The Best Australian Bush Stories Read online

  The band-cutter, noticing our astonishment, said, ‘Mad old bastard, but the only man in the country who can get more than half a ton an hour through her.’

  At the other end of the cutter where the chaff came out, two men wearing only shorts and sandshoes sewed up the bags deftly, pushing the needle in and pulling it through in one quick movement; then, hoisting the bags on their shoulders, they ran up the pyramid of stacked chaff as nimbly as monkeys.

  Suddenly there was a bang and then a grinding noise in the bowels of the cutter, and geysers of chaff were spewed out of various orifices. All the men round the machine yelled, their faces showing various degrees of annoyance because they were on piecework, and the engineer ran to stop the engine.

  Marks alone looked good-humoured.

  ‘Only the riddle box,’ he said. ‘Fix that in a minute.’

  But the men looked at each other in sudden anger and condemned their souls if they knew why they stayed with such an old rattletrap outfit.

  We looked at our father to see how he was taking all the swearing, because he was very strict with us in that way, but he seemed to be only concerned about getting the machinery going again. Marks and the engine-driver undid some bolts, pulled off parts of the cutter, and let a cascade of chaff flow out. Then the engine-driver crawled in among the chaff, regardless of itch and irritation, to screw and hammer.

  A dejected-looking man with a long downward-curving mouth joined father; he was the teamster who carted the chaff to the railway station. He tried to curry favour with father by telling him he had once had a farm of his own but had lost it through sheer bad luck.

  Father looked as if he didn’t believe any part of the story, so the teamster started sneering at Marks and his outfit. As father hardly bothered to answer, he took a chaff bag and began to bag up the chaff that spilled out of the cutter, for his horses, watching father to see if he was going to make him pay for it.

  Presently the engine-driver emerged with chaff leaking out of his sleeves and trousers. The parts were slammed back and the whistle blew. The men rose slowly from where they were sitting and said cynically, ‘How long will she go this time?’

  The wood-and-water-Joey came trudging along with a load of water slopping out of the Furphy. He stopped about ten yards from the engine, notwithstanding the engine-driver’s beckoning and shouting to him to bring it within reach of his hose.

  ‘Come and get it yourself!’ he shouted back, and retreated with an anxious eye on the steam-pressure gauge.

  He was a very melancholy individual with a long, flattened nose, no teeth, and ragged clothes.

  ‘She’ll blow up and kill everybody one of these days,’ he told us. ‘They’ve been dodging the boiler inspector for years. Only last week one of the pipes burst just when I was backing up the cart.’

  He lifted his rag of a sleeve and said, ‘Look.’

  The skin had peeled off the entire length of his arm. We didn’t feel so contemptuous of his cowardice after that, but gazed admiringly at the engine-driver, who was clambering up and down all the time. He started a pump to get the water out of the cart into the engine, and the extra strain slowed the cutter down to half speed. All the crew gazed apprehensively at the engine.

  The next day when we came home from school the outfit was silent. We ran down to see why and found the engine surrounded by heaps of raked-out ashes and pools of rusty water. The engine-driver was somewhere inside the still blisteringly hot engine, trying to find out what had put the fire out. Marks was standing by with his grin, saying reassuringly to his men, ‘It’s only a bloody pipe. That boiler’s all right for another fifty years.’

  ‘Fifty years my fat arse,’ one of the bag-sewers said and the others laughed in rueful agreement. Marks laughed, too.

  The engine-driver came out feet first, as red, hot and dripping as a well-boiled yabbie coming out of the pot.

  ‘It’s only a boiler pipe,’ he said, smiling at Marks despite his distress. ‘Hand me a Stillson and I’ll go in again and undo it.’

  The others said, ‘You’ll kill yourself.’

  After he’d gone in again Marks said confidentially to the men, ‘He’s a good boy.’

  The engine-driver had to come out twice for air, but in about half an hour he had the broken pipe out.

  ‘Have to go into town now for a new one,’ he said.

  There was a chorus of yells—‘Room for me?’ ‘Take me, too?’—and a rush to the car. It was full when Marks arrived, struggling into a torn pullover.

  ‘Ah, you buggers,’ he said, ‘I don’t mind taking a few of you along, but will you be ready to come back again?’

  All the men were prepared to pledge their chance of salvation. Marks looked at them unbelievingly and hopelessly, but still grinning.

  ‘Ah, you buggers,’ he said again, ‘if I find any of you you’ll be blind and no use all tomorrow.’

  ‘You’ll have to throw us out now,’ said the biggest bag-sewer, getting a good grip on a good support.

  Marks gave a resigned shrug and squeezed a couple of men over so that he could get behind the wheel.

  Next morning the cutter was still idle. We ran down before breakfast and saw that the Ford had not returned. The men who had stayed behind were still asleep—Strelitz, the feeder, in his clean white tent, the cook in his galley, quite a colony on their stretchers under flies attached to the teamster’s wagon, and the wood-and-water-Joey, who seemed to have no gear at all and camped in a stook of hay with a couple of chaff bags for blankets.

  When we were nearly at school we met the car, the young engine-driver at the wheel with Marks leaning heavily on him, and in the back a heap of tangled limbs, trunks and heads.

  When we got home that night our mother was in a scandalised state.

  ‘Don’t you go down to the cutter,’ she said. ‘Mr Marks couldn’t find more than half his men last night, and this morning he went to the police, and they gave him enough men from the cells to make up his team.’

  We sneaked down as soon as she forgot to keep an eye on us, but it was hard to pick out the jailbirds from the rest of the crew. The engine and cutter were running well, but the output was slow. Half the men were blundering about dizzily, and several were flat out where they had fallen. Many of them were more or less damaged, and even the engine-driver had a black eye.

  On the following afternoon the outfit was still running well and the new men looking less awkward at their jobs.

  It seemed as if Marks’s luck had changed.

  Then we saw a man come wheeling a bicycle between the stooks, inappropriately dressed for summer cycling in a town suit, with thick woollen socks pulled over the ends of his trousers.

  He leaned his bicycle against Strelitz’s tent and carefully dried his face and the inside of his collar. He wiped his hands and then strode deliberately across to Marks. The original members of the crew looked significantly at each other.

  The teamster, always eager to tell something to Marks’s detriment, came over to us with a malicious grin on his face.

  ‘It’s the bailiff,’ he said. ’Marks’s wife always keeps dunning him for maintenance money.’

  Some of the other men, possibly with matrimonial trouble of their own, were all sympathy for Marks.

  ‘The lousy bitch!’ they said. ‘Always at him as soon as he starts to earn a bit of money.’

  ‘If mine did that,’ said another, ‘I’d cut her bloody throat.’

  We were vastly interested in this glimpse into real-life drama. We stared at the bailiff and edged a bit closer to hear what he was saying. He was a fair, slight man with a mild and pleasant face, and he spoke as if he were merely collecting orders for groceries, or something like that.

  ‘If you just sign this paper,’ he was saying helpfully, ‘Mrs Marks will be able to get the money straight from the produce merchant who bought the hay.’

  It seemed to be a very simple transaction.

  But Marks was grinning and swallowing and waving his h
ands about uncertainly. He pushed his hat back to scratch his head, and when we saw that his hair was white we were suddenly very sorry for him.

  ‘Come on,’ said the bailiff briskly, ‘I’ve got a long way to ride home. It’ll be all right.’

  Marks wiped a greasy hand on his trousers and took the pen.

  ‘By cripes, I hope so!’ he said.

  He didn’t grin so much when the men began to chip him. He stroked his jaw thoughtfully with his black hands and said, ‘I don’t know how it will turn out. I signed one of them papers before, to get you blokes wages.’

  ‘That will be her funeral,’ one of the wife-haters said joyfully.

  But the decrepit old wood-and-water-Joey said ominously, ‘My word, you’ve done it now!’

  At the tea table that night our mother was inclined to condemn Marks, but father had the severest ideas about wives who took the law against their husbands.

  After that there was always something exciting going on at the cutter. They had their breakdowns every couple of days, but we were now more interested in the real-life drama. What we didn’t see we heard about from the teamster, who seemed to be having the time of his life.

  The bailiff came out again, gave Marks a severe lecture, and got him to sign another and different paper. The wood-and-water-Joey was shocked when he heard about this; he seemed to have a wide knowledge of the various papers people could sign to their detriment.

  Several days later two severe and outraged men accompanied the bailiff. They tried hard to make Marks go back to town with them, but after he had refused defiantly several times, and called to the boys to come over and hear what they were trying to do to him, the bailiffs left him, after getting him to sign a paper still another shape and colour.

  The wood-and-water-Joey seemed to think that now Marks might just as well go and cut his throat.

  In between bailiffs and breakdowns they gradually got the hay cut. Marks did not go to town when new parts had to be procured, but sent the engine-driver. However, there always seemed to be momentous news for him, and we were not really surprised when we saw two large policemen arrive.

  Marks had not been at the cutter all that day, and the teamster’s guess was that he was ‘in the dead centre of your father’s big scrub paddock’.

  The day came when the last stook was chopped into chaff, and the men began packing up and hooking all the parts of the outfit into a train again.

  ‘He’s going to make a run for it now,’ the sour teamster said.

  That rather amused us, because the traction engine travelled at about two miles an hour and the big wheels left tracks two feet wide wherever they went.

  Then suddenly a car came tearing down the road and across our paddock. Some of the men said it was the bailiff and some said the police, and all of them were right.

  This time, we could see, there was going to be no nonsense, but we were hardly prepared for what they did. The bailiff read out a paper that left Marks quite speechless and then, while the police stood each side of Marks, the two severe-looking men put seals all over the engine, cutter, steamer, galley and Furphy. The teamster came over and told us gloatingly that they were seizing the plant for debt.

  When it was all done they waited there for Marks to leave, but he didn’t seem to realise that there was nothing for him to do but go away empty-handed. Finally he got into his old Ford with the engine-driver and as many of the gang as could pile in with him and drove off.

  The severe-looking men were suddenly desolated that they had omitted to seize the car.

  * * *

  The chaff-cutting plant stood there for a long time.

  Now and then hopeful-looking bargain-hunters came to inspect it, but none of them bought it. Father was always most discouraging when they asked his opinion of it. Of course he was all for law and order, but he thought it was the ultimate outrage to ‘deprive a man of his living’.

  The time came round to plough the long 200-acres again, and we had to leave nearly an acre untouched where the plant was standing.

  No more chaff-cutting contractors came to look at it, but the scrap-iron merchants began to take an interest. That was in the days when we were selling a lot of scrap iron to Japan. Father told them we didn’t know who owned the plant now, trying to make things difficult for them. When they hinted that they’d give him a fiver to say nothing he was so indignant that we saw no more of scrap-iron merchants.

  Then, after the next harvest, when we and many of our neighbours were away on holidays at the coast, the plant disappeared. There was heavy rain before we returned and we couldn’t see any tracks. Father’s explanation to everyone who commented on the disappearance of a landmark was, ‘I believe those confounded scrap-iron pedlars dismantled it and frisked it away.’

  Sowing time had come again, when one day while we were waiting to go home from town, we saw father talking to a pair of rough-looking men in the street. After he got into the car he kept smiling to himself and our mother looked at him hard several times to see if he’d been drinking. Father began to chuckle.

  ‘You don’t know who those two men have been working for, way down in Ganmain,’ he challenged us.

  Then he gave us a hint to help us guess: ‘On a chaff-cutting plant . . . the chaff-cutting plant that used to stand in our paddock.’

  ‘A WALGETT EPISODE’

  BANJO PATERSON

  The sun strikes down with a blinding glare,

  The skies are blue and the plains are wide,

  The saltbush plains that are burnt and bare

  By Walgett out on the Barwon side—

  The Barwon River that wanders down

  In a leisurely manner by Walgett Town.

  There came a stranger—a ‘cockatoo’—

  The word means farmer, as all men know

  Who dwell in the land where the kangaroo

  Barks loud at dawn, and the white-eyed crow

  Uplifts his song on the stockyard fence

  As he watches the lambkins passing hence.

  The sunburnt stranger was gaunt and brown,

  But it soon appeared that he meant to flout

  The iron law of the country town,

  Which is—that the stranger has got to shout:

  ‘If he will not shout we must take him down,’

  Remarked the yokels of Walgett Town.

  They baited a trap with a crafty bait,

  With a crafty bait, for they held discourse

  Concerning a new chum who of late

  Had bought such a thoroughly lazy horse;

  They would wager that no one could ride him down

  The length of the city of Walgett Town.

  The stranger was born on a horse’s hide;

  So he took the wagers, and made them good

  With his hard-earned cash—but his hopes they died,

  For the horse was a clothes-horse, made of wood!

  ’Twas a well-known horse that had taken down

  Full many a stranger in Walgett Town.

  The stranger smiled with a sickly smile—

  ’Tis a sickly smile that the loser grins—

  And he said he had travelled for quite a while

  In trying to sell some marsupial skins.

  ‘And I thought that perhaps, as you’ve took me down,

  You would buy them from me, in Walgett Town!’

  He said that his home was at Wingadee,

  At Wingadee where he had for sale

  Some fifty skins and would guarantee

  They were full-sized skins, with the ears and tail

  Complete, and he sold them for money down

  To a venturesome buyer in Walgett Town.

  Then he smiled a smile as he pouched the pelf,

  ‘I’m glad that I’m quit of them, win or lose:

  You can fetch them in when it suits yourself,

  And you’ll find the skins—on the kangaroos!’

  Then he left—and the silence settled down

  L
ike a tangible thing upon Walgett Town.

  Part 3

  DAVE IN LOVE

  Here are some ‘love stories’ from the bush. They range in style from Henry Handel Richardson’s insightful examination of adolescent sexual awakening to the stereotypical Victorian melodrama of Marcus Clarke and Ethel Mills.

  In between those two extremes are some delightfully well-observed stories which delve into various aspects of the relationships between men and women. Some are poignant, some are amusing, and some are both. What they have in common is a special ‘bush’ flavour—most of them explore the stoic nature of the outback characters whose tales they are.

  Lawson once wrote, ‘they say that I never have written of love’. Of course he had, and quite successfully, too. It is, however, a common, ill-informed ‘furphy’ that our colonial authors did not write well about women and love. I hope this selection of stories proves that opinion to be a furphy, indeed.

  ‘TO MANY LADIES’

  ‘DR NIL’

  (CHARLES SOUTER)

  When you raise your gentle eyes

  All the blue fades from the skies.

  When your tones so softly ring

  All the birds forget to sing.

  When you smile, the sea smiles too.

  ’Tis the same, whate’er you do:

  Nature takes her cue from you.

  THE WRONG TURNING

  HENRY HANDEL RICH ARDSON

  THE WAY HE HELPED her into the boat was delicious, simply delicious: it made her feel like a grown-up lady to be taken so much care of. Usually, people didn’t mind how you got in and out of things, as you were only thirteen. And before he let her step off the landing he took her strap of books from her, those wretched schoolbooks, which stamped her, but which she hadn’t known how to get rid of: her one chance of going for a row was secretly, on her way home from school. But he seemed to understand, without being told, how she despised them, and he put them somewhere in the boat where they wouldn’t get wet, and yet she didn’t need to see them. (She wondered what he had done with his own.)