Wool Away, Boy!

1950

‘The boy has developed bronchiectasis – a spot on the lung. He might not survive another attack like this last,’ Dr Woodhill warned. ‘You say he’s free of asthma in the west. My advice is that you send him to his father.’

I was in my twelfth year, undersized and skinny and just discharged following another stay in Toowoomba Hospital fighting off chronic asthma and chest infection.

My mother, Pat, was struggling to raise and educate seven kids aged from twelve months to twelve years, and to manage financially on the proceeds of the cheques Dad mailed while he was out west shearing. At her wit’s end, she put her oldest son on the Western Mail train – destination Cunnamulla.

I remember the lonesome whistle of the great engine and the lonesome heart of a small boy with sandwiches his mother had packed along with a tin of jelly beans and some treasured comics. ‘Don’t you worry, missus,’ the kindly middle-aged guard assured my anxious mother. ‘I’ll keep a good eye on him.’ And he did.

I loved my mother – her patience, her understanding, her playful teasing – but as the train pulled out, my thoughts turned from her to my father. I lived in constant fear of him: of failing to live up to his expectations of what a small boy could and should achieve; of punishment for misdemeanors committed through accident or carelessness.

‘There’s no such word as can’t!’ and ‘Your mother never raised a squib!’ were his mantras.

As I nervously clutched my Rover and Wizard comics,

I recalled a six-year-old boy hiding behind the barn to avoid a thrashing for accidentally breaking a plate while wiping the dishes; a small boy finding a track through the cow cane in the half-light of morning searching for milkers, in dread of failure and punishment; an eight-year-old asthmatic being shoved out the front gate to take a second thumping from a bully years older and twice his size. Most vividly

I recalled the nightmare of a terrified two-year-old being swung up behind his father onto a rearing stock horse. The horse went pigrooting around the mounting yard while the child howled blue murder, before the gate was opened and the boy was swung, sobbing, from the back of the horse to the safety of his mother’s arms.

As I sat back in my seat on the train, sweat began to bead. It was mid-summer and hot as Hades in the secondclass sleeper Mum had booked. I reached over and opened the window, only to have coal smoke and eye-stinging grit blast me. Quickly shutting it again, I instead tried to focus on the reassuring rock and rhythm of the carriage; the regular drumming of steel wheels and rails.

The two men in my berth introduced themselves and, as I had been brought up to do, I politely addressed them as mister. ‘Call me Dan’ and ‘Make it Joe, son’, they corrected. Dan was a talkative young station hand heading west after a holiday in the big smoke; Joe was a weathered middle-aged drover from Toowoomba, wearing moleskins and riding boots.

When we stopped at stations Joe took me to feed and water his kelpie dogs in the dogbox at the rear of the train.

They yelped at his approach and I was allowed to pat them through the bars. Afterwards we went to the dining car together, an adventure for a lad who had rarely eaten anything but his mother’s wholesome cooking. I felt embarrassed when Joe shouted my meal, as Mum had given me the money to pay for it, but he insisted.

When we had eaten we made our way back to our sleeping berth. The terrain was flat west of the Great Divide, but the train rarely reached thirty miles per hour and the journey would take about twenty-four hours to cover the 500-mile distance. Stirred by curiosity, passengers walked the corridors of the swaying brick-red carriages, greeting fellow travellers.

We stopped at sidings where railway gangs lived in government houses with wives and kids. The kids and some of the mums ran to the train, joining the fettlers shouting an appeal for reading matter. ‘Paper!’ they yelled to the passengers, who responded by thrusting the newspapers and magazines they had finished with into grateful hands.

Towns were far apart: Dalby, Chinchilla, Roma, Mitchell, Morven, Charleville, but finally we reached Cunnamulla, where Dad met me off the train with a handshake. Perhaps I longed for a hug, but an outward display of affection between males was outside Dad’s curriculum at that time.

Nevertheless, it was the beginning of a new relationship: a tentative step towards a trust which would take years to develop into mutually understanding mateship. For the next couple of years, until I consistently earned a living,

I became his ‘shiralee’ – the swagman’s bundle. I was his responsibility.

We travelled by taxi, as most shearers did in 1950, to Dynevor Downs – a vast sheep station belonging to the Kidman Empire. Although the property was rabbit infested, a bountiful wet season had grown a mantle of green grass and herbage over the paddocks and filled the nearby lakes, which hosted seagulls, pelicans, storks, ducks and waterhens.

Red kangaroos and wild pigs abounded.

The room Dad selected opened onto a narrow verandah.

There were two stretcher beds with a small table between, but no wardrobe, so we hung a few things on the nails and hooks on the walls and left the rest in our ports.

With our room in order I followed Dad diffidently around the quarters, where he introduced me to a few old mates. Jack Muldoon and Tiny Hazelgrove were ‘gun’ shearers – legends in the shearing fraternity. They usually took the lead, often shearing over 200 sheep in a day. Word of their tallies had come to me through shearers calling in at home in Toowoomba, and now I stood in shy reverence as I shook hands hardened and enlarged by years of hard work. Jack Muldoon towered over me, tall, lean and bald, but Tiny was only a few inches taller than I was. Short in the legs and powerful in a long upper body, he was known as the ‘mighty midget’ and the ‘pocket battleship’.

Next Dad introduced me to Bob Dougherty, who was the Union rep; and Harry, a nineteen-year-old whose athleticism, I would later discover, belied his weakness for drink.

That night some of the men moved their beds onto the verandah or right outdoors to catch any breeze in the stifling heat. I lay in bed in our room with an aching hollow in my child’s heart. For the first time I had begun to really care for my father, but if he heard me sobbing into my pillow for my mother and home life, he never said so. That was his way: I had to grow up tough.

Over the next few days I tried to help out in the dusty manure cloud of the sheep yards, but was told too often to ‘Get out of the bloody road, boy’ or ‘Don’t play with the pup, boy – she’s learning to work. You’ll bloody well ruin her.’ I had become ‘the boy’.

The cook was a cranky old coot who wouldn’t accommodate a kid’s desire to please, so I stayed out of his way too and invented solitary games. I raced marbles representing race horses down a ramp, and whittled tiny cricket bats and boats, racing the boats in the bore drain and playing cricket matches using a marble as a ball. Heroes like Bradman and Miller would score centuries and send the stumps flying in test matches against the likes of Alec Bedser and Len Hutton; however, playing against Queensland in my miniature version of the Sheffield Shield they were not so potent and Queensland always won.

My mother, who had spent five years as a governess on outback stations, had packed the necessary school books for me, and Dad had placed them neatly on the table in our room. He ordered me to obey Mum’s timetable of study while he was shearing, which God knows I tried to do, but the latest Rover and Wizard that arrived on the mail truck took precedence.

It was only the powerful young wool presser, Jim, who was kindly and understanding of a lad’s needs. Stripped to shorts and boots, Jim towelled salty sweat from his shining face and welcomed me to his wool room with a smile and a word, and taught me how to sweep up the locks and weigh and brand bales. The latter was a responsibility I appreciated; it made me feel useful in a grown-up’s world. I goggled at the muscles in Jim’s nuggety twelve-stone frame, and doubted my skinny five stone could ever grow to such proportion and power – yet ambition was born.

At smoko, I squatted on a wool bale and tucked in to patty cakes and a fruit cake flavoured with cocoa called a brownie. This was washed down with a mug of tea sweetened with condensed milk and sugar. Knowing a small boy’s place was to be seen and not heard, I listened keenly to the jokes and yarns, laughter and sardonic complaints that circulated about the wool room, while trying to ignore the four-letter words and blasphemy. I noticed that many of the older men – my father included – rarely swore except for the occasional ‘bugger’ and ‘bloody’, which wasn’t really considered foul language. The same men – to a man solid unionists and some of them ex-diggers – would pull the foul-mouthed brigade into gear for vulgarly disrespecting women. ‘Don’t you have any sisters, son?’ or, ‘I’ll warrant you’d get a clip around the ear if you talked like that in front of your mother’ were common reprimands.

I’ve since heard it argued that woolsheds were simply ‘factories in the bush’, as Henry Lawson described them, but in contrast to the city’s rush hour, after the bell rang and the blades ceased their chatter, shearers often relieved their backache with an after-dinner walk, enjoying a yarn and a smoke as they strode in step with nature beneath the immense and silent arch of a starlit outback sky.

Gradually, over five weeks at Dynevor Downs, I became accepted as part of the landscape: walking and listening, offsiding for Jim, learning card games and tricks, gaining confidence and security as I tagged along pig hunting on a weekend. By now I was completely unaffected by the asthma that had plagued me. It had simply vanished.

When the team cut-out at Dynevor we went to The Lakes for a month. The team was astonished by the vast expanse of water, with waves lapping and flocks of seagulls 500 miles from the sea. Commandeering a rowboat, the workers rowed for miles on weekends, diving overboard and splashing and playing, like kids holidaying at the seaside. On two weekends Dad borrowed a station truck and we drove to the opal fields, deserted long ago when the price of gems collapsed. Shearers and rouseabouts fossicked through the mullock heaps and I recovered discarded potch and colours, collecting them in a tobacco tin as a gift for my mother.

A few more sheds brought the June break at the end of the financial year, but the first week in July found my father and me again beginning a run out west. By now the ‘shiralee’ had become handy, if not paid. I could ‘pick-up’ fleeces and throw them neatly on the wool roller’s table to have the rough skirt removed; I could skirt fleeces passably, and was taught to further grade the skirtings. ‘C’mere, boy!’ a rouseabout would command. ‘Show yer form while I go for a crap.’