Larrikins, Bush Tales and Other Great Australian Stories Read online

  Praise for other books by Graham Seal

  Great Australian Stories

  ‘The pleasure of this book is in its ability to give a fair dinkum insight into the richness of Australian story telling.’—Weekly Times

  ‘… a treasure trove of material from our nation’s historical past… you don’t have to be Australian to enjoy it, but it helps.’—Courier Mail

  ‘This book is a little island of Aussie culture—one to enjoy.’—Sunshine Coast Sunday

  ‘Numbskulls, drongos, bunyips, whingers and cockies all feature in this book of legends, yarns and tall tales from our rich tradition of Australian storytelling… Great fun.’ —Scoop

  Great Anzac Stories

  ‘… allows you to feel as if you are there in the trenches with them.’—Weekly Times

  ‘They are pithy short pieces, absolutely ideal for reading when you are pushed for time, but they are stories you will remember for much longer than you would expect. Fromelles, the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels, the grim humour in horrific circumstances, or the heroism of a person will haunt the reader. There is so much here: victories and defeats, help and hindrance, memories and wilful forgetfulness, and much that has never before been published.’ —Ballarat Courier

  ‘… rewarding reading… a valuable document.’ —Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘A compilation of yarns about Aussies at war, Great Anzac Stories provides an in-depth look into the bravery of all those involved.’ —4 x 4 Australia

  ‘… a book that will clarify many of the Anzac myths and settle a few arguments.’—The Senior

  ‘This book represents just a small selection of stories of courage, calamity and some humour in a comprehensible form.’—PS News

  Other books by Graham Seal

  Great Australian Stories

  Great Anzac Stories

  The Soldiers’ Press: Trench journals in the First World War

  Outlaw Heroes in Myth and History

  Dog’s Eye and Dead Horse: The complete guide to Australian rhyming slang

  Echoes of Anzac: The voice of Australians at war

  Inventing ANZAC: The Digger and National Mythology

  Tell ‘em I Died Game: The legend of Ned Kelly

  First published in 2014

  Copyright © Graham Seal 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone:(61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74331 996 3

  eISBN 978 1 74 343 944 9

  Typeset by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Contents

  The Great Australian storyscape

  Acknowledgements

  1 Wide, brown land

  Eaglehawk and Crow

  Great floods

  Firestick farming

  ‘The landscape looked like a park’

  Captain Cook’s Law

  The corners

  2 Upon the fatal shore

  Leaden hearts

  The Ring

  The melancholy death of Captain Logan

  A Convict’s Tour to Hell

  ‘Make it hours instead of days’

  Captain of the push

  The Prince of Pickpockets

  3 Plains of promise

  ‘I was not expected to survive’

  The town that drowned

  Wine and witches

  Phantoms of the landfall light

  Tragedy on Lizard Island

  Who was Billy Barlow?

  The temple of skulls

  Chimney Sweeps’ Day

  The dragon of Big Gold Mountain

  4 A fair go

  Black Mary

  The Tambaroora line

  Mates

  A glorious spree

  The Greenhide Push waltzes Matilda

  The Bunuba resistance

  The bagman’s gazette

  Homes of hope

  5 How we travel the land

  Rangers and rouseabouts

  The swagman’s union

  The oozlum bird

  The Tea and Sugar Train

  The black stump

  The rise and fall of Cobb & Co.

  The Long Paddock

  The real Red Dog

  6 Doing it tough

  Depending on the harvest

  ‘Women of the West’

  Cures!

  A seasonal guide to weather and wives

  Backyard brainwaves

  Sugar bag nation

  Happy Valley

  Sergeant Small

  The farmer’s will

  7 Home of the weird

  Curious discoveries

  The marble man

  Was Breaker Morant the Gatton murderer?

  Vanishing vessels

  Yearning for yowies

  8 Romancing the swag

  Lore of the track

  Sniffling Jimmy

  The poetic swaggie

  ‘There you have the Australian swag’

  A swagman’s death

  Where the angel tarboys fly

  Bowyang Bill and the cocky farmer

  The Mad Eight

  9 After the Kellys

  The saga

  A Glenrowan letter

  ‘I thought it was a circus’

  A death in Forbes

  Living legends

  The stranger

  10 The child in the bush

  The beanstalk in the bush

  Forgotten nursery rhymes

  The lost boys of Daylesford

  Fairies in the paddock

  Surviving Black Jack

  11 Larger than life

  The fate of Captain Cadell

  The Fenian

  The last bushranger

  Lawson’s people

  The Coo-ee Lady

  Australia’s first Hollywood star

  A vision splendid

  The illywacker

  12 Working for a laugh

  Droving in a bar

  A fine team of bullocks

  A stump speech

  Working on the railway

  Service!

  High-octane travel

  Railway birds

  Rechtub klat

  The garbos’ Christmas

  A Christmas message

  Total eclipse of communication

  The laws of working life

  Somebody else’s job

  The basic work survival guide

  Twelve things you’ll never hear an employee tell the boss

  Excessive absence

  Running naked with the bulls

  Doing business

  The end of a perfect day

  Sources

  Bibliography

  Picture credits

  Introduction:

  The Great Australian storyscape

/>   THERE IS A great Australian story, made up of many, many stories. These are tales large and small, personal and public, funny and sad, wild and woolly and sometimes just weird. Taken together, they sum up what Australians are, how we came to be and how we like to think of ourselves as a people. They also suggest something about how we might be in the future.

  I think of this as the great Australian storyscape, a never-ending flow of yarns, legends, myths, jokes and anecdotes that we tell each other over time. Stories by Australians, for Australians, about the Australian experience. Some of these tales are borrowed from elsewhere and adapted to our needs in accordance with the tradition of making do and improvisation. But most are home-grown. They tell about the past, both as it was and how we wish it might have been. But because they are still being told, re-told, rediscovered and otherwise recycled by word of mouth, in print and, increasingly, on the internet, they also speak to us in the present. These tales are worth the telling and the hearing or reading because they give an insight into that larger national story of which they are all a part.

  Readers of the earlier Great Australian Stories will be familiar with the approach and format of this sequel. In a few cases there are updates or new angles on some of the stories included in the earlier book. The evolving history of the piratical ‘Black Jack’ Anderson is one of these. The yowie and friends continue to fascinate many of us, and so I’ve taken the opportunity to get up to speed with the latest on hairy figures and similar creatures.

  Some readers wondered why there was nothing on Ned Kelly in the first book. I thought that readers might be tired of the Kelly saga but judging by the swag of recent books and television shows on the subject, it seems not. So there is a whole Kelly chapter here, beginning with an overview of the events of 1878–80 but focusing mainly on the rarely mentioned aftermath of the outbreak.

  You will find here tales both true and less so from Australia’s rich history and folklore, beginning with a selection of Indigenous legends and settler stories of the wide, brown land. This is followed by selections on the early unwilling emigrants, as well as free settlers attracted to the ‘plains of promise’ in search of a better life for themselves and their children. Many of the early settlers did not come of their own free will; a few tales of the convict days reflect their troubles as well as some of their unusual reactions.

  The love of ‘a fair go’ is an important element of national identity, as is travelling across the vastness of the country and carrying a swag. The hardships of pioneering and economic depression and of the battler feature in the section on ‘Doing it tough’, while the sometimes forgotten experience of colonial children deserves attention as well. We also have our fair share of unsolved crimes and other mysteries that nag at the nation’s memory, and these are also touched on.

  Finally, most of us have to work for a living. Working life is a primary source of the kind of dry humour that gets us through the working day, and beyond, and there were just as many experiences of work to laugh at in the past as there are in the present.

  A few themes weave their way through this collection. Together, these themes sum up the distinctive experience of the Australian people and how they have talked about it, written about, sung about and laughed about it.

  The land itself features in many stories, either directly or by implication: understanding it, travelling across it or trying to make a living from it and the challenging environment that famously produces fire, flood and drought, often at the same time. From the earliest times, we hear about hardship, struggle, tragedy and conflict. But these troubles are balanced by hope, optimism, celebration and the need for equality and fairness. Making do and getting by are wired into the Australian way of life and state of mind. No matter what the situation, someone comes up with a way to make things easier, faster, safer or just better, and in the most difficult situations, laughter often comes to the rescue. The people in the stories, and sometimes those who tell them, range from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Occasionally, they are just plain odd. They are reproduced faithfully and like many historical texts, some contain language and express attitudes that may be considered offensive today—you stand warned.

  Tall tales and true. A few sad ones, a few strange ones and a lot of yarns. A couple of curiosities for good measure. All seasoned with the characteristic spice of the ‘great Australian slanguage’.

  Graham Seal

  Acknowledgements

  MY THANKS TO: Rob Willis, Olya Willis, Maureen Seal, Mark Gregory, Peter Austin, Robyn Floyd, Mary Newham and the descendants of Olga Ernst (Waller), Elizabeth Weiss and staff at Allen & Unwin as well as all the unknown—but not unheard—spinners of yarns and tellers of tales who help us to laugh, cry and perhaps think about things anew.

  1

  Wide, brown land

  The wide, brown land for me!

  Dorothea Mackellar, ‘My Country’ (1908)

  AT THE BASE of the great, wide treasure trove of Australian stories lies the land: the natural features, the environment, the people and places upon it and the things that have been done in those places. Indigenous stories are all about the land and the links between it, the ancestral creators, its plants and animals and the human beings who lived here for 50,000 years, perhaps longer. When visitors from other places began to arrive seeking trade and, later, settlement, they too needed to create an understanding of the land and to express it in their stories. Different though these stories are, they also tell of ways of living on and relating to the environment we all share.

  Dorothea Mackellar’s famous poem ‘My Country’ first appeared in a slightly different form in the English Spectator magazine in 1908 and was not published in Australia until 1911. Dorothea was only 22 at the time of writing and homesick for her home country while travelling in Britain. Her patriotic creation is often criticised as overly sentimental and unconscious of the Indigenous connection to country. On the other hand, it pointedly breaks with the British connection in its first verse, the fields and coppices the ‘ordered woods and lanes’ that ‘I know but cannot share’. The next verse begins with the lines best known to generations of schoolchildren: ‘I love a sunburnt country’. The remainder is a highly emotional testament of love for the harsh environment: ‘Core of my heart, my country’.

  Ever since its first Australian publication, the poem—or ‘verse’ as Mackellar might have called it, refusing to be called a ‘poet’—has been a touchstone for popular ideas of national identity and relationship to the land. But long before then, Aboriginal Australians were expressing their unique connections to the wide, brown land.

  Eaglehawk and Crow

  The wedge-tailed eagle or eaglehawk lives across the continent in considerable numbers. Not surprisingly, this fierce hunter appears frequently in traditional Aboriginal mythology. In Tiwi tradition (Melville and Bathurst islands, Northern Territory), Jurumu is the name for the wedge-tailed eagle, which, with Mudati the fork-tailed kite, made fire when they accidentally rubbed some sticks together. For the Wonnarua people of the Hunter Valley, Kawal is the wedge-tailed eagle, created by the great spirit Baiame (Byamee) to watch over them. In Victoria, Bunjil is the wedge-tailed eagle, the creator of the Kulin nation.

  The eagle may also be associated with totems of one kind or another, and with the complex human and spiritual relationships in Aboriginal culture.

  There are many wedge-tailed eagle stories, some involving Crow, who often represents the complementary darkness to the eagle or eaglehawk’s light. Crow may also be a trickster figure and is frequently associated with fire. In some stories, the characters end up as stars in the night sky, as in traditions recorded along the Murray River. Here it was said that the earth was inhabited by a race of very wise black birds long before humans came to be there. The eaglehawk was the leader of this group and Crow was his deputy. The eagle’s son was killed by Crow. In some versions, Eagle trapped Crow and killed him but the wily black bird came back to life and then disappeared. In this telling of
the story, the argument between Crow and Eagle explains how crows come to be black.

  One day, a crow and a hawk hunted together in the bush. After travelling together for some time, they decided to hunt in opposite directions, and, at the close of the day, to share whatever game they had caught. The crow travelled against the sun, and at noonday arrived at a broad lagoon which was the haunt of the wild ducks. The crow hid in the tall green reeds fringing the lagoon, and prepared to trap the ducks. First, he got some white clay, and, having softened it with water, placed two pieces in his nostrils. He then took a long piece of hollow reed through which he could breathe under water, and finally tied a net bag around his waist in which to place the ducks.

  On the still surface of the lagoon, the tall gum trees were reflected like a miniature forest. The ducks, with their bronze plumage glistening in the sun, were swimming among the clumps of reeds, and only paused to dive for a tasty morsel hidden deep in the water weeds. The crow placed the reed in his mouth, and, without making any sound, waded into the water. He quickly submerged himself, and the only indication of his presence in the lagoon was a piece of dry reed which projected above the surface of the water, and through which the crow was breathing. When he reached the centre of the water-hole he remained perfectly still. He did not have to wait long for the ducks to swim above his head. Then, without making any sound or movement, he seized one by the leg, quickly pulled it beneath the water, killed it, and placed it in the net bag. By doing this, he did not frighten the other ducks, and, in a short time he had trapped a number of them. He then left the lagoon and continued on his way until he came to a river.

  The crow was so pleased with his success at the waterhole that he determined to spear some fish before he returned to his camp. He left the bag of ducks on the bank of the river, and, taking his fish spear, he waded into the river until the water reached his waist. Then he stood very still, with the spear poised for throwing. A short distance from the spot where he was standing, a slight ripple disturbed the calm surface of the water. With the keen eye of the hunter, he saw the presence of fish, and, with a swift movement of his arm, he hurled the spear, and his unerring aim was rewarded with a big fish. The water was soon agitated by many fish, and the crow took advantage of this to spear many more. With this heavy load of game, he turned his face towards home.