Warrigal's Way (15 page)

“It's in the car park out back,” he told me.

We dropped Dennis in town and Nola and I went down to Casuarina beach, we drove through the scrub down to the water's edge, got undressed, had a good look for crocodiles, and went skinny dipping. We had great fun for a couple of hours, then I took her home. I didn't stay. I told Nola I was going back to pack my gear, ring Tony and take
off for Tennant Creek. She cried and made me promise to ring her as soon as I could.

Tony told me to report to Charlie, the engineer, as soon as I got there. So I filled the station wagon up with petrol, got a patching kit, a couple of tyre levers and went out along McMillans Road past the dump to look for a couple of half-decent spare tyres. When I found these I was off.

The trip was pretty good. The car used a bit of oil, but that was to be expected as the rings in the motor weren't too flash. I got through Tennant and stopped at the road-house at Wahope Well for a feed and a drink. I had a yarn to Sandy, the bar girl, and Malcolm, the boss. Mal told me that the boys from the Warrabri job came in a couple of times a week to collect mail and pick up stores. He said that the turn off to the settlement was about ten miles down the road, and it was a further thirteen miles to the place from there.

I was relaxed, the car was going like a well-lit cigar, when bang, clatter, clunk, it stopped dead. I got out lifted the bonnet and it wasn't hard to see what was wrong. Half the inside of the motor was outside—chucked a rod is the casual term for it.

About an hour later a blue International flat-top stopped and Charlie, the driver, introduced himself, then towed me into the settlement. Luckily for me it was a mail day, and they had told Charlie about me at the roadhouse. He pulled the car in past the police station and store, past the school and around the back of the cook house, where we left it. He showed me my tent and told me to watch for scorpions, as the site was full of them.

“Probably won't kill you, but make you bloody crook, and they're painful,” he said, and left me to sort myself out.

The area was dry, but the firm had a licence to drink on the site, but not outside the fence that went right around it. I was putting my gear away when a well-built, dark-haired white bloke came over and introduced himself.

“G'day. My name's Jim. I'm the concrete contractor. Come over to the mess for a cup of tea.”

I followed him over to a building that had the kitchen, dining room and office under the one roof. Sitting at a table was a slim, dark-haired, olive-complexioned bloke with a moustache, who Jim introduced as Joe. His girlfriend Sylvia was the cook. She was white and blond, and a rotten cook. We had a cup of tea and Jim told me that the job was stop-start.

“They can't keep blokes here,” he said. “A couple of weeks of heat and flies and they're gone, or mucking around with the settlement girls, Bert, the supervisor, he's right down on that. He says it causes trouble and he's right. Anyway, “Jim continued, “come and have a look at the plan. Don't worry about Charlie. He's got his two cartons and a couple of sheilas in there with him. We won't see him until he runs out of grog. I think he hates the place. Anyway, this is what we're doing.”

He showed me how much work had been done and what we still had to do. “Geez, there's a fair bit yet before we get off the ground,” I said to Jim and he agreed.

The next morning I was on the job at half past seven to meet Jack, who lived on the settlement and was the leading hand for the casual Aboriginal workers each day. He was a good bloke and a handy carpenter and did all the boxing for Jim. He told me that the company had an agreement with the settlement to employ eleven blokes each day.

“But it's hard enough to get five, and even harder to keep them for a full day. They usually shoot through at lunchtime and turn up after work for their pay.” He pointed to a mob of blokes boiling a billy under some trees. “That's the best of a bad mob. Come over and I'll introduce you.”

I met Graham, Moses, Henry, Toby and Don. Graham and Don tied steel before, but I was going to have to teach the others.

Jack walked over to a trench with a half-built reo cage in
it. “We got this for the other day, all that steel laid out there, that's for here. You'll work it out, eh? I'll have to give Jim and Joe a hand.”

I worked with the boys for about an hour and promoted Graham to leading hand and asked him to keep an eye on the boys while I went to have another look at the plan. In the drawing office Jim was waiting and I went over the steel plan for the floor with him. It was straightforward enough, with no tricky bits or problems, so I went back to the job.

The boys told me they didn't like the heat in the middle of the day, so we decided to start at six and work until one, with a half-hour break at ten. This worked well and we got more done. We were happy and Jim was happy.

We used to go hunting in the afternoons, Graham, Don, Toby and I. The boys were teaching me to throw a boomerang and to use the woomera and spear. I wasn't much good, but they were deadly, and I really enjoyed it. Graham is a bark painter and by the look of his work a very good one.

Charlie eventually surfaced. He came staggering out of his caravan and tripped over a piece of one-inch waterpipe cemented into the ground. Swearing horribly, he got a big hammer and pounded it right into the ground.

“You know what this is?” said Jim to me. “That's the datum peg for the whole job. Now we have to go over to the school and shoot it all the way back.”

The next thing that happened was that Jim found Joe and Sylvia in a compromising situation on the dining-room table, and sacked them both. We got a couple of local girls to work in the kitchen, and I was working with Don just outside the door on their first day. One of the girls put the jug on, while her mate, Lena, was cutting bread and making sandwiches. The kettle had one of those whistling tops on it, and as it started to boil, it started to whistle. It got up a good head of steam and was whistling like dixie and Lena screamed to her mate, “Run for your life, it's gunna blow!” and they both came out of the kitchen like wombats in front
of a bush fire. Laughing, I went in and took the kettle off the heat and made the tea. Try as we might we could not get those girls back into that kitchen. So I ended up doing the cooking, until a week later Syd, the Alice Springs boss, came up and sacked Charlie and closed the job.

I went back to Darwin to Dowsets and took over Trevor's job on the road-train while he went on holidays. A red Acco with a trailer—a good little rig. I did two trips a week, depending on loads and turn-around time, carting building materials from Alice to Darwin. I did it for two months, with Nola getting in my ear every time I was in Darwin, so when Trevor came back I left.

I had a week off and then one night in the Victoria hotel I ran into Snow, who I knew from the Buff club and who worked on a barge that travelled all round the islands off the coast.

“You working?” he asked me over a beer, and I told him I had just pulled the pin. “If you want a job, come down the Forcroy, down Perkins yard at six tonight. We're gunna do the milk run around the Gulf. Just stores, dry stuff for the Aboriginal settlements.”

So at six that night after a big and final row with Nola I turned up at the gangplank with my gear. Snow took me aboard the barge and introduced me to the skipper, and the rest of the crew. We cast off at half past six and my career as a sailor had started. We rubbed, scrubbed and polished, doing a trick on the wheel in between, and painted what seemed like the complete ship from stem to stern. She was a trim and tidy ship. I got to see all the settlements around the top end. It was a good job that suited a gypsy like me. There are a few things that stick in my mind. Like the time we were at Maningrida. We'd unloaded their supplies and had to wait for the tide to lift us off, so Bob, Jim and I decided to go for a swim. We lined up on the stern rail and dived into the water, just as a twelve-foot hammerhead shark
came swimming into view. Needless to say we got back on that boat in record time. We rigged our shark line, chained it to a 44-gallon drum and anchored it, and we got it, no sweat, about an hour later. We had to use the forward port winch to land it. Christ it was big.

The kids who were swimming later in the water laughed at us when we told them about the shark. They are fearless young buggers. All the kids of the top end could pick up your spirits with their laughing and joking. I think if I could pick a place on earth to live, it would have to be Elcho Island—it had the loveliest people you could ever want to meet, in a beautiful place.

We went to Gove and then down to the Roper River. After we'd unloaded at the Roper, we had about two hours to wait for the tide.

“Hey Ed,” called Russel, one of the settlement blokes who had been giving us a hand to unload. “You want to get a photo of a real big crocodile? I tell you, man, it's huge!”

“Geez yeah. Hang on and I'll get my camera and ask the skipper if we've got time.” I headed off to get my camera, and noticed Bob doing the same. We met on the Bridge, and Joe told us we had heaps of time.

We set off, Russel leading the way, and we walked for ages across sand, through high grass, and in knee-high mud.

“Christ, I hope this is worth it,” Bob said to me. I agreed.

On the way Russel told us that this was a sacred croc. I got a bit uneasy at this, a sort of jittery feeling, but he just grinned and said, “She be right.”

We finally came out on the bank of a large billabong with sloping muddy sides. “Now look,” said Russel. “When I slap my hand on the water this bloke will come out, and you can get a ripper photo. You ready?”

We nodded. Russel slapped the water and nothing happened. I had the old instamatic screwed into my eye socket waiting. “He must have had a feed,” Russel was saying, when
the water erupted and this enormous croc came roaring out of the water.

Take a photo? I couldn't even get its head in the viewfinder, and my feet didn't need my brain to tell them to leg it. Christ, it looked bigger than the Loch Ness Monster. I reckon I broke the sound barrier. I could feel its breath on my legs and when I put my hand behind me, I reckoned I could feel it. Bob was about one step in front. I tell you, man, if that barge had gone, it wouldn't have mattered as we'd have beaten it back to Darwin by about two days. Did we get a photo? I reckon we ran a mile flat out before we even realised we had cameras.

Bob said, “I don't think we should do this kind of thing again.”

I sort of gasped out, “Not until JC comes back and teaches me to run on water. From now on, swimming in billabongs is a great big no-no!”

I worked on the barge for about three months, but that was enough for me. Back on the mainland, I went to the boarding house and old Rosa made a fuss over me, which was a bit sus. But then again, I had a quid, so that might be it. Her favourite saying was, “Dermarmie, Dermarmie”, and I thought she was saying tomorrow, but Dave, another of the blokes staying there, and one of the deck crew on our sister ship, “Warrender”, said, “No mate. That's pure English. She's saying, “the money, the money”. When I listened closely, I realised he was dead right, but she was good to me.

Dave and I had decided to go to Western Australia, and I was waiting around for him to get back. His ship was travelling down the West Australian coast on a cattle trip. So I hung out at the Buff club, playing pool and darts, and yarning with Sue, the girl working behind the bar. One day Kevin and Bob and a few others I had worked with came in, and Kevin told me about a mate of his who'd just bought a block out by the Onoonamah Pub. It had an old shed on it
and all sorts of junk lying around, and they were going to have a working bee to give him a hand to clean it up. Everyone used to pitch in in those days, and although I didn't know him, he was a mate of Kevin's, so I said I'd help. Next day, Saturday, we got stuck in, and by mid-afternoon we had done the deed and had a huge pile of rubbish.

Kevin's mate Fred was just about to drop the match into the pile when Bob said, “Look,” and about a half mile down the track was a tourist bus.

“What do you reckon?” said Fred with a grin. We all rushed over to the shed, where there was a heap of old coats and jerseys and hats, and when the tourists got off the bus, sweltering in the ninety-five degree heat, they saw six blokes standing, rugged up to the nines, warming their hands over this huge fire.

The girls at the pub told us later that the tourists had thought we were fair dinkum.

That'll give them something to tell the folks back home, I thought.

Dave and I were having a night on the town and we ended up at the club. Kevin and the boys were dancing and I was sitting at the table on my own, when a bloke I knew well sat down at the table with me. He was a cop, but he was a member and a decent bloke. “I want to give you a quiet word on the side, mate,” he said. “We've got a warrant out on you at work. It's old but still in force. There's not much information, but you must have been a kid when it was taken out. Do you want to tell me about it?”

With my heart thumping, and visions of jail, I explained the situation.

“Christ, is that all? Bastards getting us to do their dirty work again. Don't worry about it, mate. I'll bury it in the back of a file somewhere. Christ, you're bloody near grown-up. Nah, don't worry, we're not all bastards.” He gave me a tap on the shoulder and went back to his table.

I was shattered. The bubble of freedom had burst. How long are they going to hound me?” I thought. I was feeling panic-stricken and just wanted to get out of here. I got up and blundered my way to the door, sweating and sober. Kevin and Dave followed me.

“What's wrong, mate?” Kevin asked.

I told him and Dave the whole story.

“And they want to whack you in the can because your mum's Aboriginal?” Kevin said in wonder. “I never heard of this sort of bullshit.” Dave agreed.