a good quid, or dollar now. I had got to know a couple of butchers who had been working in Darwin and that fired my interest in having a look at the Northern Territory. As Jim had said, it was my country. The boys were going back to Victoria so we had a few beers and said our goodbyes. I went into Bowen and bought a five-year-old Ford Falcon and headed for Darwin.

20

I got into Darwin at about six o'clock on a Friday night. I was quite surprised at the size of the place. I had expected something smaller and older, but the town was quite modern. I got some takeaway food and drove around in the Falcon feeling a bit lost. I finally found Mindal beach and the council caravan park. The bloke at the park told me that the police and the council would turn a blind eye at people sleeping in their car on the beach front road for a couple of days. The police were Commonwealth police and they just checked you out and let you be. I got a bit shaky when they pulled up, and I was so nervous that I don't know how I talked to them.

But these were the days of hippies, drugs and bulldozers. Darwin in the late 1960s was a big melting pot. There was no such thing as colour or race. If a man was good enough to work with, he was good enough to drink with. My mates in Darwin were Aboriginals, Thursday Islanders, Chinese, white Aussies, Poles, Germans, Yugoslavs and White Russians. We had no hassles about race because we never went anywhere where it mattered. We all lived in caravan parks or boarding houses. A large part of the population were transients. There were hippies from all over Australia and the world living in shacks or sleeping out on the beach or
among the rocks along the beach front. They grew and smoked dope and were driving the council off its head. The police would go in with a bulldozer and clear them out of an area, but in no time they'd be back, worse than ever.

I camped in the car till Monday, then went looking for the Labour Department. The woman there told me there wasn't much going, so I went out to the meatworks next morning and sat on the gate. I got a pick-up on the beef-chain trimming forequarters and was told to front-up again tomorrow.

I met this bloke Kevin at work and he gave me a knockdown to his landlady at the boarding house in Stuart Park. She was a funny old duck, Greek, I think and her name was Rosa. She showed me a double room, charged me eight dollars for a week and left me to it. It was a big room, with an overhead fan, and a fridge in the corner. I had the use of the kitchen downstairs, and there were toilets and showers at each end of the block. I was quite happy with it and shifted my gear in.

Kevin asked me if I wanted to go down to the Buffalo Club with him and Little Roy, another of the blokes that stayed there. “We'll sign you in,” he told me, so I thought, why not. It was about two blocks from the boarding house on the Stuart Highway. There was a fair crowd and the boys seemed to know them all. We got a beer, ordered steak and chips, then found a table.

“We usually come up here for tea,” said Roy. About five one, Roy was a small bloke with sun-bleached brown hair, a nice little pot belly, and he was wiry tough. He worked for a construction company building houses. He made good money and was trying to get Kevin a job with him.

“Give it a try for you too, if you want,” he said.

I thanked him and said I'd appreciate the help. We had tea, played a couple of games of pool and a game of darts, then went home. I got another three days at the meatworks,
and on the Friday Roy said that his boss Harry had said he would put us on.

On Monday we went with Roy to Nightcliff to a house site where we met the boss. Harry was a big, well-built bloke with an easy manner. Kevin stayed with Roy, and Harry and I went out to the workshop factory at the twelve mile and he told me we had to profile an office block and put the foundation in. The ground was so hard we couldn't hammer the stakes in to hold our string lines for the profiles, so we had to nail a piece of twelve-by-one to the ground and nail the upright stakes to that. Harry made up the boxing, and we worked like slaves to hack the trenches for the reinforcing steel. We finished it by about lunchtime next day and the crane turned up. It was a ‘53 Kenworth, ex-Korean war tank carrier with a hydraulic crane on the back, which was operated from outside by levers. The driver got out and started to argue with Harry about money. He wanted an increased hourly rate, and as the crane belonged to the company, Harry was the boss. When he told him no, the bloke dropped his cool and pulled the pin.

“What the hell are we going to do now?” Harry asked me.

Being a cocky young bloke I said to him, “It don't look all that hard to me.”

“Do you think you could drive it?” he asked me.

I told him I didn't know, but if I could take it down the back for a while I could probably figure it out. He said to do it, so I drove it down the back and practised with the levers. There was a chart in the cab to follow for lifting different weights and another to show how not to overreach on the different angles and weights. I took it back and we put the half yard skip on the hook, and I did the pour very slowly and carefully.

That night Harry gave me a book about four inches thick on operating the crane and safety measures and told me to read it up and remember it as I was the new crane driver. Mobile cranes were thin on the ground in those days. There
was only ours and a fifty-ton P&H of Brambles, and John, their driver, did all he could to help me. After about a month placing beams and shutters on the houses we were building, I was confident of my ability, but was worried that someone would ask me for my licence.

I spent a year lifting for houses and multi-storeyed blocks of flats for the Housing Commission, learning to read plans from Billy, our gang foreman, and learning to weld properly from George, who welded the beams and shutters into place. Everything went together like a giant jigsaw. It was a good job with good money and a great mob of blokes to work with. I was at last sort of beating the habit of looking over my shoulder, as I felt pretty secure.

I was working in Nightcliff one day, on a big block of flats for the Housing Commission, when I saw a bloke in shorts, long socks, white shirt and tie and wearing a hard hat walking towards me. I brought the skip back and put it down and shook his hand. He told me his name was Dave and that he was from the Machinery Department and he wanted to know whether I had an operator's licence. I said I didn't, and he told me to finish pouring the truck as we only had two skips left and then to come over to the office. I thought I was in trouble for sure, but he was a really fair bloke, and he said he had watched me for a while and he thought I was competent. He wanted me to splice a rope strop and a wire strop, and he asked me some questions, which I answered to his satisfaction. He wrote me out an interim ticket which was good for six weeks, and told me to come into his office in town after that and sit the operators exam.

I was convinced I would never pass a written exam, so I got myself into a fine old state and handed in my notice that night. The boys tried to get me to stay, but I had convinced myself I couldn't do it. Harry asked me to stay at least until they could find another driver. On Friday the new
driver turned up—a tall shaggy, hippie bloke—so I spent the next day with him and left that night.

I spent the next week fishing and just mucking around with Nola, an Aboriginal girl I had met at the Dolphin Hotel one pool night. She was about eighteen and we just sort of clicked. I liked her parents and they liked me. Her dad worked at the Airforce base.

The following Monday there was a knock on the door, and I opened it to find Noel, a Kiwi bloke, who was foreman on the building site now Billy had left. He told me that the hippie had demolished one lifting stage of the crane, over reaching to take a two-ton packet of Jarrah off the back of a truck. They had had to hire Browns' hire crane, 25-ton hydraulic cap, which was the same as ours but cab-operated, and with a longer reach. Harry had sacked the hippie and they were stuck for an operator. I didn't really want to go back as I wanted a change, but Harry had given me a go and now it was time to return the favour. I went back for a month until Blue, a very capable driver, turned up.

There was one highlight during that month, Benny, one of the boys, organised a picnic and a day trip across the harbour to Mandorah. We were going to have a swim, a picnic lunch, a few beers at the pub, and dance until the last ferry took us home. It sounded great. However, it didn't quite turn out as planned.

About half a dozen of us managed to miss the first ferry, waiting for the wives and kids of some of the blokes. So Ben chartered a water taxi to take us across, but we had to go to Casuarina Beach to get it. The missing wives and kids had turned up, meaning there were now about fifteen of us. The taxi could take only five at a time, so the rest of us were sitting down on the beach, having a yarn and a beer while we waited. We had some people with us from the Buff club who we didn't know very well, and all they could do was whinge. We got sick of it and Ben said something I didn't hear, and next thing, pow!, one of these blokes had king-hit
Ben and knocked him right out. Little Roy jumped up to say his two bob's worth, and pow! he got the same. Now Roy was lying alongside Ben, and women were screaming and kids were howling. I poked out my jaw and asked him if he wanted to go for a hat trick. He must have been feeling a bit ashamed of himself and he declined, thank Christ. They left and we eventually got to Mandorah.

The day had started with a bang, but little did we know what the night had in store. Things settled down during the afternoon. There were a couple of sore jaws and shattered egos but we were all determined to put the bad start behind us and have a good time. All was going well until one of the blokes in the band said something to the oldest of Ben's three daughters that really upset her. By this time we were pretty tanked up. Roy's mate Bill, a fiery sort of a bloke, told the offender to apologise or wear a thick ear. Down went the music and in the blink of an eye there was a tremendous blue going on. Everybody got a few licks in, and after about ten minutes the chap apologised and we all had a beer together and said what a great blue it had been. Bill and Roy were the subjects of another escapade. One Sunday Bill came around to see if I wanted to go to Casuarina beach for a swim, so I grabbed my gear and we collected Roy as well. Bill was a tall, rangy bloke, an ex-ringer with a dry sense of humour, while Roy was a nuggety game cock sort of bloke whose favourite saying was, “You can't educate idiots”.

At the beach Roy spread a towel in the lee of the sand-bank just below the grass line and as there was a nip in the wind he had put his jersey on. He was lying sort of uphill reading a book. Bill and I were walking back up the beach towards him when we saw a big brown snake poke its head out of the grass and bite him on the arm. God, the pandemonium.

“Ahhh, the bastard's bit me. Quick! Get the ute. Rush me up the hospital!” Roy screeched, hopping around. “I bloody tell you it's really got me!”

Bill fixed a steely eye on him, and his next sentence floored both of us. “I haven't got much juice in the ute, Roy. Not enough to go galavanting all over town anyway.”

I was now starting to have a small panic attack.

“You mad bastard!” Roy yelled. “I'm dying of snake bite, and you're worried about bloody petrol! Your best mate and you're just gunna watch me die. Geez, you're a bastard, Bill!”

“We'd better get the bugger up there, Bill. He could be kicking off,” I said.

Billy just laughed and said, “He's been running around rabbiting for the last ten minutes. You couldn't kill him with a brick. If it had got you, Roy, you'd be bloody dead by now.”

We quietened him down and had a look. There was venom on his shirt and jersey, but the snake had not pierced his skin. How Bill knew it had missed I will never know, but it was closer than I ever want to get to a snakebite, I can assure you. Roy never really forgave Bill, and I know I will never forget him and his “not much juice in the ute”.

I called into the Parap Pub about a week after I left the crane to Blue. I got talking to the barman, who I knew slightly, and he told me that Dowsets were looking for a bloke.

“Give Tony a ring. It can't hurt,” he said.

Tony asked me to come into the office, so I got a taxi and went to meet him. He was a big, good-looking bloke, with black curly hair. He told me they wanted someone who could do a bit of all sorts of things—pour concrete, do a bit of boxing, drive the truck, relieve Trevor on the road-train.

“But the first thing is to get the reo steel in down at Warrabri settlement, near Tennant Creek. We're building a hospital there. Would you be willing to go down there?” I said I could, but I was wondering how Nola was going to react. She had been getting in my ear lately about rings on fingers, kids and cosy little houses. I had been taking large
side-steps, and this job could be an opportunity to cool things off a bit.

Nola was waiting for me when I got there, so I took her up to the Club for lunch. She wasn't overly rapt when I told her about the job, but she agreed I could make better money out in the bush. I promised to ring whenever I could.

As we were having lunch, Dennis came in and got a drink and came over and sat down with us. He worked for the same construction company, but in a different gang. Dennis was a Canadian, and I asked him what he was doing here in the middle of the day.

“Didn't you hear?” he said. “I'm going home at the end of the week.”

“What, for good?” I asked.

“Yeah. The old man's taken crook and I have to take over the garage, there's no one else. Hey! You still got your car?” he asked me.

I told him no I'd sold it as it had been making rude noises in the motor.

“Well, I've still got that old ‘62 Consul station wagon that I've got to sell. You can buy it if you want. I'll tell you what—how much you got in your pocket?”

I had the princely sum of twelve dollars.

“That will do,” he said, taking it and giving me the rego papers.

I wasn't going to argue. It went alright. It blew a bit of smoke, but what the hell, and it had seven months of rego.

“Thanks, mate. You have a good trip home,” I said as he handed me the keys.