Australia's Best Unknown Stories Read online

  Jim Haynes was born in Sydney, attended Sydney Boys’ High School and Sydney Teachers’ College and then went bush to teach in towns like Menindee, on the Darling River, and Inverell in northern New South Wales. In between stints ‘in the bush’ he spent several years working in Britain and also gained two master’s degrees in literature, from the University of New England and the University of Wales.

  Throughout his teaching career, Jim was usually in a band or group as a singer. He started the Bandy Bill & Co Bush Band in 1977 and also worked in radio on 2NZ Inverell and the ABC’s popular Australia All Over program.

  A major career change in 1988 saw him signed as a solo recording artist to Festival Records. Other record deals followed, along with hits like ‘Mow Ya Lawn’, ‘Since Cheryl Went Feral’ and ‘Don’t Call Wagga Wagga Wagga’. He created the first morning variety shows at the Tamworth Country Music Festival and toured his own shows, as well as touring with artists like Slim Dusty, Melinda Schneider and Adam Brand. He has hosted the Pat Glover Memorial Story Telling Awards at the Port Fairy Folk Festival for almost twenty years.

  Jim has written and compiled over twenty books and released many albums of his own songs, verse and humour. He still works as an entertainer and has a weekend Australiana segment on Radio 2UE’s long-running George and Paul show.

  Jim lives at Moore Park in Sydney with his wife, Robyn. He collects colonial art, plays tennis twice a week, supports the Sydney Swans and can walk to Randwick Racecourse in ten minutes.

  First published in 2014

  Copyright © Jim Haynes 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.

  Every effort has been made to contact persons owning copyright in the stories and poems published in this book.In cases where this has not been possible, owners are invited to contact Allen & Unwin.

  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 76011 178 6

  eISBN 978 1 74343 913 5

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Dedicated to the memory of James Dellit

  1947–2014

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Part 1 Stuff Aussies Should Know About

  It ain’t necessarily so

  Sporting stuff you probably don’t know

  Why Aussie kids should love Nugget Coombes

  Accidental discoveries

  The love boat

  Australia’s best-known song

  The colony that couldn’t be prevented

  Safe passage to Melbourne

  The wreck that modernised Sydney

  The great zigzag

  The great escape

  Poetic parodies

  Wattle they think of next

  What Smithy did before he was famous

  The Red Baron’s Aussie send-off

  How two heroes swapped planes

  Great train robberies

  In vain sacrifice

  The enemy we were never told was there

  Part 2 Characters Aussies Should Know About

  The pocket picking policeman

  The evangelising blacksmith

  Our first homegrown hero

  Unknowingly quoted by millions

  The Frenchman who put on a show

  Two claims to fame

  The poet time forgot

  The man in charge of everything

  The dawn and dusk dreamer

  The most important Australian ever

  Voice of the invisible people

  The princess and the pie

  The bard of Cup week

  Fatty—the impressionist

  Along the road to Bundaberg?

  A pleasant minor poet

  Who remembers Frank?

  Part 3 Unlikely Tales From Small Towns

  The day the pub didn’t burn down Jim Haynes

  Motionless Bob Magor

  The dunny cart Peter Watson Sproal

  A bushman’s holiday Colin Newsome

  We called him ‘Ally’ for short Henry Lawson

  Daley’s dorg ‘Wattle’ W.T. Goodge (‘The Colonel’)

  The loaded dog Henry Lawson

  My kelpie Wilbur Howcroft

  That there dog o’ mine Henry Lawson

  The mongrel Grahame Watt

  Bailiffs I have met Victor Daley

  When the police force couldn’t spell Jack Moses

  Barrington John Lang

  The silent member C.J. Dennis

  Bill’s yarn: And Jim’s A. Chee

  The ghost of the murderer’s hut A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson

  His masterpiece A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson

  Incognito Anonymous

  A lucky meeting Ernest Favenc

  Bucked off its brand ‘Raf’

  Nobody knew who the fire captain was Jim Haynes

  Someone pinched our firewood Jim Haynes

  A stripe for trooper Casey Roderic Quinn

  Dan wasn’t thrown from his horse Henry Lawson

  INTRODUCTION

  The raison d’etre for this collection is to give a few insights into bits of our history that may have escaped the school textbooks and which might, at the same time, serve to amuse and enlighten readers.

  The aim of these stories and anecdotes is to make readers raise their eyebrows and exclaim, ‘My goodness, I never knew that!’

  Of course, it is a moot point if any of these stories contain what many people would consider to be ‘essential information’. Some of us are, however, of the general opinion that you can never know too much.

  After all, you never know when a certain fact or insight might be useful in some way, even if just to flaunt useless knowledge in the face of a tedious bunch of friends at a dinner party.

  On the other hand, some of the information contained in these stories might actually help you to better understand the Australian psyche or just get a firmer grip on our history—or widen the horizon of your knowledge of Australia generally and meet a few characters from our past who deserve to be remembered but somehow weren’t.

  In this modern world where all knowledge seems to be available at the touch of a google, it is, perhaps, more fun to go seeking information we may not need right away. Information which might add to the rich tapestry of our life in less immediate ways.

  Take the wombat, for example.

  How many of you knew that wombat poo is cubic in shape?

  Evidently the wombat needs to mark his territory, perhaps her territory also, and cubic poop stays on hillsides far more easily than the usual shaped stuff.

  The wombat is, indeed, a mysterious creature.

  Did you know that no one had ever seen wombats mating until 1987 when the process was finally filmed using infrared cameras? You might catch the movie on the adult pay TV channel one day.

  That enigmatic explorer George Bass, who discovere
d the truth about Tasmania at the age of 27 and then sailed off and disappeared in the vast Pacific at the age of 31, and was never heard from again, managed, in his short life, to achieve the honour of being made a member of the Royal Society for his treatise on the anatomy of the wombat, which he dissected himself.

  I bet you didn’t know that.

  You see, you’re already more knowledgeable and the book has hardly begun.

  We live in the only nation on earth that is also a continent. It is the driest and flattest continent on the planet and only one quarter of its surface can support agriculture.

  The first European settlers in Australia drank more alcohol per head of population than any other community in the history of mankind.

  Crimes for which you could be transported to this alcoholic haven included receiving stolen goods, setting fire to undergrowth, starting a union, stealing fish from a pond, being suspected of supporting Irish terrorism and ‘recommending that politicians get paid’.

  Once you were here you could do pretty well as you pleased. In fact, in 1832, in what was described as a ‘rare moment of collusion’, 300 female convicts from the Cascade Female Factory mooned the governor of Tasmania during a church service. The result of this mass mooning, believed to be the first of its kind in the world, was that ‘the ladies in the governor’s party could not control their laughter’.

  Australia had a prime minister who was famous for his ability to drink 2.5 pints of beer in eleven seconds and New South Wales had a premier who famously drank a pint of rum every morning for 35 years of his life. (Bob Hawke and Sir John Robertson respectively.)

  We needed two referenda before we decided we wanted to become a nation. Then one state, Western Australia, voted by a huge majority of almost 70 per cent to secede from Australia in 1933, only to be told by the Commons Joint Committee of the British parliament, from whom they sought permission to become a separate nation called ‘Westralia’, that, while it had the power to do what was required, it could not change the Australian constitution in order to do it!

  Furthermore, the joint committee said, the state of Western Australia had no right to alter the Australian constitution and, consequently, Western Australian remained part of the Commonwealth.

  We are an odd lot, us Aussies. Supposedly we have a distinctive character and, as Australians, exhibit many unique and lovable traits, which set us apart from other nationalities.

  Yet we were reluctant to even become Australians at all. The constitution of our nation does not contain the word ‘citizen’ but speaks of us only as ‘subjects’.

  There was no such thing as an ‘Australian citizen’ until a law was passed enabling us to become such, in 1948. Before that date we were all British subjects. The first Australian passports were issued in 1949. Married Australian women, however, had to wait until 1983 before they were finally able to apply for passports without their husband’s permission.

  After 1949 you could be an Australian citizen in one of three ways: If your father was born here you were in, but mothers didn’t count. If you were British and lived here and were ‘of good character’, or had lived here a year, were ‘of good character’ and swore allegiance to the Queen of Britain, you were okay too. Oh . . . and being white helped a lot.

  Of course, these days you simply know if you’re an Aussie or not—it’s easy.

  You know you’re Australian if you understand the true meaning of the phrase ‘a group of women wearing thongs’ and you also understand that, unlike Britain and the USA, Australia does have a plural form of ‘you’—it’s ‘youse’.

  And, if you’re really Australian, you need to know our own history, the quirky, the unknown and the forgotten . . . it helps.

  PART 1

  STUFF AUSSIES

  SHOULD KNOW

  ABOUT

  The Australian history we were told about at school was only ever a small part of what happened to make our nation the place it is for us to live in.

  Fads and trends come and go in education and at times, during some eras of education in different states, the curriculum didn’t really include a lot of Australian history at all.

  Of course, being young is never the best time to learn certain things. Kids are not that interested in the past, they want to be engaged in what is happening now and think about the future.

  A desire to know about our past and what makes us who we are is more often than not a thing that comes with age.

  Most of these stories fall into the category of things that most of us were not taught at school but they are stories which, hopefully, help us to understand how Australia developed into the kind of place it is today.

  I am often annoyed by the simplistic attitude taken by teachers to history. The desire to pigeon-hole personalities and events into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ gives kids a very wrong impression of how things were in the past.

  During my own education, I often had teachers who taught history as if it was mathematics: this person was bad, this event was good, etc. There was little attempt made to make history a continuum of consequences or a human story.

  When I did strike a teacher who gave a class some idea of the complexity of the past and made history come to life by explaining the consequences of events, and describing the characters involved as real people, history became a ‘story’ and suddenly I was interested!

  History is really only useful if it can help us to unravel and explain why things are the way they are today. We need to understand the present by looking at the past but, in order to make people look into the past, the past has to be made interesting.

  So, some of these stories are attempts to help us understand who we are and why things happened to make our society the way it is.

  There is also, however, another reason for the inclusion of some of these yarns. I have quite an obsession with researching things that are presented to us as ‘facts’ in order to find out if there is another side to the story. In doing so, I often discover that the ‘facts’ have, in fact, just been made up to suit someone’s agenda and the truth lies elsewhere. Those stories, where a commonly held belief is proved to be wrong, are often the most interesting. People love to know stuff others don’t.

  Then, of course, there are the facts and stories that are fascinating and amusing for no other reason than they are unusual or odd or just funny!

  I hope you enjoy this section, and maybe find out something about Australia you didn’t know.

  IT AIN’T NECESSARILY SO

  There are always going to be more things you don’t know than things you do know. It goes without saying.

  As Hamlet (or was it Bill Shakespeare?) reminded us a few centuries ago, there are more things in heaven and earth than we can dream of.

  What is sometimes very strange, however, is what we do know and what we don’t. Even more fascinating, to me at least, is what we think we know, but what may not be true at all.

  Let’s start with an obvious one.

  THE GHAN

  Ask any Aussie why the train that runs from Adelaide to Darwin is called the Ghan and anyone who has an answer at all will tell you it is named as a tribute to the Afghan cameleers who carried goods through the outback before there were trains or roads.

  That is what the railway publicity tells you and it’s in all the encyclopediae and is a widely accepted ‘fact’.

  It is not true.

  The Southern Section of the Great Northern Railway was begun in 1877 by the South Australian government and finally came to a halt in 1929 when the Commonwealth government completed the section from Rumbalara to Stuart, which later became Alice Springs.

  The train was a ‘limited mixed’ which meant it had passenger carriages and goods vans, and it was given the official title of the Oodnadatta Night Train, until the route was extended. Then it reverted to being known as the limited mixed once more.

  So, the legendary Ghan only came into existence on 4 August 1929 when the first passengers arrived in the town of Stuart, whic
h would later be renamed Alice Springs. The train was two and a half hours late and the name was adopted as a private staff joke at the expense of George Gahan, Commissioner of the Commonwealth Railways, who was on that first train.

  Commissioner Gahan had an obsession with building the line through to Stuart and arrived in a special commissioner’s carriage he’d had built. The carriage cost £7584 of the Commonwealth government’s money and featured an observation saloon with curved glass, four sleeping compartments, a bathroom, a dining saloon, a kitchen and a compartment to accommodate two male servants. The interior of the car was made from the best Tasmanian oak.

  The train was regarded as unnecessary by many, including most of the railway staff at the time. The commissioner’s carriage was seen as an extravagant toy and the rail line itself as a waste of federal money. Staff on the train often outnumbered passengers and the train was never going to cover its costs. The line was beset by problems of washaways and derailments and notoriously sloppy work practices prevailed.

  Commonwealth Railways, which operated the service, was often referred to as the ‘Comical Railways’.

  As the train was considered slow and useless by railway staff, they took great delight in christening the train the Gahan, as a derogatory jibe at their commissioner.

  So, the popularly believed story about the name Ghan, which most people believe, because they are told it over and over, is a ‘furphy’, which is an Aussie term for a false rumour or fib.

  Here’s another one.

  AUSTRALIA’S CAR

  It has long been a national legend that the Holden was ‘the first car specifically designed for Australian conditions’.

  Well, that’s not a legend, it’s a myth.

  During World War II the government, along with both Ford and General Motors-Holden, explored the possibility of a locally produced affordable motorcar.

  The Holden company began life in 1856 as saddle and harness makers. In 1908 the company moved into the automotive field before becoming a subsidiary of US company General Motors (GM) in 1931.

  After the war General Motors-Holden continued to pursue the idea. Managing director Laurence Hartnett wanted a local design, while the company preferred to see an American one.