Selected Stories (16 page)

On about the fourth morning Steelman had a yarn with one of the men, going to work. He was a lanky young fellow with a sandy complexion, and seemingly harmless grin. In Australia he might have been regarded as a “cove” rather than a “chap”, but there was nothing of the “bloke” about him. Presently the cove said:

“What do you think of the Boss, Mr Stoneleigh? He seems to have taken a great fancy for you, and he’s fair gone on geology.”

“I think he is a very decent fellow indeed, a very intelligent young man. He seems very well read and well informed.”

“You wouldn’t think he was a University man,” said the cove.

“No, indeed! Is he?”

“Yes. I thought you knew.”

Steelman knitted his brows. He seemed slightly disturbed for the moment. He walked on a few paces in silence and thought hard.

“What might have been his special line?” he asked the cove.

“Why, something the same as yours. I thought you knew. He was reckoned the best—what do you call it?—the best minrologist in the country. He had a first-class billet in the Mines Department, but he lost it you know—the booze.”

“I think we will be making a move, Smith,” said Steelman, later on, when they were private. “There’s a little too much intellect in this camp to suit me. But we haven’t done so bad anyway. We’ve got three days’ good board and lodging with entertainment and refreshments thrown in.” Then he said to himself: “We’ll stay for another day anyway. If those beggars are having a lark with us, we’re getting the worth of it anyway, and I’m not thin-skinned. They’re the mugs and not us, anyhow it goes, and I can take them down before I leave.”

But on the way home he had a talk with another man whom we might set down as a “chap”.

“I wouldn’t have thought the Boss was a college man,” said Steelman to the chap.

“Awhat?”

“AUniversity man—University education.”

“Why! Who’s been telling you that?”

“One of your mates.”

“Oh, he’s been getting at you. Why, it’s all the Boss can do to write his own name. Now that lanky sandy cove with the birthmark grin—it’s him that’s had the college education.”

“I think we’ll make a start to-morrow,” said Steelman to Smith in the privacy of their whare. “There’s too much humour and levity in this camp to suit a serious scientific gentleman like myself.”

ON the diggings up to twenty odd years ago—and as far back as I can remember—on Lambing Flat, the Pipeclays, Gulgong, Home Rule and so through the roaring list; in bark huts, tents, public-houses, sly grog shanties, and—well, the most glorious voice of all belonged to a bad girl. We were only children and didn’t know why she was bad, but we weren’t allowed to play near or go near the hut she lived in, and we were trained to believe firmly that something awful would happen to us if we stayed to answer a word, and didn’t run away as fast as our legs could carry us, if she attempted to speak to us. We had before us the dread example of one urchin, who got an awful hiding and went on bread and water for twenty-four hours for allowing her to kiss him and give him lollies. She didn’t look bad—she looked to us like a grand and beautiful lady-girl—but we got instilled into us the idea that she was an awful bad woman, something more terrible even than a drunken man, and one whose presence was to be feared and fled from. There were two other girls in the hut with her, also a pretty little girl, who called her “Auntie”, and with whom we were not allowed to play—for they were all bad; which puzzled us as much as child-minds can be puzzled. We couldn’t make out how everybody in one house could be bad. We used to wonder why these bad people weren’t hunted away or put in gaol if they were so bad. And another thing puzzled us. Slipping out after dark, when the bad girls happened to be singing in their house, we’d sometimes run against men hanging round the hut by ones and twos and threes, listening. They seemed mysterious. They were mostly good men, and we concluded they were listening and watching the bad women’s house to see that they didn’t kill anyone, or steal and run away with any bad little boys—ourselves, for instance—who ran out after dark; which, as we were informed, those bad people were always on the look-out for a chance to do.

We were told in after years that old Peter McKenzie (a respectable, married, hard-working digger) would sometimes steal up opposite the bad door in the dark, and throw in money done up in a piece of paper, and listen round until the bad girl had sung “The Bonnie Hills of Scotland” two or three times. Then he’d go and get drunk, and stay drunk two or three days at a time. And his wife caught him throwing the money in one night; and there was a terrible row, and she left him; and people always said it was all a mistake. But we couldn’t see the mistake then.

But I can hear that girl’s voice through the night, twenty years ago:

Oh! the bloomin’ heath, and the pale blue bell, In my bonnet then I wore; And memory knows no brighter theme Than those happy days of yore. Scotland! Land of chief and song! Oh, what charms to thee belong!

And I am old enough to understand why poor Peter McKenzie—who was married to a Saxon, and a Tartar—went and got drunk when the bad girl sang “The Bonnie Hills of Scotland”.

His anxious eye might look in vain For some loved form it knew!

And yet another thing puzzled us greatly at the time. Next door to the bad girl’s house there lived a very respectable family—a family of good girls with whom we were allowed to play, and from whom we got lollies (those hard old red-and-white “fish lollies” that grocers sent home with parcels of groceries and receipted bills). Now one washing day, they being as glad to get rid of us at home as we were to get out, we went over to the good house and found no one at home except the grown-up daughter, who used to sing for us, and read
Robinson Crusoe
of nights, “out loud”, and give us more lollies than any of the rest—and
with whom we were passionately in love, notwithstanding the fact that she was engaged to a “grown-up man”—(we reckoned he’d be dead and out of the way by the time we were old enough to marry her). She was washing. She had carried the stool and tub over against the stick fence which separated her house from the bad house; and, to our astonishment and dismay, the bad girl had brought
her
tub over against her side of the fence. They stood and worked with their shoulders to the fence between them, and heads bent down close to it. The bad girl would sing a few words, and the good girl after her, over and over again. They sang very low, we thought. Presently the good grown-up girl turned her head and caught sight of us. She jumped, and her face went flaming red; she laid hold of the stool and carried it, tub and all, away from that fence in a hurry. And the bad grown-up girl took her tub back to her house. The good grown-up girl made us promise never to tell what we saw—that she’d been talking to a bad girl—else she would never, never marry us.

She told me, in after years, when she’d grown up to be a grandmother, that the bad girl was surreptitiously teaching her to sing “Madeline” that day.

I remember a dreadful story of a digger who went and shot himself one night after hearing that bad girl sing. We thought then what a frightfully bad woman she must be. The incident terrified us; and thereafter we kept carefully and fearfully out of reach of her voice, lest we should go and do what the digger did.

I have a dreamy recollection of a circus on Gulgong in the Roaring Days, more than twenty years ago, and a woman (to my child-fancy a being from another world) standing in the middle of the ring, singing:

Out in the cold world—out in the street—Asking a penny from each one I meet; Cheerless I wander about all the day, Wearing my young life in sorrow away!

That last line haunted me for many years. I remember being frightened by women sobbing (and one or two great grown-up diggers also) that night in that circus.

“Father, Dear Father, Come Home with Me Now” was a sacred song then, not a peg for vulgar parodies and more vulgar “business” for fourth-rate clowns and corner-men. Then there was “The Prairie Flower”. “Out on the prairie, in an early day”—I can hear the digger’s wife yet: she was the prettiest girl on the field. They married on the sly and crept into camp after dark; but the diggers got wind of it and rolled up with gold-dishes, shovels, &c., &c., and gave them a real good tin-kettling in the old-fashioned style—and a nugget or two to start housekeeping on. She had a very sweet voice.

Fair as a lily, joyous and free Light of the prairie home was she.

She’s a “granny” now, no doubt—or dead.

And I remember a poor, brutally ill-used little wife, wearing a black eye mostly, and singing “Love Amongst the Roses” at her work. And they sang the “Blue Tail Fly”, and all the first and best coon songs—in the days when old John Brown sank a duffer on the hill.

The great bark kitchen of Granny Mathews’ “Redclay Inn”. Afresh back-log thrown behind the fire, which lights the room fitfully. Company settled down to pipes, subdued yarning, and reverie.

Flash Jack—red sash, cabbage-tree hat on back of head with nothing in it, glossy black curls bunched up in front of brim. Flash Jack volunteers, without invitation, preparation, or warning, and through his nose:

Hoh!—

There was a wild kerlonial youth, John Dowlin was his name! He bountied on his parients, Who lived in Castlemaine!

and so on to—

He took a pistol from his breast And waved that lit—tle toy—

“Little toy” with an enthusiastic flourish and great unction on Flash Jack’s part—

“I’ll fight, but I won’t surrender!” said

The wild Kerlonial Boy.

Even this fails to rouse the company’s enthusiasm. “Give us a song, Abe! Give us the ‘Lowlands’!” Abe Mathews, bearded and grizzled, is lying on the broad of his back on a bench, with his hands clasped under his head—his favourite position for smoking, reverie, yarning, or singing. He had a strong, deep voice, which used to thrill me through and through, from hair to toenails, as a child.

They bother Abe till he takes his pipe out of his mouth and puts it behind his head on the end of the stool:

The ship was built in Glasgow;

’Twas the “Golden Vanitee”.

Lines have dropped out of my memory during the thirty years gone between—

And she ploughed in the Low Lands, Low!

The public-house people and more diggers drop into the kitchen, as all do within hearing, when Abe sings.

“Now then, boys:

And she ploughed in the Low Lands, Low!

“Now, all together!

The Low Lands! The Low Lands!

And she ploughed in the Low Lands, Low!”

Toe and heel and flat of foot begin to stamp the clay floor, and horny hands to slap patched knees in accompaniment.

“Oh! save me, lads!” he cried,

“I’m drifting with the current,

And I’m drifting with the tide!

And I’m sinking in the Low Lands, Low!

The Low Lands! The Low Lands!”—

The old bark kitchen is a-going now. Heels drumming on gin-cases under stools; hands, knuckles, pipe-bowls, and pannikins keeping time on the table.

And we sewed him in his hammock,

And we slipped him o’er the side,

And we sunk him in the Low Lands, Low!

The Low Lands! The Low Lands!

And we sunk him in the Low Lands, Low!

Old Boozer Smith—a dirty gin-sodden bundle of rags on the floor in the corner with its head on a candlebox, and covered by a horse rug—old Boozer Smith is supposed to have been dead to the universe for hours past, but the chorus must have disturbed his torpor; for, with a suddenness and unexpectedness that makes the next man jump, there comes a bellow from under the horse rug:

Wot though!—I wear!—a rag!—ged coat!

I’ll wear it like a man!

and ceases as suddenly as it commenced. He struggles to bring his ruined head and bloated face above the surface, glares round; then, no one questioning his manhood, he sinks back and dies to creation; and subsequent proceedings are only interrupted by a snore, as far as he is concerned.

Little Jimmy Nowlett, the bullock-driver, is inspired. “Go on, Jimmy! Give us a song!”

In the days when we were hard up

For want of wood and wire—

Jimmy always blunders; it should have been “food and fire”—

We used ter tie our boots up With lit—tle bits-er wire;

and—

I’m sitting in my lit—tle room
,

It measures six by six
;

The work-house wall is opposite, I’ve counted all the bricks!

“Give us a chorus; Jimmy!”

Jimmy does, giving his head a short, jerky nod for nearly every word, and describing a circle round his crown—as if he were stirring a pint of hot tea—with his forefinger, at the end of every line:

Hall!—Round!—Me—Hat!

I wore a weepin’ willer!

Jimmy is a Cockney.

“Now then, boys!”

Hall—round—me hat!

How many old diggers remember it?

And:

A butcher, and a baker, and a quiet-looking Quaker
,
All a-courting pretty Jessie at the Railway Bar
.

I used to wonder as a child what the “railway bar” meant.

And:

I would, I would, I would in vai
n
That I were single once again
!
But ah, alas, that will not b
e
Till apples grow on the willow tree
.

Adrunken gambler’s young wife used to sing that song to herself.

Astir at the kitchen door, and a cry of “Pinter”, and old Poynton, Ballarat digger, appears and is shoved in; he has several drinks aboard, and they proceed to “git Pinter on the singin’ lay”, and at last talk him round. He has a good voice, but no “theory”, and blunders worse than Jimmy Nowlett with the words. He starts with a howl:

Hoh!
Way down in Covent Gar-ar-r-dings

A-strolling I did go
,
To see the sweetest flow-ow-wer
s
That e’er in gardings grow
.

He saw the rose and lily—the red and white and blue—and he saw the sweetest flow-ow-ers that e’er in gardings grew; for he saw two lovely maidens (Pinter calls ’em “virgings”) “underneath (he must have meant on top, of) a garding chair”.

Sings Pinter:

And one was lovely Jessie, With the jet black eyes and hair,

Roars Pinter:

And the other was a vir-ir-ging
’
I solemn-lye declare
!

“ ‘Maiden’, Pinter!” interjects Mr Nowlett.

“Well, it’s all the same,” retorts Pinter. “Amaiden
is
a virging, Jimmy. If you’re singing, Jimmy, and not me, I’ll leave off!” Chorus of “Order! Shut up, Jimmy!”

I quicklye step-ped up to her, And unto her did sa-a-y: Do you belong to any young man Hoh, tell me that, I pra-a-y?

Her answer, according to Pinter, was surprisingly prompt and unconventional; also full and concise:

No; I belong to no young man
—
I solemnlye declare
!
I mean to live a virgin
g
And still my laurels wear
!

Jimmy Nowlett attempts to move an amendment in favour of “maiden”, but is promptly suppressed. It seems that Pinter’s suit has a happy termination, for he is supposed to sing in the character of a “Sailor Bold”, and as he turns to pursue his stroll in “Covent Gar-ar-dings”:

“Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh, no!” she cried,

“I love a Sailior Bold!”

“Hong-kore, Pinter! Give us the ‘Golden Glove’, Pinter!”

Thus warmed up, Pinter starts with an explanatory “spoken” to the effect that the song he is about to sing illustrates some of the little ways of woman, and how, no matter what you say or do, she is bound to have her own way in the end; and how, in one instance, she set about getting it.

Hoh!

Now, it’s of a young squoire near Timworth did dwell, Who courted a nobleman’s daughter so well—