Warrigal's Way (4 page)

5

I walked the beat out to the meatworks every morning for a week and got nothing. It was Friday, three days until my eleventh birthday on Monday, 16 March 1959. I had just walked back from the meatworks and was at my favourite spot, the bridge over the river, sailing my pirate ship to tropical islands covered in flowers and coconut palms looking for hidden treasure. I was getting right into it. I had a plank on the bridge and was just about to make that personnel bloke from the meatworks office walk it while I prodded him with my dirty big sword.

“G'day,” this voice said, breaking into my daydream, and rescuing that personnel bloke, right at the very last step. I decided to let him live and put my sword away and told the sharks infesting the river to come back tomorrow. I turned around. Well, did I get a shock! I was lookin' at a kneecap dressed in moleskin pants, held up by a shin as tall as me, balanced on a boot I could use as a weekend runabout. The voice roared again. I looked around for a beanstalk, convinced he was a giant. I leaned back and followed my eyes up, taking a step back before I fell over. He must have been six or seven feet, if you counted the boots and hat. He sorta tapered down from shoulders a mile wide to riding boots with three-inch heels. He was the tallest bloke I'd ever seen.

“You look a bit lost, so I thought I'd wander over for a yarn. You one out?” Meaning was I on my own—that's Australian English, not American drivel.

We had talked, Danny and I, about being accosted, but as he said to me, you can always tell. I dunno what it is, a feeling or just nouse, but it's very rare you can't sus one. I sort of took another step back and looked this bloke over again. There definitely wasn't anything sissy about this bloke. He looked like he could fight the town. With a grin on his face, you sorta felt he was a mate.

“Yeah,” I told him, “I came up from Melbourne a month or so ago lookin' for work. I been out the meatworks, just walked back in.”

Holding out a hand as big as a dinner plate he said, “The name's Hugh.” And we shook hands.

“My first name's Eddie, but most people call me Warrigal,” I told him.

“You old enough to come for a beer?” Hugh asked with a grin.

“Nah. It's no good for me, and they wouldn't let me in anyway.”

“Yair. I reckon you're right. What about a cup of tea then? There's a cafe over the road.”

“You won me,” I said, and although I don't like to admit it, I had lost, out of my pocket I think, seven pounds that was change from the ten Danny had given me. I had it on the Tuesday morning when I walked out to the meatworks and I couldn't find a penny when I got back in. I walked back out and searched but found nothin', so I had been living on mangoes, pawpaw, and spuds cooked in the ashes. I had been fishing, but didn't do too well, so right at this moment a cup of tea sounded like heaven. We went over to the cafe and sat in a booth, with a plate of sandwiches and a big pot of tea.

“Get around those,” Hugh said, and I proceeded to give
them the treatment. I cleaned up the plate and started on the tea.

“Look Ed, do you mind if I ask how old you are?”

“Nah. That's alright. I'm eleven,” I said, trying to sound it.

“You sure?” he asked, fixing an eye on me.

“Nah. you're right. I'm ten. Won't be eleven until Monday.”

“What the hell are you doing running around here all on your Todd Malone? Where the hell are your parents?”

“You mean me Mum? She's in Melbourne.”

“Then how come you're here?” he asked in a puzzled voice.

“I come on the train. Are you the police?” I asked getting ready to bolt.

“Nah, hang on! I'm not the police. Have you run away from home?”

“No. Mum said the Department were comin' for me, so she packed my port, give me a fiver and told me to leg it, and not to let them get me, or they will lock me up. You the Department then?” I asked fearfully, heart in mouth.

“No mate. I think I know now. Is your mum Aboriginal?”

“Yeah. How did you know?” I asked in wonder.

“Oh, I come from the bush and we know these things. How would you like a job?”

“Doin' what?” I asked, curious.

“Drovin',” he said.

I thought about it while I sipped the tea. I needed a job. “Drovin', what's drovin'? I don't think I can drove. What do you do?”

“Babysit cattle,” laughed Hugh. “I'm a drover for the meatworks. I got my own plant out at the Drovers Cottage, that's where we got our camp. We contract to most works—Grascoss at Pentland, Angliss in Rockhampton, Swifts in Rocky, Alligator Creek, Mackay, Ross River, Merinda at Bowen. They pay, we work. We cover a lot of country at
times. There's three of us at the moment, Mike my brother, and Ted the cook and part-time horse tailer. They're in the pub now. Can you ride a horse?”

“I dunno, never been near one.” I was feeling a bit worried.

“You'll learn. Do you want the job?” Hugh gave a great big laugh at the look on my face. He paid the lady and we walked outside.

“You are fair dinkum, eh? If you're fair dinks, I'll take the job alright, by crikey I will, real quick.” I felt ten foot high, a real job.

Hugh stooped and looked at me, put his hand out and said, “You're on,” as we shook hands. “The pay's five quid a month all found. Alright with you?”

“Cripes, anything's okay with me,” I told him.

He just laughed. “Come on, mate, we'll go and prod the boys out of the Crown.”

Hugh went in and flushed them out and I waited on the footpath. Ted was a big grey-haired bloke, and I mean big. Two buses wide and one bus thick is how Mike described him, and I can't disagree. He is just big all over, and as strong as he looks, but a real nice bloke and mostly gentle.

“Nobody's mad enough to rouse him,” Mike told me. “A stockman was flogging a horse tied to a fence with a piece of number eight wire, and Ted hit him twice—first one broke his jaw and fractured a bone in his neck, the second broke all the ribs on his left side. The doctor reckoned this bloke was lucky Ted wasn't wild. The RSPCA and the police reckon he should have given him another one for good measure. They had to put the poor bloody horse down. Yep, he's a wild one, our Ted, but you got to stir him up.”

He looked like someone's happy grandad to me. He shook my hand, or wrapped his around mine, gave me a smile and a pat on the head and said, “Welcome aboard.”

Mike was an entirely different type of bloke. He had the aura of the outdoors about him, always happy and easygoing,
nothing seemed to worry him much. Everything he did was easy, or he made it seem easy. He had that knack. He was about the only one I ever heard razz Ted and get away with it. “You would make the biggest mistake of your life to pull Mike on,” Ted told me. That puzzled me a bit, why a big tough bloke like Ted would say something like that about Mike. Mike was a lover—all the girls liked Mike. He was a good-lookin' bloke, about half a head shorter than Hugh, with jet black hair, black eyes that sparkled when he was happy or up to mischief, naturally brown skin made darker by the sun, and a slim Errol Flynn moe which graced the top lip and gave him the air of a dasher. Him and I hit it off straightaway. He draped his arm around my shoulder and offered me some advice: “You watch that moaning old pommy. He's just a sour old bugger who's lost his first sixpence and won't be happy until he finds it again. I tell you, these pommies are all the same, mate, always moaning.” He said this with a great big laugh.

“Get out, you colonial swine. I can't get a word in to moan over your drunken ravings,” Ted hooted triumphantly.

Hugh looked at me and raised his eyes to the sky. “Like a pair of bloody kids. You'll hear plenty of this, mate. These buggers can never agree, just don't listen.”

It was all an act. Ted, Mike and I became the best of mates. They sort of became my older brothers, and when they found out I couldn't read or write, Mike became my first teacher. He got this book for me. Had it sent up from Brisbane, I think. Jane or John and Janet. My first school-book, anyway.

Around the fire at night they all became my teachers. And there were newspapers and Mike's dirty Mickey Spillane books. Ted, who was well educated, had a good collection of the classics, and after a while I could read pretty well. I would be on my horse at the back of the mob but riding with Ivanhoe, the Three Musketeers, chasing pigs with Ralph, Jack and Peterkin, looking for bread growing on
trees and candle-nut fruit, nuts that burn like candles, hard to believe eh! That's where I learned to send my head for a walk.

I didn't understand everything I read and would sometimes skip over the hard bits. They, the boys, would make me read three pages out loud every night. I got good at reading, but my spelling is still pretty rank. But I think they did a fair enough job, especially Ted. He would turn into Hitler's brother at school time, with verbs and vowels, adverbs and adjectives, and other strange things that lived in books, and were real hard to grab. Ted reckoned education was riches and the more you got the richer you were. We didn't entirely agree on that in those days. I couldn't see the point.

Anyhow, we went and found Hugh's truck—a 1948 Austin 8 tonner, with four feet added to the chassis and a lazy axle, Mike told me. I thought it was a good start that me and the truck were the same age. It had a big wooden crate on the back. “It's for carting horses and gear,” Mike said as Ted and Hugh climbed in the cab.

“Where did you leave your gear, mate?” Hugh asked me through the driver's window.

“Do you know where the Billiard room is?” he nodded his head.

“It's a couple of houses past there on the left,” I told him.

“Righto, hop aboard.” Mike reached up and opened a small sliding door on the front, put his foot on a step, grabbed a hand hold and climbed in. I followed with no trouble. There were a couple of 44 gallon drums in there. “Water for the horses,” Mike told me. They made great seats. We were in a sort of gape between the front of the truck and the back of the crate. “Room for odds and ends,” Mike told me as we cruised down the road. The wind was pulling at my hair, and there was a sort of sour overpowering smell that you couldn't get away from.

“What's that smell?” I asked Mike.

“Horse shit!” he told me. “There's two major smells in a drover's life—horse shit and cow shit. Everything else is a gift from God.” He roared laughing, which left me even more confused. I'll ask Ted, I thought, as the truck slid into the curb and stopped.

Mike came with me and give me a hand to pack up. It didn't take long to gather up what I had collected. I looked around one last time and felt a bit funny, like happy and sad at the same time. Here I had been sort of totally dependent on myself for the first time, and I found I could handle it and that secretly made me pleased.

“You ready, mate? Got everything?” asked Mike.

“Yeah. Thanks mate. Let's go.” I promised myself that one day I would come back and buy that house, but of course I never did.

6

We climbed back on the truck and Mike told me what to do when we reached the camp. “You stick by me, mate. I'll see you right,” he said. As soon as the truck stopped, I grabbed my gear and got down, put my plunder on the veranda, went into the kitchen and got the two buckets Mike told me about, took them to the tank outside, filled them and took them back to Ted. I then went back out for a load of kindling, then carted the wood in as Mike cut it.

Finally Mike put the axe away. “Come on, mate, I'll show you about.” We wandered over to the blacksmith's shop, and he showed me the iron shoes that go on the horses' feet. I was surprised—I'd never thought of horses wearing shoes. “Stops them wearing their hooves away, stops splitting, stone bruising, and other things,” said Mike. “We got to cold shoe, which is not as good as hot shoeing, but we haven't got a forge to heat the shoes.”

I thought about it for a while, and wondered if I was getting my leg pulled. “Why is a hot shoe better than a cold one?” I asked.

“That's a good question, and because you asked I'll tell you. A horse's hoof is sort of like your fingernail, but about one and a half times thicker than your fingers, so when you burn the shoe into the hoof it sort of makes a tight bed for
the shoe, and when you nail and clinch it tight it's a good tight fit. But when you got no forge and you got to shoe cold, the shoe just sits on top of the hoof. Oh, don't get me wrong, you can do a good job cold, but you got more chance of your horse stubbing its toe and kicking the shoe off. Are you with me?” he asked, giving me a grin. To be honest, he had lost me early in the piece, but he looked so pleased and obviously knew what he was talking about that I didn't want to interrupt. I put on my best “gee that was interesting” face and said “Yeah”.

There was a hell of a clanging noise and Mike said, “Tucker bell, mate. Let's go for a bogey, then see what Ted's got for us.” We had a wash and went in and sat at the table. Ted gave us battered fish and homemade chips, two eggs and wedges of lemon. It was absolutely fantastic. I helped wash-up afterwards.

We went out and sat on the veranda and watched the day come to a close, and saw the stars come up, all in harmony with the night noises, crickets chirpin', and a frog with a croak so deep Mike reckoned it had to be a bullfrog with hair on its chest. Well, I had to laugh at the thought of that. Mike got up and put the radio on, and caught the rock and roll hit parade. I couldn't tell you who was singin' as I didn't know much about it. I liked it though—it's happy bouncy music.

“What's that bloody rubbish?” Ted roared. “Get some bloody music on that thing!”

He looked so fierce I shifted down the veranda a bit. Mike just laughed at him. “Get out, you crusty old bugger, this
is
music. You want to hear Hank Williams and his cousins, Hank and Hank go to Yank land.”

“Bloody brainless bloody ringer. You're all front, you blokes. No class whatsoever,” Ted sniffed.

“Get out,” said Hugh. “Mike's right when it comes to music. You know the first world war's over? They play “Marjie”, “Sister Susie sewing shirts for soldiers” and all
those other old tear-jerkers with hair on them at seven o'clock on Thursday nights—the Hospital Hit Parade. You want to drop them a line.” He said this with a completely straight face. Mike's face was going redder and redder trying to hold back the mirth, and Ted was squinty-eyed sussing out Hugh, not quite sure if he was taking the mickey or not.

Mike ruined it all. He let go with a cackle you could hear in Sydney. Well, Ted burred up straightaway. We were all bastards, colonial bastards, crooks and criminals, and he was still fuming as he headed to bed. The boys laughed and howled like demented kookaburras, but I just had a bit of a chuckle—no way I wanted the flat of Ted's hand around my ear.

“Come on, mate, I'll give you a hand to make your bunk and put your gear away,” said Mike. I saw the boys look at each other as I lay out my gear—toothbrush, towel, spare shorts, shirt and sandals, that was me. I had a quick wash under the tank, gave my teeth a quick brush, and headed for bed, shivering a bit as the night had turned a bit nippy. I leapt into the bunk, said goodnight, and went out like a light.

I woke just on daylight. I got up and put some water on for tea, made my bed and finished getting dressed. Ted woke as I was feeding the fire and waiting for the billy to boil. He got up and put his pants on, his braces hanging down from his waist, stretched and scratched himself through his long underwear, then got some water to shave. “Wake the boys, digger. Big day today.”

I gave them both a shake. Hugh bounced out of bed straightaway, but Mike was a real picture. He sort of slid out of bed sideways with his eyes still closed, stood up, opened his eyes and stretched, grinned and said, “Less bed-makin' this way, cobber,” then laughed at the look on my face.

“You're a lazy bugger all round. Stop teaching the young fella your bad habits,” Ted told Mike, while serving up
heaps of bacon, eggs and toast. “Get into that lot, before you miss out,” he said to me. So I filled up my plate. I had never eaten like this in my life.

Over breakfast Hugh said he was going to run the horses up. Ted was going to make up the swags and stock the tucker trailer. He told Mike to take me into Elders and get me fitted out with gear. So after breakfast we headed back to town.

I got all sorts of things. For a kid who never had much in his life, it was sort of overwhelming, until Mike assured me I would need every bit for my work. It seemed like every birthday and Christmas rolled into one. We had to go to the boys department to get shirts, jeans, and a jeans jacket. The jeans were the latest from down south. Mike got me two of the lot, plus underwear and socks. Then we went to the footwear department for riding boots and spurs. “I'll show you how to take that rowel out of them, and drop a halfpenny in its place,” said Mike.

We went to the hat counter where I tried on a heap, finally deciding on a brown stetson. I got a belt with a knife loop, and Mike let me pick my own folding knife. We also bought an oilskin coat, towels, a skinning knife, an oil stone and steel, a quartpot and a waterbottle. I can't tell you the feeling I had as I headed back to camp in my new gear, my hand on the kitbag Mike had bought to hold all these new things. My old port wouldn't be big enough now. I wished Mum could see me—I wonder what she would have said.

Hugh was working on the horses' feet when we got back, shaping and shoeing cold as Mike had told me. Mike got an apron and told me to watch as I would have to learn how to do it. He picked up a front leg and put the hoof between his knees and started to file the hoof flat with this dirty big file, trying the shoe for fit every now and then. I watched him file out a vee in the front of the hoof. I asked him why he did that, and he said it was to centre the shoe on the hoof, so now I knew. When he was satisfied, he took up a hammer and showed me how the nail was angled so it would
come out the top of the hoof instead of going straight in and crippling the horse. He nailed on the shoe, grabbing and twisting the end of the nail poking through the hoof. He clinched it up tight to the hoof, and hammered the bent twisted nails into an orderly line around the hoof. He did all four feet while I watched, and then it was my turn.

It was a bloody disaster. As soon as I hit the hoof with the hammer, the horse hit my rear end with his hoof. Or so it seemed—it was a bit quick, and all I really knew was the sensation of agony while flying across the blacksmith's shop. I thought my leg had gone from the rump down.

“Can you walk?” asked Mike, ignoring my agonised screams.

He stood me on my feet and prodded me into a walk. I staggered enough steps to convince the boys that my leg wasn't broken, then got handed over to Ted—doctor, vet, all things medical to all of us, man and beast. (He should have been shot. Kill or cure was his motto. He could hit my mouth with castor oil or Fryers balsam, even if I was at a dead run flat out. No way would he miss. There wasn't a lot of coughing around Ted, at least not by me.) I ended up in a hot bath—to bring the bruise out, he told me. I don't know what the spoonful of Fryers balsam was for. I can still taste it. If it was to make you forget the pain, it was that bloody vile that it did that, but it didn't fix the leg. I got dressed again and Ted said to move around on it.

That put the lid on my learning to shoe for a couple of days. The bruise came out all yellow and black, and I hobbled about, offsiding Mike and watching Ted take a truckful of horses each morning and head off.

“Where is he taking the horses?” I asked Mike.

“Stocking the government paddocks,” Mike told me. “We put remounts in each of four paddocks and that gives each horse two days on and six days off. Ted just leapfrogs each bunch around the herd in the truck.”

I thought about this for a bit. “And it works alright, eh?” I asked Mike.

“Had no snarl-ups in the last few years. Be different if we weren't using paddocks, I reckon,” said Mike. “How's the leg? Fit enough to ride?”

I said it was still a bit sore, but yeah, I reckon I could start to learn to ride.

“Good. Come with me. Hugh cut Shorty out for you. He's a good cow horse, and what you don't know, he'll show you.”

We called into the tack room alongside the smithy and picked a bridle and reins.

“This is like the steering wheel,” Mike told me, picking up a saddle and blanket. “This is the one you will use. It's a three-quarter size, just right for you.”

We walked down to the round yard to meet Shorty. Shorty was a stocky bay horse about fourteen hands, with one white sock, a black mane and tail, and a white blaze down his forehead.

“He's not too bad now he's been gelded. You couldn't even handle him before,” said Mike.

Christ! That's bloody great, and you expect me to leap aboard, I thought. And gelded? What the hell is gelded? Why would that make any difference? I didn't find out for quite awhile that gelding meant cutting off some of the bits that made boys different to girls. They had a habit of doing that out in the bush—cows, sheep, now horses. No wonder they all carry a pocket knife. If it gives you trouble, castrate.

Mike ducked under the fence with the bridle and walked straight up and put the bit in Shorty's mouth, put the bridle over his ears and then did it up.

“Pass the saddle, mate, the blanket first.”

I handed him the blanket and then the saddle, and he fitted the horse no sweat.

“Always watch them when you do up the girth, Mike explained. Some horses will put up their belly, and when
you get on they let the air out, the saddle slips and off you go. Now leap on and we'll adjust the stirrup leathers.”

Well! No sooner had my bum hit the saddle then he threw me six hundred feet in the air. Man, was I dark! I hurt my leg again, dirtied my jacket and ripped the knee of my new jeans. My leg felt like fifty people had just had a dance on it, but I got up and limped over and mounted that rotten horse again. He threw me nine hundred feet this time—going for the record, Mike reckoned.

“You'll have him this time, mate. He must be getting tired.”

Feeling like I had just done three rounds with a bulldozer, I bravely or stupidly climbed back onboard, whereupon he launched me into a forward one and a half, with three twists, all done above the height of the saddle. I stayed down this time. My leg didn't hurt any more—my whole body screamed in pain. I should have got a Victoria Cross just for trying to move. Mike told me he caught the last throw and in his view it was gold-medal class.

It took me a week of hot baths and bruises on bruises to stick to that saddle, and finally Shorty was teaching me to ride. I thought I was every cowboy I'd ever seen in the pictures. I put my spurs on, because Mike had said to me, “If you're fair dinks about working on or with horses, always wear your spurs. Like if a lump of beef spins out of the mob just alongside you, and it's got horns four feet wide, and it's spent every weekend for the last six months rabbin' them up to razor-sharp points just in case it can help you off the world with them, a bare heel in your horse's ribs and you might as well tell your mates what kind of flowers you want.” He smiled at the look on my face. “With spurs,” he continued, “you can turn a horse on a threepence. Spurs are a tool just like your bridle or saddle—they keep a horse on his toes. Some need it, some don't, but they're there if you need them. Just a touch is enough usually. That's why we take the serrated rowel out of them and put a halfpenny in.
The halfpenny runs up and down the hide just gigging, not ripping and cutting like the rowel. Same reason I'll learn you to tail-down one day. You get a bloody beast that keeps breaking from the mob, you throw him on his head using his tail a couple or three times, and he soon learns some manners.” He grinned.

“What if you kill the bludger?” I asked, real serious.

“Ted gets him. He goes into the stew pot,” Mike said laughing. “We get a lot of them. You will hear some people say you don't tail-down on a drive, but that's ignorance. Means they've never driven meatworks cattle, just breeders. We handle bulls, potter bulls for Yank hamburgers, five-year-old steers, the absolute premium export beef, right from five-to seven-year-olds, mainly Hereford and black poll angus. Everything we push is killed by the works. We handle nothing else but parcels bought by the cattle buyers. You will hear all sorta bullshit over the years, but we are nothing like the blokes that just push breeders. They just have to get there. We have a timetable plus we have to get them there in prime condition. Hugh's a gun at that. They reckon six hundred's too many for three of us. Bullshit! Ten coachers to keep the lead on the road and the herd together, and how fast you want to move them depends on how far out your mob strings. The only thing you worry about's a rush—can't stop that. Anything you want to know, you ask us. Like a truck driver don't ask a taxi for advice. Anyway, our average mob would go around three hundred, not many over that. We had six hundred once, but only for two weeks, and that was a bit hard. But don't let it worry you. You'll learn. One day when Hugh and Ted were away doing business, Mike suggested we go down to the meatworks canteen for a pie and chips and a decent cup of tea.