Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
1 BUSH WAYS 9
Across the Blue Mountains 9
Send ’er down, Huey 12
On foot to Appin 14
Bush generosity 16
Whoppers! 19
Talking bush 22
Bush names 24
The boy with the pony 27
The man from furthest out 29
2 BUSH FOLK 35
Burgoo Bill 35
Bundaburra Jack 38
Bob, the railway dog 40
Bill Bowyang 44
Jack-the-Rager 48
Don’t mess with Jess! 52
Lord of the Bush 56
vii
5 WRONGDOING 109
We’ll take the whole damn country 109
The death of Ben Hall 112
Hang him like a dog 115
All in the family 118
The Namoi horror 120
Murder by the book 123
Murderer’s bore 125
A dingo’s got my baby 128
9 MYSTERIES 211
The Devil’s Pool 211
Tall tales 213
Small tales 215
Who stole Waltzing Matilda? 218
Lasseter’s undertaker 220
Lost gold 223
The forgotten bushranger 225
The Master Bushman legend 228
The sentinels of Myrrhee 230
At Hanging Rock 231
The last tiger 234
NOTES 263
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 283
Happily the bush people do not yet know the claims of social
superiority, and behave as if all were natural equals.
Francis Adams, The Australians, 1893
The corporal’s wife (an old woman, who had been transported
20 years previously) came forward with pleasing manners to show
us in . . . The kitchen contained a long table and form, and stumps
of trees to answer the purpose of chairs. Several persons were
here, to rest for the night. We were shown to the small back room,
which had nothing but a sofa, with slips of bark laid on it for
the seat. There I felt desolate and lonely. It was nearly dark, and
still Hawkins did not arrive. At length the store-keeper from Emu
Plains came to tell me that he could not get in until fresh horses
were sent . . . On going out I saw what appeared to be a scene
of great confusion—men, tired with their day’s work, swearing
while releasing horses and bullocks, with the glare of the fires over
all. At length I found Hawkins, and felt easy.
round, he felt sure that his welcome would be the loss of whatever
she could steal from us . . .
I spread my mattresses in the store room, the earthen floor
of which was dirty, cold, and damp. We put the children to bed
without undressing them. I laid down for a few minutes, but sleep
was out of the question, the place being infested with vermin, and
other sleep-vanishers were the noise kept up by the quarrelling of
the men and the noise made by a flock of sheep camped next [sic]
the wall of the room. Hawkins remained on the green in the cart all
night watching, but the old woman (before mentioned) contrived
to steal some spoons from our basket. It was not with any regret
we next morning departed from the house at Springwood.
The family battled on through rain and bush for eleven days,
nearly losing one of the drays over the precipice along the steep
slope of Mt York. Finally:
On foot to Appin
The Quaker missionary and naturalist, James Backhouse,
visited Australia in the 1830s. He travelled widely through all
the colonies, frequently on foot. In September 1832, he was
journeying from Campbelltown to Wollongong, both then
in the process of developing from original bush settlements.
Progressive in his views of Aboriginal people, Backhouse was
not immune to another strong prejudice of his period towards
the Irish and Roman Catholics in general. His account of the
way from Appin to Wollongong, complete with naturalist’s
notes, describes how most people got from place to place in
those times, and for long after:
respectable settlers: most of them are low Irish. We felt but little
liberty in distributing tracts among the benighted population; and
in a few cases in which we offered them, they were received with
a sort of fear, the evident result of Popish restrictions. The people
are afraid to receive religious instruction, lest their priests should
find fault; and though the priests visit them, with an attention that
binds the people to them, many of them seem to exercise much
more care, to prevent their leaving the Church of Home, than to
turn them from the service of Satan.
Next day, the son of their host guided the travellers further
along a complicated way:
Bush generosity
The difficulties of bush life encouraged hospitality to travel
lers, as the upper-class new chum, Walter Spencer Stanhope
Tyrwhitt, observed in the 1880s:
CHORUS:
Tramp, tramp, tramp across the borders,
The swagmen are rolling up I see,
When the shearing’s at an end we’ll go fishing in a bend,
Then hurrah for the Wallaby Brigade.
When you are leaving camp you must ask some brother tramp
If there are any jobs to be had,
Or what sort of a shop that station is to stop
For a member of the Wallaby Brigade.
You ask if they want men, you ask for rations then,
If they don’t stump up a warning should be made:
To teach them better sense, why, ‘Set fire to their fence’,
Is the war cry of the Wallaby Brigade.
The squatters thought us done when they fenced in all their run,
But a prettier mistake they never made,
Whoppers!
Liars and furphies—unsubstantiated stories—are not only
found in the bush. The term ‘Tom Collins’, meaning someone
who spreads falsehoods, derives from Collins Street in
Melbourne, for some reason. But a great many tall tales are
set in the bush and it is the place where an awful lot of accom
plished bullshit artists like to exaggerate a little. Noted liars are
celebrated in bush tradition almost as much as the whoppers
they tell, their most noted tales passed on, honed and finely
polished by many tongues. The topics of these tales are almost
endless, but bullock team stories are constant favourites, as
told by the man from Jugiong:
The man from Jugiong held the floor, and the talk veered around
from politics to bullock punching.
‘Struth,’ he said, ‘you blokes should have seen a thing that
occurred our way the other day. One of Mr. Osborne’s teams was
crossing spewy pipe-clay ground with a load of timber when the
vehicle sunk to the axles.
‘The bullocks made a game effort, but gradually became
wrapped in the pipe-clay until only their backs were visible.
Chummy, bullocky’s cattle dog, rushed to investigate, and was
soon swallowed up, all but his bark.
The river is running a banker. The bullocky and his team are
struggling through wind and rain to deliver their load to a distant
location. There’s no way around it, they will have to get across
the river, no matter how badly it is flooding. The bullocky wades
into the water and finds that it’s not as deep as he feared and
so decides to attempt a crossing. He goes back to his team and
speaks to each bullock, telling them what they needed to do to get
across to the other side. He cracks his whip and the team moves
into the water, taking the strain. The bullocky walks alongside,
encouraging them to keep pulling against the weight of water.
Finally, they reach the far bank and stop for a well-earned rest.
The bullocky looks behind him and is amazed to see that his
bullocks have done their job so well that they have pulled the
river twenty metres off its original course. No word of a lie! They
were a fine team of bullocks.
For two solid hours me and Steve had been sinking pots in the
Carriers’ Arms when in blows a jackaroo cove, an noticin’ we
was lookin’ dry he asks us to have one. We excused ourselves for
not refusin’ and jackeroos ain’t got nothin’ on us, so we fills ’em
up again. The jackeroo was a good spender, but a skite, an’ I had
to dig up yarns to keep pace with him. By sundown he was in his
deadliest form an’ finishes up boastin’ of his escapes from death
while shooting in the jungle. At last he paused and gazed around
the bar.
‘You fellows have never known experiences like those, have
you?’ he asked.
To my surprise old Steve staggers out of his corner an’ said,
‘Spare, me days—I was once slewed in a scrub on a cloudy day an’
all I had was me old 32’ an’ one bullet.’
‘Really,’ said the jackeroo, ‘and how did you manage to get
away with your life?’
Steve grins and says, ‘While I was wonderin’ whether I should
starve or not, 13 ducks flew past. I fired an’ the bullet passed
through all their heads. In fallin’ the ducks hit the branch of a
tree. This came down an’ hit an old man ’roo on the head, in his
death struggels [sic] the ’roo kicked a wallaby and it come sailin’
through the air and knocked me in to a creek. When I came up
I had all me pockets full of fish and an eel in each hand, and
a couple of crayfish hanging from each ear. Now me jackeroo
bantam, can you beat that!’
Probably not.