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    Great Australian Stories South Australia
    Great Australian Stories South Australia
    Great Australian Stories South Australia
    Ebook255 pages3 hours

    Great Australian Stories South Australia

    By Bill Marsh

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    About this ebook


    Master storyteller Bill 'Swampy' Marsh travels our wide brown land collecting yarns and memories from the authentic voices of rural Australia. the people you will meet in these stories will touch your heart as Swampy brings to life all the drama and delight of life in the outback. By turns frightening, hilarious, wonderful, tragic and poignant, these tales are sure to get you in, hook, line and sinker.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers Australia
    Release dateApr 1, 2011
    ISBN9780730498247
    Great Australian Stories South Australia
    Author

    Bill Marsh

    Bill ‘Swampy' Marsh is an award-winning writer/performer of stories, songs and plays. Based in Adelaide, he is best known for his successful Great Australian series of books published with ABC Books: More Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories (2007), Great Australian Railway Stories (2005), Great Australian Droving Stories (2003), Great Australian Shearing Stories (2001), and Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories (1999).

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      Great Australian Stories South Australia - Bill Marsh

      A Female on the Board

      I’m a local girl from Kangaroo Island, in South Australia. I love it here. It’s isolated. It’s country. There’s also a fair bit of work, fresh water, fish, beach, sea. I’ve got a house and a block out the back, not too big but big enough, and I’ve been shearing now for about eight or nine years.

      When I first began, I started off by doing a bit of roustabouting. Then I got sick of that so I gave it away and I did lots of different work until the abattoirs opened up here. That was at the start of the 1990s, right in the middle of equal opportunities and women’s rights and all that. So they sort of had to give me the job at the abattoirs because if they didn’t, I could’ve taken them to court or anything. Though, mind you, I wouldn’t have because I’m not like that.

      But, anyway, when I applied for a job they said, ‘Oh bugger you,’ they said, and they stuck me on the hardest job in the whole place; that was pelting, chopping off the sheepskins. So right from the start I knew that they were thinking along the lines of, ‘Oh, she’ll only last three hours and she’ll be out of here,’ you know. Then a couple of days went by, then a week, and I was still there, like, five months later.

      So I ended up being the chief pelter and was teaching all the blokes. But, to be honest, a lot of them were absolutely bloody useless. One bloke lasted three hours and this other bloke lasted a week and a half. Too much for them it was. Still and all, a couple of blokes stayed there for as long as I did.

      But the thing I didn’t like about working at the abattoirs was that we were all getting paid by the hour and some of these blokes were hung-over a lot of the time, and others were putting in bugger-all. And there I was, working me arse off while all these drunks and bludgers were getting paid the same amount as me. So eventually I said, ‘Oh stuff this. I’ll go back roustabouting.’

      Anyhow, that’s what I did. I went back roustabouting. And then while I was roustabouting I started thinking that there’s blokes here in these shearing sheds who are bigger dickheads than me and they can shear a sheep.

      ‘Bugger it,’ I said. ‘If these blokes can do it so can I, yeah.’

      So I started off by asking the shearers if they minded if I took a belly off while they were having a fag. Then after a while they were asking me. They’d say, ‘Do yer wanta take over fer a bit while I have a fag?’ And then I got better and I’d finish the sheep and they’d still only be halfway through their fag so they’d say, ‘Christ, I haven’t finished me bloody fag yet, yer may as well shear another-ie.’

      Then soon I was shearing two sheep while they were having their fag, then three, and so it went, you know.

      So I gradually got better until I reckoned that I could shear okay. Then I bought a handpiece and away I went. But I tell you, it nearly killed me there in the beginning, it did. It was such hard work. But at least I was getting paid for what I done and there were no drunks or bludgers on the same hourly rate as me who were getting paid for doing bugger-all.

      Still and all, I must say that back when I started, not only was it hard work but I also got it hard from a few of the blokes. I had a young guy one time who was a bit too sure of himself. He thought that he could shear a few, or so he reckoned. So I rocked up at this shed on the first day. I was just there as a fill-in, like, and this young dude, he got stirred up by the other shearers who were telling him that he’d better watch out or I’d take his stand.

      Anyhow this young dude came back at about half-past six the next morning and he rolled his swag up, packed up his gear, and he pissed off before I got there. He wouldn’t even shear with me because he thought that I might’ve rounded him up. And I reckon that I could’ve too, given half a chance. But he was a bit sure of himself, he was, a bit of an ego boy, a young lad who was paranoid that I’d beat him. So that was the end of him and I got his stand after all.

      Then there was another time I was travelling with the old man, the hubby, like. He was a shearer too. Anyhow, one weekend we drove 120 kilometres over to Ravensthorpe, over in Western Australia, to do some crutching. When we got there the old guy, the owner, well, he wouldn’t let me in the shed because I was a female. He said, ‘No, I won’t let her in the shed to do any crutching.’ So that was it. Me and the hubby, we had to turn around and drive all the way back again. And that really pissed me off, I can tell you.

      There were a few of them like that, fellers who wouldn’t let females in the shed. But most of them put up with it these days. Ten years ago a female shearer was a new thing, a novelty, and they didn’t like us in the sheds that much. They just weren’t used to it. ‘She won’t last,’ they’d say. ‘She won’t cope.’

      But I did. And I’m still coping. But the thing is that you’ve got to prove yourself. It doesn’t matter if you’re a female or a male. You know, I’m not a big person or anything, but I’m stocky. I’m only just over 5 feet, 2 inches tall, so I realised right from the start that I had to use skill more than brute force. So that’s what I work hard on, my skill. And, I’ve been at it for eight or nine years now.

      A Great Big Adventure

      Well, for a lot of years I’d been wanting to do a big trip because my grandfather had Clydesdales all his life. He did all the roads around Victoria, up around Kerang and that area. That was his lifetime job, and I sort of grew up with the horses there, and I thought, Well, I’m gonna do something one day. And I started thinking about it and I thought, Oh well, while I’m doing it, it’d be good to do something helpful for somebody.

      Then, probably about ten years beforehand, I’d had a hernia after doing the Border Dash out on the Nullarbor. I was in a bit of a bad way there for a while and the RFDS flew out to the Nullarbor Roadhouse and they picked me up and they took me to Adelaide. Then they picked me up and flew me back again.

      Now, with the Border Dash, I guess that I should explain that every year over on the Nullarbor they had, and still do have, I think, an event that they call the Border Dash. It’s also a fundraiser for the Royal Flying Doctor Service. It started off as just a bit of an argument one night in the pub at Border Village when they reckoned one bloke couldn’t run the 12 kilometres from Border Village Roadhouse in South Australia, to Eucla Roadhouse, which is in Western Australia. So he ran it. Then the next year they said, ‘Oh well, you know, we might make this a yearly thing.’

      So it became known as the Border Dash and, back when I got my hernia, it used to be a very friendly run. You know, you’d have a support vehicle driving along beside you and there’d be a stubby of beer passing hands, here and there. It was all very social, nice and casual. And Eucla’s a little township and there’re a few married women there and they’d come along and be pushing their kids in prams and all that and the women from the roadhouse staff, they’d join in, and so while most people ran, some people walked.

      But everybody who went on the Border Dash had a sponsor and whatever amount they were sponsored for, it all went to the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Of course, it’s all grown since then. Nowadays, they get professional runners from Adelaide, Perth and all sorts out there. Oh, they get big heaps of people. It’s just before football season and a lot of the footy teams use it as a training run, plus it’s also a bit of a bonding weekend for them.

      Anyhow, about four days after I did the Border Run, I come down with this hernia. So when I started thinking about doing this big trip, I started thinking about how the RFDS helped me out back then and I thought, Why, can’t I do it for them. They probably saved my life out there. So I said, ‘Yeah, I will. I’ll do it for the RFDS.’

      So I went and saw the Flying Doctor people here in Rockhampton and I told them that I wanted to do a trip from Rocky, which is about 700 kilometres north of Brisbane, all the way down to Ceduna, which is out on the west coast of South Australia. And they gave me the addresses of who I should contact about it all and I wrote away and I told them what I was going to do and they sent me big heaps of pencils and stickers and stuff like that.

      That’s how it sort of first got going. Then I had to send away and get a letter that made it all legal for me to raise money for the RFDS. And I went to the Commonwealth Bank and opened a special account and they gave me a pay-in-book, with all the details, so that each time I got to a town I’d bank what I’d picked up along the road. That’s where most of the money ended up coming from; people stopping along the road to have a yarn and to take a photo, then they’d put $2 or $5 or $10 in the Royal Flying Doctor Service collection tin I carried with me. Rotary Clubs along the way helped out as well.

      While I was getting all that organised, I did a lot of test runs. You know, I’d go out for three or four days testing things. I had a covered wagon and one of me mates set up one of them things that the sun shines on—a solar panel—and that charged the battery I had on the side of the wagon. I ran lights and a little caravan fridge off that. Actually, this mate first set it up with a generator that he had running off the rear axle, but I couldn’t keep the belts on it so we gave that away and we finished up settling for this solar panel. So that was good. It worked out well. And I just had a piece of flat timber going from one side of the wagon to the other and bunked down in there, in the swag. But a lot of nights it turned out to be so beautiful that I just threw the swag down by the camp fire. Fantastic.

      So when everything was organised, I set out in the wagon from Rocky with two Clydesdales, Big Mac and Bill, and my little dog, Minnie, a fox terrier. And all along the way people helped with water and horse feed and a bit of food. It was really unbelievable, especially through outback New South Wales. There was an eight-year drought going on and nobody out there had anything. Oh, it was a terrible, terrible, drought. You know how the little bit of moisture runs off the edge of the road of a night, and so there’s the tiny pickings there? Well, the drought was so bad that the kangaroos were coming into the edge of the road just to get what was left of that. And they were so weak from lack of food that they couldn’t move. They didn’t even bother to take any notice of me when I come along, and the horses didn’t worry them either. And you’d see a vehicle go past and the driver would toot the horn to warn the roos and half of them would fall over dead. That’s true. There was just no feed, no nothing. It was that bad, it was.

      And a lot of the stations out there, they were still going but, they just had managers on them. You know, there’s thousands and thousands of acres or whatever and these managers, all they did was go around the boundary fences. They had no stock or anything. I guess the properties were all owned by Sydney lawyers and doctors or what have you: probably tax dodgers or something. I don’t know. But these people had nothing out there, you know, and they did everything in their power to help me. Absolutely everything.

      Because, what you’ve got to realise here is that there wasn’t just Minnie and me. The horses needed food and they needed water every night. Like a Clydesdale will drink 75 litres a day. You know, I did carry water but just emergency water and the New South Wales Pastoral Protection Board supervisors helped with water drops along the way. But, oh, I would’ve never have been able to do it without the station owners or the station managers, that’s for sure.

      Well, there was one woman, she heard that I was coming through and she drove all the way out to the main road with some water and food for the horses, then she picked me up, took me back to her place where I had a shower and what-have-you and I had a beautiful tea with her and then she drove me all the way back to camp. And that was a 210 kilometre round trip she did. That was the sort of thing that was happening.

      And a lot of these people I’d never even met before. Some I didn’t even get to meet. Like, I’d just be driving along and there’d be a 44 gallon drum of water and a couple of bales of hay, sitting on the side of the road, with a sign on it saying, ‘for the Royal Flying Doctor Service horse-drawn wagon trip.’ And I didn’t even have a clue who left these things.

      Then, at one stage, I got bogged. That was near G4 Station, between Walgett and Brewarrina, in the central north of New South Wales. It’s all black soil through there and we got this rain and the horses were slipping this way and that and the wheels on the wagon were sliding all over the place. Then the trailer wheels got clogged, and the horses just couldn’t handle it. So we just could not move.

      Anyway, I walked the horses into G4 Station and the people there came back out with a big four-wheel-drive tractor and towed the trailer in. Then we were there for about eight or ten days, waiting for everything to dry out enough to get out of the place. But they looked after us really well. They killed a sheep for us and everything. And those people had nothing, neither.

      Then sometimes the news would get out that I was coming along and people would kill a sheep and they’d cut up half a side and put it in little bags for me. And here I am with a little caravan fridge, you know. The freezer was flat out holding six mutton chops and here they are hitting me with about thirty or more chops.

      And another funny thing; everybody wanted to give me eggs and you can’t say ‘No’ because they just won’t take ‘No’ for an answer. Anyway, this particular day I had about six dozen eggs with me and this elderly couple pulled up. They were pensioners who were just touring around in their little caravan on holidays. So when they pulled up I asked them if they’d like to have a dozen eggs.

      ‘Oh, lovely. Oh, lovely,’ they said.

      Anyway, there I am talking to the elderly lady and the old bloke’s walking around and around and around the wagon. And he’s looking under it here and over it there and all through it and then, after he’d searched all the wagon over, he comes back and he says, ‘Where do yer keep yer chooks?’

      And, oh, I had to laugh because he was thinking it was like in the olden days when they always had a cage of chooks underneath the wagon. That’s what he was looking for. Yeah, ‘Where do yer keep yer chooks?’ he asked, and I didn’t even need to have any chooks because everyone was giving me all these eggs.

      Charlie Rayner, Big Mac and Bill arrive at Ceduna after travelling a distance of 3,200 kilometres, raising money for the Flying Doctor Service— Charlie Rayner

      So, there was quite a few funny little things like that that happened. Another one was with two English girls. They were probably in their early twenties or something. They were travelling around Australia and they stopped for a chat because they’d never seen anything like a horse-drawn wagon in their lives before, and one of them asked if she could travel with me for three or four days.

      I said, ‘Yeah, that’ll be fine.’

      Then the other one says, ‘No, you can’t travel with him because we’ve got to get to such and such a place at such and such a time.’

      Well I thought that was a bit rich, you know, but then there was nearly a blue. Oh yes, I thought there was going to be an all-out brawl between the two of them so I said, ‘What about I make a compromise.’ I said, ‘I’ll get the fire going and put the billy on and you can have tea with me then you can head off.’

      ‘Oh, that’d be lovely,’ they said.

      So anyway, after tea they nuzzled off and away they went.

      But I must say that I did have a couple of run-ins. See, I went through Bourke and followed the Darling River down to Wilcannia, then along the road to Broken Hill and down the Barrier Highway into South Australia. But Walgett, Brewarrina and Wilcannia, they were terrible. It’s a shame. The police at Bourke weren’t going to let me go through to Wilcannia. Apparently, not long beforehand two young couples had been driving along and they were forced out of their cars, then they were beaten up and the cars were hijacked and taken for joyrides. So they were wary of me going down that way, because of the trouble. But I said, ‘Well, what am I going to do. I’ve got no other way to go, you know.’

      So, I went on and when I got to Wilcannia there was an old Aboriginal bloke, a full blood. He used to be a drover, and when he saw me coming past, oh, he run out and he waved me down and I probably spent a good hour and a half there with him while he was going on about the old droving days. Oh, he was showing me all his old photos and all that. And oh, it was fantastic. I enjoyed every minute of it.

      Then

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