Mallee Roots

A Bird’s-eye View

Some things endure. Rising to forty-five metres, our wheat silo dwarfed the only other structures breaking the horizon, the two ageing water tanks mounted on the hill. Houses were all single-storey. For some town dwellers, the silo was just a couple of concrete cylinders with a galvanised roof that cast a late afternoon shadow over the main road. For us kids, it was a perpetual challenge to land a penny from the road onto its roof. Most often, the coin simply clattered and echoed disappointingly down the side.

A solid concrete structure like our silo, built in 1939, embodied promise of continued prosperity, but it was certainly not unique. Silos with more or less equal number of bins dotted the railway line running due west from Ouyen to Murrayville near the South Australian border. They were silent sentinels above the near-flat countryside and served as milestones for motorists trailing billowing dust as they journeyed along the only main road.

Spending so much time in the silo’s shadow, I’d long had a desire to go up to the top and see what my town looked like from above. After all, there was no way we kids could shin up the fat poles supporting the two water tanks up on the hill. At first, Silo Jack said I was too young to make the climb. Finally, when I reached mid-teens, he relented. Any latent fear of heights was softened by the interior’s division into ten storeys, concrete platforms, each linked by steel ladders. Step by step, rung by rung, my courage increased. At last, hands gripping each rung like an eagle with a rabbit, and the rasping sound of my feet reverberating up and down the darkness, I made it. I opened the door looking east from the galvanised iron hut at the top and cast my eyes over the brown and green of the Mallee flatness. Below, the township that once loomed so large and bounded the limits of my life, now looked like the model village at Bourton-on-the-Water we had seen in the English Cotswolds earlier that year.

We had three general stores lining the settled side of the road. Closest to the silo was Mrs Dickie’s. If longevity is the measure, Mrs Dickie’s store was worthy of distinction. Established in 1911, it was the first general store in town and one of the earliest in the Mallee. Unlike the original structure, it was now of brick, cool inside and, with limited merchandise to sell, its large display window was superfluous. It was its owner’s practice to sell to needy kids liquorice that shattered in the hand, boiled lollies long past their use-by date, and all-day suckers that would have passed as archaeological specimens. This provocation was a challenge we were not going to shirk. We reacted to her stinginess by filching some of those on display, despite her watchful lurking up behind. She also stocked token wrinkled fruit and vegetables for those with no inclination to garden and not very discerning eyes.

Further along stood a very modest bakery, put to use by Mr McCurdy, just back from service as an army cook. Normally, to call an army cook a chef would be an oxymoron but not Mr Mac. His hot, golden flaky sausage rolls and small loaves of crusty bread (loafers as we called them) that he passed through a hole in our paling fence confirmed both his skill and generosity. A bonus was the primeval mouth-watering smells of baking bread wafting our way.

The savings bank further down the street staggered along on a part-time basis, served by an Ouyen branch until finally it closed. Its shutting up shop foreshadowed the departure of services from small country towns in years to follow. With the aim of promoting thrift, most kids were encouraged to keep a small Commonwealth savings box for coins. But the bank building did service to community in another way. On Sunday mornings, Lacey (Wallace) Caldwell and I sat on its concrete front steps to swap and read comics, always assured of quiet in Walpeup. We weren’t bosom buddies; our relationship was one of mutual advantage. One of my favourite comics featured the hooded, muscular and invincible Phantom (the Ghost Who Walks). As with the other contemporary superhero, Superman, invincibility had a certain appeal for young kids. Second favourites were Blackhawk comics set in the Korean War. US jet pilots blasted North Korean War commies from the skies, miraculously without loss. For avid consumers of comics, it was good to be always on the winning side. Prose in these comics might not have owed much to elegance or rivalled that of Milton and Shakespeare, but at least we were reading something. There were few books available in our house or the community.

Mr and Mrs Kendrew occupied the bank residence at rear. Mr K reminded me of a cowering dog about to be chastised by its irate master for playing hide and seek with his gumboots. Perhaps it was just his age. He kept occupied mending the shoes of locals but there was surely another reason for his spending long hours out in the back shed. Mrs K earned the title of Radio 3WLP (our wireless was always tuned to ABC 3WV, western Victoria) because every titbit of information, no matter how confidential, hit the airways as soon as she heard about it. Most treated her transmissions with a measure of scepticism, but her self-appointed role as bearer of gossip spiced up her life considerably.

Further along the main road, Digger (he was a World War II veteran) ran a farm supply agency: machinery, fertiliser, petrol and other things of vital interest to people on the land. It was a business sustained by a still relatively closely settled agricultural community even though farmers had begun abandoning their properties not long after World War I. Life was just too tough, particularly for returning soldiers trying to eke out a living under the soldier settler scheme. This exodus began not long after the end of Mallee scrub rolling that had been more or less obligatory for new landowners to maximise the farming potential of their allocated land.

Digger’s house, a converted billiard room, and business were next door to our second residence. The green felted tables and bended figures in half shadow under low hanging lights had had a real mystique for me. Who played? I wondered. I was sorry to see it converted to more domestic purposes. Digger sold petrol too. As summer’s heat waned, and his store of forty-four-gallon petrol drums contracted in the evening chill, they emitted an endless percussive chorus. We never gave a thought to what would be left of us and the neighbourhood if a fire broke out among them.

Digger earned unquestioned respect not just as a returned soldier, but also for his personal qualities. Few in rural areas were untouched by war. With him, the war left no apparent scars, physical or mental. He seemed to combine a genial and generous nature with a capacity for speaking directly.

Local telecommunications at the time involved telephone party lines, connected at our post office and simultaneously linking the receivers on several farms. In an emergency, this had its advantages, but could be abused. Mrs Maxwell at the end of one of these party facilities enriched her day by eavesdropping conversations. Digger knew of her habit. One day, while hoping to speak to another customer, he asked Dad (who as postmaster, had connected him), ‘Is that silly old bugger on the end of the line again?’

Dad heard a clunk of a receiver being hastily replaced.

Coincidentally, Digger’s new wife, Ila, was the daughter of Dad’s World War I friend along the Murray. Consistently cheerful, she had a hearty laugh, not the sort of nervous, uncontrolled outburst betraying a person lacking in confidence. A trained nurse, she stepped without hesitation into the role of surrogate mother for me and my brother Bruce while Mum had to spend some time in the Ouyen hospital. Bruce was just over three years my senior. Ila had not yet started her own family so this was new territory. I was intrigued and impressed that she was no slouch in arm wrestles with me. I should not have been surprised. At the time, nursing entailed its own bit of manual labour even before the nation’s waistlines swelled to their current state.

On the other side of our house stood Simpson’s modest grocery store, a distributing point for bread we delivered gratis to farmers with their mail. For our small service, they reciprocated with home-grown vegetables and fruit in season. Miss Simpson was a small, spectacled woman who never missed an opportunity to show she had a business to run. Despite her limited stock and competition for a small market with two other shops, her tiny store was destined to out-survive them.

Out the back, in full view from our kitchen, her nephew Simmo, his mind elsewhere, lifelessly transferred potatoes from hessian sacks to smaller paper bags for sale. A bit of a joker, and a good tennis player when he tried, but with little drive and no qualifications, word came that he later died prematurely of alcoholic poisoning. As always, loss of hope drains ambition and by no means was he the exception in the district. I would have loved to ride on his Matchless motorbike and tour around town like he did. His bike was his way of transcending small-town living. I rode the wheat trucks.

At the end of the street rounding out the town’s retail activity was Landry’s grocery and department store: cool brick, big blocks of cheese on the wide wooden counter, open bags of flour on the floor and, in white apron, proprietor who wore glasses pushed up over his wrinkled forehead. Landry’s perpetually cool interior would sometimes tempt us to bypass Simpson’s to sample some of its limited stock. The concept of general store seemed to know no bounds. Inspired by tales of legendary American woodsman Davy Crockett, I used my precious returns from dead wool and beer bottle sales to buy a hunting knife. About twenty-five centimetres long, it could have done real damage to any Indian brave I should come across in the wilds of Walpeup. Dad made me take it back, much to my disappointment and embarrassment. Although it wasn’t Dad’s intention to humiliate me, I finally saw the need to return it. It wasn’t the last unwise purchase I made in my life but a lesson for me in decision-making. In retrospect, that was probably Dad’s goal.

Of modest frontage, Sidney’s butcher shop next door to Landry’s had sawdust covering the floor and, for a chopping block, a huge sawn tree stub, girth many times bigger than any Mallee tree could produce. It must have been from a red gum and trucked in from along the Murray River. Hundreds of indented lines from multiple cleaver blows told its history of years of service. A measure of the amount of meat consumed locally was that two butchers were kept busy on Saturday mornings when farmers came to town. They worked well together in the cramped space although assistant butcher Billy Bent had to duck to avoid meat hooks hanging from the rail at the back. Many farmers killed their own but sought out Sidney’s for variety. The butcher shop’s meat came from animals they killed in slaughter yards over a kilometre away. In a high wind, its noxious odour of mud, dung and decayed blood wafted to the edge of town. Not totally without logic, as a little kid, I thought the slaughter yards were the snorty yards. After all, pigs also spent their last moments there too.

I had long hankered to see how the local butcher made the sausages we ate with mashed potato, peas and cabbage. Sausage production was a modest operation at the back of the butcher shop. Mr Sidney’s flourishes suggested he was flattered by my interest. I stood at a respectable distance to watch bits of gristle and beef churned into continuous straws of malleable substance in a mincer five times the size the one we used at home for our rissoles. Lamb was the less popular ingredient for sausages despite massive consumption in other forms. I was fascinated by the steady, patient oozing into sheep’s intestines threaded onto the mincer. The machine might have been much bigger but still had to be turned by Billy Bent’s muscular forearms. As if engaging in a centuries-old craft, Mr Sidney applied regular pressure of index finger, thumb and a final twist to turn tubes of meat like a flexible pale garden hose into sausages. While their sausages said much for our butcher’s manual dexterity, they said little for his desire to seduce the market. Somehow, their sausages always came in one standard thick variety and of one standard length.

People on the Fringe

Farmers had an accepted place in the community. They provided the base for the town’s economy. Others played bit parts. One of these others, Kevin, a casual farm worker, lived for a short time in an abandoned farmhouse. His stay was as brief as my friendship with him, both cut short when I learned from Mum that he was charged with sheep stealing.

Kevin at least had a brief stake in the agricultural economy, but others were clearly fringe dwellers – on the margins of a town itself on civilisation’s fringe.

Marmaduke sat shrouded by smoke of his campfire near the football ground. Alone, dirty trousers, broken-laced boots, wrapped in military great coat, his cheeks sunken and bewhiskered, he embodied hardship. He was part of a remnant army of Depression-era swagmen wandering across rural areas with roll of bedding or swag and billy for tea in search of odd jobs. Mum offered him one, chopping Mallee stumps. It was surely an act of kindness on her part because one of the regular chores for Bruce and me was to split along fault lines red and white Mallee stumps we burnt in kitchen and dining room. It would have been little comfort to a swagman like Marmaduke that the term had been immortalised in ‘Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong…’ the first lines of ‘Waltzing Matilda’, long the sentimental Australian anthem first penned by nineteenth-century bard Banjo Paterson. This lone toothless swaggie had a harmonica as his constant companion, seeming to bring solace to his solitary and dismal existence.

Although curiosity drove me as I rode out to the footy ground to see him, I had a measure of sympathy for him. Some would doubt my sympathy and I put it down to peer pressure.

One day, on one of his infrequent visits to town, he wandered up from Mrs Dicky’s towards the memorial hall. My mate Butchy Sidney, eager to test his newly acquired airgun, chose as his target Marmaduke’s retreating backside. The victim wheeled around with stinging pain but shamefully, we did not hang around to confess to Marmaduke. (I should add that, strictly, Butchy was brother Bruce’s friend because my hold on the handle of friendship with Butchy was shaky.)

About three kilometres out of town, there was another unexpected encampment of what were immediately identified with dread as gypsies. With horse and caravan, they had pulled in at the edge of a dam, our favourite place for tadpoles. Curiosity getting the better of me, I went too close. One dark, wrinkle-faced stranger grabbed hold of my bike – a crime for me about as bad as stealing a taxi-driver’s cab. It was after all, the means of my mobility, my freedom and, occasionally, my income. I ran home to tell Dad, who immediately drove out from the comfort of our post office. I can still see him, raised to his full five foot eight, and in authoritative voice, cowing them into returning my livelihood. Again, to me, indisputable evidence that he was on my side. At that stage in my life, there were two camps: those with me and those against me, with little room for subtlety.

I had no proof of their ethnic origins, but I knew that neither precedent nor commercial interests of Afghans would prompt such action. Until this time, Afghans (in fact, mostly northern Indians) had an accepted place in the early 1940s economy, trading mainly cloth and items of clothing. We had many people of non-British origin in the district – mostly German – but ethnic origin most often simply didn’t register. Rural areas were the last to be touched by the big post World War II influx of southern Europeans. Had the community seen greater cultural diversity, social and political conservatism might have had less of a stranglehold.

On the other side of the railway line in the shadow of the silo, we had the stationmaster, a couple of gangers (who undertook repairs along the line) and briefly a porter, but extra work required occasional extra labour. At this stage, ‘gang’ had no criminal connotations for me. It just meant a group of labourers. One of them, a dark-skinned bloke, probably around twenty, lived briefly in a railway van parked there by a goods train. Each summer evening for a few months, he came over for a chat with me, freshly bathed, a waft of deodorant, and black hair neatly slicked back with Brylcreem. For me it was of no consequence that he was an Aborigine – if I was even aware of it. I was pleased he thought me worthy of his company. We just chatted.

One who lived literally on the town’s margins in the scrub was Dave Rowan. His dark skin should have registered with me but another feature took my attention. Every time I passed his tent fronted by its blackened bucket, pots, residual smell of campfire smoke and yesterday’s cooking, and horse tethered nearby, Dave would say, ‘Gday Bill’ in a voice rivalling Paul Robson’s in its depth and resonance. Even if the conversation went no further, I found the greeting comforting. Despite the depth of his voice, I never heard him launch into song. I did occasionally see him dance.

In the absence of income from social services, Dave trapped rabbits. Before the advent of myxomatosis in 1950, he did so very successfully. Every Saturday morning, his horse-drawn cart laden with his catch – now stiff with rigor mortis, gutted and strung in pairs over sticks running crosswise – bounced down to the local butcher’s. From there, one of the two butchers drove him and rabbits to the freezer in nearby Underbool. Money in hand, he spent the afternoon in the pub ‘pissing his earnings up against the wall’, as was the expression. Then, still quite drunk and getting a lift home, he ambled down to dances in the memorial hall where men plied him outside in the surrounding scrub with yet more beer. His only dancing was an inebriated jig at the hall’s entrance at the edge of a group of men mustering up the courage to ask girls for a dance.

I was conscious of Dave’s Aboriginality, more so than with the young bloke visiting briefly as a railway employee. Yet I had no insight into what it was like to be marginalised in such